Only slightly bent

Next up on the summer reading list was Chip & Dan Heath’s Made to Stick: Why some ideas survive and others die. The title, borrowing the term from Gladwell’s Tipping Point, lays out what it’s all about – why do we remember some messages and forget others? How can we make our ideas stickier, so that people wouldn’t just shrug them off in a second?

One repeating theme in the book is the emphasis on using stories – the idea is that our brains are hardwired to remember concrete stuff instead of abstract statistics. Proverbs are one powerful example of this. Few of us can remember a piece of statistic from last week, but we know and often repeat proverbs that originated thousands of years ago. Almost as “good” (or bad) are the many urban legends tenaciously circulating the world. Stickiness of both of these is uncontested. But how do we go about creating our own equivalent of undying – hopefully useful – proverbs of our ideas?

We don’t, of course. And we shouldn’t even aim for immortality for our ideas, but we can certainly aim and achieve something better than 0.5 seconds. Made to Stick presents a framework called SUCCES in identifying and building stories that stick – Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional Stories. Another key theme is the curse of knowledge; this means that once we know something, it becomes incredibly difficult to imagine life without knowing that. That, in turn, makes it quite difficult to teach whatever it is that we know to others as we’re dying to tell all the details we know, laying out too much information when what we’d really need to tell is just the simple core message.

That applies to me in writing this review also; I’d love to tell you about the 40-something interesting points that I wrote down when reading it, being blissfully unaware that you haven’t read the book yet and as such they may mean nothing to you. So I will for once to resist doing that. It’d be great if I could compact the message of the book in a sentence or two but, alas, I cannot. So let’s tackle just one very shortly: abstract vs concrete.

How often do you see something concrete in, say, a company strategy? Not very often – yet the management would most likely want the employees to remember and even act on the strategy. But eventually all actions are concrete, so consider this:

Abstraction makes it harder to understand an idea and to remember it. It also makes it harder to coordinate our activities with others, who may interpret the abstraction in very different ways. Concreteness helps us avoid these problems.

So the lesson? The lesson is to make your message concrete. Help people understand by giving them a concrete cases, people, something they can relate to instead of just empty words that’ll soon be forgotten. Here’s a quick example to see how concreteness helps. First, try to think of five silly things people in the world have done in the past 10 years. Second, try to think of filly silly things your kids have done recently. Most people find the latter task easier, even though it’s a very limited domain to draw those silly things from and, indeed, a subset of the first group.

So there’s lots of good insight in the book. Armed with all this insight into how to make your idea stick, you will most likely become better at it. There’s a small catch here (and this catch, btw, is entirely my thought and not in the book): as more and more people become better in making their ideas sticky, you will have to constantly stay ahead of them and be better than the rest to be remembered. Why? Well we as human beings have a finite capacity to remember stuff – if all the ads we saw were remarkable, none of them would be. If everything is surprising, nothing is. So by definition, not everyone can play this game well. And that’s the challenge; just be better than most others and you’ll be remembered. Made to Stick should help in that regards. Luckily everyone won’t read it.

Please select the secure lane

Here on the right we have a gate at our campus at work. Looks pretty secure, no? It’s certainly a solid piece of work, fully capable of stopping the average thief or vandal.

Unless, of course, that vandal has the sense to look an inch left of the gate, where there is open road – see below.



(Okay, in all fairness – they are in the process of dismantling the whole gate/fence thing and this is just an in-between step..)

In case of a heart attack, please run that way

While in reality this is probably a good health care service to have around, I still found this sign at a mall in Monaco quite funny.

If this is how the country is run when times are good..

.. what will happen when times are not so good, as will soon happen? Finland has been experiencing good – in some sense even unprecedented and certainly above EU average – economic growth for the past years. Would this be a logical time to try to invest in the future of the country?

One would like to think so, but apparently the government doesn’t quite agree. For one, we all know mental health care is in a pretty shoddy shape. Outpatient treatment has come to mean abandonment. And we all know what happens to mental patients when they’re abandoned, don’t we? Do they magically heal themselves. No they don’t. The regular health care is struggling with worsening labor shortage.

Meanwhile, child care is also another area that’s not being run well – group sizes are ridiculously big and day care is hard to find with long waiting lists. Many other important sectors are also running short of money.

One has to wonder whether it makes sense to invest in overpriced infrastructure projects and on pampering the willingly unemployed while skimping on preventive care in good times? Big infrastructure investments for one would be so much better done in times of an economic slowdown when they’d be cheaper and provide some jobs as well as economic stimulus. I’m pretty sure this will be contrasted by similarly dumb counter-moves when times are bad.

This is a great list is shamelessly borrowed from a piece of paper I ran into and freely translated into English. The paper quoted the source as www.positiivarit.fi, a Finnish “positivity” site. Now, all men out there, do you agree with this?

