Whether as an entrepreneur or employee, I have always sought to provide value to the market, and to measure my performance by the degree of value I am providing.

Here are some of the ways I deliver value in the marketplace.

1. Stay ahead of the technology curve

• adopt technology best practices
• deliver technical projects on schedule and under cost
• forecast technology trends, spot opportunities
• develop technology marketing programs
• hire and manage software engineers, data engineers, and analysts

2. Develop new lines of business

• promote standards and interoperability
• perform in-depth research and analysis
• build and test prototypes
• subject-matter expert
• drive complex cross functional initiatives

3. Simplify operations workflows

• use data to make automated and assisted decisions

4. Store, process, and stream data at scale

• discover patterns in structured and unstructured data
• define a common language for understanding and interpreting data
• develop innovative new artificial intelligence prototypes
• generate synthetic data sets for system training and simulation

5. Quantify, substantiate, and eliminate risk

• adopt a risk framework

6. Identify the right ideas and see them through to fruition

• bring together the right people and guide them with a common vision
• initiate change (people, process, technology) and innovation
• experiment with new technologies and unproven methodologies

7. Define shared objectives, rank and quantify them

• make persuasive arguments about technical topics
• incorporate sound engineering principles

8. Manage effectively

• cut across organizational and political boundaries
• navigate regulatory ambiguity and uncertainty
• operate under hostile conditions (project failure, burnout, layoffs)

9. Propose radical new ideas without fear

• always try again and again, always be learning

10. Ensure technology investments are productive

• conduct M&A due diligence on software and IT services companies
• navigate cross-cultural communication (US, China)
• write long-form sales copy such as sales letters and marketing collateral

11. Identify the right technology investments

• conduct technology research and development (R&D)
• provide access to the latest tools, enable advanced capabilities

Of course, this not an exhaustive list. Continuous improvement ensures capabilities will continue to grow over time.

Recently, I joined the faculty of Thales College as an adjunct professor.

My inaugural course is entitled Philosophy of Business and Management. In it, I cover the ideas behind the great business and management thinkers of the 20th century, including Peter Drucker, Clayton Christensen, Masaaki Imai, and a host of other luminaries.

Thales College is an outgrowth of Thales Academy, a successful network of private schools in the Raleigh, North Carolina area. It was founded by entrepreneur and philanthropist Bob Luddy, who turned his company, CaptiveAire Systems, from a small startup into the largest privately held manufacturer of kitchen ventilation systems in the United States, with revenues exceeding ~$500 million per year.

Although this college is small, and to date remains relatively unknown in the wider world, I was drawn to the opportunity to teach there because of Thales' unique approach to higher education – combining the best of classical thinking with real-world experience, yet still affordable for people of average means.

I recently had the opportunity to read The Thales Way, a book in which Luddy outlines his vision and mission in the world of education, and how this translates into providing "the best opportunities for as many students as possible."

The Thales approach to education is based on the ancient Greek tradition of the trivium, which breaks down learning into three parts – grammar, logic, and rhetoric – each building upon the former, and resulting in a well-rounded thinker and communicator. Underlying this framework are core values which give purpose and meaning to the student's life, and work.

Truth, Goodness, and Beauty

The book begins with a quote from Alice von Hildeband: “The purpose of education is the pursuit of universal truth.”

Pursuit of Truth is indeed a noble endeavor, and one to which we should all aspire as lifelong students of the world. In classical thinking, Truth is the first of the "three transcendentals" – and it leads directly to the next two, Goodness and Beauty.

"To know that I do not know" is considered the very first truth. This humble admission is where we all must begin, for in order to learn anything, we first must acknowledge our own ignorance. Being honest about this gives us a genuine, solid foundation to build upon.

Beyond this, what is Truth? Having Truth means that our thoughts and perceptions accord with objective reality. Being in accord with what is real, we are able to use our mind to make choices, to direct our will in ways that are congruent with Truth. When we do this, it is called Good.

Because we are not perfect, we often fall short of doing good. In fact, even with continuous, conscious effort to overcome our weakness, our ability to discern Truth remains clouded. This hinders our ability to consistently choose to pursue Goodness. We feel we must make a sacrifice in order to do so.

Beauty manifests when our own will is displaced by the will of the higher ideal, when this feeling of sacrifice transforms into a feeling of joy, a feeling of peace. When we begin to love Goodness, find joy in Goodness, find pleasure in choosing the Good, we call this Beautiful.

Human Dignity

Every human being is endowed with a special gift, something they are uniquely able to contribute to the world. Recognizing this, it is the responsibility of the teacher to nurture and magnify this gift in each student, leading them to fulfill their highest potential.

Establishing and holding students to high standards is in service of this end. When we compromise ideals for the sake of expediency, or a false sense of mercy, we deny the inherent dignity of the student, we limit their potential, and we prevent them from embodying the fullness of their calling.

Character

A well formed character is critical to making excellent decisions.

Our moral compass helps us make sense of the knowledge we have learned.

• Character development
• Skill formation
• Habit formation
• Virtue formation

Skills

• Learning: Recognizing ignorance, Searching for knowledge and wisdom, Retaining knowledge and wisdom
• Reasoning
• Patterns of thought for facing new and complex challenges
• Math: quantitative and analytic reasoning
• Humanities: imaginative reasoning
• The scientific method
• Economic reasoning
• Communication
• Expressing ideas clearly and persuasively across different media
• Being articulate in writing improves and conveys excellence of mind
• Trivium: grammar, logic, rhetoric

Social

• Effective entrepreneurs are those who have learned the art of interacting with people with authenticity
• We must decide to be the  main character in our lives and respond to each situation as such

Virtue

• Virtues exist at the midpoint between two vices (golden mean)
• Four cardinal virtues (Aquinas)

Prudence

• The mind’s recognition of what the right action is
• Judgment on how to apply ethical rules

