Letting Go of What You Know To Prepare for a Once-in-a-Thousand-Years Storm

Trust Mark Twain to hit the nail on the head in his inimitably folksy way. Sometimes what you know never was true; sometimes it used to be true but conditions have changed and it's no longer true. But confirmation bias keeps us clinging to those beliefs even in the face of new information. We pay attention to any signals or data that support our belief and firmly disregard anything that challenges those beliefs. Furthermore, as Kathryn Schulz puts it in her book Being Wrong, "But the point is not that we are bad at saying "I don't know" (a fact she has just spent some pages illustrating). The point is that we are bad at knowing we don't know."

We can see this unwillingness to let go in emotionally-laden politics. We can see it in companies that persevere with business models that are clearly no longer tenable. You might think of Kodak, where digital photography was invented, refusing to acknowledge the assault on their film-based business model.  

Then, there's the Netherlands. As far back as the Iron Age, people in the Netherlands have been building dikes of ever increasing sophistication. This is not surprising in a country with a quarter of its land below sea level and fully one half is less than one meter above sea level. Building dikes to keep out the water or to reclaim land is part of their national DNA. Yet the Dutch have abandoned dike building as their main defence against devastating storms and floods and generally rising sea levels. They've let go of what they know - at least as the only solution.

A 1953 flood, when a major storm coincided with a high spring tide in the middle of the night, resulted in the loss of 1,836 people mostly over the space of a few hours (Katrina's death toll was 1833). This was their wake-up call.  They initiated Delta Works, a project to protect the Netherlands against a once-in-a-1,000-years storm. (As a reference point, Katrina was a once-in-hundred-years-storm and Hurricane Harvey has been described as a once-in-a-500-years storm.)

1  As a reference point, here is a photo of traditional dikes along a river and lower lying land from a recent trip to the Netherlands. (Also worth nothing is the fact that there are two bike lanes but only one lane for cars).

After the 1953 storm, the Dutch concluded that they just couldn't build the river dikes high enough for full protection. And besides it would be much too expensive. They had to stop the water before it reached the rivers. They still use sand dunes as a natural barrier along the sea shore. These large dunes needed to be reinforced annually, a significant task to dump the sand all kilometres of coastline. But the Dutch are so clever. They observed where sand was distributed naturally by tides and currents and concluded they could simply dump sand in a few strategic places and let nature distribute it where needed.

2 To protect further against the sea, they first built two dams south of Rotterdam. But this approach was problematic. Where once there had been a gradual change from salt water to fresh water, now there are two totally separated ecosystems on either side of the dam. The types of fish the fishermen used to fish disappeared. Solid dams were clearly not the answer.

3  Further south, at Oosterschelde, a different approach was taken in the 70s: to build gates that 

stay in a raised position normally but would be lowered during a storm. This allows the fish - and their predators the fishermen - to pass through freely. An excellent movie at the visitors' centre at Ooseterschelde describes how huge piers were placed on the ocean floor, sitting on ‘mattresses’ made of material filled with rocks to form a firm foundation. The mattresses were laid by being uncoiled off huge rollers on the back of special boats. The piers were built on shore on a huge dry dock, then towed out to sea after the dry dock was submerged. Then each pier was lifted off the dock and precisely placed on the mattress floor between the piers.  Lastly, a road  was laid on top.

4 The solution of gates that could be raised and lowered between fairly closely set piers wouldn't work at the mouth of the Rotterdam port. Once the largest ports in the world, Rotterdam is now surpassed by ports in Asia, but it’s still impressive. The day before, with many kilometres of piers b (numbered from 1 to 9900), that seem to stretch endlessly off the main road. 

The problem of protecting Rotterdam from the sea was difficult. Proposals were invited for techniques to close off the mouth of the river as required in the case of big storms, but leave it open for shipping. The winning proposal involved two huge arms (the size and twice the weight of two Eiffel Towers) which are swung in from either side of the estuary to close it off completely if there is a risk of the water level rising 3 metres in Rotterdam. It's designed to protect Rotterdam in the case of seas rising five meters above normal! You can see the scale of the arms that support the barrier from the picture of me standing by them.

