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From Daniel Cox at the Survey Center on American Life:

College graduates live increasingly different lives than those without a college degree. They are more socially connected, civically engaged, and active in their communities than those without a degree. I find that college graduates have more extensive systems of social support and a larger number of close friends. Consequently, they feel lonely and isolated less often.

The whole piece is interesting. The message is pretty clear that American Society “works” for people who go to college in a way that it doesn’t for those who don’t. The differences in levels of social integration are striking and somewhat confusing. It’s intuitive to think that this is just financially driven; if you have more money and stability, it’s easier to make friendships and get involved in the community… but it’s also not clear that this is the root cause (at least from this work).

Some other things that stood out to me…

The relationship between litter / graffiti and trust in one’s neighbors:

Americans living in neighborhoods where trash and graffiti are common express far lower trust in their neighbors. Less than half (45 percent) of Americans who say garbage or litter are everywhere in their neighborhood say they have a great deal or a fair amount of trust in their neighbors. Eight in 10 (80 percent) Americans who live in places where there is no trash or graffiti nearby say they trust their neighbors at least a fair amount. This pattern holds across community types. Feelings of trust are higher in places without trash, litter, or graffiti marring the physical environment, whether that’s a dense urban neighborhood, a suburb, or a town.

A similar dynamic exists with tap water:

Americans who trust their tap water express a stronger connection to their community and the people who live there than those who do not trust their tap water. A majority (58 percent) of Americans who say they would be very comfortable drinking water from their tap say they feel closely connected to their neighborhood—a feeling shared by only 44 percent of those who say they would be very uncomfortable drinking unfiltered tap water.

Both of these are pretty intuitive if you think about it — if a place is dirty, you probably aren’t going to feel comfortable there. If you don’t think you can trust the tap water in a place, you’re unlikely to feel really at home there.

Being involved with a place of worship seems to help with social integration, which makes sense:

Regardless of educational experience, Americans who belong to a religious congregation are much more active in community life and report stronger social connections. Overall, Americans who are members of a place of worship are much more likely than those who are not to volunteer in the community at least a few times a year (47 percent vs. 23 percent), talk to someone in their community they do not know well (64 percent vs. 54 percent), and attend a community meeting or local event (60 percent vs. 41 percent). They are also more likely than others to feel connected to their neighborhood and the people who live there (58 percent vs. 46 percent).

But so does living near stuff to do:

Simply living near a public park, library, coffee shop, or bar is strongly associated with greater community engagement, higher feelings of social trust, and connection to the community.

So to summarize:

• there’s clearly a relationship between going to college, participation within society, and trust — it’s not clear what the driver is here.

  • my best hypothesis is that the people that are naturally inclined to go out and do stuff are now being routed into college (that’s the default path and you have to work hard to get off of it) and that this accounts for most of what we’re seeing, but I can’t prove this.

• it seems like having communities that are clean and that provide quality basic services is correlated with trust

• being involved with a religious organization is correlated with participation

• living near stuff (reducing the friction of participation) is correlated with social trust

Over the weekend, I read We Don’t Sell Saddles Here where Stewart Butterfield outlines how Slack plans to take over the world. It’s a great piece and worth reading if you’re planning on launching a new product. It really captures the dynamism that Slack had in the early days.

This part in particular stood out to me though:

The best way to imagine the reward is thinking about who we want our customers to become:

* We want them to become relaxed, productive workers who have the confidence that comes from knowing that any bit of information which might be valuable to them is only a search away.

* We want them to become masters of their own information and not slaves, overwhelmed by the neverending flow.

* We want them to feel less frustrated by a lack of visibility into what is going on with their team.

* We want them to become people who communicate purposively, knowing that each question they ask is actually building value for the whole team.

As someone who uses Slack every day, I had a visceral reaction to each of these propositions. I never feel relaxed when using the app and I almost always feel overwhelmed by the flow of information.

The app became what it set out to fix — in many ways, the reduction in friction, which made it so addictive, made many of the problems it set out to solve worse.

Sometimes you have the opportunity to give a user an insanely great product. The organizational support, project funding, and technology all line up to give exceed user expectations. These are rare opportunities — enjoy them!

Most of the time you’re missing one of the key ingredients: project funding, technology, or organizational support.

Frequently the limiting constraint is a political one. You can’t launch the new product to all users because the sales team is afraid of how enterprise partners will react. You have to launch sooner than you want because a leader has drawn a line in the sand. A partner team won’t change their roadmap to help you with a dependency.

These political constraints can be the most frustrating because they seem arbitrary. But that doesn’t make them any less real. The best product leaders I know play the long game. They make the case for the best theoretical path, but are willing to accept the best one available. Then they move on to the next iteration. After all, iconic products are built one well thought-out iteration at a time. This flexibility gives them credibility with others, which gives them more space to operate in the future.

It’s common for companies to talk about product managers as mini-CEOs, masters of their own feature set. In many situations I’ve seen, this is actively unhelpful because it doesn’t prepare the product manager or their stakeholders for the reality of what the pm is being asked to do: find the possible, the attainable, the next best.