Justice

• Starts by doing right to actual people around one’s self
• Expands outward until we treat all people rightly

Courage

• The mother of all virtues, and the hardest
• To be courageous, we overcome fear and moderate boldness
• Courage makes prudence and justice manifest

Temperance

• Trains our desire to take pleasure in doing the right thing

Direct Instruction

• Siegfried Engelmann
• Precise and unambiguous rules lead to effective learning
• “What humans learn is perfectly consistent with the input they receive”
• Repetition, seat checks, choral responses
• Be clear
• It is much more difficult to correct a mistake later than it is to teach the correct rule first
• Order your presentation of examples so that you rule out all the other possibilities
• Be efficient
• High time on task
• Mastery through a series of steps (algorithms) and familiar frameworks
• Choral responses maximize the number of students engaging with content
• Teach to mastery
• Lessons designed to contain 15% new material, 85% review material
• Builds upon knowledge with logical sequences
• Repeats concepts until they are cemented
• Quality versus quantity
• Celebrate success
• Praise positive student behavior and achievement whenever and wherever possible and praise it precisely
• Beware of intuition
• “You cannot fall in love with your own judgment” -Engelmann
• Student progress is measured by real data and not subjectivity
• “More scientific evidence validates the effectiveness of (Engelmann’s) methods than any other approach to instruction” -Shepard Barbash in Clear Teaching

Classical Curriculum

• The role of the teacher as mentor is most important
• The teacher imparts him or herself beyond just the content of the lesson
• The academic vocation is a contemplative one: philosopher, theologian, monk
• Three stages of learning (trivium): grammar, logic, rhetoric
• Grammar: terminology, formulae, axioms, history
• Logic: understanding meaning, cause and effect, “reasons why”
• Rhetoric: self-expression, original thought, and persuasive  communication
• Masters of thought
• Socrates and Plato
• Humility is the first step to growth of any kind
• To interact with a master of thought is to face your ignorance
• Socratic reasoning
• Searching repeatedly through dialogue to discover something solid, and the key questions a subject depends upon
• Requires setting aside false or mistaken ideas
• Interweaves thinking and communication skills

The Arts and Vocational Training

• The original quadrivium: arithmetic (discrete number), geometry (forms of number), music (harmonic number), astronomy (dynamic number)
• Fine Arts: understanding and expressing beauty
• Industrial Arts: the means to be self-sufficient and independent

Communication

• The ability to communicate well is necessary for students to achieve excellence throughout their lives
• Words tell the story of humanity and have the capacity to dictate what chapter comes next
• Debate
• Thinking, presentation, quickness, good memory
• Organize logical arguments in a series of clear, succinct, well-presented ideas
• Willingness to respect other viewpoints and revise your own
• We may have good ideas, but unless we can convince others of them, our ideas flounder

Get The Book

If you are interested in the field of education, and learning from someone who has created a unique and successful model for private education in America, I highly recommend reading this book. The book can be purchased on Amazon, or downloaded for free from the Thales Academy website.

As a technical program manager, you are expected to be a capable engineer as well as a manager, and be able to perform at a level equivalent to a practicing engineer in the field. Many program managers, especially senior ones, find fewer opportunities to keep their technical skills sharp. This guide is intended as a refresher and crash course on system design, intended for software program managers.

Understanding system design is critical because it enables the program manager to participate in technical decisions and discussions that affect the program. Program managers without enough technical depth can get lost in these discussions, and this can make it difficult to effectively manage the program.

Clarify and agree on the scope of the system

The first step in any system design discussion is to clarify and agree on the scope of the problem being solved and the solution space available. Scope, timeline, and quality are the three variables available to work with, so it helps to fix one of them early on, and then proceed to work out the others as more information becomes available. You may have to have discussions around trade-offs, especially if you have additional constraints or special requirements for quality or timeline.

Use Cases

User Stories

Constraints

High-level architecture (abstract design)

• Components
• Each component is a set of interfaces (connections)
• Modules are sets of components
• Map features to modules
• Schema design
• Common Systems
• Application service layer
• Data storage layer
• Web server load balancer
• Services / APIs
• Databases
• Caching

Bottlenecks

• Physical constraints (size, space)
• Time constraints
• Quantity constraints
• Storage
• Bandwidth
• CPU

Scaling

• Vertical scaling
• Cache
• Add CPU, RAM
• Horizontal scaling
• Add machines
• Load balancing

System design topics

• Concurrency
• Threads
• Consistency vs. Coherence
• Networking
• TCP/IP
• Throughput vs. Latency

Abstraction: Be comfortable with multiple layers of abstraction and be able to design your own abstract architectures and service layers. Know how to refactor and use common design patterns to model and simplify the problem space.

Programming Languages: Be familiar with at least a handful of major programming languages, and be able to discuss the differences and trade-offs between them. Understand type systems, interpreters, compilers, garbage collection, and syntax as they relate to programming languages. Be able to make the case for choosing one language over another for particular project.

Operating Systems: Be familiar with Linux, macOS, Windows. Be comfortable in a shell and writing shell scripts. Understand processes, memory management, threading, input/output, drivers, kernel.

File Systems: Understand storage media and trade off between cost and speed, and cost and durability. Understand file system architectures like ext3.

Databases: Understand and be able to describe the differences and trade-offs between relational (SQL), non-relational (NoSQL), distributed databases and related tools and implementations (postgres, mysql, mongodb, etc).

• Performance
• Local hardware (CPU, memory, storage)
• Network interfaces (bandwidth, throughput)
• Availability / Reliability
• Content delivery network (CDN)
• Sphinx/Lucene/Solr (Text Search)
• Security (CORS)
• Offline support (progressive enhancement)
• Front-end design topics
• Code: HTML5, CSS, JS, Python
• Style Guide / Pattern Library
• Architecture Diagrams (code flow, tool chain)
• Documentation
• Testing (performance, unit, end-to-end)
• Deployment (source control, dependency management, build system, continuous integration)
• Estimation
• Work breakdown structure (architectural dependencies, critical path)
• T-shirt sizing (S/M/L)

Today, much of our life and culture exists in digital form. Unfortunately, many important digital artifacts are lost to history. Bookmark is building digital archives to enlighten humanity and to withstand the test of time.

