Category: Companies

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Less Face, More Book

My first Facebook status update, from 2007, was “Josh is going to the Waldorf-Astoria to work on the Foreign Minister’s speech.” Over the next few days, I let people know that I was “tired,” “hungry,” “mildly nervous,” “sorry the 49ers got slaughtered,” and “going swing dancing today.”

That third-person lead-in — remember? — prompted us to write about what was happening to ourselves in the present. This led to a kind of inane self-regard that was easy to make fun of, but it also made Facebook different from a blog, or from Twitter. It was a place to say what you were doing or feeling, not what you were thinking. In November 2008, I made not one political post.

Not dogs

Through all the changes — the end of the lead-in prompt, parents joining, brands joining, Farmville, Upworthy — what stayed interesting was seeing what people we knew, or used to know, were up to in their ordinary lives.

But as Facebook expanded, we became more cautious in what we posted. Silly nattering became vanity and humblebragging. Our online selves became something to curate. On the new Internet, everyone knows if you’re a dog.

More and more, then, we had to show that we weren’t dogs. We had to like and reblog the right things. Facebook became a place to perform our righteous selves. Especially after the election, we pivoted from sharing what we ate or where we went this weekend to sharing what we were outraged about and what we thought you should also be outraged about.

Many of my Facebook friends are legitimately outraged about legitimately outrageous things, but that’s not really a fun place to hang out. Living abroad, I’d hoped to use Facebook to stay in touch with friends back home, but it hasn’t worked out that way. I know a lot about what different people are upset about — trans issues, Democrats who don’t support unions, family separations at the border, guns in schools, Russia’s occupation of Eastern Ukraine, anti-vaxxers — but not what they ate for breakfast and did on the weekend, which is much more interesting.

The great unfollowing

I’m a profligate Facebook friender, but I make up for it by being a pretty ruthless unfollower.

I started years ago, unfollowing anyone who wasn’t an actual person. I’ve unfollowed all the Vietnamese people I friended when I gave lectures in Saigon and Hanoi, and most of the other people I met on my travels. I’ve unfollowed people I’ll never see again: long-gone friends, minor high school acquaintances, ex-colleagues, Landmark contacts. My feed is now down to family, close friends, local friends, news about Korea, and a few people whose posts I find interesting.

This has made my news feed both more interesting and a lot shorter — short enough, by now, that it doesn’t suck me in the way it used to, or at least it shouldn’t. I noticed recently that Facebook was still, out of habit, my go-to activity in moments of boredom, even though it offers less and less.

So I’m consciously trying to change that. I used to make sure never to leave the house without a book or The New Yorker, two if I was getting towards the back of the first one. I have all that on my phone, and I’m training myself to go there first. Facebook can wait.

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Saving a Millennium or Two

Today I gave a presentation to senior management about ways we can streamline and improve the text on Samsung phones. I can’t and shouldn’t go into detail, but there are specific things we can do to make our phones more intuitive, limit interruptions, and reduce confusion and uncertainty.

Samsung sells something close to 80 million phones every quarter. Estimating that the average lifespan of each phone is about two years (there are statistics that suggest this is conservative), that means that there should be more than 600 million Samsung phones in circulation at any given time.

Now, imagine that the work we’re doing manages to save each Samsung user, on average, ten seconds during the entire two-year lifespan of the phone. That’s not much — just one or two moments of uncertainty wiped away as you poke around settings or try to open an app for the first time. That comes out to 6 billion seconds, or about 190 years. And if the changes we make manage to shave off, say, 100 seconds over the two-year life of the phone, that’s 1900 years of user time we save.

A couple of millennia. That’s an astonishing thought.

And sure, maybe it’s just 1900 extra years people will spend on Instagram and Snapchat, but it’s still something. When you’re working at scale, small improvements matter.

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Unleashing Korean Productivity

Once again, Bloomberg has rated Korea as an innovation hub. And once again, Korea’s weakest statistic is productivity per worker, though a jump from 32nd place to 21st is impressive.

So what gives? After more than a year at Samsung, I see two main causes of Korea’s low worker productivity. The first, most obvious cause is long hours. Many Koreans (though, thankfully, not those in my division) feel like they have to get to work before their bosses and leave after, regardless of whether they have anything important to do. They put on a show of being at work for very long hours, but exhausted workers don’t actually produce very much. They’d be more effective if they just went home and slept.

This culture, thankfully, is changing. The president is pushing policies to limit excessively long hours, and companies like Samsung are making changes. In my division at Samsung, it’s now against the rules to work more than 52 hours in a week — still a lot of hours, but it means you can’t put in 12-hour days and then come in on the weekend without a notice getting sent to HR and the CEO. There are twice-a-month events called Smile Day, when you’re encouraged to go home early, and Wednesdays are Family Day, so people are also pushed out the door a little bit. And vacation days are mandatory: if you don’t take them by the end of the year, you’re actually not allowed to come in to work until they’re all gone. None of these reforms is a magic fix, but they’re helping to push the culture away from overwork and toward more efficient time management.

The second cause of low productivity is perhaps harder to pinpoint, and harder to reform, but I think it has much to do with the top-down, authoritarian culture that still rules many companies. Workers put in a lot of effort do get something done, only to be told to do it all again differently. I’ve worked on projects that carried on for months in a state of constant crisis, everything needing to be done immediately even though the release date was still far in the future. Instead of “measure twice, cut once,” it was more like “chop everything to pieces and glue it all back together,” and we did it over and over again. The final result was the sloppy hodge-podge you would expect.

This too is changing, though maybe not as visibly or as quickly. The leader of that project was edged out, and there’s a notable lack of panicked frenzy these days in my division. When workers are given the time and space to think and to do things right, they produce greater value. Just think what we could do if we added that latent worker productivity to the many factors already standing in Korea’s favor!