Why double monk straps are ace

Double monks have made a resurgence in the past half a decade, and considering I am just about to embark on yet another trip and am mainly waiting for the boarding and need to kill time, I decided to list some reasons:

• Very simple in security -- don't buckle the upper strap and you can kick them on and off like loafers and just glide through security
• No need to swap laces all the time. Conversely, no need to fear about having a lace give out at just the wrong point of time
• They strike the perfect balance between casual and formal; they're definitely not sneakers, but depending on the material can pass off with even a suit under certain circumstances. As a corollary, in a pinch you don't need to carry so many shoes with you on a trip
• They have been interesting, as in they have only recently been breaking into the mainstream, so they easily add a little interesting detail

Exploratory behavior

Part of current day problems that I believe I observe both in my professional life in the industry, as well as from the sidelines of looking at the political and social discourse happening in Finland, may stem from a similar source. My pet peeve for a long time has been the overt theoretization of problems, in practice characterized by the old wisdom that boxing is not a purely theoretical exercise. In boxing, one also needs to be prepared to put theory in practice and apply pragmatism and evolve one's thinking as the empirical evidence starts pouring in.

What this means in the context of companies is that especially in turbulent situations where power has become institutionalized into structure and process, a lot of energy and time seems to often be wasted on contemplating things, planning, and strategizing. All of these are good, but at the end of the day one must be prepared to take a step forward, test out the thinking, and adapt as required. However, in very turbulent environments the cycles may get so short that in practice no practical steps are ever taken and the cycles consist of only theoretically pondering over and over again. It sounds like a caricature, but seems to be rather prevalent.

I fear that a similar dynamic may have also found its way to the political landscape of present day Finland, perhaps elsewhere as well. The previous government was a case study of a very broad-based and heterogenous bunch, incapable of getting very many initiatives from the drawing table into execution. This has been clearly called out by very many observers, and the newly elected government has taken clear steps to rectify the rampant indecisiveness of the previous one. Interestingly enough, however, the discussion has again immediately found its way into a mode where all views are heavily polarized and argued from ideological positions without a hint of real, tangible empirical evidence. And more worryingly it seems like not too many are even interested in honest testing of ideas and would much rather sling mud and have rhetorical arguments rather than attempt to solve problems.

In my very limited experience of how the world seems to work, I have tended to take the stance that is roughly in line with empiricism, where possible. This may stem from the mindset of a mere engineer, but I find that at the end of the day I value getting things done more than being right or wrong. Unfortunately it often seems people would rather not do anything than risk being wrong, or even worse, look silly. Hence, I suppose, it is a lot safer to sling rhetorical arguments back and forth without worrying about stepping into the empirical world to test out and adapt accordingly.

The current mess

What are the issues with the current day Finland? Attempting to boil it down to the essentials, a layman could note the following:

• Our economy is not really doing too hot and a big part of this is coming from the difficulties in our export industries. Probably the major contributing factors to this are, in no specific order:
1. The downfall of telecommunications and the pulp/paper industry
2. The EU/Russia situation and the impact on Finnish companies doing business in/with Russia
3. Lack of competitiveness of the Finnish companies compared to competitors
4. ... and probably a long tail of other things...
• Finland is a relatively small country, so managing with only the internal markets isn't probably feasible. This further emphasizes the importance of solving problems in the export sector.
• The aggregate of most of these issues can be in a stagnating, or even decreasing GDP.

So, this in essence means that for some reason or another, our businesses aren't doing too hot. Sure, the profits have been surprisingly decent in many parts of the world over the duration of the financial crisis, but these are probably hardly relevant indicators as they probably just demonstrate that companies are aggressively reducing costs to try to stay afloat, and actually doing a very good job of that, from the perspective of the companies. What this leads to, however, is probably the following:

• A significant cost of companies stems very likely from the cost of labor. Hence, in reducing costs, companies will often shed a lot of employees. This leads to increased unemployment.
• Increased unemployment has probably a couple of major immediate impacts on the economy: immediate loss in taxable income (shrinks the money available to the government to take care of entitlements, etc.), relatively immediate change in stance towards consumption (the unemployed individuals probably will stop consuming, which impacts companies in lower sales and the government in lower value add tax), and immediate increased costs in the form of unemployment benefits and costs associated in handling the related bureaucracy, as well as the activities aimed towards attempting to get the individual employed again. Over a longer period of time it probably increases e.g. healthcare costs, and so on.