💫 The purpose of archives

Consider this: Archives preserve our collective knowledge over time – they are collections of intentions for the future. They are low time preference.

The purpose of archives are not to "keep everything", but rather to keep specific things selected by specific people for specific reasons. Archives are a testimony to the achievements of human thought.

This distinction has been lost in the modern world of technology where information is cheap and abundant – but knowledge and wisdom are rare. Not everything is worthy of archiving. So what makes the cut?

🙏 Archivists are benefactors

Archivists are like benefactors – identifying, classifying, and preserving the value of the past for the benefit of the future. We want to make this practice more accessible, and more suited for a digital world.

The human instinct to collect and share information is not well served by the current generation of digital tools. A generation of young people are growing up in walled gardens and do not know the open internet.

Bookmark.org represents a new way to aggregate, preserve, and share future intentions for generations to come. Imagine a world in which your great grandchildren refer to the archives you create. That's why you should start archiving on Bookmark.org today.

⚖️ We are restoring the human-curated internet

We believe in an independent and global internet, made up of humans interacting and contributing as equal peers with transparent rules. Too much of the internet has been given over to unaccountable algorithms. We are working to reverse that trend.

🔗 A market for preserving links

Who decides what information to preserve? Traditional archives have been funded by governments, large corporations, or large donors.

Bookmark.org believes that individuals acting in their own best interest will make the right decisions about what to archive and preserve for the future, not large bureaucratic organizations with uncertain goals.

• Bookmark.org creates a free market funding model for long-term archives. Anyone can participate with no barriers!
• Bookmark.org archives can be supported with integrated lightning donations. This creates an economic incentive.
• Supporting an archive signals to Bookmark.org to preserve the archive for a longer period of time. Money is a neutral signal for value.

🌐 Pioneering a new way to earn online

Users who create archives are rewarded with Lightning ⚡ donations. This incentivizes users to create high quality archives, and share them widely.

Bookmark.org makes 100% of the donation available to the recipient without taking a fee. This opportunity is accessible to anyone, globally.

If you are old enough to remember the turn of the millennium, then you remember a time when the internet was a much simpler place.

Bookmark is bringing that internet back, and we invite you to be part of the mission. Instead of an internet controlled by a tiny handful of corporations, we will build alternative infrastructure to disrupt the power dynamic. We will empower our own users to have more control over their own data and digital assets.

We believe that in order to do this, we need to rebuild the entire infrastructure stack. It might sound strange to start such a mission with building an archiving service, but consider how we are actually building out from the core: media and payments.

As we develop out our long-term roadmap, all of our future plans will depend on the core infrastructure that we are building now.

How it works

Basic link archiving is launched and live on bookmark.org right now.

Bookmark.org creates archives on independent infrastructure with a permanent URL like https://bookmark.org/archive/1234

👾 Link rot is our enemy

Link rot is what happens when a link no longer points to the same resource – maybe it was deleted, changed, or no longer accessible. This happens all the time on the internet, and it can be a real problem.

Digital archives backed by ⚡ Lightning

• Web Archives: Our current release includes support for web archives and works well on traditional web content (HTML, CSS, images). Future releases will include improved archive quality (fidelity), improved crawling, indexing, and retrieval capabilities, archive scheduling, bulk archives,  and private archives.

• Social Media Archives: Currently supported platforms include LinkedIn posts, Youtube channels, Wikipedia articles, Substack articles, Wordpress blog posts, and more. Support is currently limited for some closed and proprietary social media platforms.
• Audio and Video Archives: Audio and video is not currently archived. Future releases will include support for extracting, storing, and serving archived audio and video.

Micropayments

• Bitcoin Lightning Wallet: Users receive an integrated bitcoin lightning wallet for making micro-transactions. Users can make deposits to the wallet. Users can use the wallet to donate to other users. Users can use the wallet to receive donations from other users and from the public.

• Donations: When a user clicks one of the donation amounts, they are prompted to confirm the payment, and the payment is made from the integrated wallet. Future releases will include the ability to pay from an external wallet.

• Deposits: Users can make additional deposits from any lightning wallet to their Bookmark wallet.

• BOLT-11 invoices: Users pay a BOLT-11 to execute the deposit

Future releases will also include the ability to withdraw.

Profiles

• Profiles: User profile pages currently display a simple list of archives created by that user. Future releases to include profile picture, etc. Users are designated using an @ symbol, e.g. https://bookmark.org/@user

The future

Collections

• Collections and pages: Our roadmap includes the ability to group archives into logical sets, or collections. Users can publish pages that contain any number of collections. These pages, curated by an expert user, can become authoritative sources of information in all manner of subjects.

Search

• Search and discovery: Our roadmap also includes content discovery features, including categorization, tagging, and full-text indexing and search.

Media & Commerce

• Digital products: Bookmark will enable users to monetize digital content in new ways. In addition to donations, users will be able to directly monetize  via premium content, subscriptions, and streaming money.

The opportunity

Bookmark has an opportunity to disrupt and establish new segments in several related industries:

The digital media industry

• Paid media: ~$104B US, ~$67B China, ~$53B Europe
• Ads: ~$616B worldwide

The payments industry

• Microtransactions: ~$70B worldwide

The archiving industry

• Enterprise: ~$7B
• Non-profit: ~$2B
• Government: ~$1.4B  (National Archives digital archives)
• Academic: ~$1B (estimate)

We will bring alternatives and a bitcoin standard to these industries. We see opportunities to create value in a wide variety of B2B and B2C applications. Web archiving is just the beginning!

