Learning from Munger & Glassman...Copying Abbott

Innovate...Like Henry Abbott 

 

Henry Abbott is an excellent writer. He’s smart, articulate, and passionate. He loves basketball. And he wants to make it better. His blog ‘TrueHoop’ was an invaluable source of basketball information long before ESPN picked it up.

Henry Abbott, TrueHoop founder, innovator.

As informative and timely as his blog is, though, I think the best thing about it isn’t that it provides enough material that a person could be well-informed about basketball without ever leaving the site. The best thing about it is that Abbott tries to make the game he loves better. And his method is instructive.

This fledgling blog is devoted to learning from two businessmen: Charlie Munger and Greg Glassman. And Abbott’s success can be described by their respective principles. Glassman wasn’t thinking of Abbott (but he may well have been) when he said, “I can tell you what it is that makes you successful in business…the blind and relentless constant pursuit of excellence.”

It’s clear that Abbott loves basketball. And he provided people with stuff they could use: timely insights into the game, interesting analysis, and quick links to some of the best writing on each team. Provided every morning (he had a feature called ‘first cup’ with a nice coffee mug logo that included a short snippet from some of the most compelling basketball writing from across the country).

I don’t know how he wound up landing at ESPN. But I’ll guess it’s pretty similar to the way Glassman went from training a few friends & clients in a couple rooms of a larger center to running a worldwide operation with thousands and thousands of affiliates. Here’s Glassman’s account of how it happened. He outgrew the 1,250-square-foot space where he was training athletes, and didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know anything about business, so he went to the bookstore (maybe he should have tried the library!) “And there wasn’t one book on the shelf, not one, that told me how to improve my product or service.”

Glassman made a list of pros & cons, to determine whether expanding was a good business decision.

“And the mindset was that business is about makin’ money, ’cause if you can’t pay the rent, you won’t be in business. But then it hit me in just a blinding flash: ‘Wait a minute. I’m not trying to make money. Money’s what happens when you do something right.’”

So he threw away the checklist, and asked a different question: “Will it be good for clients?”

And the surest way to make a difference for clients was to be good. Really good. Excellent. And Glassman was able to provide excellence. People noticed. “Excellence is obvious to everyone,” Glassman said. “It’s just that easy.”

“I believe that business is the art and science of providing uniquely attractive opportunities for other people,” he says. “That’s what we’ve done. That’s it. Nothing else.”

Excellence...and then?

Abbott’s blog was excellent. He provided people useful material on a topic they loved. But then, he did something else. Abbott looked around at the sport he loved, and decided that it could be better. So, in addition to his wildly successful blog TrueHoop, he founded another endeavor: HoopIdea. It’s motto: ‘Basketball is the best game ever. Now let’s make it better.’

Abbott set out to make basketball more exciting, more, fun, and more intelligent, and to feature smarter rules, continuous action that features creativity and athleticism, and that got fans on the edge of their seats.

This pursuit mirrors Munger’s favored practice of problem solving via the process of inversion. Munger argues, “The way complex adaptive systems work and the way mental constructs work is that problems frequently get easier, I’d even say usually are easier to solve if you turn them around in reverse. In other words, if you want to help India, the question you should ask is not ‘how can I help India’, it’s ‘what is doing the worst damage in India? What will automatically do the worst damage and how do I avoid it?’”

A recent post on HoopIdea argues that the engine of success is innovation. At HoopIdea, we’re trying to make sure that the right kind of innovation takes root and improves the game we love.

HoopIdea: a great example of solving problems via inversion.

Just as CrossFit enthusiasts dislike seeing young, healthy athletes go from one isolation bicep curl exercise to another to another when they could be pursuing more functional fitness, Abbott disliked seeing the game he loved be less exciting than it could easily be.

And he did something about it. Abbott's recent post makes the following points:

A near-perfect illustration of the HoopIdea motto, that basketball is the best game on earth ... now let's make it better. Hell yes, changing the game makes sense ... if the idea is right.

Is wondering about how the game could be better a waste of time?...people doing just that have already saved the sport once -- and are role models for the leaders of the free world.

The best thing leadership can do is make sure it doesn't become "ossified." What was the cost of coming to the 3 decades after the idea emerged? How many mistakes like that can the league tolerate?

Don't you love the idea of basketball being open-minded and nimble in a way a leading economist says the whole nation should emulate?

Looking for that 3-point shot 

 

Abbott cites a New Your Times piece that comes to the conclusion the U.S. economy needs to find it's own 3-point shot.

Charlie Munger has made a great living by doing something that might be described as ‘General Intellectual Preparedness.’ Munger’s approach to making sense of the human experience draws on something very much like the mental counterpart of Glassman’s General Physical Preparedness (GPP) model that is at the heart of CrossFit. And the soon-to-be nonagenarian's thinking is innovative in just the way Abbott describes.

I think looking at the world in a sane, intelligent way is worth trying to do well. And I think it's possible to emulate Abbott in doing so. Abbott is at his best when he asks us to consider the costs for taking too long to adopt clearly good ideas. Mungers ideas are, I think, obviously good. While I continue to love basketball, I’m even more interested in exploring ways we can use Munger’s ideas to realize the kind of (mental) excellence Glassman has achieved.

CrossFit was my college

Andrew Delbanco in his excellent new book College: What It Was, Is, And Should Be offers an interesting interpretation of Moby-Dick Author Herman Melville’s line “a whaleship was my Yale College and my Harvard.” 

