Business & Money

When describing soccer, what would you say is the job of the goalie? I’ve tried this question out on a few friends and received answers like,

“To prevent the other team from scoring.”

“To manage the defense.”

“To lead from behind.” (goalies are often team captains)

And all of these are true statements. The problem is that all are taking a local perspective.

A different way to answer the question would be to say that “the job of the goalie is the same as the job of the other 10 players on the field: to help win the game.”

The difference in responses is the difference between a local maxima and a global maxima.

When thinking locally, the goalie is an individual with individual goals and motivations. When thinking globally, the mission of the team is paramount.

You can easily zoom out from sports and apply this concept to any other arena in life. If you think about your job, for example, are your personal goals aligned with those of the company? Is your compensation or incentive structure built to reflect such alignment?

A perfect example of this not being the case would be Wells Fargo. Individual employees were incentivized to open new checkings and savings accounts when that activity was not in the best interest of customers or the company more broadly. And when such misalignment is the case, it’s no surprise that individual incentives will often win the day.

Human Progress

Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, has been on a bit of a privacy crusade of late. He warns that “our individual information is being weaponized against us with military efficiency.”

On some level, I agree with him. There’s no doubt that the large-scale collection of consumer data has lead to unintended consequences. Whether you want to talk about misinformation campaigns, competition in industry (or the lack thereof), or cybersecurity, you don’t have to look far for ways that things can run off the rails.

However, it’s also important to put Mr. Cook’s comments in context.

First, his viewpoint is utterly self-serving. Apple’s only real competitor regarding the mobile OS is Google, whose business model is wholly dependent on harvesting as much user data as possible in order to serve targeted ads. Apple, on the other hand, is a hardware company that makes the lion share of its money from selling physical devices (mainly iPhones). Yes, they have a multi-billion dollar services business (iCloud, Apple Music, app store revenue, etc), but all of that is used to drive iPhone sales. So, Apple is heavily incentivized to push for more stringent privacy regulations in an effort to curb the competition.

Second, privacy in the information age isn’t really a thing. When everything is digital and every device is connected to the internet, privacy is essentially a marketing facade for virtue signaling.

Third, I don’t believe that people really care about privacy. If I had to make a guess about the number of people that deleted their Facebook account following the recent scandals, I’d say it’s negligible. And most, if not all of those people are still spending a ton of time on Instagram (it’s the same company people – and if you don’t think your Facebook data can be used to target you on Instagram and other FB apps, you’re mistaken). And personally, I still use the “log in with Facebook” feature on tons of other sites without thinking twice. Further, the Equifax breach might be the most egregious hack in recent memory. 145 Americans had swaths of PII stolen inclusive of full names, email addresses, social security numbers, usernames, and passwords. Yet, after diving 30% overnight, the stock gained back those losses after a year. The Target hack was similar. The stock slid 15% in the months following the breach, before gaining 50% in the 12 months after that. So, while many people say they care, the data seems to point in the opposite direction.

But hey, I guess you can’t blame Mr. Cook for taking full advantage of the present moment for Apple’s benefit. What would you expect him to do?

Philosophy

Empathy and compassion are important words that represent important concepts. And both seem to be enjoying increased usage in recent years, which is a good thing. However, it seems to me that they are often being used synonymously, which I’m not so sure is a good thing.

I’m finishing up VIC from a plane today, so I don’t have the opportunity to check Webster. Nonetheless, there does seem to be an important distinction to make.

For me, empathy means being able to truly comprehend a situation from the perspective of another. So if a friend loses their job, for example, it’s taking a moment to genuinely understand how that must feel. The feeling of low self-worth and abandonment. After putting in years of late nights and cross-country business trips, it might even feel like blatant disrespect or like their efforts when unnoticed and unappreciated. And they probably thought they were doing a good job, so it might even feel like slight to their intelligence or competence as a human being.

Compassion, to me, isn’t altogether different than the above description. I might even say that compassion encompasses empathy, but goes one step further. It’s understanding the situation from the perspective of the other, but then doing everything in one’s power to alleviate the suffering of the other person. It might involve planning a dinner with all of the person’s closest friends wherein each person writes a small note about why that person is amazing and means so much to the group. It might then involve each of said friends making an introduction to a recruiter or HR professional in their network to aid in their job search.

In other words, you might say empathy involves a feeling of emotional and psychological camaraderie, while compassion is that + some action component that seeks to alter the state of things for the better.

My Latest Discovery

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Dutch loves these things!