The Team

Joe Davison, Product and Engineering

Leon Siegmund, Marketing

How you can help

• Try it yourself: Our alpha is now live at bookmark.org.

To start, try archiving news articles, how-to guides, reference information, essays, and blog posts you find useful.

How you can help, continued

• Help us test: Reach out to us on telegram to become a tester. Anyone can do this and your feedback is really valuable to us.
• Join our team: We are recruiting engineers. The major components of our tech stack are Elixir, Phoenix Framework, Postgres, LNbits and Archivebox on Amazon EC2 (Ubuntu), plus minimal front-end JS, CSS, and HTML. (PHP, Python, Ruby, JavaScript developers: Don't worry, Elixir is fun and you can become productive very quickly. Reach out and let us introduce you to our code base!)
• Fund us: To date, we have received generous infrastructure donations from Amazon, Linode, and Digital Ocean that can sustain us for at least the next 12 months. We are currently looking for more storage, compute, and bandwidth donations, as well as help with Lightning node and channel management infrastructure. We also need bitcoin and cash to fund ongoing development. If you are forward thinking investor, donor, or benefactor, reach out.

Yours truly,

the Bookmark.org team

What is a program manager? How is it different from a product manager? How about project manager? And what differentiates a “technical” PM from a “non” technical one? These are all questions I get asked often, so I’ll attempt to avoid repeating myself (and clarify my own thinking) by summarizing my thoughts here.

As you read on, please do keep in mind that there is no “one true answer” to this question. Product and program management can vary wildly across industries and even across companies within the same industry. This can lead to quite a bit of confusion!

My thinking is informed by my own experience with program management at both Google and Apple, my experience interviewing hundreds of program managers from other companies as part of my role, and my experience interviewing at other companies which gives some visibility into how those companies operate. That said, my experience is by no means universal and should be taken as one data point.

There are likely to be as many opinions about program management as there are program managers – as a group we tend to like analyzing things, breaking them down, then framing and re-framing them in ways that facilitate understanding and actionability. Doing so is something of an art, and all true artists have their own “style”.

So take all of this with a grain of salt. With that said, I hope that some will find this helpful. It may be useful for someone considering a program management role for the first time, or perhaps a  junior program manager leveling up their skills. Heck, even experienced program managers may find value in looking at things through a different lens. Let’s begin.

Project vs. product vs. program

Out of the three (project, product, program), project management is probably the most universal and accessible idea to most people. In my view, every single person  in the modern workplace  is a project manager, whether consciously or not. A project could be thought of as a set of work consisting of more than one task, completed over a period of time, with a well-defined end state (“definition of done”).

As you can see, most knowledge work falls into this rubric. If you have ever written down a list of tasks you need to do in order to complete something, and then checked them off as they were completed, congratulations! You are a project manager in the most basic sense.

Some companies, but not all, have an explicit “project manager” title and role. The only difference between this person and everyone else is that this person is able to dedicate 100% of their time to project management, while everyone else has to do it alongside their core role. This allows the project manager to take on more projects, larger projects, and longer term projects.

Product management is about discovering and defining what needs to be built, and perhaps more importantly, why. The product manager seeks to understand the user and the market dynamics at play, and translate that into a product vision that enables the company to capture its share of the market opportunity.

Product managers pull from a broad skill set – on any given day, they may be conducting market research, talking to a strategic partner, writing detailed requirements, or establishing success metrics. Product managers are focused on building the best product and user experience possible for a specific product line or area. They are focused on the outside world and how the company can best meet the needs of that outside world.

Program management differs from product management in that the object of focus is internal rather than external. For program managers, the company itself, and the people and processes within it, is the “product” that we are working on. We work to build alignment across teams, establish roadmaps, drive execution, improve communication, anticipate and mitigate risks, and ensure accountability across multiple teams.

A program manager’s scope spans across many products and projects simultaneously. The choice of focus is dictated by the business – and usually will be in support of an overarching strategic area for the company. Program managers tend to own areas of the business that have high urgency, complexity, and/or risk, and their specialized skill set enables them to execute and deliver in these areas to produce business value.

Now that we understand what program management is, let’s dive into details. A program manager has a number of spheres of influence. These can be broken down as:

Objectives

Clear objectives ensure everyone understands the program purpose. This can be achieved with a clear vision, a detailed roadmap, and a way to measure results.

• Vision: What are we doing and why? What is the overall goal or mission of the program? The vision lays out a shared context and purpose for the program. We may be solving an operational, technical, legal, engineering, product, marketing, service, or sales problem. What impact is this problem having? What will this problem look like in the future, with the aid of this program? The vision should answer these questions and inspire the team.
• Roadmap: How will things change over time? What can we expect next quarter or next year? Who is working on what when? Estimate and visualize the work according to work streams. Break down the work into milestones. Identify and resolve dependencies and conflicts.
• Results: How will we measure success? What outcomes do we expect and what is the impact of those outcomes? Use specific and quantifiable metrics to demonstrate business value. Hold retrospectives to jointly review results and suggest improvements.

Stakeholders

Understanding stakeholders and how to manage them is a core function of program management. Stakeholders can be thought of as those who have an interest in the program. The reasons for this interest can vary.

Examples of stakeholders are:

• An executive or set of executives who sponsor (pay for!) the program
• Cross-functional teams whose work is impacted by the program
• Individual contributors on the various project and product teams
• Horizontal functions like finance, legal, privacy, security, etc
• Partners, vendors, or key customers

Each of these stakeholders comes to the program with a unique set of expectations and degree of interest. It is the job of the program manager to elicit and understand these factors in order to tailor the program to meet the needs of a diverse set of stakeholders.

