There’d better be a Mirrorball

Crossposted from Mirrorball, the EA sports blog.

If mirrorballs are anything, they’re many things masquerading as one thing. And if all goes to plan, this Mirrorball will be no different.

Practically, this Mirrorball is a new name for the Blog formerly known as The 1001.

Spiritually, this Mirrorball is Alex Turner’s wish as my command.

Memetically, this Mirrorball is Moneyball in reverse.

We need models of the past to understand the present, and models of the present to predict the future. Moneyball is the story of sporting decision makers making better decisions after they got religion and let themselves learn from analytical models of their games, models often born far afield in finance and suchlike before being given new life by blogosphere passion projects.

According to me, sport actually is the most important of the least important things because it’s itself a model of “real life”. Being right is not enough. Everything’s a tradeoff. Success is a mess.

We can have all sorts of fun picking apart sport’s rigour and its glorious randomness. Its competitions and complex collaborations. Its regulations and unwritten rules. Its ingenious and idiotic strategies. And while we’re at it, we can increase our chances of improving the outcomes that matter most.

Auctioning off a month (or three) of naming rights to the Blog earned £1001 for GiveWell’s top charities. That’s the best part of seven years of an infant’s life to you and me, at £150 a pop. That would have been worth me living a lot longer with a given name a lot worse than The 1001. That name, though, for all that I became very attached to it, and despite my best efforts retrofitting its origin story, had the fatal flaw of not telling anybody anything about what the Blog’s about.

The renaming process was art and science. Art: writing down as many sporting terms as one man’s mind can conjure and free associating from there, producing a list more than 230 names long. Science: developing a scoring rubric and assigning points for legibility, territory, tone, thesis, and, of course, layers, producing a top tier of half a dozen. Philosophy: staring at the top tier long enough that name by name each reveals itself to be intolerable, all bar one, and that’s a bingo.

Come for a swift half or two in the new clubhouse (www.mirrorball.blog), stay after hours for the same old yarns about how, if you look at it right, sport really is a matter of life and death. 

And the dancing. Stay for the dancing.

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“Chief of Staff” models from a long-time Chief of Staff

I have served in Chief of Staff or CoS-like roles to three leaders of CEA (Zach, Ben and Max), and before joining CEA I was CoS to a member of the UK House of Lords. I wrote up some quick notes on how I think about such roles for some colleagues, and one of them suggested they might be useful to other Forum readers. So here you go:

Chief of Staff means many things to different people in different contexts, but the core of it in my mind is that many executive roles are too big to be done by one person (even allowing for a wider Executive or Leadership team, delegation to department leads, etc). Having (some parts of) the role split/shared between the principal and at least one other person increases the capacity and continuity of the exec function.

Broadly, I think of there being two ways to divide up these responsibilities (using CEO and CoS as stand-ins, but the same applies to other principal/deputy duos regardless of titles):

1. Split the CEO's role into component parts and assign responsibility for each part to CEO or CoS
   1. Example: CEO does fundraising; CoS does budgets
   2. Advantages: focus, accountability
2. Share the CEO's role with both CEO and CoS actively involved in each component part
   1. Example: CEO speaks to funders based on materials prepared by CoS; CEO assigns team budget allocations which are implemented by CoS
   2. Advantages: flex capacity, gatekeeping

Some things to note about these approaches:

• In practice, it’s inevitably some combination of the two, but I think it’s really important to be intentional and explicit about what’s being split and what’s being shared
  • Failure to do this causes confusion, dropped balls, and duplication of effort
  • Sharing is especially valuable during the early phases of your collaboration because it facilitates context-swapping and model-building
  • I don’t think you’d ever want to get all the way or too far towards split, because then you functionally have one more department-lead-equivalent, and you lose a lot of the benefits in terms of flex capacity and especially continuity
• Both approaches depend on trust, and maximising them depends on an unusually high degree of trust
  • CEO trusting CoS to act on their behalf
    • In turn, this depends on trusting their judgement, and in particular trusting their judgement of when it’s appropriate to act unilaterally and when it’s appropriate to get input/approval from CEO
  • Others trusting that CoS is empowered to and capable of acting on CEO’s behalf
    • Doesn’t work if CEO and CoS disagree or undermine each other’s decisions in view of others, or if others expect CoS decisions to be overturned by CEO
    • It being easier to burn credibility than to build it is something close to an iron law, which means CoS should tread carefully while establishing the bounds of their delegated authority
• It’s not a seniority thing: an Executive Assistant having responsibility for scheduling is an example of splitting the role; a Managing Director doing copyedits for the CEO’s op-ed is an example of sharing the role
• I don’t think the title “CoS” matters, but I do think maximising the benefits of both models requires the deputy to have a title that conveys that they both represent and can act unilaterally on behalf of the principal to some meaningful degree
  • Managing Director and Chief of Staff do this; Project Manager and Exec Assistant do not

Give my Blog a name!

At long last, a way to save lives cost-effectively and get your name on the building.

A younger me was on record saying he’d sooner sit in a bath of beans than run a marathon. Sacrificing a portion of dignity still seems preferable to sacrificing both knees. These days, though, I’m more based, so I’m putting something more precious than my knees or my dignity up for sale to the highest bidder.

Blind auction. All proceeds to GiveWell. Deadline day Sunday, 26 April.

My counterfactual fantasy.

Over on my blog, I wrote about prediction models, replacement value, and how I was taught about saving lives for pennies on the pound.

So long Mo Salah, and thanks for all the lives you saved.

It’s a dog eat dog world...

Unless and until we decide otherwise.

