On rejuvenating a company

As has been noted before, my recent interest revolves around aspects of evolution, especially that of industries and companies. Again, the age-old question of why companies die and how that can be avoided remains something of a key question.

Interestingly enough a few months back I was listening to Aubrey de Grey talk about aging and the provocative thought of near-eternal life. The argument supposedly goes metabolism causes unwanted side-effects (or damage) in our bodies over time. Eventually due to the accumulation of damage we end up dying, which on an individual level can be a rather unpleasant experience, depending on circumstances. Anyway, the idea is that by repairing the damage periodically we can rejuvenate the body and in a way turn back the clock. Advances in technology paired with iterative rejuvenation should then result in a situation where we would supposedly escape death indefinitely.

Regardless of whether or not we believe de Grey, I see an interesting analogy between this and what is killing off companies. If we start from a small start up, typically things are very ad hoc and agile, unorganized and clear. With a small amount of people making up the company, things just work. Of course this structure is very fragile and susceptible to all types of problems due to the lack of experience, much like children. The company can stray from its path and end up killed by being run over by competition. But such is life.

Over time the companies that aren't killed get smarter and smarter. They learn how to survive, how to satisfy customers, and so on. The growth is thus happening and typically in order to get the revenue to grow, companies need to scale up and thus recruit new employees. Over time the company must put on some excess weight, or overhead, in the form of administrative roles and structures (e.g. reporting structures, organizational structures, etc.). The structures typically appear to solve some problem. Reporting structures attempt to solve the problem of communication, which arises when enough people work in an organization and it is no longer feasible or possible to have everyone talking to everyone. So, structures in a way should be subordinate to problems.

With size and wealth comes relative stability. A single failure might no longer cause death and the company also learns to view and evaluate the world (or the industry it operates in, which is pretty much the same thing in this case) from the perspective of survival: the organization has learned from past mistakes. Enter path dependence and the increasingly heavy bag of history. Culture and status quo forms and the company keeps growing. Implicit knowledge is taught to new employees and the culture grows. People start doing things in a certain way since that's how it has always been done. The structures solidify and become axiomatic.

Unlike humans who grow and function in a more or less unchanged environment (where the change is so slow that it does not matter from the perspective of an individual human), companies operate in a much more unstable environment. Thus as the market demand changes, the companies must evolve to address new situations. Humans very often don't need to do this: the sun rises tomorrow, much like it did today. But the company must change, it must act differently at different parts of an industry's life cycle. The structures which served one purpose need to be changed to accommodate the changing environment. But as the structures become more and more rigid, change becomes more difficult. Inertia creeps in and damage begins to build up. Eventually if the company isn't able to reinvent or rejuvenate itself, it dies.

I'll admit that the analogy isn't perfect, but the parallels are surprisingly much aligned. Now, what is the practical implication? The older the company, the fatter the organization, the more unable it is to change and eventually it will get killed off, either by its own inability to function or alternatively it will get eaten up by the new breed of predators. Some people have argued that action comes from structure, and if we accept this, then its clear that to get different action the structure must change. So thus, to put it very bluntly, the rejuvenation of the company means the breaking of existing structures to build room for new structures.

First impressions

I recently had a learning experience interviewing people for a job. It was my first experience with something like that and what a learning experience it was to sit on the other side of the table and look at the situation from a completely different perspective. I thought that I would try to summarize some key things to keep in mind if and when I'm on the "regular" side of the table again in the future...

1) First impression matters. Exclamation mark. Seriously, it's a cliche, but I would say that judging by my experience it held very much true. The impression that I got from the first few minutes would typically hold true for the entire course of the interview. So try to get that right.

2) Be prepared and have your papers in order. Due to various reasons I didn't have the possibility to get very much acquainted with the CVs in advance, so it would be beneficial to bring a complete set of all relevant documents to the interview. If you intend to show something, be prepared in advance; asking the interviewer to lend you a laptop for showing something from online is somewhat awkward.

3) Answer the questions. It was quite surprising to me to run across some cases where people wouldn't answer the question they were asked. They would instead circle around the question. If you don't know the answer, the next best thing from my view would be to admit it. If you may have some clue, you could open up your thinking by explaining out loud, but in this case it should be clear where you're going with your answer. As a spin off of this, know what you know and more importantly know what you don't know. Trying to bluff the interviewer is hazardous: it is very much possible that the interviewer will know more than you and if you get caught bluffing, that is not good.