These massive blocks of concrete are swung in by equally massive ball bearings, which can move in several directions, like shoulder joints. They have to move sideways to swing the barrier across the channel, an exercise which takes half an hour. Then the ball bearings have to be able to move up and down, as the concrete wall is filled with water and descends to fit on the concrete block on the bottom over an hour and a half. Here's a diagram from the New York Times article showing how everything fits together.

The system is tested once a year, and various disaster scenarios  each year. This bottom block gathers a metre of sediment every year. As the barrier slowly descends, the water is compressed and gathers speed and washes away the sediment. This is the reason for the slow descent. Brilliant.

This amazing piece of engineering was completed in 1997 after 6 years of construction, on time and on budget. Equally amazing. All the pieces were build in Holland, except for the massive ball bearings, which were made by Skoda in Czech Republic. The Canadian software firm CGI provided the software to control the barrier (a CGI employee told me this, but I have not independently verified).

The risk of flooding is assessed every ten minutes to check water levels and the risk of a big storm. When the software was designed in 1997, it took ten minutes to complete the calculations! Today the calculations complete in seconds, but the Dutch have not felt the need to do the calculation more often. When there is a risk, a warning is sent out to all ships with four hours notice so that they can determine if they have time to get past the barrier before closing. (Tug boats are on standby to haul ships away if there is a risk they’ll get caught as the barrier closes). At two hours, the decision to close becomes irrevocable and the countdown starts.

5 Having completed all these projects, the Dutch still didn't feel they had enough protection against flooding in an era of climate change and the inexorable rise in sea levels. So they had to overturn all their past thinking again. If you can't keep the water out, then you have to learn to live with it. So you start projects with another approach to the problem and brand them Room for the River. That's another radical change in thinking. They are building catchment areas for when, not if, there is flooding. Some of these catchment areas are lakes designed to overflow, some are used as recreational areas, some even as parking lots. It's another stage in the remarkable evolution of their thinking.

The Dutch have turned their preoccupation with water into an exportable expertise.The Dutch have consulted on water management for a long time; in fact, long ago, they helped the English drain the fens. And they are consulting around the world about this approach today (as described in this wonderful New York Times article). Toronto has also adopted the Dutch 'Live with the Water' approach in dealing with the threat of flooding of the Don River, as described here. Let's hope their expertise helps save many shores threatened by rising sea levels.

The X Factor

"One of the top ten jobs in the world"  - that's how TED's Chris Anderson described Astro Teller's job as leader of X, Google's moonshot factory. Moonshot because the projects are high-risk and high-opportunity, and factory because of the intent to operationalize.  The talk fit beautifully into TED's theme for this year's conference, Dream.



Teller laid out the rules at X:

• Dream Big: Look for huge problems that affect millions of people, then propose a radical solution based on a breakthrough technology. Google's driverless cars fit that frame. And Project Loon to use balloons to deliver highspeed Internet to remote locations looks very promising.
  
  
• Expect Failure: If you're going to dream, or innovate, you have to prepare for failure and ruthlessly kill failed projects. Otherwise you end up with what my friend Scott Anthony calls 'zombie projects', walking dead projects that suck resources and morale. X is said to have killed 100 projects over the last year. They killed vertical farming because of the inability to grow staple crops like rice and grains. 

• Fail Early: Innovation projects involve knocking down obstacles one by one, gaining information each time about how to proceed. Teller emphasized the importance of tackling the toughest constraint first so you can kill quickly before spending too much money. The moonshot to build a buoyant cargo ship was abandoned because building a prototype would have been too expensive. "You don't want to spend $200 million on your first data point"
• Celebrate Failure: Since acknowledging failure goes against human nature, X explicitly encourages such behaviour. When a project leader declares a project a failure, there's a big celebration - high fives, cheers, clapping and shouting. And, most importantly, a promotion.

These are all lessons I try to get across in my own innovation lectures. I'll certainly be using Teller's talk to help bring those lessons to life.

Teller was speaking at the opening session of 2016, which was live-streamed to a number of cinemas around the world. Our theatre in Toronto was sold out, perhaps a harbinger of more such events in the future.

Busting Myths about Creativity

In 1815, a German music journal published Mozart's description of his composing process: basically, when he was quiet and in a good mood, the music came to him complete so that the only thing left was to write it down. The letter was a contributor to the myth of human creativity - a brilliant flash of insight that strikes a bona fide genius.