The program manager accomplishes this by doing things like:

• Establishing and growing relationships directly with a tailored group of key executives
• Providing vision, leadership, and mentorship to individual contributors
• Identifying and managing vendors, suppliers, or strategic partners
• Communicating status broadly and consistently

Ideally, in order for a program to operate credibly, it should have a formal charter that is approved (ratified) by a core group of stakeholders. The charter lays out details of the program and covers much of the information discussed in this article.

Constraints

• Scope: What will and will not be included in the program?  Be explicit about what is within scope (for example, engineering and product development) and what is out of scope (for example, operations) for a program. A program should be tailored to achieve a specific strategic goal. Most projects do not need a program manager. Be judicious and thoughtful in how to apply program coverage.
• Priority: What order do things need to be done? How quickly do things need to be done? Identify the critical path and any dependencies to resolve. Some tasks can be done in parallel and others must be done in sequence. Map out teams and work streams over time to visualize what will be done first, second, third, etc. Establish shared definitions of P0, P1, and P2 priority.
• Resources: What people, tools, and assets are available? Ensure adequate coverage across needed skill sets. Estimate resource needs by individual, team project, and product line. Include testing and operations costs. Do not pad resource requests or request buffer resources, instead ensure scope and priority match resource realities.

Teams

Program managers must keep hybrid teams accountable for delivering on their commitments. One of the ways they do this is by establishing roles and responsibilities, and recognizing good work.

• Roles: Ensure roles are clearly defined. What level of commitment is necessary over what period of time? What is expected in terms of deliverables? Ensure responsibilities are understood and agreed to. List the role in the program charter with the person's name and have them sign off on it.
• Recognition: A program manager should reward good performance by praising team members who are delivering value. Highlight the achievements for their managers, directors, VPs, and cross functional stakeholders. When someone is performing well and is critical to the success of your program, make it known.

Status

• Summary: Use simple color schemes to visualize status (red-yellow-green). Keep a list of open issues that require a decision or executive attention. Report top-line metrics for each line of business.
• Risks: Identify potential risks in the areas of engineering, product, operations, and legal. Identify a comprehensive set of mitigations to identified risks. Use a probability vs. impact matrix to quantify and order risks.
• Escalations: Call out decisions that need to be made, especially when executive attention is required or the decision is blocking something from happening. Call out ad-hoc resource requests with justification.

Skills

A good program manager will have a blend of interpersonal skills and domain-specific or technical knowledge.

• Interpersonal: Communication is central to everything a program manager does. Relationships ensure your message is trusted and understood in context. A program manager acts as a neutral third party. As such, adopt a diplomatic presence. Consciously use body language and tone to convey an additional layer to your communication.
• Technical: To be considered 'technical' a program manager should have an equivalent level of technical knowledge as a practicing engineer in the field. Technical program managers are commonly seen in the fields of software (web, mobile), cloud (platform, infrastructure), and hardware (compute, memory, storage, networking, devices) .
• Domain-specific: Some program managers specialize in security, privacy,  risk, legal, marketing, UX, or other specific domains. Each of these domains has its own specialized terminology, and plays a different role in the business. Domain-specific program managers become experts in their field over time.

Culture

• Respect: Fostering a culture of mutual respect across the organization is a critical function of the program manager. They do this by approaching conflict with a neutral perspective, increasing connection across teams, being open to feedback, adapting, and assuming good intent when mistakes occur.
• Transparency: Executives do not like surprises. Give them previews and rehearsals of important communications, decisions, or meetings. Prepare them with background material, summarized context, and 1-1 discussion prior to engaging in critical meetings. Adopt a postmortem culture that does not assign blame.
• Leadership: A culture of leadership is fostered first through demonstration. Every program manager is an example for everyone they encounter in the organization. The program manager should exhibit the same qualities that they hope to inspire in others. Find opportunities to mentor other program managers directly. Find opportunities to learn from your own mentors.

Meetings

A special note on meetings.

Everyone loves to hate meetings. The truth is, unless there is a structure or purpose, meetings quickly descend into a big waste of time. On the other hand, meetings can be useful and productive when certain rules are followed.

In general, meetings are not a good medium for status updates or for one-way broadcasting of information. Using meetings as a primary mechanism to disseminate information is an anti-pattern and should be avoided.

Meetings are good for three things: 1) making personal connections, 2) identifying actions that need to be taken, and 3) making decisions. If none of these things happen, a meeting is generally a waste of time.

Consider the following regarding meetings:

• Accessibility: Don't be impossible to reach, but don't make yourself too accessible. Find the right balance based on your objectives. Set a high bar and only meet when it is truly needed.
• Agenda: A meeting must have an agenda, full stop. No agenda, no meeting. You should never run a meeting yourself without an agenda. When you run a meeting, the agenda should be sent out ahead of time, ideally the night before. If there are background materials to review, these should be sent ahead of time (day before or earlier) as well. If you arrive at someone else's meeting and find it is without an agenda, you should create an agenda as the first order of business, or disband and offer to meet again when there is a clear agenda.
• Attendees: Nobody should be coming to a meeting as an observer, everyone should be participating and contributing to the meeting. Take into account whether a particular attendee is necessary or not before adding them to the meeting. Don't ask potential attendees if they want to attend, because people will naturally feel obligated to say yes, even if it would not be that useful for them. Instead, identify a minimum quorum and make attendance mandatory.
• Timing: In general, you should meet sooner rather than later, and for the least amount of time necessary to move the program forward. Meetings tend to fill up the time allocated to them. When you have a very clear agenda and everyone reviews background material (on their own schedule) ahead of time, meetings should not take a lot of time. I schedule many 15-minute and 30-minute meetings. I rarely schedule a 60-minute meeting unless strictly necessary, and I always end meetings early when possible.
• Decisions: Decisions should be recorded, and sent out to the group in writing after the meeting. If anyone disputes a decision, they can take it up at that time. Maintain a ledger of decisions that have been made and need to be made. Do not allow indecision to derail a meeting. Either a decision can be made at the meeting, or not. If not, move on to the next agenda item.
• Actions: Action items should be identified and recorded during the course of the meeting. Maintain a ledger of action items, their assignee, and their status (open / closed). Follow up on open action items at subsequent meetings. Action items should be clear and specific. The owner of the action item should acknowledge their ownership of it and commit to taking the action.
• Notes: Notes should be taken during most meetings. The level of detail needed in the notes will vary based on the size, complexity, and importance of a meeting. Notes should capture important and relevant information discussed or discovered at a meeting. The importance and relevance of information is dictated by its ability to influence a decision or identify a course of action. Notes should contain information about the attendees, agenda, relevant discussion, decisions made, and actions identified at a meeting. Non-attendees should be able to read the notes and understand what was discussed and decided. Notes should be distributed widely to relevant teams and stakeholders to facilitate shared understanding and promote accountability.