So from the view of the government, it's very likely that entitlements go up while income goes down. This is what is commonly probably called a non-sustainable situation, especially if it extends for longer periods of time, since now the situation is that overall GDP stagnates, absolute amount of tax euros goes down (consumption and income taxation), entitlements go up, etc. And there is probably an added issue of a perception of increased inequality, which leads to unhappiness in the population (i.e. "the amount of people suffering is increasing, some people are doing well off, why isn't the system changing to support the people who suffer, shouldn't we increase taxes on the ones who still do well, etc.").

What should, then, be done about this?

• If it is expected that the less than ideal situation of the economy is a temporary blip and unrelated to structural issues, then probably the situation will eventually sort itself out, fingers crossed, and for the time being the government can bridge the gap by just bearing the brunt of the expenses via debt, and then managing the debt when the situation improves.
• However, if the economy suffers for 1) an extended period of time due to reasons beyond your control and/or 2) you have structural issues impacting, then probably at some point bridging the gap via debt will explode your debt (and if GDP stagnates or decreases, you start breaching politically agreed limits in e.g. the EU), your interest rates go up ("hey, these guys may not make it, I want more return if I give them money"), and as a corollary your absolute interest amount significantly goes up, and this will just cause the whole system to implode.
• Traditionally this could be fought against by devaluing your currency, which causes two beneficial things: your companies should receive a boost from a weak currency (it becomes cheaper for other countries to buy from you) and debt denominated in your currency will essentially be wiped.
• If you can't devalue your currency, then you might always just default on your debt. This probably means that your interest rates significantly increase, so most likely in the short term your access to money from the markets will be relatively heavily impacted, i.e. better get ready to bear the hangover from the withdrawal effects from being cut off of debt. This may also cause a fair bit of bad feelings in the international landscape.
• You could always invite the Chicago boys, but then you probably will defer all decisions to them and for better or for worse no longer need to too much worry about doing any thinking yourself. Just implement whatever is prescribed to you, and probably your citizens won't really like too much.

So if we assume that the problem is of the latter kind, i.e. won't go away by closing your eyes. What then?

1. Fix the economy. In this case export industries need to start pulling again.
2. Manage government spending

Looking at the economy, there are a couple of things:

• Devaluing the currency would be nice. Unfortunately thanks to being bound to the Euro, that can't be done. So scratch that.
• "Innovate" your way out of the mess. Invent new technologies, products, push the boundaries, and conquer the world with your brilliance. Probably more difficult than it sounds. In practice it probably means encouraging a lot more failure to happen, since the search of a new "innovation" goes heavily hand-in-hand with failing. So encourage the formation of new companies (reduce bureaucracy, simplify rules, taxation, hiring/firing, and make sure that in failure the entrepreneur is not ostracized too badly).
• Improve efficiency in operations so your costs in companies go down. Won't probably yield immediate results (you need to invest to improve efficiency, and you risk being bankrupt by the time your investments yield results in the company). Additionally increasing efficiency may often put people out of work ("I'll replace you with a very small bit of software").
• You could try to make sure that the costs don't go up, i.e. keep wage increases to the minimum, which would theoretically improve the competitiveness of your company when compared to companies in countries where the wage costs do increase. Cut salaries or freeze increases. Note: increasing taxes is not a valid solution here, since you want to treat the competitiveness of the companies, and while increased taxes give the government more income, it doesn't help the companies and their costs.
• You could try to decrease the inertia impacting your companies. Big words, but in practice it would mean making sure that companies have more freedom to move. Reduce or optimize mandatory bureaucracy so the companies can spend less time filling forms and more time doing value adding work. Make it easier for companies to hire and fire employees (this allows companies to take more risk when they know that if things go bad, they can always adjust, and as a corollary it should mean that more people might get employment).
• ... and so on...