Delightful treatment of the idea that efficient markets produce products that work by Dan Luu.

The whole thing is worth reading, but the most interesting section to me was the one on trust in between firms and within firms.

Coming back to when it makes sense to bring something in-house, even in cases where it superficially sounds like it shouldn't, because the expertise is 99% idle or a single person would have to be able to build software that a single firm would pay millions of dollars a year for, much of this comes down to whether or not you're in a culture where you can trust another firm's promise. If you operate in a society where it's expected that other firms will push you to the letter of the law with respect to whatever contract you've negotiated, it's frequently not worth the effort to negotiate a contract that would give you service even one half as good as you'd get from someone in house. If you look at how these contracts end up being worded, companies often try to sneak in terms that make the contract meaningless, and even when you managed to stamp out all of that, legally enforcing the contract is expensive and, in the cases I know of where companies regularly violated their agreement for their support SLA (just for example), the resolution was to terminate the contract rather than pursue legal action because the cost of legal action wouldn't be worth anything that could be gained.

If you can't trust other firms, you frequently don't have a choice with respect to bringing things in house if you want them to work.

Although this is really a topic for another post, I'll note that lack of trust that exists across companies can also hamstring companies when it exists internally. As we discussed previously, a lot of larger scale brokenness also comes out of the cultural expectations within organizations. A specific example of this that leads to pervasive organizational problems is lack of trust within the organization. For example, a while back, I was griping to a director that a VP broke a promise and that we were losing a lot of people for similar reasons. The director's response was "there's no way the VP made a promise". When I asked for clarification, the clarification was "unless you get it in a contract, it wasn't a promise", i.e., the rate at which VPs at the company lie is high enough that a verbal commitment from a VP is worthless; only a legally binding commitment that allows you to take them to court has any meaning.

Of course, that's absurd, in that no one could operate at a BigCo while going around and asking for contracts for all their promises since they'd immediately be considered some kind of hyperbureaucratic weirdo. But, let's take the spirit of the comment seriously, that only trust people close to you. That's good advice in the company I worked for but, unfortunately for the company, the implications are similar to the inter-firm example, where we noted that a norm where you need to litigate the letter of the law is expensive enough that firms often bring expertise in house to avoid having to deal with the details. In the intra-firm case and you'll often see teams and orgs "empire build" because they know they, at least the management level, they can't trust anyone outside their fiefdom.

While this intra-firm lack of trust tends to be less costly than the inter-firm lack of trust since there are better levers to get action on an organization that's the cause of a major blocker, it's still fairly costly. Virtually all of the VPs and BigCo tech execs I've talked to are so steeped in the culture they're embedded in that they can't conceive of an alternative, but there isn't an inherent reason that organizations have to work like that. I've worked at two companies where people actually trust leadership and leadership does generally follow through on commitments even when you can't take them to court, including my current employer, Wave. But, at the other companies, the shared expectation that leadership cannot and should not be trusted "causes" the people who end up in leadership roles to be untrustworthy, which results in the inefficiencies we've just discussed.

People often think that having a high degree of internal distrust is inevitable as a company scales, but people I've talked to who were in upper management or fairly close to the top of Intel and Google said that the companies had an extended time period where leadership enforced trustworthiness and that stamping out dishonesty and "bad politics" was a major reason the company was so successful, under Andy Grove and Eric Schmidt, respectively. When the person at the top changed and a new person who didn't enforce honesty came in, the standard cultural norms that you see at the upper levels of most big companies seeped in, but that wasn't inevitable.

I’m not sure at the moment how much I agree with his approach to build vs. buy decisions but I know I agree with his assessment that the essential ingredient for productivity is trust.

Unlike the typical seaweed collector, Durant was not a British woman but an American man, an inventor and scientist. Born in 1805, he seemed to assume, like many educated men of his era, that no aspect of the mechanical, physical, or natural world was beyond his ken. His biography is a litany of claims-to-fame.16 With a hot-air balloon ascent from Battery Park, New York in 1830, he made his name as the first American aeronaut, staying aloft for two hours in a balloon he’d sewn himself. His second ascent, in 1833, was attended by President Andrew Jackson and thousands of others, during which Durant dropped leaflets featuring his own ecstatic poetry. These poems, about the virtues of ballooning, seem to have been the world’s first instance of aerial propaganda. He was the first US manufacturer of silkworm gut, a filament used for fishing line, and his raw silk and cocoons took high awards. He turned his attention then to Mesmerism, a faddish belief in clairvoyant hypnosis that was sweeping the nation. After infiltrating Mesmerist circles by pretending to find the practice credible, he wrote one of the first anti-Mesmerism screeds to be published in America, in which he debunked the supposed science with great relish.17 After that book, Durant became interested in hydraulics. He maintained a year of technical correspondence with Ellis S. Chesbrough, chief engineer of Boston’s waterworks, and soon-to-be engineer of Chicago’s sewage system. Their letters were published as Hydraulics: On the Physical Laws that Govern Running Water (1849).

Charles Durant went on to write the first American book on seaweed, and according to this article, at least, the best one. The whole article is worth reading, especially if like me, you’re interested in seaweed.