Sources cited

Phil Knight's management style in Shoe Dog

Phil Knight, co-founder of Nike, describes his own management style in his memoir Shoe Dog (Scribner, 2016): not answering his employees' letters, setting goals without specifying the means, letting subordinates operate on their own for long periods without intervention from above.

Knight attributes this style to his study of three historical leadership figures whom he explicitly cites as models: Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy and Napoleon Bonaparte. The common trait Knight highlights in all three is economy of communication: not talking too much, letting actions lead.

To these Knight adds a specific quote from General George S. Patton on autonomy in execution, which Knight claims as an operating principle of Blue Ribbon (later Nike).

The Patton quote

George S. Patton (1885-1945), US Army general and commander of the Third Army in Europe in the Second World War, wrote:

"Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity."

The quote appears in War As I Knew It, Patton's memoir published posthumously (Houghton Mifflin, 1947), in the chapter "Reflections and Suggestions". Patton died in December 1945; the book was edited by his wife and military associates from the general's wartime notes.

Jeff Johnson, Blue Ribbon's first full-time employee

Jeff Johnson was the first full-time employee of Blue Ribbon (later Nike), hired in 1965. Knight describes in the book how Johnson sent Knight hundreds of letters during his years on the job, receiving very few replies.

Knight reports that, far from demotivating him, the lack of replies from Knight was a source of motivation for Johnson, a sign of operational freedom: without active supervision, Johnson had room to build the business his own way (customer management, card-file records, modified shoe prototypes).

The "Buttface meetings"

In Shoe Dog Knight describes informal, periodic meetings of Blue Ribbon's management group, which the participants called "Buttface" (a self-mocking name).

Typical participants: Phil Knight, Jeff Johnson, Bob Woodell, Del Hayes, Rob Strasser, Bill Bowerman. Typically 5-6 people per session.

The meetings had a loose, non-corporate format: discussions about products, distribution, finances, strategy. In the book Knight describes the group as heterogeneous and nonconformist compared with the typical management profile of American sports companies of the time:

"Hayes hadn't made partner at his firm because he was too fat. Johnson couldn't fit into the so-called normal nine-to-five world. Strasser was an insurance lawyer who hated insurance and lawyers. Woodell had lost all his youthful dreams in a freak accident."

(Phil Knight, Shoe Dog (2016); our English rendering of the Italian text, not the book's original wording)

The Macintosh team in Paul Graham's essay

Paul Graham, in the essay A Project of One's Own (2021), cites the team behind the original Apple Macintosh as an example of a group with a strong sense of a project of one's own inside an organization. The members Graham names:

• Burrell Smith (hardware engineer)
• Andy Hertzfeld (software developer)
• Bill Atkinson (software developer, creator of MacPaint and HyperCard)
• Susan Kare (designer of the icons and fonts)

Graham writes of the team:

"They were not tennis balls hit by Steve Jobs, but rockets let loose by Steve Jobs."

(Paul Graham, A Project of One's Own (2021))

The essay's argument: a project is "your own" when the people working on it have enough autonomy to feel it as such, even inside an organization.

Aesop's fable (6th century BC)

The fable of The Fox and the Grapes, attributed to Aesop (6th century BC), is the first documented description of the phenomenon in the Western tradition.

A hungry fox sees some bunches of grapes hanging high on a vine. It jumps, and jumps, and jumps, but it can't reach them. In the end it walks away saying: "They were sour anyway."

In Italian the expression "l'uva è acerba" ("the grapes are unripe") has entered everyday language; in English people say "sour grapes".

Festinger: A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957)

Leon Festinger (1919-1989), an American psychologist at Stanford University, gave the phenomenon a scientific formulation in the book A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Row, Peterson, 1957; reprinted by Stanford University Press, 1962).

The theory, in brief:

When a person simultaneously holds two cognitions (ideas, beliefs, values, behaviors) that contradict each other, they feel an unpleasant psychological tension: cognitive dissonance. This tension pushes the person to reduce it, by changing one of the two cognitions to make it fit the other.

Applied to Paul Graham's essay:

   Cognition 1:  "I'd like to paint like Leonardo"
   Cognition 2:  "I can't paint like Leonardo"

   STATE OF MIND: dissonance

   Two ways of reducing dissonance according to Festinger:
   ──────────────────────────────────────────────
   Option A:  change reality
              → get good at drawing
              (takes time, effort)

   Option B:  change the cognition
              → "I didn't really want to draw"
              (immediate, no material cost)

The Festinger & Carlsmith experiment (1959)

To test the theory empirically, Festinger and James Carlsmith ran an experiment at Stanford University in 1959, published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology (vol. 58, pp. 203-210) under the title "Cognitive Consequences of Forced Compliance".