The second problem is the one that obviously upsets people even more:

• By simplifying heavily, the public sector expenses could probably be grouped into: 1) entitlements (giving out benefits, etc.), 2) providing services (maybe could be rolled into entitlements?), and 3) the overhead required the coordinate and manage the previous two.
• Starting from the last, it's not a big surprise that public sector officials are probably not the most efficient bunch. There are examples where the Finnish government has been able to improve efficiency (surprisingly the tax officials have managed to streamline and automate their processes). The immediate negative thing is that this will probably make some public sector employees redundant, but over a longer term it's probably more worthwhile to try to encourage movement towards private sector jobs anyway. This area bleeds into the first two categories, so probably worth to tackle them still separately.
• The levers to pull when managing service costs include: breadth of service recipients, service quality, and efficiency at which services can be provided. Short of going towards a total overhaul, probably beneficiaries will observe a change in the service being provided and this will not be fun.
• Dipping into entitlements is not fun either, but similar dynamics are present there: adjust the entitlement amounts, narrow the group of beneficiaries, reduce the overhead (e.g. simplify the structure of the entitlements), or then just axe entitlements.

Overall I think the current government is doing a reasonable job of attempting to address the above situation. This has of course, rather predictably, caused an uproar in the opposition. Of course navigating the mess described above is not a simple thing, so the risks are quite high and chance of failure is equally high. I'm personally, however, withholding judgement for now and waiting to see what will in fact happen. But in the meanwhile I think it would be interesting to think a bit about some of the comments and objections being flung around:

•  "The poor are being impacted more than the well off in cutting the public sector": Of course; by definition the poor are on the receiving end of entitlements and services from the government more often than the well off. There's not as much to cut from the well off, and even if you cut generally across the board, probably the poor will be more impacted, on average. I'm not saying whether this is right or wrong, this just seems to be the dynamic of how governments work.
• "Because the poor are impacted, the rich should be impacted as well, e.g. by increasing their taxes if we can't cut from them": The social justice argument probably is more related to just venting understandable frustration. Increasing the income taxes does increase, temporarily, the income that the government gets. However, increasing taxes adversely affects the competitiveness of companies. Pay cuts and freezes are better at decreasing the costs of companies, so pay cuts of more well off would be better than increasing their taxation, from a company competitiveness standpoint. Also, progressive taxation means that the more earning individuals are already bearing more of the costs.
• "Well, then lets force the companies to cut the compensation of the better off people": A worthy objective, but probably the only way of doing this is via voluntary cuts. What would the alternative be? Companies are privately held by their owners and short of the owners cutting executive compensation, there's probably very little that the government can do but plead this case. The discussion about private ownership and similar is a different discussion, and overhauling that system is of course possible, but probably causes so much hassle that in the short term it's not feasible. Interestingly enough the pay cuts of the well off will probably adversely impact taxes, since for every Euro cut, the government would lose around 50 cents.
• "The inequality will increase as a result of these measures": It very likely will, at least in the short term, and I imagine there's really no way around this, either. But, looking at the inequality figures is also something that is a bit misleading for me: if the assumption of a smaller Gini coefficient is considered to be more preferred than a high one, then by definition a small coefficient can be obtained by just destroying the system. However, the system would probably not work very well after that.
• "The capital gains taxation needs to be increased and/or made even more progressive": Part of the problem with Finland is that Finns tend to put their wealth to bricks and mortar in the form of houses. Ownership of companies is rather small in Finland, and from the perspective of a layman, if the middle-classes don't start accumulating wealth and owning companies, then we risk foreign investors taking over our companies, in which case the profits will bleed outside of Finland. Increasing taxes on capital gains will probably decrease the incentive of individuals to invest in these types of assets. Also, increasing capital gains does not address the situation that a bulk of invested capital resides in funds and other instruments which are exempt from capital gains taxation until they pay funds out, so effectively increasing capital gains taxation will probably have a lower impact than expected (it will hit low net worth individuals who cannot incorporate their investments into funds). Finally, increasing taxation will probably drive capital abroad, and even for individuals the breakeven point will become lower for offshoring their investments (e.g. into companies which allow incorporation of investment portfolios more easily, or which may have lower corporate taxation). Capital is more fluid than buildings or people, so flight of capital is probably a realistic risk.
• "Education is being cut, which will impact the country in the future and is very shortsighted": Probably very true, but again I'm withholding my judgement until I see what exactly is being proposed. Knowing quite many researchers and having heard of the amount of rigidity and bureaucracy associated with the university landscape, I'm very biased to believe that things could be done more efficiently. As for potentially cutting student allowances, my understanding is that in practice this would just drive the students to either work more (which in case of e.g. engineers is often considered a good thing, since it gets a foot in between the door of the industry and turbocharging learning by allowing students to apply learnings to practice even during studies) or fund their studies with increased debt (for non-Finns, Finland has free education and with the student allowances and later tax breaks on student loans, it's very much possible to achieve Masters' level education with little to none costs; and for Finns, further education should be considered as an investment into the future, so comparing students and government-backed loans plus allowances to unemployed individuals doesn't really work). Furthermore, and this is a shortcoming on my part for not knowing the literature, I have an intuitive feeling that there are probably diminishing rates of return to education, i.e. it's important to have everyone go through primary schools, but the further we go, the less benefit we gain from educating everyone. In my mind it's completely fine to try to shift the default university degrees to Bachelor degrees, rather than automatically having everyone study Masters degrees. Those who wish to pursue higher degrees can naturally do that, but if we have to save somewhere, shifting costs from higher education to guarantee the breadth and quality of primary education is, based on my intuition, more prudent. Yes, I am of course slightly worried about what will come of this, but I think it's only intellectually honest to not have taboos.
• "Economics tells us that instead of austerity we should be using government debt to jumpstart our economy": Sure, Keynesian theory would probably imply this. My question is that where should these investments be directed to? Historically governments have had a notoriously bad track record of picking winners in e.g. technologies. If there's cheap debt available, of course it might be prudent to fix infrastructure. However, if the issue is with competitiveness in export markets, pumping companies up with more debt may not solve the underlying issues creating the competitiveness. If the alternatives are between the government actively driving an agenda and speculating using debt to finance companies or using similar amount of money to reduce boundaries to entrepreneurship, I think the latter is probably more sustainable. But ultimately I think it's a bit premature to say that economics ultimately says one thing or another, since everything is dependent on the actual problems and whether they have been appropriately diagnosed and understood. Curing the slightly wrongly diagnosed illness may not be too good either.