The trouble is, the letter is fake. Original Mozart manuscripts show many false starts and crossings out - in fact his composition process was iterative. But this myth, and Archimedes' Eureka moment and countless others, are still cited, and they have supported the notion that creativity arises when a sudden flash of insight strikes an extraordinary genius.

Kevin Ashton is the author of How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention and Discovery where he debunks such myths about creativity. In a recent talk at Rotman, he argues that creation arises through a series of trials and errors, and we get to a solution through a long process of incremental steps, alternately refining the problem and the solution until a 'final' solution is reached, or at least until another problem emerges. In fact the word creativity wasn't even coined until 1926 by Alfred Whitehead. But recently, creativity has become a hot topic, as shown in this Google ngram:

(I describe Google ngrams in a previous post. Essentially, it's a measure of how often a particular word is mentioned in books.)

In Ashton's fascinating talk at the Rotman School of Management, he put humans' art of invention in a grand historic context, starting with the first human technology: the invention of the hand axe one and a half million years ago. We usually think of such inventions as the result of our increasing brain size. Humans' brain evolved to be larger as the amount of space in the skull devoted to jaws and teeth diminished. Without the hand axe, humans would have starved without those huge jaws and teeth. Ashton argues that we should think of the increasing brain being the result of our technology, which allowed us to survive with bigger brains and smaller jaws. Interesting twist.

I'm looking forward to reading Ashton's book, which I'm told is full of fascinating stories illustrating his thesis about creativity.

Christensen Wins - Again!

Clayton Christensen has topped the list of best Business Thinkers, for the second time in a row.  His seminal book, The Innovator's Dilemma was published in 1997, but by 2001, he was only ranked 39th on the list.

Why did it take so long for him to be recognized? The Innovator's Dilemma proposes a number of counter-intuitive explanations of why 'great companies fail'. When I first met Clay in 1997 and heard these ideas, they hit me like an bolt of lightning "Ah that explains so much!" But I had had a somewhat unorthodox business background by then, and I was totally unschooled in and untainted by traditional business and MBA thinking. For most people it took years for these powerful ideas to percolate.

Today, Christensen's thinking has profoundly influenced management thinking, although the words 'disruptive innovation' are applied to just about any new idea or product, even when they are not in the least disruptive. In any case, it's great to see my hero recognized and I'm betting this honour will stimulate even more people to read his important books.

Note that Kim and Mauborgne, authors of Blue Ocean Strategy sit at #2. Blue Ocean Strategy is an elaboration of the theory of disruption, with the addition of a great visualization approach that enhances explainability of disruptive innovation.  Canada can be really proud to see Roger Martin and Don Tapscott in third and fourth spot.  Women hold 4 of the top 10 spots on the list, representing a significant breakthrough, and Chinese squeeze into 31st and 50th positions for the first appearance of Chinese thinkers on the list.

MOOCs - A Coming Onslaught

I've been writing about, talking about, thinking about and taking MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) for quite a while now.   I've just read Thomas Friedman's recent New York Times article about MOOCs.  He and I are pretty much on the same page - although a lot more people read his page than mine!  Of course, Clayton Christensen has been talking about education being ripe for disruptive innovation for years and published Disrupting Class five years ago.

Friedman points to the emergence of Professor as Rock Star.  I've long made the point that, with the globalization of education, the few will rise to the top and drive out mediocrity. Friedman describes how  Harvard Humanities professor Michael Sandel, has become a rock star in Korea and China.  I first heard Sandel speak at the TED conference in 2010 and I've just signed up for his upcoming Justice course on edX, the joint MOOC platform of Harvard and MIT.  Regular readers of this blog may soon read more about that course.

Who wants to learn high school math from a crappy, or even mediocre, high school math teacher when you can learn from the incredibly popular and engaging Salman Khan at Khan Academy?  Who wants to learn history from a schmuck at a third-tier university when you can learn at the feet of Jeremy Adelman of Princeton?  (see my rave review of his Coursera course here.)

I've mused about this rock star phenomenon with my students in the Managing Innovation course I've been teaching in two different MBA programs since retirement from full time employment.  I consider myself a 'pretty good' teacher, regularly earning Teaching Excellence awards at University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management and complimentary comments from students.   But world class?  I think not.  Clayton Christensen is not teaching online yet, but if someone were to be given the chance to learn from this rock star, the pre-eminent world expert on innovation, or from Lib Gibson, they'd be crazy to choose me.