4) Open questions are a lot more fun for the interviewer. If, however, the interviewer starts asking simple and direct, closed questions, this may potentially be a bad sign. In my case once I didn't get satisfactory answers for open questions and I needed to just see if the interviewee knew anything of the subject, I would narrow my questions and form them more like exam questions and ditch the discussion or dialogue approach.

5) Be active. If the interviewer needs to drag out all the bits and details from you, it reflects somewhat badly on the perception that people are getting from you: are you really the go-getter type of person? Ask questions, show interest.

I guess there were also other things I noticed, but these were some of the top things that came to my mind. Now that I've written them down on paper, most of them seem like common sense. And I guess they are precisely that.

A short introduction to investment banking...

On human capital

Being in a happy position of still retaining the title of student I've been able to talk to a fair amount of different companies and their representatives. On top of the network of people who you've sat with and solved differential equations in Mat-1.1120 also talk a bit about where they've ended up and what they're doing. The insights about how the market and employers work is a rather illuminating experience and it seems that the age old rules of thumb still apply...

Some say that if you truly want to learn, go to a small company or start your own. You get your hands dirty and learn by doing. The salaries aren't that great, but you get a sense of accomplishment when you ship something to the customers or finish a project and see how you've made a tangible difference somewhere. It's also a world where bullshit doesn't fly; the small companies don't have the luxury of employing the standard mid-level management. If it doesn't contribute to the bottom line in one way or another, it won't fly.

On the other end of the scale we have the multinationals. Compared to the startups the difference is drastic: you actually get paid every month regardless of the financial success of your company, which is sort of cool. The nature of the game also changes: you start doing more abstract things and at times it may not even be clear who exactly is paying your salary and why they are doing so. But it enables you to spend a lot more time just thinking about things instead of having to run around trying to ensure that the company will survive next month as well, which is often the top priority in smaller companies.

Salary-wise it's actually interesting. I guess with large companies the salaries follow a bell curve with the average being some decent middle-class figure. The start-up world in turn may also follow a bell curve, but the average is way lower and the variance is very much higher: you get shitty salary but if things go will, your equity stake will be worth a nice and tidy sum... Something that doesn't typically happen in the Fortune 500 companies. Or that's anyway the feeling I had. Recently I've started to think that maybe even the large companies are not that uniform: some get a totally shitty salary, more people get a decent salary, then there's a gap, and finally the few get paid enormous amounts in various types of compensations.

But the practical implication, then, is the age old notion that if you want to do cool stuff, go start companies or join small companies. You won't necessarily get great financial rewards, but it'll be pretty goddamn fun. If, on the other hand, you want to be sure that you'll never make a difference in anything but aren't hanging by a thin thread either, go to a big company.

The question is thus the following: having experienced both worlds, which one do I actually want to belong to? The sense of accomplishment is far greater in the startup world, but the big companies are places where you can grow old and fat without having to really worry about anything...

Speed of technology cycles and process/product innovation

The speed that new technology emerges has been speeding up over the course of our history with the reasons being plentiful. The idea in essence is that for instance writing took pretty darn long to emerge in its current form and be widely adopted throughout the world, but for instance computers went through the same cycle in a fraction of that time. I don't have the references off the cuff now, but I recall running across some papers on this issue a year or few back.

Recently I've also had to go back to basics and read a bit of Utterback and Abernathy, and other such guys, on industry evolution, ecology, and the whole shebang. Well, ok, Utterback and Abernathy looked at the swings between process and product innovation, and the simple thought from that is well summarized in Nelson's paper from 2001: product innovation is driven by the amount of firms in an industry, process innovation by the size of firms. In practice this means that when an industry or technology is emerging, small entrants are plentiful and thus product innovation is abound. Then when dominant designs begin emerging some companies fare better than others and thus we get big companies. Or alternatively existing big companies enter the industry. The end result anyway is that the competitive advantage shifts to process innovations as the big companies tend to be good at throwing resources at things and developing processes. Scale benefits and such then ensure that small companies either exit or gravitate toward non-mainstream niches.