There are probably many other viewpoints to all of this, but I just wanted to try to clarify my thinking. And as such, I am not entirely ready yet to proclaim the Armageddon just yet. Sure, the upcoming years will be painful in Finland, but after the last government's inability to get anything done due to internal bickering, the thing I fear more than our current direction is having another round of no direction or momentum at all. Instead of saying that nothing can work, we should probably be trying different things and being pragmatic: if after trying something doesn't appear to be working, let's then eject it and replace it with something else. Sitting and theorizing doesn't create movement and without movement the situation won't improve.

Finally it should be said that I'm not an economist, so this is just layman's logic. At the same time I outscoped the "softer" aspects from the analysis. Sure, the picture can be changed by applying different schemes of values, but my logic is roughly that without solving the hard problems, the softer problems don't really matter.

Some observation's about Rainaldi's Sapiens

I love ideas, hence I also love books. Living in an apartment in the city, unfortunately, poses some limitations based on the square meter pricing of housing, so this makes books a valuable proposition. Or alternatively it makes the priority of packing books as efficiently as possible a higher priority. Another criteria stemming from the initial observation is that I do not like to wrap books into shelves that hide the books. Put these two things together and I have had a problem of finding good shelves for a while.

Some years ago I ran into a rather elegant spine bookshelf by Bruno Rainaldi, called the Ptolomeo. The shelf has multiple variations with the X4 with the lie-flat configuration affording an incredible amount of storage efficiency, but alas, it was not one to easily fit into my apartment, and at that moment of time also the price seemed quite steep. Fortunately I rather quickly discovered that Rainaldi had created a slightly cheaper alternative for Gruppo Sintesi called the Sapiens bookshelf, and I immediately jumped on board and ordered the tallest, nearly two meter tall variant of it. As of today I have two of them and a third one as a smaller variant.