So what are the prospects for a good-but-not-world-class professor?  As lectures become available online, institutions are experimenting with flipping the classroom model: watch the lectures online in your own time at your own pace  and do homework or discussions during class.  San Jose State is flipping that classroom with MIT's introductory Circuits and Electronics course and College Preparatory School in East Palo Alto is doing the same with Salman Khan's math videos.   Perhaps there'd be scope for people like me running those discussions.  But this prospect would be rather gloomy if teaching was my chosen career.  Such outsourcing would definitely diminish my value.

Another of Friedman's points is about the coming shift from the Time Served model of education to the Stuff Learned model.  Sitting through high school, and getting a graduation certificate (of uncertain pedigree since different high schools have such different standards), will no longer be the benchmark.  Rather, your actual competence in a subject will be measured.

A good example of this is my own abortive registration for Calculus: Single Variable by Professor Ghrist of University of Pennsylvania.  I had two motives.  One was a crazy desire to refresh my memory about calculus and one was to see Professor Ghrist's teaching methodology, which looked downright exciting.  I was advised to take a self-administered test before starting the course to ensure I had the right background: if I scored less than 80%, think twice about registering.  So, I have a Masters in Math, and I've even taught first year calculus - a mere 43 years ago - although I've never used a stitch of what I learned.  The Axiomatic Foundations of Algebraic Topology (my thesis topic) doesn't exactly come up in everyday conversations.  Well, I was even rustier than expected and I didn't come near scoring 80%.  So I self-selected out of the course.  (Maybe I'll go to Khan Academy and brush up on some of that prerequisite stuff).

So how does this differ from what happens now?  I'm sure that with a credential like a Masters in Math, I'd have been accepted into that course.  In the bricks-and-mortars world, my bum in that seat would have denied a chance for another more worthy student.  In the world of 'infinite' capacity, I can decide whether to take the course or not, without impacting access for anybody else.  And there was a great online tool to help inform my decision.

Adapt - or else!

It's a privilege and honour to have a guest post today from my friend Donna McPhail.  Donna and I met by chance at the Fortune Innovation Forum in New York a number of years ago and developed a friendship based on our shared passion for ideas.  We breakfast together from time to time and my husband is always amazed that a breakfast can take that looong.  But we always leave with a bunch of topics we wanted to discuss and never got around to.  I never come away without learning from these meetings.  And now I'm happy to share some of her wisdom here.

At our last breakfast, Donna was excited about a book she'd recently read, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, by Tim Harford.  Or as so eloquently put by Sonny in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, "Everything will be all right in the end; if it's not all right, then it's not yet the end".

I thought others would enjoy Donna's review of this book:

 

In Adapt, Tim Harford argues that complex or complicated problems are best solved through a process akin to evolutionary development.  Survival of the fittest doesn't mean survival of the strongest, but rather of those with the ability (accidental, usually) to adapt to the environment in a positive or influential way.

He outlines a fairly simple 'algorithm' for finding solutions - although these solutions can never be permanent since the environment itself is always changing.  The steps of the algorithm were developed by the early  20th Century economist Palchinsky.  They are paraphrased as follows.

Try new things in the expectation that some will fail.  This liberates you to try some very unexpected ideas, things that are quite wide-ranging.

Make the failures survivable because failure will be common.  This implies you should focus on small tests, rather than giant leaps of innovation, because small experiments are more survivable if they fail.  Look for buffers to protect you from failure.

Take the things that work and start all over again.  Try variations on the successes as well as new ideas.  Make sure you know what is working and what has failed.  When you discard the failures, make sure you understand why they have failed.  Then, if there's a simple 'fix', you can add that to the ideas you're testing again.

This instruction set is based on trial and error, not ideology or theory.  In fact, Harford seems convinced that theory can rarely solve complex problems, except perhaps in science, although even in science there can be fundamental paradigm shifts which overturn theory. 

Why did this book impress me so much?  Perhaps because it reinforced my slowly dawning rejection of ideology and theory as solutions to the world's problems -  apparent most obviously in the stalemate of US politics and in the pre-2007 rigid belief that markets are 'perfect', self-correcting, and amenable to mathematical modeling.  Theory simplifies complex situations too much.  It encourages a rigid attitude and an all-or-nothing approach to solutions.