But what if you lump these two things together? Technology cycles become shorter, thus meaning that the time window for big companies to reap benefits based on process innovations is shortened (I guess that product innovation cycles will also shorten, but I think the point is that to have relevant process innovation, you first need a product and the business, otherwise it's pointless). Will this, then, imply that big companies will be at an increasing disadvantage because of their inertia and inability to perform product innovations, at least on the level that start-ups can? And will this, then, imply that from an evolutionary perspective the days of the big companies are outnumbered?

Books and covers

I ran across Fantastic Plastic Machine quite some years ago, mainly by stumbling on the first track of FPM's third album, Luxury. The track was quite aptly named Theme of Luxury, which I fell in love with right from get-go. Trying to describe it would only discredit it. Yes, it's that good. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) the rest of the album was, well, very different. As a matter of fact the album itself is as eclectic and diverse as they come. So I was somewhat disappointed with the album and it has been lying around ever since. Well, up until recently, anyway, when I finally picked it up again and started to listen to it, and lo-and-behold, it is in fact very good.

I guess the underlying dynamic here is that based on the first track, I was expecting something. The album didn't deliver that, and that was the letdown. But what it does deliver is something else, which is equally good, just different. It's like picking up the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated and finding out it reads like The Economist. Well, not really, but you get the idea.

Tuition fees

We've traditionally had free university in Finland, meaning that in practice students do not pay for their education. This system has essentially afforded equal opportunities for people regardless of socio-economic background to educate themselves in universities. Now, recently there's been talk of introducing tuition fees in Finland. This presentation made by a group doing a report for the government would suggest a yearly fee of 1000 euros per student, translating to an extra 250 million euros of income per year for the education system (calculations done by Helsingin Sanomat). The rationale behind this move would be to get students to graduate faster as well has help in hiring new faculty, and so on.

Technically the goals of this initiative sound good: who wouldn't want to graduate faster and have more faculty per student than before. However, this somewhat undermines the free education principle. Some people stand very firmly behind the principle, but I don't consider myself as much of a hardliner on this issue. From a practical standpoint, however, I'm am somewhat worried about this turn of events: if the system was working and someone could guarantee that the extra 250 million would be spent wisely and would in practice improve the quality of education, I wouldn't necessarily be that much against it. But I fear that the extra money wouldn't matter; it would be squandered on pointless exercises and real tangible value would fail to materialize for the students.

Aalto University, the merger between Helsinki University of Technology, Helsinki School of Economics, and the University of Art and Design Helsinki, promised lots of new and unique opportunities for students. The jury is still out on this one, but as far as I'm concerned this seemed precisely like an exercise that could bring synergies via increased economies of scale: reducing overlapping functions and bureaucracy and refocusing the left over resources on improving quality. Instead my current feeling is that this isn't happening. I don't have any hard evidence, but I have a feeling that the bureaucracy has in fact increased and thus I'm not so sure throwing extra money helps. There's a saying that states that only when money runs out does the thinking start. So in practice as long as there is an abundance of resources nothing will really change as it doesn't really have to.

So based on this I would argue that the system shouldn't be rewarded with more resources before it can clearly demonstrate that it will not spend the resources on completely pointless work groups consisting of bureaucrats who just like to spend their time in glorified workshops in remote locations.

As for the tuition fees themselves, that's also somewhat of a difficult issue. On one hand I somewhat understand the logic of putting some pressure on students: if you want to study, you have to be confident enough in what your doing to put some money where your mouth is. But many students are already doing this as traditionally the state support for students hasn't been that great in Finland and students are often forced to take jobs on the side (as a curious side note, I argue that this habit of taking up extra work is especially good for engineering students who clearly benefit from the overlapping of school and work and are thus, in my opinion, better prepared to face future challenges when compared to being merely school educated and lacking all practical experience coming out of school).

From the point of view of an individual student the net effect isn't too different if you consider two options: 1) institute tuition fees or 2) reduce state support for students. The result is less money for the student, meaning more work or more loans. I am a proponent for the work-while-studying approach, but that's mainly in the cases where the work actually supports studies. In cases where the work is routine manual labor and doesn't really overlap with your studies, the benefits are not as many. And ultimately I'm not sure either approach is necessarily that good, despite the fact that provocatively enough I often do argue that students need to indeed be ready put up a bit more of a stake than merely saying that "Yeah, I'll graduate, maybe..."