Andrew Delbanco--America’s Best Social Critic

Delbanco’s Melville recognizes college as a place people went to prepare for their lives. He argues that Melville uses “college” as shorthand for all the lessons that needed to be learned and the experiences that needed to be had for a person to become an adult.

In his book, Delbanco writes that college should strive to be, “a place and process whereby young people take stock of their talents and passions and begin to sort out their lives in a way that is true to themselves and responsible to others.” 

College and University Presidents address the question, 'What is College for?' in a Chronicle of Higher Education piece. And Scott Carlson asks whether ROI is the right measurement for what a college degree offers.

As the information that once was difficult to find outside of a college or university becomes increasingly available to anyone with a smartphone, the places where people can learn to take stock of their talents and sort out their lives in responsible ways will become increasingly important.

Delbanco’s idea of what a college should be is a great description of what happens at CrossFit affiliates. Eminent institutions, including Stanford, Harvard, and MIT, have made much of the information their professors provide available publicly and free. But I'm not so sure the newest methods for conveying information are great at also teaching people judgment.

Firing Live Bullets over foxholes.

Charlie Munger lauded the U.S. military’s practice of offering applicable, ‘real-world’ education to its soldiers preparing for war by firing live bullets over the foxholes they were training in for its vividness. 

What better way, after all, to get your trainees to get down than to make it a matter of life and death.
I’m sure the practice was effective. 

If only everything we needed to train for were so simple as hugging the ground. 

CrossFit founder Greg Glassman is known for his emphasis on training his clients for the ‘unknown & unknowable’. He also uses methods that, while less stark than Munger’s WWII example, are vivid and totally applicable to the tasks people face. Perhaps because he's spent so much time thinking about & designing for some of the least elegant, most demanding situations the human body has been put through—soldering—he’s accustomed to preparing people for the worst kinds of unknown & unknowable.

A previous post on this blog considered CrossFit’s elegance. Pat Sherwood’s piece lauded Glassman and CrossFit because they both are remarkably good at finding the best, simplest solutions to problems. In particular, Sherwood cited CrossFit’s now (in)famous 21-15-9 rep scheme. ‘Fran'—one of the most famous CrossFit workouts—consists of 21 then 15 then 9 repetitions of a pair of exercises: ‘thrusters', front squats into a shoulder-press, and pull-ups. (Here's trainer Bob Harper taking a crack at it). One cannot begin the pull-ups until the thrusters are completed each round.
 
As part of the open qualifying competition for the 2013 CrossFit Games, CrossFit director of training Dave Castro offered a workout—called 13.5—that included 45 total repetitions each of those exercises (though the chest had to touch the bar on the pull-ups instead of the usual standard of chin-over-bar) partitioned into 3 sets. But he deviated from the element Sherwood cites as the hallmark of CrossFit’s elegance: the 21-15-9. 

Why? With 13.5, all the reasons Sherwood cogently lists for the simplicity and benefits of the 21-15-9 are out the window. 13.5 was not elegant. To say the least. It's an ugly one. It’s also wonderful. The 15-15-15 rep scheme has the benefit of being easier to remember while fatigued, but the benefits extend beyond that. 

Probably every CrossFitter who still had hopes of making it to the 2013 CrossFit Games had done Fran—with its 21-15-9 reps—before. Most had likely done it many times. But Castro didn’t just change the rep scheme—he made other changes that cashed in the elegance of Glassman’s original in order to take something that people were familiar with, something they knew how to deal with both in terms of strategy and pain-management and provided something they had no idea how to manage. By mixing the familiar with elements of the unknown, he pushed people’s limits. 

That's the point of General Physical Preparedness. And General Intellectual Preparedness. Because life makes those kinds of demands on us. Jobs make those kinds of demands on us. Consider Delbanco’s assessment of what college is for. Then, ask yourself what you learn at your gym. A gym need not provide the stuff that prepares people for living, but CrossFit gyms do. I don’t even belong to a CrossFit gym, and the workouts alone prepare me in those ways (though I miss out on the magic formula for camaraderie—see video below for Glassman’s unique and colorful take on the formula!)



So, CrossFit prepares people for living. If we consider our mental preparedness, Munger’s thought does the same. Asking Delbanco’s question, “What's college for?” We see that it sometimes does a good job of preparing people for jobs, careers, and other times it fails. Sometimes it prepares people for the intellectual demands that will be placed on them by living in contemporary society and sometimes it fails.

Charlie Munger points to the single biggest problem plaguing higher education: a fatal disconnectedness. When I look at his proposals for solutions, I see Glassman looking over the fitness landscape. Fortunately, higher education is a lot better (and a lot more moral, with a much high character of the professionals involved) than the prevailing fitness model. But it’s still not perfect. And the stakes are a lot higher. Charlie Munger’s thinking goes a long way in remedying intellectual preparedness just as Glassman’s thinking (and practice!) has for the physical.

Philosopher Michael Oakeshott discusses the components of learning. Information is a necessary component of learning. And it’s pretty easy to impart. But judgment is important, too. And it’s much more difficult to impart. The greatness I recognize in CrossFit is that it offers people, even more than the camaraderie, is the physical equivalent of judgment—the ability to be prepared for novel and unexpected situations that extend beyond the movements/skills trained for. I see Munger’s latticework of ‘mental models’ as providing much the same thing for our intellectual needs. 

General intellectual preparedness, in the same terms Glassman holds as the ideal for general physical preparedness, is possible. And I think it’s possible to teach and train it in much the same way.