In contrast, studies of successful people and companies would indicate that trial and error are the norm, that luck plays an important part in achievement, and that cross pollination of ideas is more likely to contribute to invention and innovation than sheer genius or theory.

While we often recognize these 'success factors', we don't always translate them to adoption of pragmatic testing of hypotheses.  Instead, we try to codify what did work into a new theory after observing one example of success.  Hence, for example, there is a new trend to micro-managing because Steve Jobs micro-managed everything.

An ideal summation comes from the father of economics, Friedrich von Hayek, as quoted in the beginning chapter of the book.  "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."

Donna is an independent marketing and communications consultant in Toronto.

Innovation and Getting Out of Recession

Clayton Christensen has revolutionized our understanding of innovation - and in fact business - by providing a theoretical framework around sustaining and disruptive innovation[1].

A couple of days Christensen published an article in the New York Times, showing how different types of innovation either created, destroyed or just maintained jobs in the overall economy.  And without new jobs, the US will not emerge from recession.

Empowering Innovation (what he has called new market disruptive innovation in the past) creates jobs, whereas efficiency innovation (what he has called low-cost disruptive innovation) destroys jobs.  Sustaining innovation doesn't create jobs, but does manage to preserve reduced job numbers in an industry that might otherwise fade away.  Very interesting analysis.  It takes his thinking about innovation at the level of an individual company to a thoughtful analysis of how innovation affects a whole nation.

He goes on to discuss the perniciousness of some of our financial metrics for measuring company success.  Let me take one he mentions, RONA, or return on net assets.  You can improve this ratio, like any other ratio, by increasing the numerator (return or profitability) or reducing the denominator (net assets).  Too many companies have focused on the denominator, clearing net assets off their balance sheets.  Outsourcing manufacturing activities to another party gets those big expensive factories (assets) off your balance sheet, improving RONA but outsourcing jobs and reducing your own control of your destiny in business.  And it certainly doesn't grow jobs in your own country.

I highly recommend reading this article.  It'll get you thinking.

[1] Disruptive innovation is a term of art coined by Christensen.  It's means something quite different from what you'd read in a dictionary by looking up disruption.  Read The Innovator's Dilemma to get the whole picture, or my post here to get a quick summary.

Coursera and Peer Evaluation

Readers of this blog know how enthusiastic I am about taking a course on world history on Coursera.  I've loved learning the history, and the experience has provoked many thoughts about the future of education (see this post).  Education is undergoing the process of disruptive innovation, and it's about to explode.

I've just discovered a TED talk by Daphne Koller, one of the founders of Coursera from TED Global this summer.  It outlines some of the motivations of the founders of Coursera and talks more about data on the efficacy of online teaching.

She quoted Thomas Friedman's article in the New York Times:

Big breakthroughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary. 

How true that is.

MOOCs (massive online open courses) in the social sciences must figure out a way to include written work as part of the course.  For a class of more 80,000 students, like The History of the World Since 1300,  what is desperately necessary - evaluation of those essays - meets what is suddenly possible - mass technology-enabled anonymous peer evaluation.

But can peer evaluation be effective and fair?  Koller showed some fascinating data on peer evaluation (which she acknowledged was based on relatively small samples).  Here's her chart of the very high correlation between peer grades and the grade a teacher would offer.

Even more surprising was the chart showing that self-evaluation correlated even more highly with the teacher grade (given some software that prohibited perfect scores).

I'm eager to see what my peers think of my first essay handed in a few days ago.  Coursera also asks students to self-evaluate their essays.  Coursera is so cleverly designed that I'm sure this data will all be collected and form the basis of future publications on the effectiveness of peer evaluation.  It is truly a new age!

Defining Innovation

I've just finished teaching a course called Managing Innovation at the Rotman School of Management at University of Toronto.  It's a second year MBA course and I always start the course with a discussion of the real meaning of Innovation.  Most students arrive at the class with a pretty narrow definition of innovation - and for most it centres on technological invention.

My definition is much broader than that and we had an extended discussion about our different views of innovation.  Perhaps it has something to do with me being the professor, but we ended converging on my favourite definition, namely.

