Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1410

A few weeks ago I watched a talk by Keith Rabois called, How to Operate . Keith is a venture capitalist with Khosla Ventures, the former COO of Square, and a member of the PayPal Mafia .

The talk was primarily geared towards startups, but much of what he talked about could be applied to any organization where people are managed. So whether you’re an architect, real estate developer, or governmental organization, I bet you’ll find the lessons relevant.

One in particular that stood out for me was the idea of barrels and ammunition.

For a lot of organizations, the thought is often that by adding more people you’ll be able to increase output. More people = greater velocity. But Keith’s reasoning is that most people are actually ammunition. And just like in war, it doesn’t exclusively matter how much ammunition you have. You can only shoot through the number of barrels you have. Output depends on barrels.

So who exactly are barrels?

Barrels are the kind of people who can take something from idea all the way through to completion, while at the same time taking a group of people along with them. They are, in other words, your leaders.

But, they are difficult to find.

There are fewer barrels than ammunition. And, the culture of the organization itself will impact every person’s ability to be a barrel. Here’s how Keith puts it:

Barrels are very difficult to find. But when you have them, give them lots of equity. Promote them, take them to dinner every week, because they are virtually irreplaceable because they are also very culturally specific. So a barrel at one company may not be a barrel at another company.

That’s something for you to think about as you start your workweek.

Image: Flickr

This past week was Toronto’s first real snowstorm of the season. It was awesome. I love snow. And part of the reason I love it, is because it means snowboarding season is here. Yes, the “mountains” in Ontario suck, but Quebec and Vermont aren’t too far away and every February there is  The Annual .

This year in preparation for the season I decided to splurge on a GoPro camera . We had a lot of fun filming last year in Jackson Hole and, since it looks like we’re going to have close to 10 people at this season’s Annual, I wanted to throw another camera into the mix. Expect another ski and snowboard video sometime in February 2015. We’re heading out to Alberta and British Columbia.

I also ordered this mount for the camera:

But as I was ordering the camera, I started to think about what else I could use it for. And then it hit me: city tours. One of the things I love to do in the summer is ride my bike around the city and explore. I like to find areas I don’t know very well, find new developments I may have missed, and generally just get to know the city more intimately.

Being on a bike is really the perfect way to do this. You don’t cover enough ground walking and with driving you simply miss too much of the city. So what I want to do is strap my GoPro to my handle bars and bring you along for these exploratory bike tours. I think it could be a unique way to show you the city – even if you happen to also be from here.

How does that sound?

It likely won’t happen until the spring, but if you’re interested in joining me, let me know . I think this could be a lot of fun with a group of city geeks.

Image: GoPro

Harvard Business Review recently published a conversation between Roger Martin – who is the former dean of the Rotman School – and Tim Brown – who is CEO of the global design firm IDEO. The title of the talk is “ Capitalism Needs Design Thinking .” But I decided to call this post something else after reading Roger say this:

My friend Dan Pink argued in an  HBR piece in 2004  that the MFA is the new MBA. I wrote to Dan to say that if that’s the case we have a problem because America pumps out a mere 1,500 MFAs a year versus 150,000 MBAs. Thirty MFAs per state per year is just a rounding error. This is one of the reasons I was so keen on transforming business education. It’s a huge infrastructure: 27% of all graduate students in America are in an MBA program. If they’re all being taught how to analyze things to death, that’s going to affect how they’ll shape the future of business.

But what this conversation is really about is the future of democratic capitalism, which is why I think it’s a nice tie-in to yesterday’s Architect This City post about startups and inequality .

I’m very worried about the fact that in America we’ve now gone 24 years without the median household income rising — it was the same in 2013 as it was in 1989. That’s unprecedented in American history. The longest that’s ever happened before is when it took just under 20 years to recover, after the Great Depression. This long period of stagnation has coincided with the top 1% of the economy doing spectacularly.

And so while it’s easy to point fingers at the tech community and say that it’s to blame for rising income inequality, the reality, I think, is that there are other more fundamental issues that need addressing. Roger and Tim believe that design thinking can help. Here’s another great snippet from the former:

I think the way that government generally works is to think, think, think, think, and then finally create legislation that brings about some change, and then they ignore their legislation and say okay, we’re finished with that. Then people go and figure out how to game that legislation, and the government doesn’t do anything about it. Whereas if they had a design view of it, they’d say when they passed a bill, that’s just the best idea we’ve got now, we have to go see how it works in practice, and then fix it. That’s just not the mentality.

Technology is having a profound impact on the world. And it’s something that is very visible. But part of the challenge is that governments aren’t keeping up. They are almost never out in front.

So when something new comes along, like Airbnb or Uber, the reaction is to just stop it . It doesn’t conform to the rules and regulations currently in place, and so it shouldn’t exist.

But as Roger and Tim point out, maybe we need to look at our rules and regulations as simply part of an iterative process (like designers do). Because if we did that, maybe we’d be better equipped to transfer the benefits of innovation over to society as a whole.

Image: HBR