In general I am very satisfied with the Sapiens shelves, although they seem to split opinions a bit. But what is not to like about a stack of books? There were, however, some observations that I had not immediately thought of when I ordered the shelves. Firstly, the shelves stand alone, which is nice, but creates an interesting situation where the spine stands rather far away from the wall. This is fine, but only if you do not view the shelf from the sides. In practice this ended up causing some head scratching and compromises in my current apartment, and over a longer period of time in my next apartments I will from the get-go just probably end up getting the wall-mountable Ptolomeo shelves, since it will solve the problem and also make the shelf that much more compact.

A second observation was a corollary to the first one: a single Sapiens shelf looks good in a corner or comparable location where it is not as apparently obvious how far away it stands from the wall (i.e. no direct views from the sides), but a single shelf against a larger wall is a bit lost. Fortunately this is relatively easily overcome by multiple shelves side by side. I think this is due to the fact that a lot of the "marketing" or interior decoration pictures of the shelf are of spaces that are not really too compact and hence can dedicate lots of air and space to bring the focus to the single shelf. In practice, especially in smaller apartments, this type of situation rarely happens and hence there is force in numbers.

Aside from these caveats, I still very much like the product and at least for me the concept of spine bookshelves was finally an answer to a long standing problem. Brilliant design based on a simple insight. And the spines of the books are for once in the right orientation as well.

Bad product design

I like design and have a huge respect for people involved with product design. At the same time I admit that I am a very novice person in this specific area, hence amplifying my respect for good design. But as a consumer, I am also quite convinced that if I identify something that I believe is bad design, then it must be seriously bad design. Above are the instructions for changing a lamp; this design is utter rubbish.

Just to labor the point a bit more, first of all you can't tighten the lamp with your fingers, as there is too little space. Secondly, while you can remove the glass lamp shade, it does not help much as once you tighten the lamp, you can no longer screw the shade back into place. Hence an elaborate scheme involving suction cups to twist the lamp into place. The person who as an afterthought came up with the idea involving suctions cups should be shot twice, just for good measure. At the point of product development when you have a nearly finished product and you have that "oh shit" moment when you figure that you have designed yourself into the corner, you should either go back to the drawing board and change the design to make it functional or then just abandon it and go to work on cutting grass or comparable. Under no circumstance should you have an "a-ha" moment involving elaborate hacks like this.

Decentralization

I've been for the last 10 months rather tightly tied down to a relatively heavy transition program; how do you sell a substantial portion of a company away and make sure that what is left behind continues to function from a technical standpoint ("did you remember to find all your data", "how do you develop new environments from scratch at a rapid pace", etc.). The exercise has been quite rewarding in very many ways, and I think reflecting and post-processing the experiences will continue for the next couple of years.

Some things that have, however, immediately come to mind is the split between centralized and decentralized ways of working. Again, it reverts back to an evolutionary argument: if your organizational design is very centralized, it may provide faster execution and clearer structure. Emphasis on the word "may", as this is not always the case. This all assumes that the core has a good sense of what needs to be done and has the capability to carry out whatever work needs to be done, or alternatively has an efficient way of delegating work down. In the latter case, especially, the clarity in thinking and knowledge about how things should be gets emphasized even more. It's be no means a trivial challenge, and often what is asked are near omniscience from the key people. For good or bad, I think our program was very centralized.

Another way of going about it is obviously to decentralized. If the culture is already heavily emphasizing distribution of authority into self-contained, autonomous entities, this will probably be a walk in the park. Every entity clearly carries responsibility for sorting out how they survive these types of transitions. The amount of chaos, especially when observed from the outside and above, can be quite high, which easily explains why managers often appear to hate this kind of setup as this not only makes them nervous about their inability to control the larger context. A leap of faith, if you will.

Interestingly enough, at the end of a transition you are also faced with the question of cultures, and which way you want to start cultivating your culture. For us, this discussion resembled a bit of a farce; at first the general consensus was that a smaller, leaner, and more decentralized way would be the thing to go for. The problem with this is of course that everyone needs to become more accountable, because ultimately you need to get your job done and if it's a free-for-all at worst, then you probably should already be solving all of your problems.

What we amusingly enough encountered very quickly was a rapid swing back where people and projects started asking about who is responsible for delivering this and that. Paralysis was close-by as the supporting infrastructure and processes had been designed to tackle only the skeleton requirements, but this had been lost in the communication, or more likely a lack of appreciation for the true degree of changes was plaguing many parts of the organization. Unfortunately at precisely this moment it seems that the discourse takes a drastic turn and people cling onto centralized models; there needs to be someone who will provide answers for very specialized topics. And paradoxically enough the empowerment of individuals and greater accountability goes out the window as learned helplessness takes hold again.