Finally, if you need to run political or controversial meetings with many high level stakeholders, consider reviewing Robert's Rules of Order, the classic work on parliamentary procedure, for some wild ideas. ("Permission to speak, madam chair?" Imagine!)

PMO

• Charters: Once the program is defined, develop a charter and have program sponsors ratify it. Charter should include information about objectives, stakeholders, constraints, and teams. This document is like the birth certificate of the program that team members can refer to.
• Portfolio management: In a large organization, many programs, projects, and products are developed simultaneously and it is difficult to manage scope and resource assignment across all programs. Unify reporting across programs to summarize at a portfolio level. Adopt a process for assigning engineering and product resources to programs.

In conclusion

As you practice and develop your craft as a program manager, you will begin to form your own structure and framework for how you think about things. The above is my own, incomplete and imperfect as it is likely to be.

It is my hope that by sharing my thinking and structure with you, you might use it as a spring board, and a tool to help your own even greater understanding.

If you are a new or aspiring program manager, please do not hesitate to subscribe for more, and connect with me on Twitter or LinkedIn. I have helped a number of software engineers and others make the jump into program management.

Although my background is in computer science and engineering, early on I understood the importance of communication, especially writing. So I consciously set out to learn the art and science of direct response copywriting. Why did I do this?

Persuasive writing is the kind of skill that pays dividends for life. That is why I highly recommend that everyone invest at least a little bit of time and effort to learn the basics of the craft. You will be surprised how far even just a little bit of education can go.

A fair note of warning: in this field charlatans are rampant. It is a minefield and most people are easily led down the wrong path. In that spirit, I would like to recommend some of the best of the best.

For the total beginner

David Ogilvy (half the namesake of the famous Madison Avenue agency "Ogilvy & Mather"), was an outspoken fan of measurable and scientific direct response marketing.

His book Ogilvy on Advertising is one of the most accessible books on this subject, especially for a person who is new to the field. It contains a plethora of pictures and examples of advertisements that Ogilvy created, and explains the rationale and thinking that went on behind the scenes in the creation of those ads. This is an illustrative way to put yourself into the mindset of someone whose job it is to motivate human action based on words alone.

Ogilvy on Advertising is available cheaply on Amazon. I would pick it up just to leaf through and get some ideas. It applies to all businesses.

For the intermediate and advanced

Once you are convinced of the importance of learning how to persuade through words, you may wish to deepen your understanding even further. For this I would recommend Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz.

Schwartz was a pure genius and should be read for that reason alone. I guarantee you have never read anything like it. His description of the levels of awareness that a market goes through, and how to create a message to match the market based on those levels of awareness, is the most advanced and accurate explanation I have ever come across of what motivates human action in markets.

Breakthrough Advertising is not cheap. People generally buy it and keep it, and refer to it regularly. As of this writing, it is available new for $125 directly from the publisher, Brian Kurtz of Titans Marketing. There are also 13 used copies on Amazon with prices ranging from $320 to $550.

Disclosure: If you buy books through my Amazon links, I will be compensated.

Beyond Eugene Schwartz, I also recommend the works of:

• Gary Bencivenga, perhaps the top copywriter of all time, oversaw more than $1B in scientific split run advertising tests (Gary is also the person who gifted me Obvious Adams, which I also recommend.)
• Gary Halbert, an unorthodox but brilliant writer who created one of the largest direct mail campaigns in history ("Coat of Arms")
• Joseph Sugarman, the inventor of Blu-Blockers sunglasses, a TV infomercial, catalog, and direct mail pioneer
• Ken McCarthy, the person who brought the "cost per click" model to the internet in 1994 and discovered how to monetize the internet
• Dan Kennedy, a direct mail and infomercial legend, also known for his books and hosting well-attended seminars for deacdes.
• Bob Bly, a pragmatic and prolific copywriter with a wide scope of work including B2B direct response.

Connectors

I hope this page serves as a connector for you. If you want to join the big leagues of copywriting, as in write copy full time exclusively, you will need to connect with other players in the two biggest industries that pay the most to copywriters: health and finance.

Financial copywriting

On the finance side, I can recommend John Newtson and Jami Stout and their Financial Marketing Summit (formerly Investing Info-Marketing Summit) as the premier gathering in the world of financial publishers who work with copywriters and operate at a massive scale. I attended this summit in 2014 and found it to be incredible.

Health copywriting

On the health side, the connector-par-excellence is Michael Fishman who hosts the annual Consumer Health Summit, which is invitation-only but I believe you can apply to attend. I attended in 2011 and made some life changing connections. Many top authors, writers, entrepreneurs, and publishers in the health world attend.

Some final tips

There are a few ways to get paid as a copywriter:

• You own your own business and you write copy to sell more
• You write for another business and they pay you a royalty on sales
• You write for another business and they pay you a fixed fee

There are variations on these and the market is constantly evolving, but there are different pros and cons to each of these general models. Which one you pursue depends on your personal situation, so consider which approach to take when you make your services available.

Well, that's about it. This page should be about enough for any serious student of copywriting. Godspeed!