So what should be done, then? I actually think that tuition fees shouldn't be instituted. I also don't think that student support from a financial standpoint should be increased either. I do, however, think that one thing where students could use support is with affordable housing. To an extent this mechanism is already in use as student housing is given to students for a certain period of time with the assumption that students will eventually graduate or then get kicked out of their apartments after some years. It's the cheap housing which then enables students to have slightly more cash with which to improve their lives, and more money can then be obtained via working or lending money from the bank.

But yeah, by no means is this a simple issue and the problems are very much real. However, I think that both the students and the government are coming at the problem in a way too hardliner way which to an extent frightens me. Schools don't deserve any more money as far as they're as fat as they currently are and tuition fees are a bad idea, but also giving students too much financial aid (as opposed to loans) is also somewhat questionable. The fact that students take quite long (~6-7 years, I would guess) to graduate may not necessarily be a bad thing, and the government should try to understand that point as well. As for the students whose studies drag on and on, I would argue that there's hardly any extra cost (after the already sunk costs) for the state as these people often don't attend lectures and classes and are merely trying to finish their thesis or do the last couple of exams and are thus hardly more than a few bits in a data system.

These were just my two cents on the subject from the top of my head, so again I reserve the right to change my view in the morning after I sleep a bit...

Strike!

AKT, the Finnish transport workers' union, went on strike yesterday. Today the strike ended with both the employer and employee sides still unsatisfied. The strike itself brought Finland, to an extent, to a halt as all forms of automotive transport from public transport to cargo traffic came to a halt. Without going into the employee side's demands, this illustrates an interesting dynamic: in effect a single union can hold more or less an entire nation hostage. This situation seems completely absurd as in a sense the union seems to have a type of a monopoly on the human capital that its members essentially sell to companies.

Building off this analogy, it's interesting that this type of behavior is allowed from a legislative perspective. If we would have a company with a monopoly position behaving in a similar way, using it's monopoly to hold its customers hostage and forcing its own will on others in this respect, I'm quite certain that many regulatory entities would have a field day beating the company around with antitrust legislation.

Collars

I recently gathered quite a strong opposition by arguing for contrast collars and cuffs. It seems that very many people don't like the look, which begs a question regarding why. As we know from history, the wealthier individuals have traditionally clustered towards white shirts, namely to demonstrate wealth by being able to keep the shirts white when the lesser people would soil them quickly. The story goes that white shirts eventually became boring and thus some individuals took to wearing also colored shirts, but opted for white collars and cuffs as these were the parts which would soil most frequently, thus still being able to differentiate from the pure blue collared group. Since then it seems that most people associate contrast collars with bankers and other suspicious types.

So thus it seems that ultimately there would be three potential reasons for why people might object to contrast collars: 1) because they are, to an extent, a sign of wealth, 2) because they are, to an extent, associated with questionable people who aren't too well liked these days, or 3) because of aesthetic reasons. The first point is easy to discard as it would imply that the same people would also need to object to white shirts, something which isn't as widely spread as a viewpoint as the hatred towards contrast collars. So then it must have something to do with the links to certain shady occupations or pure aesthetics.

We can't do much about the second point, but the third point warrants some more discussing. My girl friend is very open about her distaste towards these types of shirts and bases her argument on the fact that they just look horrible. There are some theories as to why contrast collars might appear horrible. Some say that if the tie is too pale it will get lost in the color of the shirt and thus allow the collar to stand out too much. This point is increasingly relevant as the contrast between the shirt and tie increases, namely by making the shirt out of stronger colors than the traditional light blue or light pink. Others suggest that the white collars draw the attention upwards and into the face of the person, and that this wouldn't be a good thing. I can't for the love of life recall the reasoning behind this argument, but I guess a tongue-in-cheek interpretation might include the face in question in the equation: if you have an ugly face, you won't want to draw attention to it... Discarding the second point we still find two things to bear in mind: make sure that your tie dominates the shirt, not the other way around, and that the contrast between the shirt and the collar doesn't become too drastic.