Setup: 71 (male) students from an introductory psychology course. The experimental task: for about an hour, turn pegs on a board and move spools into a tray. A deliberately boring task.

After the task, the experimenters asked some subjects to lie to the next participant, telling them the task was interesting. The subjects were split into two groups:

• group A: paid $1 for the lie
• group B: paid $20 for the lie

Afterwards, the experimenters privately asked the subjects, in an interview the subjects believed was unrelated to the experiment, how interesting they had really found the task.

Result: the subjects paid $1 rated the task as more interesting than those paid $20.

The researchers' interpretation: the subjects paid $20 had enough external justification for the lie ("I said it because they paid me well"): no dissonance, no change in attitude. The subjects paid $1 felt a contradiction between "I lied to another student" and "I am a basically honest person". To reduce the dissonance, they changed the cognition: "It wasn't a lie. The task really wasn't that boring."

The experiment entered the standard social psychology textbooks as the canonical demonstration of the cognitive dissonance mechanism.

Jon Elster: Sour Grapes (1983)

The Norwegian philosopher Jon Elster extends the concept in Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (Cambridge University Press, 1983), introducing the technical term "adaptive preference formation".

Elster's thesis: people automatically change their desires to fit what they believe they can obtain. The mechanism operates below the threshold of awareness: it isn't a deliberate choice, it's an implicit adjustment the preference system makes to avoid dissonance.

Examples Elster cites: people under unfree political regimes who sincerely declare that they don't value freedom; workers in humble trades who sincerely declare that they don't aspire to more prestigious ones; economically disadvantaged people who declare that they don't want goods they can't afford.

Elster considers adaptive preference formation a subversion of rationality: preferences, which economic and political theory treats as a neutral starting point for individual decisions, are in fact shaped by the constraints the person is under.

The job at the Patent Office in Bern (1902-1909)

After graduating from the Zurich Polytechnic, Albert Einstein could not find an academic position. On June 23, 1902 he started working at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern as a Technical Expert, Third Class, with a starting salary of 3,500 Swiss francs a year.

His job: examining patent applications, reading the technical specifications, assessing the novelty of the solution, filing the documentation.

In April 1906 he was promoted to Technical Expert, Second Class. He left the Patent Office in 1909 to take up his first academic post (University of Zurich).

During his Bern years his only day-to-day scientific interlocutor was his office colleague Michele Besso, an Italian engineer and physicist whom Einstein described as "the best sounding board for my ideas in all of Europe".

The annus mirabilis (1905)

In 1905, while still employed in Bern, Einstein published four scientific papers in the journal Annalen der Physik:

1. The photoelectric effect (March 1905): the proposal of light quanta; he would win the 1921 Nobel Prize for this work
2. Brownian motion (May 1905): an analysis of the motion of particles in suspension, indirect proof that atoms exist
3. Special relativity (June 1905): "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies"
4. Mass-energy equivalence (September 1905): "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?", the source of the formula E = mc²

The four papers were written alongside his full-time job at the Patent Office.

Peter Galison's thesis on clock synchronization

The historian of science Peter Galison (Harvard) proposes in his book Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time (W. W. Norton, 2003) that the setting of the Swiss Patent Office in Bern supplied conceptual material for the central insight of special relativity.

The facts the thesis rests on:

• Between the late 1800s and the early 1900s, the expansion of the European (and especially the Swiss) railway network created an industrial demand for synchronizing clocks across geographic distances. Stations hundreds of km apart had to show the same time precisely, to avoid collisions and manage traffic.
• Synchronization was achieved with electrical signals over wires: a master clock sent pulses that updated the outlying clocks in the network.
• Numerous patent applications for electrical clock synchronization systems passed through the Bern Patent Office between 1902 and 1905 (Galison documents the flow from the archives, although historians cannot identify with certainty which ones Einstein examined personally).

The central insight of the 1905 special relativity, that the simultaneity of two distant events depends on the observer and is not an absolute property, is described by Galison as having emerged precisely from the practical problem of how to synchronize two distant clocks: you have to send a signal, the signal travels at a finite speed, so two events that are "simultaneous" in one frame of reference are not simultaneous in another that is moving.

Galison concludes that Einstein reached the insight not through pure abstract reasoning but through daily contact with the concrete problem of synchronization, an input that a physicist at a university would not have had. The thesis is argued historiographically by Galison; it is not a unanimous consensus among historians of physics.