This article is a continuation of Part 1, so if you haven't read that, start there.

To quickly recap: my LND node was set up, I was able to open a few channels and able to send a successful test payment. But I could not receive payments and my node was not routing any transactions.

To solve this, I embarked on a journey of opening more, bigger, higher quality channels, and obtaining inbound liquidity. I also made some configuration improvements along the way.

I opened new channels like:

• Kraken
• Bitfinex
• OKX
• Paywall.link

I also closed some under-performing channels.

Following this, I was able to send a successful transaction from my LND node to another lightning wallet. The transaction was routed via Kraken.

At this point my node was still publicly identifiable only by its public key. Rather than leave it like this, I decided to name my node "xsat.org" after a domain name that I use as an lnbits wallet and lightning address.

After I was done configuring my new node name, it showed up in amboss, 1ML, etc. It also showed the 500% increase in capacity.

At this point the node was largely unbalanced with an overwhelming majority of outbound vs inbound liquidity. There was, however, a small amount of inbound, enough to route our first successful transaction:

The fee of 1,049 mSats (milli-sats) is equivalent to about 1 satoshi (1.049 satoshi to be precise). The above transaction information is the equivalent to taping the dollar bill used by your first customer to the cash register. Our first earned satoshi!

Despite the excitement, the node was still in need of work.

To solve the liquidity imbalance, I purchased 20,000,000 sats of inbound liquidity for 50,000 sats from zero fee routing | CLN.

The new inbound immediately exposed the under-pricing of my outbound to bitfinex: a flood of transactions (dozens per minute) draining my liquidity, and earning me only very small fees along the way.

This is how I learned about "liquidity sinks". Since most people send funds to an exchange in order to sell or exchange them, and only very rarely spend bitcoin lightning directly from an exchange back into the market, exchange nodes tend to "eat up" your outbound liquidity.

The solution to this is to set your outbound prices high enough to ensure you are compensated for the use of your funds. I adjusted outbound pricing to exchanges to prevent any future draining of funds.

As an additional method to gain both inbound and outbound liquidity, I participated in a few liquidity swaps on lightningnetwork.plus.

Following this, I basically left my node to run itself for a few weeks. It routes transactions on most days. Sometimes it goes for a few days without routing any transactions, and sometimes there is a sudden flurry of transactions. I'm still learning the ropes as an operator.

On August 8, I did have a very welcome surprise:

My node earned 4,702 satoshi for a single transaction, by accepting 474,914 and forwarding 470,212 onward, from zero fee routing to bitfinex.

In USD terms, that is roughly a $1 fee earned for forwarding a roughly $100 payment. If you could do that all day, you might have a real business. Presumably this liquidity was valuable enough that the sender was willing to pay the 1% fee.

In August, as compared to July, my node began to receive more frequent transactions and fees. In the entire month of July, the node earned 1,227.66 sats in 91 events. In August, by the 13th the node had earned 13,323.92 sats in 1,187 events.

(In USD terms, the node earned $0.26 in July vs $2.85 so far in August.)

This represents a monthly payments growth rate of 985% by frequency and 1,204% by volume from July to August (so far).

If you are running a lightning node, please feel free to open a channel! The node public key and QR code are above.

To be continued...

Next time you are faced with an organizational challenge or situation, try using this framework to analyze the group situation from the perspective of each of these attributes. By doing so you are likely to uncover opportunities to improve group identity and performance.

Cohesion

• Cohesion is a fundamental aspect of group dynamics.
• A group is cohesive according to the degree to which there is physical and mental connection among members.
• These connections endure to varying degrees across space and time.

Human beings are inherently group creatures. We tend to organize our life, our identity, and our society around the groups and identities to which we belong. Group identity derives part of its value from its aspect of cohesion.

We can think of this like the momentum of a moving object in physics. An object that is in motion tends to stay in motion. A group that has cohered around a shared identity and shared set of values tends to stay cohered. The motion gives the physical object energy. The cohesion gives the group (social) value.

What causes cohesion? There are both physical and mental aspects to this. (Some would also say spiritual, but we will not cover that here.)

The strongest kind of cohesive group is the family. In the family group, there is an obvious physical link – the physical and inseparable bond between a mother and child, the genetic bond with the father, and the (hopefully) nurturing physical touch that goes along with feeding, clothing, bathing, and interacting with a child as it grows from infant to adulthood.

This physical link is inherent in a family but is also present in other, less cohesive groups. Groups of friends may like to hug each other. Groups of business associates may handshake. These physical exchanges connect groups together and result in an increase in cohesion for the group as a whole.

Mental connection is much broader. This includes the exchange of ideas, affinities, and information. Two members of a club who have never met will still have some element of cohesion by having read the same weekly newsletter, for example.

Thinking about how these forces are distributed, a key difference between physical and mental cohesion is that physical cohesion cannot be exchanged at-a-distance. This is why you see so much of a premium placed on interacting in-person as a way for human beings to grow closer to each other.

On the other hand, the growth of global transportation networks and electronic communications has led to an explosion in the size, number, level of specificity, and depth of mental connections across all geographic boundaries.

Both physical and mental cohesion degrade over time. They need constant renewal to remain strong. As an individual evolves and receives feedback from the group and new information from outside the group, he makes decisions to either renew, or allow to degrade, all aspects of cohesion across all groups among which he is a member (both consciously and unconsciously). This is free will expression.

Due to the fact that cohesiveness has a stickiness, there needs to be an energy input in order to overcome the initial-starter friction. (Where this energy comes from will be saved for another discussion.)

Fervor

• Fervor is an amplifying medium for the other forces active in groups.
• Too much or too little fervor will produce negative effects on the other forces.

Fervor is a multiplying force. It serves to increase and extend the other forces at play. It can provide both positive and negative expression as it interacts with the other forces at play.