Moving on, to provoke people even more, I decided to go ahead and order yet another MTM shirt from France, this time with a nice 120s poplin with blue and white stripes combined with contrast collars and cuffs. And to ensure that there are enough stares, I also ordered a pair of braces from the UK to conclude the slimy banker look, which should be perfect for the upcoming premiere of Wall Street, the sequel.

Bow ties

I may have to start wearing bow ties way more often in the future, if only for the fact that it's incredibly good looking to lounge around with an untied bow tie around your neck and a bit of whisky in your glass.

And on an unrelated note, Gounod's interpretation of Goethe's Faust, as performed by the Finnish National Opera, was somewhat of a let down. I was expecting the devil to be a bit more sinister.

"I could talk about that, but I won't..."

The sheer energy of the guy is amazing... Both inspiring and funny...

On taxation

The tax debate is in full swing in Finland again, this time regarding capital income and how it should be taxed progressively. It seems to me that progression is the trendy word these days, so I'm going to leap-frog myself over it and discover the next big trend around the corner: regression. What I propose is simple: regressive taxation. The more you earn, the more you pay taxes in absolute sense. But in relative sense your tax rate should decrease as a function of your income (be it salary or capital based).

But, this is still merely a stop-gap on our way to the ultimate goal: regressive taxation where relative taxes decrease so as to ensure that everyone pays an equal amount (in an absolute sense) of taxes, regardless of income levels. This would naturally be the ultimate fair and reasonable solution! Everyone would finally be equal, regardless of race, gender, wealth, and so on... ;)

Research questions

One of the biggest challenges so far is nothing new to anyone who has ever written academic papers: how to define what it is exactly that you want to do and how to scope it? This often manifests itself as the difficult of defining a good research question. By instinct I would say that the difficulty is in trying to define a set of questions which are not only interesting, but also solvable while not being entirely naive. There may be more aspects as well, but those came to mind right away.

Regardless, the broad strokes of my thesis have been more or less clear for a while:

1. I want to look at two industries (automobile and ICT).
2. I want to use the industry evolution viewpoint and systems thinking (more specifically system dynamics) to hit stuff with.

What then happened was that I decided to more or less climb up a tree arse first, as I typically do. So I figured that maybe these two industries have links between each other, which could be manifested in various ways (e.g. by the emergence of ICT stuff in your everyday cars). Building off of this, I got excited and decided that obviously I could find some smaller subindustries from beneath the two and argue that they are moving towards each other, in which case my core idea would be to speculate on a collision test: how do two industries (or subindustries in this case) collide, what are the aspects related to something like this, and what does theory say about industry convergence or industry formation.

When I woke up this morning I decided that maybe I'm going at it the wrong way. Getting anything empirical from the above would possibly prove rather tricky. So I had another Idea, despite the fact that more intelligent people than I have said that when writing a thesis, if you get any type of idea you should immediately kill it as MSc theses are no places for ideas. I know these people to be true, but come on, I have an Idea and I trust myself implicitly!

So, maybe my problem is that I'm making too many assumptions about what might be happening. How the hell could I know what exactly is going on between two massive industries when I haven't even talked to any of the companies directly and tried to get an idea of what is actually happening. But one thing is certain: companies in these two industries are talking. Can't deny that. But will it result in industry convergence or industry formation? Perhaps not, as both are large, well established industries themselves. So maybe there isn't any collision to look at per se. But there are obviously cross-industry interactions going on in the form of companies talking with each other, doing products which interface increasingly with each other, participating in the same industry discussion platforms, talking with the same regulators, and so on.

Now, maybe a more dialed down version of an approach could be as follows:

• What are the mechanisms for companies to interact (e.g. collaborate) across different industries?
• How do cross-industry interactions shape the evolution of an industry? And vice versa?
• What is (and has been) happening with the automobile and ICT industries: what does theory say, what does practice say?

This set of questions seems, from my point of view, to be a lot less assuming than the original approach. They're also slightly more boring, and I've yet to figure out what exactly the really cool thing would be. But herein lies another point that I often overlook: maybe my thesis doesn't in fact need to create any type of radical new insight, maybe it's enough that I just apply the scientific method and solve at least the questions above. Getting empirical material for the above questions should be too difficult, so in this regard it also seems doable.