The Blog fka the Blog with No Name is now dba The 1001.

LeBron James just got off the escalator to nowhere.

The Decision, The Decider, The Desiderata: what to make of a living legend taking the minimum allowable salary? Is there more to life than salarymaxxing?

From The 1001, the EA sports blog

Everything is a tradeoff.

Pep Guardiola is first a dancer, second Mourinho's nemesis, and third a genius endlessly troubled by the impossibility of the game he loves providing him with the control he craves.

Mikel Arteta, Pep's disciple, is first and foremost a sicko.

There's all sorts we can learn from these two madmen and their race for the title, starting with how everything is a tradeoff. When you start looking at your favourite game as a short blanket, always forcing the choice between a cold head or cold feet, it makes more sense. 

Despite the best efforts of the just try harder and be better at everything crowd, the same goes for the workings of the “real world”. Few easy fixes. No free lunch.

If you've been enjoying the Blog, please consider subscribing via Substack! No slop, no spam, and it really helps with the wretched algo, and therefore with the impact. (Nothing at all to do with my ego you understand.)

You don’t have to stick to your picks.

Changing your mind is not the second-worst thing you can do.

Nerd Blog Power Rankings.

Does exactly what it says on the tin.

And in the process explains how our best and brightest consultants naming F1 fantasy teams after their employer proves we need regulation of AI right now.

With McIlroy at the Masters.

Success is a mess.

Golf, if you allow it, teaches forbearance.

Doing hard things is hard. One of the hardest things to do is hit a tiny ball in a tiny hole hundreds of yards away. Tiny errors cause terrible outcomes. Control is a phantom. The promise and perils don’t bear thinking about.

When it all comes together, though, my goodness, it’s a hell of a party.

If it’s worth going where you’re aiming, there’ll be no straight line from here to there. Next time you’re stuck, remember Rory and what we went through with him.

Why isn’t there a shrine to the Unknown Donor at Roland-Garros?

Shot: “Rafa gave absolutely everything. He gave us everything he had.”

Chaser: “I gave my life to one of the most individual sports that exists.”

Rafa Nadal isn’t the GOAT, and neither are Federer or Djokovic.

The World Cup is a random number generator.

And at the end legends be minted.

From The 1001, an EA sports blog.

"I understand sports really well, really well."

Nope.

The President of the United States of Advertising had an eight-minute episode on the subject of soccerball. Who am I to let that pitch go by?

Come for the satire, stay for the realisation none of us know much better, about football or about the rest of life.

From The 1001, an EA sports blog.

11 ways the World Cup can help you survive.

An adjustment to the Information-Action Ratio.

There’s a lot of stuff out there along the lines, “Can you guess the hidden meaning behind every World Cup kit?” and it’s hard to know how to feel about it. 

On the one hand, it’s an eyesore and a regrettable reminder of how our brains have been turned to mush. On the other, there really is a lot to learn from a coming together of 48 rabid fanbases from the four corners and the Lord only knows how many nations, cultures and languages they represent. I know a straight shooter respected on all sides who will tell you without a hint of irony that this World Cup is the most important geopolitical event in history, and the thing it’s replacing at the top of the charts is the last one.

The 1001 plays it straight, of course, because you don’t need clickbait or SEO bros when huge-if-true claims like "The World Cup is a random number generator" and "Everything is a tradeoff" are, in fact, true. The thing about kit-based knowledge - and I say this as someone who, at the behest of Grandad, could once name the home ground of all 92 clubs in the Football League - is there’s very little you, someone in the waning days of their career with a laptop job, can do with it, other than score points at The Parrot’s Beak quiz on a cold, rainy Tuesday night in Sheffield.

The real quiz is extending as many careers and lives as possible long enough to see the next World Cup. For that, we need to adjust the Information-Action Ratio a little away from titillating trivia and toward generalizable concepts that can be deployed day in day out at the desk in mum and dad’s basement.

I wrote a list of some of the things football commentators say which sound silly out of context yet will make you better at understanding contemporary workplace dynamics and communicating about them with your colleagues (human or otherwise).

You can bet your bottom dollar "11 ways the World Cup can help you survive" is unlike any listicle you've ever read.

From The 1001, an EA sports blog.

1. Healthy habits can be good for your wellbeing and productivity, in the short- and long-term
2. Establishing healthy habits is especially hard under conditions of scarcity: time, energy, bandwidth
3. It’s worth putting in effort to establish health habits during the good times

I keep daily yoga and meditation practices, one in the morning and one during the day, and I keep them during busy and stressful periods. I don’t think I would have started or maintained either (or habits related to sleep, food, phone) if I hadn’t entrenched them as fixtures of my routine when I was living an easier life.

This is not an argument for specific habits. Compiling the evidence behind and my experience of my preferred habits would require more scarce time than I currently have. And in any case, I don’t think I’ve found the Correct Combination for myself, let alone anybody else.

It is an argument for acting now, beginning to solidify whatever your preferred habits might be, before you come to really depend on them.

Is Thomas Tuchel deluded or what?

"If you believe we should be burning witches at the stake, you're a full crank. If you believe we should be segregated by race, you're somehow a former crank. If you believe we should be factory-farmed by species, you're a future crank.

"Some cranks are harder to spot. When the winner of one game says they were lucky, you can't tell if they’re well-calibrated or a performative crank. When the loser says no regrets, you can't tell whether they're well-adjusted or delusional. (If the loser says they’re the winner, that’s a different kettle of fish.)"

From The 1001, the EA sports blog. If you like what you find, subscribe for free to get posts directly in your inbox. No platform, no slop, no spam.