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A conceptual model is the underlying belief structure held by a person about how something works. When you look at the file structure of your computer, perhaps moving a file from one folder to another, you are exploiting the conceptual model that software designers have carefully put into your head. The files and folders are fictions. There are no files or folders inside the computer. Instead, material is saved within the computer’s permanent memory systems in whatever way is most convenient for the system. Most files aren’t even stored in one place. Rather, they are broken up into segments, and each segment is placed wherever there is room, but with special pointers added to the file contents so that when the end of a segment is reached, the pointer tells the computer where to find the next one. In this case, the underlying complexity of the technology of storage has been replaced with the conceptual simplicity of putting files into folders, and then organizing the folders.

Many times, we tend to associate higher number of features with increased complexity. However, what really makes something complex is if we are not able to get a good conceptual model of how it works. For instance, I doubt many people will think that TV controllers are complex items. Many of us intuitively know the key functions of a TV controller and what it does. Now to someone who might have never used or seen a TV before, it might be complex as they lack the conceptual model of how it interacts with a TV.

When linking it to what we do, simplicity isn’t always better. Whats more important is getting your users to have a good conceptual model of what your service/product does.

What if we set upper limits to our goals instead? For instance, “I want to make at least $1 million this quarter, but not more than $1.4 million,” or, “We need to grow our list by 2,000 people per day, but not more than 2,200”? In most areas of business, there’s a magic zone for sustainability that relates to the concept brought up at the start of this book about having “enough.” If growth happens too quickly, problems can arise—like not being able to hire fast enough to keep up, or not having enough infrastructure to handle increased volume. The lower limit can be important, for example, if you need to make enough revenue to be profitable. But more than that? How useful is it to make more than you need to be profitable? How does it benefit you, your business, or your customers if you blow past your company’s goals? James Clear, a successful blogger on the topic of habits and productivity, tells the story of Southwest Airlines being faced with an interesting problem way back in 1996: the airline had methodically expanded from a tiny regional carrier to having a bit more of a national presence. And at a time when most other airlines were losing money or going under, over 100 cities were begging Southwest to service their location. However, that’s not the interesting part. What’s interesting is that Southwest turned down over 95 percent of those offers and began serving only four new locations. It turned down exponential growth because company leadership had set an upper limit for growth.

It might be counter-intuitive, but Paul Jarvis raises the idea of setting an upper limit to your growth as a business. Citing the example of Southwest Airlines, their ability to “throttle” their growth actually helped them remain profitable in a time when most other carriers were going bust. Sometimes, rejecting the urge to grow rapidly can help you remain as a “great” company.

Corporations that excel at creating autonomy for their best employees often empower them to become something like companies of one: these employees work faster and more ingeniously, and they use fewer resources. For example, Google gives its engineers “20 percent time”: they can work on whatever project they want for 20 percent of their time. More than half of the products and projects Google releases were created during this 20 percent time.

This book is about how less can be more. The author advocates for the idea that great companies don’t always have to be big companies, especially in today’s where lots of value can be driven by technology. Sometimes, scaling businesses or organisations only up new kinds of problems, and might impede the company from doing great work.

Ultimately, the author is proposing an alternative perspective to what we’ve seen from the media about how each startup “has a dream to be the No. 1 xxx”. I’ll be sharing some excerpts that I found interesting when reading this book.

Today’s “born-digital” kids—the first generation to grow up with the Internet, born 1990 and later—crave gameplay in a way that older generations don’t. Most of them have had easy access to sophisticated games and virtual worlds their entire lives, and so they take high-intensity engagement and active participation for granted. They know what extreme, positive activation feels like, and when they’re not feeling it, they’re bored and frustrated. They have good reason to feel that way: it’s a lot harder to function in low-motivation, low-feedback, and low-challenge environments when you’ve grown up playing sophisticated games. And that’s why today’s born-digital kids are suffering more in traditional classrooms than any previous generation.

Having grown up with quite a bit of access to games and rich virtual worlds, I’ve definitely been guilty of not feeling engaged in the traditional classroom environment and in certain workplaces also.

While this might not be necessarily a bad thing, it is a pretty worrying prospect as the generation of kids (that grew up with mobile phones even from a toddler age) will begin to engage in the workplace environment.

We might also observe a shift towards more dynamic workplaces with greater autonomy and variety of work. Hopefully. Otherwise, we might be preparing to see historically low work satisfaction levels in the upcoming years.

During this period of mild depression, Nesse theorizes, we can conserve our resources and search for new, more realistic goals. But if we persist in pursuing unattainable goals? Then, Nesse proposes, the mechanism kicks into overdrive, triggering severe depression. Nesse thinks this mechanism, and our tendency to set unrealistic goals, may be the cause of much of the current depression epidemic in the United States. We set extreme goals: fame, fortune, glory, and supersized personal achievements. We’re encouraged, says Nesse, to believe that we can do anything we set our hearts to, and then we try to achieve dreams that are just unrealistic. We don’t pay attention to our real skills and abilities, nor do we put our efforts toward the goals we are capable of achieving. We’re distracted by extreme dreams—even when our evolutionary mechanism kicks in, signaling our ill-fated efforts. But games can take us out of this depressive loop. They give us a good reason to be optimistic, satisfying our evolutionary imperative to focus on attainable goals.

The allure of achieving great things. While we all have lofty dreams of what we can achieve and use them to motivate us to keep going, it can also be a double edged sword when we don’t hit our very high expectations. The author states that one of the benefits of games is how it can provide us goals that are both attainable yet meaningful, helping to satisfy a part of us that real life necessarily can’t.