Finally, let me conclude by saying that most of the thinking I was doing while I was writing. And I spent about 15 minutes performing the act of writing. So I reserve the right to decide to revamp the approach at least three more times by lunch, and continue at that pace for as long as I see fit. But hey, it's better to have these types of mood swings at this point of the process, as opposed to the end of the process (I have experience about that as well: I ended up writing my BSc thesis three times during which I slightly evolved my viewpoint during every iteration: I can't suggest that approach too much...).

Breaking ground

Starting in January I had my first discussions regarding my upcoming thesis, and things seem to be progressing, despite a slightly slow pace as of yet. Anyway, I finally today broke ground by actually starting build a map of the relevant literature and authors in Excel. Reflecting back on my many learning experiences from my BSc thesis, I guess the best thing to do is to be smart about things; instead of randomly running into papers and reading everything that comes up, my strategy this time around in regards to literature can be summarized something like this:

1. Build the main corpus starting from a set of literature from one or two relevant courses from school. Break the articles down and do a simple analysis of references to attept to identify the key authors and potentially their key papers. In my case the literature will be primarily based on the field of industry evolution.
2. Since my specific topic is related to a topic which the bulk of industry evolution papers don't appear to touch directly, I'll have to most likely venture out into the periphery of literature to see if anything's present there. The tactic here will be to formulate some keywords and guestimates. Bonus points for articles which cite Utterback, Hannan, Klepper, Frenken, Abernathy, Carroll, etc.
3. The Big Books of systems thinking and dynamics. No direct link to the subject at hand from these books, except for potentially providing me a nifty hammer with which I can then hit everything with.

My hope is that by spending a bit time on actually analyzing the literature before jumping in will result in brownie points from school for finding the truly relevant articles as well as enabling me to actually read a lot less than I otherwise would. Also, a map is always a cool thing since you are less likely to get lost if you have one (although it's still nothing compared to the nifty Ovi navigation stuff that Nokia recently decided to start giving out free... Yeah, I know, this was a really cheap plug, but oh well...).

But, from now on I'll try to blog every once in a while about the progress of my thesis. Let's see if I can actually graudate by the end of the year...

What's for dinner?

Had a decently nice dinner last week to mourn over a steadily accelerating decline (or is it still a steadily declining ascent?) that nature has imposed on all of us. The menu consisted of:

• Lobster seasoned with rosemary and cold smoked salmon-sweet potato crème
• Fried scallop with champagne risotto
• Ox tail and sauerkraut
• Fillet of hare, Jerusalem artichoke and green pepper sauce
• Banana ginger cake, caramel chocolate mousse and mango sorbet

The letdown, if one can call it that considering the overall suberb quality of the food, was the hare, which without wine was left too much on its own without support. To call it a letdown, however, might be overstating it as it was by all measures still very enjoyable. The star of the menu, in my opinion, was the fried scallop, which was heavenly.

Sufficient to say, based on this experience I can suggest Carma as quite a decent place to have dinner if you're in Helsinki. The price for the above menu was a quite reasonable 69 euros, including two small treats from the kitchen.

Layer cake

"You're born, you take shit. You get out in the world, you take more shit. You climb a little higher, you take less shit. Till one day you're up in the rarefied atmosphere and you've forgotten what shit even looks like. Welcome to the layer cake son." -Eddie Temple from Layer Cake

I think the above quote summarizes life pretty well. The core thing here, in my opinion, is the fact that to get anywhere in life you need to take shit and shovel shit. You can't get around that fact. How much shit you need to shovel, in turn, is something you can affect. The smarter you are, the less shit you have to shovel. But you always have to shovel, so you better get used to the idea.

Now, why is this relevant? Over the past few years I've often come across situations where people seem to think that they can just jump over the step that was mentioned above. But it doesn't work that way. Even if you are able to temporarily see what life could be like in what Eddie calls the rarefied atmosphere, you won't stay there for long if you haven't served your time. I have to admit, even I occasionally forget this, but life has a funny way of knocking you back down to earth and eventually you learn to keep your nose to the grindstone.

