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The first non-bullshit book about culture I've read

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Re: The first non-bullshit book about culture I've read

#41

Post by goblin89 »

“Culture can’t be broken, any more than complexity can be the cause of failure”.

Am I in the minority thinking that “complexity is the cause of failure” may in fact be a useful and actionable statement? Start analyzing where complexity resides, cope with failures caused by inevitable complexity…

Of course, qualifying the sources of unnecessary complexity would be even more helpful, but even merely pointing it out may be more strategically useful than “X and Y caused an error”. (So you’ll fix X and Y; then Z will start causing trouble.)

It’s a tangent, I agree that “culture is broken” does seem like a useless statement.

Re: The first non-bullshit book about culture I've read

#43

Post by auto »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #29

This reads like a commercial, but I'm not going to downvote it. I read the book and liked it, along with about a hundred other books on culture over the years. There is a similar pattern: a problem, an old way of doing things, a hero, a change, and a beautiful sunset with our hero riding off. I think there are really, really good things in these kinds of books, especially if you identify with the problem and hero. At…

> then a slow die-off until the next book.

I'm curious if you think that it's actually possible for a book (or perhaps more generally, a school of thought) to actually break out of the cycle, or whether it's just the natural order of these sorts of things.

What I mean is, maybe what we get from these sorts of "self-help" pieces of literature/philosophies/whatever is less like a mantra that's one and done, and more like food satisfying a nutritional need, and just as you can't expect to eat a perfect meal and never be hungry for the rest of your life; when you get hungry again, you just need to find the next thing to eat.

I ask because I've gone through a number of these sorts of cycles in my own personal development over the last decade or so, and I'm finding that success tends to lie in seeing things in the latter light.

Re: The first non-bullshit book about culture I've read

#44

Post by ikurei »

goblin89 wrote: post #41

“Culture can’t be broken, any more than complexity can be the cause of failure”. Am I in the minority thinking that “complexity is the cause of failure” may in fact be a useful and actionable statement? Start analyzing where complexity resides, cope with failures caused by inevitable complexity… Of course, qualifying the sources of unnecessary complexity would be even more helpful, but even merely pointing it out may…

> Am I in the minority thinking that “complexity is the cause of failure” may in fact be a useful and actionable statement? Start analyzing where complexity resides[...]

I think the spirit of the original statement is exactly that: complexity is the cause of failure is an awful conclusion to reach.

What you're saying sounds like you think it's a good first intuition to start going deeper and reach more specific conclusions.

Re: The first non-bullshit book about culture I've read

#48

Post by jtms »

teddyh wrote: post #26
gexla wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like books which are sort of lessons within a biography format. Points pulled from real experience. For me, this adds context and makes a book readable. If you don't learn anything, then at least you might get to read a good story. The hard thing about hard things, by Ben Horowitz The Score Takes Care of Itself, Bill Walsh (49ers Coach) Creativity, Inc, Ed Catmull (Ran Pixar) To Pixar and Beyond, Lawrence Levy (CFO…

> I like books which are sort of lessons within a biography format. How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life (Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert) also fits this description.

Why is this being downvoted? Did Scott Adams get cancelled or something?

Re: The first non-bullshit book about culture I've read

#50

Post by jcbrand »

ikurei wrote: post #44
goblin89 wrote: post #41

“Culture can’t be broken, any more than complexity can be the cause of failure”. Am I in the minority thinking that “complexity is the cause of failure” may in fact be a useful and actionable statement? Start analyzing where complexity resides, cope with failures caused by inevitable complexity… Of course, qualifying the sources of unnecessary complexity would be even more helpful, but even merely pointing it out may…

> Am I in the minority thinking that “complexity is the cause of failure” may in fact be a useful and actionable statement? Start analyzing where complexity resides[...] I think the spirit of the original statement is exactly that: complexity is the cause of failure is an awful conclusion to reach. What you're saying sounds like you think it's a good first intuition to start going deeper and reach more specific concl…

Even if you can reach a more specific conclusion, that wouldn't necessarily rule out complexity as the cause of failure.

It's a question of how far you zoom in or out.

In the micro-level you can find the particular bug that causes failure, while on the macro-level it's still complexity that's causing failure (because it causes bugs like that to occur more frequently).

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