• Learn to use the toilet cover. You’re a big girl. If it’s up, put it down. We use it up, you use it down. We don’t complain about it being down either.
• Birthdays, valentine’s days and wedding anniversaries are not tests to see if we can again buy the perfect gift.
• Sometimes we do not think about you. Learn to live with that.
• Sunday means sports and/or cars. It’s like the full moon or the tides. Let it be.
• Shopping is not sports. We will never think otherwise.
• Crying is blackmail.
• If you want something, ask clearly. Subtle clues do not work. Strong hints don’t work either. Obvious clues don’t work. Just say it.
• Check the oil of your car. Please.
• “Yes” and “no” are perfectly acceptable answers to nearly all questions.
• Tell us your problem only if you want it fixed. That’s how we work. You can get sympathy from your girlfriends.
• A headache that lasts 17 months is a problem. Go see a doctor.
• Nothing we said six months ago applies when arguing. In fact, all our comments become invalid after seven days.
• If you think you’re fat, you probably are. Don’t ask us. We will not answer.
• If something that we say can be interpreted in two ways, one of which makes you sad or angry, we mean the other one.
• Let us look at other women. We’ll do that anyway, it’s in our genes.
• You can either ask us to do something or tell us to do something. Not both. If you know beforehand how to do it best, do it yourself.
• Whenever possible, say what you want to say during a commercial break.
• Christopher Columbus didn’t need directions and neither do we.
• Our relationship will never be like it was in the first month. Learn to live with that and stop complaining to your girlfriends.
• All men see only 16 colors, just like in Windows’ settings. Peach, for example, is a fruit, not a color. And we have no idea what a beige is.
• If it itches, we scratch it.
• We do not read minds and we never will. This deficiency doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t care about you.
• If we ask what’s wrong and you say nothing, we act accordingly. We know you’re lying, but it’s not worth it to find out what is the matter.
• If you ask a question which you do not want to hear an answer to, expect an answer you don’t want to hear.
• When we’re going somewhere, anything you own will be just fine to wear.
• Do not ask what we think unless you’re prepared to hear, for example, about how the stomach works, navel lint, football or cars.
• You have enough clothes.
• You have too many shoes.
• We think beer is a fun thing, just like purses are to you.
• Thank you for reading this. I know I will have to spend the next night on the couch, but that’s okay. It’s kind of like camping.

I’d vouch for perhaps 70% of these, so it’s a pretty good list

Slowly getting back up to speed with my reading schedule, the first book I completed from my reading list was Robert I. Sutton’s The No Asshole Rule: Building a civilized workplace and surviving one that isn’t. Kind of a refreshing title to see on a business book, isn’t it? Similar topics have usually been handled very cautiously under terms such as bullying, but somehow the word “asshole” has a much better ring to it than a socially handicapped individual, bully, jerk, antisocial person, tyrant or whatever.

Now, we all know assholes. And while we can often steer clear of them in our personal lives, workplace assholes are another matter. While most of us probably agree with Sutton that life is just too short to put up with assholes, do we know how to deal with them if needed? The book begins by providing some guidelines on how to tell a permanent asshole from a temporary one – an important distinction to make since we’re all temporary assholes from time to time. It then goes on to surveying the damage assholes cause, shows how companies can implement a “No asshole rule” teaching the assholes to act better or ousting them. Some personal advice is also offered in terms of how to keep your own inner jerk from getting out too much and some coping strategies are offered if you are forced to work with assholes and you can’t just leave.

Decisions in any company are often taken purely based on the impact on the company financials – what’s more, you have to have an estimate of the financial impacts, even if it were a useless estimate. Given that, it’s comforting to know assholes actually cost you money. Do you ever wonder just how much damage they are capable of doing? How do you even begin to measure that? Sutton gives some rough guidelines to establish your company’s TCA – Total Cost of Assholes – through a checklist. The checklist includes a number of items from damage to the victims, time lost, impact to management, legal and HR costs etc. Armed with a financial estimate of how damaging these individuals are can be the first step to recognizing the problem and getting rid of it. One interesting thing to note is that the so-called “sales superstars” who are often assholes are, in fact, a financial liability – sales teams overall often do better without these so-called “superstars”.

One of – if not the – key lessons of the book is that it doesn’t really matter, per se, what your company values purportedly are. It doesn’t even matter that leaders talk about them. What matters is consistently treating the person right in front of you, right now, in the right way. Walking the talk, eating your own dogfood, call it whatever you want – but if a company says one thing and does another, it’s called hypocrisy and it would’ve been better to not have such a policy in the first place that you know you’re going to violate.

Another important point in the book is that not being an asshole doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be any confrontation – the best groups and organizations are places where people know how to fight. But the key concept here is people shouldn’t fight on a personal level. Not always an easy thing to accomplish but something that can be taught.

There are plenty of real-life stories and quotes in the text, which are an excellent way to bring the topic to life. One nice quote comes from the CEO of Mission Ridge Capital:

For most of my professional career, I have been telling anyone who would listen that I can work with just about every type of person, with one glaring exception – assholes. In fact, I have always used that very word. As much as I believe in tolerance and fairness, I have never lost a wink of sleep about being unapologetically intolerant of anyone who refuses to show respect for those around them.

One chapter towards the end of the book, on virtues of being an asshole, makes sure the book provides a balanced view on the subject. It clearly shows that there are certain situations and cases where it pays off to be an asshole, but those are few and far between. In some cases throwing a temper tantrum is warranted and a useful course of action – just be careful you don’t get sucked into the role of being an asshole for longer than is absolutely required.