Based on this, I would extend the above by suggesting that you can, at times, take a short leave from the treadmill. But every time you do, there is a discontinuity. If the discontinuity becomes longer than a certain threshold allows, you fall back down. The threshold is very subjective and depends on many different things. For the sake of conversation I'll simplify it and say that it depends on how much shit you've shoveled previously. Typically the more you shovel the more you learn and the more competent you become. But while becoming more competent, you also need to ensure that you're in an upwardly mobile trajectory. So the threshold also depends on your position in the layer cake. As a sidenote, it's interesting how as you mature, it appears that your technical competence, to an extent, becomes less relevant, but only if you've been upwardly mobile and have replaced your technical competence with another type of competence, which is essentially something related to understanding how the world and the systems that make up the world actually work. You can essentially, at some point in your life, replace the heavy lifting with cunningness.

All of this is essentially very obvious. But the implications are huge: my biggest gripe with younger people these days is the assumption that you simply don't need to shovel shit, that you don't need to learn hard technical skills, and that you'll just be handed everything on a plate. That combined with the situation that most young people are doing the wrong things and then creating holes in their CVs by doing wrong things and dropping themselves down in the layer cake again. Granted, during the past few years the recession has meant that life has become slightly more difficult, but I would still argue that having more spare time should enable youngsters to train and practice the skills that are relevant for them. In software participating in Open Source projects, for instance, is a brilliant way of making sure that despite not getting paid, you're still maintaining your technical competence and keeping yourself on the treadmill, thus keeping you from falling back down in the layer cake. Entrepreneurial activities are another way to achieve the same effect.

And finally: embracing opportunities. While grinding away with your shovel, one should always be on the lookout for opportunities to sieze. Opportunities that open up offer brilliant vehicles to demonstrate your competence and move up in life. But that's assuming that you don't make a hash of things. If you do, then the effect is negated, i.e. down you go.

Now, add network externalities to the soup and this becomes quite an interesting topic. Is your shoveling affected by others around you? Can someone help you with your burden or do the exact opposite? Is the world a zero-sum game or are you able to tap into synergies?

"Why don't you start calling me Gordon..."

On public transport... Again...

Yeah, so about public transport... Amazingly enough it appears that the amount of headaches public transport causes makes all of life's other problems seem very manageable and relatively insignificant. Let's recap...

1) The people. Not to sound elitistic or anything, but it's incredible how people are not able to take care of basic hygiene. It's very uplifting to wake up, wash up, and dress up, only to get on a bus and have a person who reaks of urine sit next to you and a person with long, unwashed hair with ticks and such sit in front of you. Not to criticize people's various lifestyles, but could you be considerate towards other people? Pretty please... And the polar opposite in this category are the women who are serious abusers of all sorts of fragrances. These aren't restricted to merely public transport, but all walks of life. We all know the types of people who you can smell from hundreds of meters away. Maybe tone down the amount of perfume?

2) The space, or lack off. I'm a bit over 1.9 meters tall and in decent physical shape. The number one problem is: leg room. Finnish buses aren't fortunately in the same league as the buses in Malta, but it is a rare day when I don't contemplate amputating my legs. It's impossible to fit in the seat. As an offshoot of being this size in general is that the width of my shoulders, while not in any way comparable to bodybuilders of any type, is what it is and I can't do much about it. Combine this with the first point regarding people, and things get interesting. Just today I ran across a situation where the bus was half-empty. I managed to get an entirely empty seat, but the legroom wasn't that nice. So I decided to sit by the aisle to compensate for the problem. Of course a fellow co-passenger absolutely positively has to sit next to me, despite the fact that there are more seats with more space available. Fair enough; who am I to take up two seats, so naturally I move over. Then begins the bitching and moaning: why do you take up so much space, can you be any narrower, I'm having difficulty staying on my seat, and so on... I'm sorry, but a) I am a big guy and have a certain amount of space that I must have in order to fit; I can't become any smaller without the help of a saw, and b) could You go on a diet, since the size of your arse is something that you can affect.