This might be a bit of a cynical portrayal, and it is likely very clear that I'm much more in the decentralization camp than the tightly centralized one. This also means that I'm very sad at the fact that we had a chance, a very good one at that, to try to embrace a more dynamic way of working and organizing ourselves, but when push came to shove and we were standing at the edge of the cliff, we took a step back and didn't have the courage to see things through. As a result, the road ahead will be again long and painful and I keep wondering whether we've ever learned anything or if we continue to make the same mistakes over and over again if only because they are comfortable mistakes to make since we've done them so many times already...

Boxing is not a purely intellectual exercise

For the past half a year I've been fairly deeply embedded in the bowels of a relatively large divestment operation of a multinational corporation. No points are given for guessing what it might be, but as part of the program I've been thinking a bit about my working life as well. At a very early stage I was thrown into what I would characterize as the cargo-cult school of strategy and spent quite a few years in positions that, if I'm honest, I didn't really understand and became highly sceptical and cynical of.

Fast-forwarding to the present, having ditched the strategy-land for at least a while, I've gone back to my roots in technology and been solving very tactical issues with visibility to the future measured at best in days. Quite a stark contrast to the horizons of over ten years, which made me disgruntled earlier. Running in the trenches and occasionally coming up to sit across the table from the generals, I've struggled to put into words my frustration. The best I've come up with so far has been the notion of comparing the working life to boxing; too often I have a feeling that senior management is treating boxing as an exercise in intellectual and abstract thinking. However, at the end of the day the objective in boxing is to knock the other guy out while avoiding giving the other guy opportunities to do that to you. It has an intellectual component, however relying purely on that will result in you going to sleep relatively quickly.

In practice what this means is that outside of all the theorizing, at the end of the day the strategizing and thinking must turn into tangible action. In technology industries typically we utilize, well, technical tools to achieve different results we deem worthy of pursuing. Technology is especially interesting as it is one of a handful of force-multipliers in the world. An example would be that if measured in distance per calorie used (i.e. how efficiently one is able to move), humans are not that great, ranking a bit above the average when compared to all animals. But a human with a bicycle, that's off the charts. So in many cases the ability to wield technology effectively allows one to greatly magnify force. In boxing the analogy would be to create a base of strength, agility, speed, and a handful of other attributes and magnify them by appropriate application of technique.

Often, it appears, getting "stuck" in matters of tactics and execution is not deemed too sexy or glamorous. In the trenches of divestment operations the reality is quite harsh and decisions and actions have to be done quickly. For individuals higher up in the corporate food chain, this leads to the second force-multiplier: organization. If appropriate experience in commanding technology greatly magnifies output by scaling vertically, the appropriate organization of resources will allow one to scale out horizontally. That is, by effectively commanding more units, one is able to again magnify force.

There are undoubtedly more force-multipliers than the two listed above, and the natural third one goes back to the initial topic of the post: strategy. When an effective commander is able to organize a technically competent group to achieve results more efficiently, the next force-multipleir can be argued to relate to having a deeper understanding of the mission at hand, the larger landscape, knowledge of other players, and so on. It could be argued that individually any of these might be characterized as superior ability in relation to technologies. But, and pardon the bullshit, putting all the pieces together might give superior insight on elegant approaches that might have been otherwise missed. Identifying pivot points and opportunities for leverage. At best this can result in again greatly magnifying force, and historical precedent is abundant in quantity. However, the pitfall here is that no amount of strategizing will make up for inability in the two previous areas.

To put the above in a different way, no amount of thinking about how to win a boxing match will get you any closer to victory if you have not done your share of conditioning, developing and honing your technique and creating a solid base from which to knock the other poor guy out. Only once you get over a certain threshold level can you actually reap competitive advantage from theorizing. Prior to that, it doesn't matter how big the force-multiplier is if you are multiplying zero. If you can't meet the table stakes, you don't even get a seat at the table. And that, annoyingly enough, is what many people do not seem to comprehend.