The No Asshole Rule is a great book and I can highly recommend you read it even if you’re not suffering from assholes at this point in time. At under 200 pages it’s a quick read, not to mention a fun and informative one. I’ll borrow the words of the author to wrap up the review:

The essence of this little book is pretty simple: We are all given only so many hours here on earth. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could travel through our lives without encountering people who bring us down with their demeaning remarks and actions?

This book is aimed at weeding out those folks and teaching them when they have stripped others of their esteem and dignity. If you are truly tired of living in Jerk City – if you don’t want every day to feel like a walk down Asshole Avenue – well, it’s your job to help build and shape a civilized world. Sure, you already knew that. But isn’t it time to do something about it?

Ps. The author, Bob Sutton, is also writing an excellent blog at http://bobsutton.typepad.com/.

To celebrate our 8th wedding anniversary, we went to Restaurant Näsinneula in Tampere as we were spending the week at my parents place there. They also graciously took care of Amanda so just the two of us could spend some quality time together and have a proper adults dinner.

Restaurant Näsinneula is supposedly one of the Top 10 restaurants in Finland, so our expectations were high – pun intended, because the restaurant is located near the top of the Näsinneula Tower, which at 168 meters (551 feet) is the tallest freestanding structure in Finland. What’s more, the restaurant actually revolves full 360 degrees every 45 minutes, so great views were guaranteed. Below is one example towards lake Näsijärvi: (you can click on this and all the other thumbnails in this post to get a bigger photo)

The interior decoration of the restaurant was low-key but quite modern and clean-cut; nothing spectacular and nothing to divert attention from the views and the food, which in this case was a good thing. All the standard stuff like cloth napkins and tablecloths, proper wine glasses and all that are a given in this category, so no more about those. Everything was in order. The middle of the circle-shaped restaurant area did not rotate, only the tables situated at the “rim” of the room. This made for semi-interesting views inside also, as one minute you’re looking at the kitchen and the next time there’s a bar. Still, the views to the outside trumped anything inside.

As for the food, we went with the Finlandia Menu (62eur), a six-course menu that started off with Deer pastrami with marinated green asparagus and a quail egg, pictured below.

Next up was the fish platter with three different kinds of fish and some hard roe – photo below. As a third starter there was morel soup (no photo of this). All of the starter dishes were quite delicious, but perhaps the fish could’ve used a little less salt. I’m also not typically a big fan of mushrooms, but the small, creamy morel soup really hit the spot.

As the main course, the menu called for reindeer fillet with lingonberry sauce. Somewhat disappointingly it was actually reindeer sirloin, not tenderloin – however, it was cooked very well and was tender, so one can’t complain. Why they stuck asparagus in this course also I don’t know, but it went along well enough. Many Finnish restaurants seem to be bent on serving asparagus during summer and I never quite understood why.

Finally, there were two desserts. The first dessert was a collection of local cheese – talking about local, Näsinneula is known for its emphasis on fresh, often local ingredients, sharing this trait with restaurant Nokka in Helsinki. The cheese were served with some special honey sauce that, while good, was also very very sweet and I was subsequently left quite thirsty afterwards.

Luckily the second and last dessert of the menu, sea buckthorn and white chocolate (photo left) along with excellent sea buckhorn sherbet, came to the rescue and took care of the thirst. This refreshing, sharp dessert was the perfect ending.

However, one important part of the overall dining experience, service, suffered from a common problem in Finland – multiple waitresses. We had at least four over our dinner. All of them did the very basics of what they were supposed to do well (such as keeping our glasses filled without asking), but I felt there was some kind of professional proud lacking. Some were more in touch with what they were serving than others, i.e. explaining what it is, where it’s from and so on but all could’ve used a little bit more knowledge, pride and enthusiasm. I would’ve preferred one waitress only, but multiple waitresses is often what you get in Finland. I’m just surprised they did that here, too.

So how was it? Overall, the experience was very enjoyable.

But did it meet the high expectations? Well.. the food was good, the price/quality ratio was also generally decent, the views great (even fine weather was good, but I would really love to dine there during a major thunderstorm), but some details left to be desired.

If you strip away the unique views and focus only on the essentials – food and service – I’m not entirely sure Näsinneula belongs to the Top 10 Finnish restaurants. Top 50 certainly, but personally I would place for example Nokka (now #21) before Näsinneula. So let’s say that I can highly recommend Näsinneula, but expect “only” a good restaurant with good food and great views, but perhaps not a world-class experience. With that frame of expectations I’m sure you won’t be left wanting.

Except for one week later in July when I’ll be at work, I will be on vacation, paternity leave or traveling for the next two months and then some. I don’t really know what this will mean to my blogging frequency – might go up, might go down – so we’ll just have to see what happens. Still, to be on the safe side, expect a somewhat quieter period on average as there will be periods of being completely offline.

And so with that, this flower below and the quote below that, I wish all my readers an enjoyable, warm, happy and sunny summer! And, of course, an otherwise similar but appropriately rainy winter to those Down Under

Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.
– Robertson Davies