On Google

I'M INCREASINGLY CONVINCED that Google is one of the best-managed, highest-potential companies in the United States. I have no proof other than heuristics, the most powerful of which is my impression that everything the company does leaves me satisfied and impressed.

The search is just what I would want, and more. Gmail is just what I would want, and more. Google Maps is just what I would want, and more. Google Earth is just what I would want, and more ... and on it goes (although, admittedly, I outgrew Blogger pretty quickly, but it's right for its intended market). And these services get better all the time.

Other things I like: Their long-standing approach to employing knowledge workers, which takes some spot-on management wisdom Druker started writing about in 1959 and uses it to grow a dot com that works. More: Google's non-pretentious way of talking about itself. Simple without being simplistic; clear without being superficial ... it's probably the best on-line representation of a company's "About" facts in the world. Finally, their pervasive sense of intelligent fun. Take as examples this collection of Google holiday logos, and this collection of "inside Google" photos.

It's tough to make money in the dot com world, but I think Google's going to do just fine.

Full disclosures: Google isn't a client, but I do own the stock. And even at its outrageous price, I plan to buy more.

* Scheduled post, written earlier.

More On Thin Slicing

Nobel laureate Reinhard Selten on decision making:

Experience is very important. Of course it is! However, the ways in which decision makers take experience into account — and therefore the outcome of any decision-making process — are different from the kinds of rational optimization assumed in economic theory. Traditional economics assumes that before you make a decision, you go through some rational calculations, which then yield a recommendation. The idea of optimization is a very attractive fiction. But it is a fiction. In actual fact, people are often not at all influenced by such calculations before the fact, but only after the fact. We call this “ex-post rationality.”

...

In many situations, decision makers adjust their behavior by thinking about how different actions in the past could have yielded a better outcome. These alternatives, reinforced in the decision makers’ minds, become default actions to apply in future situations. When making decisions in those future situations, no optimization or rational calculations are involved, and instead, the decision maker simply follows the rules he has developed in the past — just like many of the subjects in my experiments about the winner’s curse.

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The most effective way to improve your decision making is to improve your intuition. It is very rare that you can derive a decision from data and calculations alone. In most situations, you have to have some intuition that is based on the knowledge of analogies. These analogies concern very simple situations in which you can clearly see the best course of action. Such simple situations, sometimes presented in game theory, can then be transferred to more complex situations with similar features. When people have in mind great stores of such simple business or game situations and their analyses, they have better intuition. They will not easily forget the important aspects of a decision problem.

This is about decisions via heuristics, or as Malcolm Gladwell terms the process, "thin slicing." If you've not read Blink yet, put it on your short list.