This brings us to our next fix for reality: FIX # 3 : MORE SATISFYING WORK Compared with games, reality is unproductive. Games give us clearer missions and more satisfying, hands-on work. Satisfying work always starts with two things: a clear goal and actionable next steps toward achieving that goal. Having a clear goal motivates us to act: we know what we’re supposed to do. And actionable next steps ensure that we can make progress toward the goal immediately. What if we have a clear goal, but we aren’t sure how to go about achieving it? Then it’s not work—it’s a problem . Now, there’s nothing wrong with having interesting problems to solve; it can be quite engaging. But it doesn’t necessarily lead to satisfaction. In the absence of actionable steps, our motivation to solve a problem might not be enough to make real progress. Well-designed work, on the other hand, leaves no doubt that progress will be made.

Why is work so unsatisfying for many as compared to games? For many sometimes, the goal or objective of what they are doing might not be clear. Even so, the objective might be so abstract (i.e raise sales/dominate market) that someone at the lower rungs can’t possibly see how they can take any steps to work toward that. Not to mention, these are just the fundamental aspects of satisfying work, and that many other factors such as lack of autonomy, unfriendly work environment among many others that can make the prospect of work terrible and unsatisfying for many.

Games made life bearable. Games gave a starving population a feeling of power in a powerless situation, a sense of structure in a chaotic environment. Games gave them a better way to live when their circumstances were otherwise completely unsupportive and uninhabitable. Make no mistake: we are no different from the ancient Lydians.

A book about how reality can fail us, and why games are so immersive and, even addictive at times. It talks about how we are seeing things from a wrong perspective. Rather than try to make games less addictive as they “waste time”, the idea would be to try make reality adopt more elements of games. I’ll be sharing a few interesting passages from this book in the next few days.

Neo-classical economists do not like political intervention in markets. They claim that markets are inherently efficient. But history shows that markets – with the primordial exception of what the institutional economist Ronald Coase dismissed as ‘individuals exchanging nuts for berries on the edge of the forest’ – are created. 1 Which is to say that in a functioning society markets are shaped and re-shaped by political power. Without the dispossession of landlords in Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China there would have been no increased agricultural surplus to prime industrialisation. Without the focus on manufacturing for export, there would have been no way to engage tens of millions of former farmers in the modern economy. And without financial repression, it would not have been possible to pay for an accelerated economic learning process. In all of the above, markets and competition were made to serve development. The message that east Asia – and indeed an historical understanding of development around the world – sends to economists is that there is no one type of economics. At a minimum, there are two. There is the economics of development, which is akin to an education process. This is where the people – and preferably all the people – who comprise an economy acquire the skills needed to compete with their peers around the world. The economics of development requires nurture, protection and competition. Then there is the economics of efficiency, applicable to a later stage of development. This requires less state intervention, more deregulation, freer markets, and a closer focus on near-term profits. The issue is not whether there are two kinds of economics that exist at different stages of development. The question is where these two stages meet. This is the difficult and interesting subject to which economists could more productively apply themselves.

There is no 1 kind of economics that works for all economies. Having a strong ideology can be counter-productive to choosing the best course of action. Debating to prove any chosen form of ideology might lead to some unproductive discussions.

Along with macro-economic stability, the IMF and the World Bank have consistently pressed the virtues of private enterprise, and the privatisation of state enterprises. In developed countries, there is considerable evidence that private firms tend to be more cost-efficient than public ones. But in the learning phase of development, the public–private ownership distinction is framed differently, that is, in terms of what kind of company is able to absorb knowledge and make technological progress. When the state’s regulatory capacity is weak, it is sometimes easier for governments to pursue industrialisation objectives via state firms. Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China all made rapid technical progress using state-owned companies, particularly at an early stage; China is today making greater use of state firms than any successful developing nation before it. This does not prove that state ownership is superior to private. It merely demonstrates that it is not such an important consideration as developing countries have been told. In failed, autarkic socialist states like the Soviet Union, and India and China in their pre-reform incarnations, the absence of export discipline and competition were the real developmental culprits, not who owned firms’ equity.

What works for a developed country might not necessarily make sense for one that’s developing. Many countries that have not yet reached developed status, were able to utilise state firms to pursue industrialisation and grow their economy. State firms might be less efficient in developed economies but it does not mean that they are detrimental to the economic growth of a state.

Unfortunately, there were to be fundamental policy differences in Malaysia when compared with Japan, Korea and Taiwan. Compounded by an already lacklustre performance in unreformed agriculture, these differences were more than enough to derail Mahathir’s industrial ambitions. The new leader failed to grasp the need for export discipline, and on trips to north-east Asia his Korean and Japanese hosts did not explain the dirty secrets of protectionism to him. This was hardly surprising when the self-interest of these states was now in selling turnkey industrial plants and construction services to countries like Malaysia. In fairness to Mahathir, however, when it came to implementing effective industrial policy, he had no appropriate regional example to follow; all the countries around Malaysia in south-east Asia were making bad development policy choices. Mahathir could have read the first of the great academic analyses of Japanese industrial policy, Chalmers Johnson’s MITI and the Japanese Miracle , which was published in 1982 just as Look East was being launched. Unfortunately, he did not. Nor did Mahathir read Park Chung Hee’s books about development policy in Korea. 145 Instead, he would later read – and tell his underlings to read – a fashionable, pro-globalisation book that was wholly irrelevant to his country’s needs: Kenichi Ohmae’s 1990 tome The Borderless World . Mahathir was mercurial. He launched his biggest industrialisation projects, and then began to sour on Japanese joint venture partners, even before Malaysian bureaucrats had completed a detailed Industrial Master Plan.

1. Protectionism can be useful but must be coupled with export discipline, i.e forcing your domestic firms to face global competition rather than allowing them to be complacent.

2. Do not select winners in your industries, this breeds complacency and leads to less competitive companies and will hence affect your industrialisation efforts.