3) The drivers. Somehow it's very surprising that there can occasionally be people on bus stops who would like to get on a bus. Yeah, I know, it's completely unbelievable! But it just so happens that this is the case. So it shouldn't come as a surprise to bus drivers that there might be people on the stops. So please, look at the bus stops and slow down enough to see if people would like to get on. And if there are people, could you slow down and let them on, instead of driving past and acting as if you didn't see them at all? Then there is the fact that in Finland we occasionally have a phenomenon called slush. It's a type of mixture between snow and water and it's very annoying. So when the bus driver decides to pass the stop without stopping, of course the natural thing to do is speed up enough and aim for the slush so that you can throw it on the people who are standing on the stops. Especially so when near business parks: I bought these made-to-measure suits just so that you can destroy them to demonstrate your power over us mere mortals. And I enjoy having them dry-cleaned after every use.

4) The scheduling. It is surprising that we have different type of weather at different points of the year. It's so surprising that it seems that the guys who plan the schedule seem to think it's completely irrelevant to take this into account. So naturally when the winter comes you can just ditch your schedules and don't even bother looking at Reittiopas. The bus will come when it comes, if it comes. One would imagine that operating a bus fleet wouldn't be rocket science: you drive from point A to point B via a certain amount of stops. You plan the schedule to be realistic and then add compensating amounts of time when external, environmental aspects force you to do so. But apparently operating a public transport company is even more difficult than putting a man on the moon and getting him back in a sane amount of time.

So yeah, I'm having a difficult time to see why I should voluntarily suffer the public transport. Fair enough, the company does subsidize it enough to make it practically free for me. But let's ask the question in another way: if I promised to drive you from point A to point B for free, would you take the offer? Undoubtedly. But would you still take the offer if you had to take an incredible amount of shit at the same time? Most likely not. So I would like to be a nice person and hug all the trees and save the world, but my annoyance threshold is closing in at a pace which begs the question: is all this really worth it when I could just lease a BMW Z4 and drive like a lunatic and have fun commuting to and from work, instead of suffering public transport in all the multiple different ways as I currently do...

Boating

The boating season is soon upon us again...

Dissatisfaction

As I have noted previously, I've been digging even deeper into the world of made-to-measure clothing. Today I fetched my newest suit from Sartoria Rossi. The suit is simple enough: a single-breasted, two-button, side-vented, notch-collared, four cuff-buttoned suit made out of extremely dark blue wool. So a fairly traditional "dark suit" to wear to more formal occasions and to replace tailcoats and tuxedos with (as I'm too lazy and cheap to actually invest in any formal or semi-formal attire).

Anyway, as I fetched the suit, I couldn't help but be slightly dissatisfied. I couldn't precisely point the finger at any specific thing at first, but after some time I came to the conclusion that some problems that I have with the suit are:

1. The shoulder padding could have been slightly (0.5-1cm) longer on either side.
2. The buttons could have been slightly higher (the lower button by 1-2 cm and the upper button by 2-3 cm). An offshoot of this is that now the lapels seem slightly too long and slightly too thin (in reality the lapels are nearly ok width-wise, but the length makes them seem narrower).
   
3. The jacket could have perhaps been slightly longer (1-2 cm).
4. The lining should have been silver instead of the slightly pinkish-grey.

Now, after spending the day thinking about all of this, it's actually fairly evident that most of the issues that I have with the suit are things that I could have and should have directly influenced. But all of these are again things which would have been really difficult for me to know in advance. So ultimately this is another case of needing to use the first purchase as a test to calibrate the system and thus enable successes in the future.

That said, at the end of the day I do have to admit that I'm starting to somewhat like the suit. The quality of the suit seems high enough for this price range and the service I got was very good. So as of now I don't really have anything against Sartoria Rossi, which seems to be one of the better stores in Helsinki when it comes to mens' clothing. One additional thing to note with made-to-measure suits is concerning the cut: you should pay special attention to suits that the manufacturer has made earlier, either MTM or off-the-rack. This will most likely be the cut that your suit will follow, so in this regard it's imperative to find the right manufacturer with the right cut that you like.

In the longer run I'll most likely test out one or two other manufacturers. Learning from this experience, I will most likely begin testing MTM manufacturers in the form of jackets at first. This has the benefit of reducing financial risk and trousers are anyway more or less simple and cheap to make, so calibration in that area may not be as crucial as with the jacket. The next thing I was thinking of extending my wardrobe with, at some point, is a double-breasted navy blazer. Pair that with grey flannel trousers, a blue and white striped shirt and a nice tie and the result will be a very classic and elegant outfit...