I like this definition for several reasons.  I like the use of the word value.  Value doesn't just relate to profit.  The value can arise from cost reduction, or social value, or even a new way of thinking about the world.  So the definition holds for corporations, governments, or non-profits.  If we're going to solve the world's social problems, we're going to need a lot of innovation, so it's important that our thinking about innovation extends to social situations, not just profit-seeking enterprises.

The definition requires you to have more than just a great idea; you have to implement something to create value.  I like that concept of creating value.  An invention alone might not create value, and that's why I would argue an invention is not by itself enough to qualify as an innovation.

I like the use of the word fresh instead of new.  Taking an idea that's been used in one area and applying it to another fits in my definition of innovation.  Fresh captures that idea of taking an idea from one arena to another; I would classify that as innovation too.

This year, we had a particularly spirited discussion about value, and whether something had to have significant and immediate impact to qualify as an innovation.  We concluded that something had to have a measurable impact in order to be considered to deliver value.  It was an thought-provoking discussion.  You always learn from students!

TED Book Club Selection - November 2011

 Today, the lastest TED Book Club Selection arrived, Walter Isaacson's biography Steve Jobs.  What an appropriate choice!  Both TED and Jobs stand for Technology, Entertainment and Design. I've received many comments on my posts about TED book selections, showing that many people enjoy hearing what the folks at TED have chosen.  So I decided to post this, even though I've barely begun the book.
 

Jobs life is linked to three inspirations in my own life: Clayton Christensen, TED and Ian Sharp. 

 

It's said that Jobs was inspired by Clayton Christensen's book The Innovator's Dilemma, and that it was pivotal in molding his views about innovation.  I've talked about Christensen's ideas in previous posts (such as this one).  I celebrated the fact that The Innovator's Dilemma was chosen as one of the six best business books of all time(click here), and that Christensen was named the top Business Thinker (click here).  These posts explain why I think Christensen's ideas are so important, and if you examine the trajectory of Jobs' career, you can see his products as an illustration of Christensen's theories.  Consultants from Innosight (the firm founded by Clayton Christensen) had a great article about the innovation lessons learned from Steve Jobs.  I've seen lots written about Jobs recently, but that assessment is my favourite.

Jobs' life is an illustration of the very essence of the TED conference.  So many conferences bring together people with shared interests in a particular field.  They are very focused, and can often provide deep information, but seldom any true inspiration because they simply reinforce an industry's entrenched way of thinking.  TED is different - it brings together people from a wide variety of disciplines and the sparks of creative and innovative thinking fly.  Jobs similarly capitalized on the breadth and depth of his interest in technology, entertainment and design in the breathtaking innovation in his products.  In just the first few chapters, there have been appearances by people I've met at TED like Larry Brilliant and Stewart Brand, and the index reveals more to come.

The description of those early days in Silicon Valley brings back memories of my early days in  timesharing (now called cloud computing) in the early 70s in Canada.  I worked for I.P. Sharp Associates, a pioneering software and network communications company, led by the brilliant and unassuming Ian Sharp (shown at left).  Ian's penchant for hiring bright people resulted in a company full of them.    Like Jobs, many 'Sharpees' had dropped out of university  (often leaving the US motivated by the Vietnam draft).  Like Jobs, some of them had nevertheless earned a BA (brilliant & abrasive) or a BE (brilliant & eccentric).  Ian exhibited huge tolerance of eccentric behaviour as long as people were contributing and were respectful of their colleagues and focussed on solving customer problems.   Jobs' success arose, at least in part, from the diversity of his interests and his appetite for ingesting ideas from many fields. Ian's disregard for people's area of specialization meant that I.P. Sharp was seething with people from diverse backgrounds - computer science as well  as education, mathematics, biology, music and many fields.  (It was also full of 'minorities', because Ian seemed blind to nationality, religion, skin colour, or sexual orientation).

Authorized biographies often present a somewhat varnished version of events.  What has surprised me so far about this book is that it shines a glaring light on both Jobs' brilliance and his less desirable traits.  Jobs and Wozniak have just founded Apple, and Jobs' trademark chutzpah, passion and single-minded drive are already evident.  The reality distortion field has made its appearance.  So has Jobs' arrogance, although that aspect of his personality remains to be polished and honed.  His penchant for abuse and his 'anti-loyalty' is disturbing to read about.   Perhaps it's a final comment on Jobs' unfailingly high  self-esteem that he was willing to support a book that could present him in such an unforgiving light.