By way of analogy, consider a pot of water. Heat, when applied to a pot of water, brings it closer to a boil. But if you apply too much heat for too long – the water can "boil over" and spill down the sides of the pot. The heat is the same. But the result goes from desirable to undesirable.

In group dynamics, the fervor is the heat. And the water is the other dynamic attributes. The connection between fervor and the other attributes varies in degree. Two of the attributes most closely related to fervor are cohesion, discussed previously, and zealotry, yet to be discussed.

Fervor causes cohesion to flow more easily. Cohesion is like glue: sticky, more difficult than water to move and form. It can get stuck, or it can dry up and become too rigidly inflexible. When applied to cohesion, fervor is like melting the glue. Melt a glue stick in a glue gun and you can apply it more precisely and in more places.

Too much fervor, however, causes too much flow. This is like a liquid glue that never cools down, and thus never forms a tight bond. Too much fervor can actually cause a group to become weaker by liquefying cohesive bonds. There is a sweet spot where there is just enough fervor to allow cohesion to flow, but not enough to cause the pot to boil over.

Fervor as applied to zealotry is similar. An excess of fervor leads a group that is susceptible to fanaticism. Extreme fanaticism is a fragile state for a group to be in, because it becomes less resilient to new information or environmental changes.

Purpose

• Purpose predicates all human action.
• Group relations exist because of shared purpose.
• The existence of a purpose is more important than the purpose itself.

Who are we and why are we here? This is a fundamental question that we all ask ourselves, consciously or unconsciously, all the time. Purpose gives the answer to this question.

Purpose is closely related to belief. Beliefs give us the reason why things exist and these reasons in turn inform our action. Ultimately, every action we take as independent agents can be traced back to a reason and set of beliefs that define our purpose.

Groups provide built-in purpose for those who are purposeless or unclear of their motivations, on their own. This is a convenience factor but also a bonding factor. Given our free will as human beings, our life is what we choose to make of it. Choosing is the key.

And when we choose a purpose that aligns with the same purpose of others, we express a group identity and build connection with others.

Purposes can be of many types – we can have a financial purpose, a social purpose, a religious purpose. We can have the purpose of just entertainment. Whether we believe or not in an afterlife, nobody wants to work in vain and to feel like their life is futile. The purpose itself does not matter as much as the fact that there is a purpose and the purpose is clearly defined and shared by the group.

Having a shared purpose promotes feelings of solidarity, which satisfies a fundamental human craving for connection and validation. We all want to feel like we are part of something larger than ourselves and that all of our efforts and strife in this world will not go to waste.

Of course, as we mature in our outlook, we may be more discerning about the purposes to which we choose to subscribe (and by proxy, the groups with which we choose to associate), but fundamentally, when two humans come together in common interest, there must always be a common purpose, otherwise there is nothing.

Zealotry

• Zealotry is a group expression of potential energy.
• Zeal is a common but not necessary condition of strong group dynamics.
• Over-zealousness can lead to repulsion and weaker group structure.

Zealotry is the aspect of a group which embodies its evangelical energy, motivation, and propensity to engage with the outside world. It is like a potential or magnetic energy, latent, and able to be activated when counter-posed against the right conditions.

A group lacking in zeal is a dull, lifeless place. It has no strong pulling power, but it also does not repel. Groups like these can survive when other aspects of group dynamics are present and strong, which makes zealotry less critical than some of the other aspects.

Despite this, zealotry can be important in bringing life to groups by providing an expression path for shared values. The reason why some religions are able to maintain their hold on human minds is often purely a function of zealotry, along with some basic common truths about reality (golden rule).

Too much zealotry can cause eventual repulsion. Although it may initially draw attention and bring new members to a group, these connections tend to be weaker and fall off over time. Others are immune to over-zealous expressions and will be repelled without even engaging in the first place.

Distinction

• Distinction is what sets a group apart – “insiders” vs. “outsiders”.
• A group’s distinctive elements are expressions of shared values.
• Stories about and within a group are a mechanism to exhibit distinction.

What makes us different? Why are we special? Distinction is that aspect of groups that give identity to the group and set it apart from the rest of the world.

The old quote, "I would never want to join a group that would have me as a member" applies here. We all want something that is just beyond our reach, beyond our grasp, to believe that we are "insiders" and the rest are outside, according to the version of reality that our group has framed for us.

To the extent a group is able to embody and exhibit distinction, it sets itself apart as uniquely desirable. Distinct groups set themselves apart and in doing so, they provide members of the group with a shared identity and way to express a common set of values.

These values could be things like health, wealth, fitness, honor, intelligence, compassion, tolerance, intolerance, reverence, irreverence – really, anything that the group as a whole agrees to set apart as especially important, and therefore held in high regard. The group then exhibits distinction in these areas in a number of ways.

Some members may possess a high degree of merit with respect to one or more of the shared values. Or there may be particular stories or legends outside of the group, that group members tend to hold in high regard.

For example, if a group that values fitness has an Olympic athlete as a member, it would produce a high degree of distinction for the group. But even lacking such a unique member, such a group could set itself apart by sharing stories of famous athletes, and exhibiting reverence towards those athletes in their attitude and demeanor with respect to those stories.

Exclusivity

• Exclusivity is the expression of who or what is not part of the group.
• Like distinction, exclusivity is part of group identity and value expression.

Exclusivity is the mirror image of distinction, and thus they are closely related. While distinction is mostly concerned with the identity of the group, exclusivity can be thought of as the anti-identity. Who is not part of our group? What goes against the values we share?

A common enemy can be a strong unifying factor that brings people closer together and increase the level of trust among group members. This enemy can be a specific person, a common belief, or a synthetic “straw man” identity that becomes a focal point for group enmity.

Exclusivity can manifest both consciously and unconsciously within a group. A group may not always be consciously aware of who they are rejecting, and if asked, may even deny it. For example, wealthy members of a fancy country club would probably not openly express disdain for the poor or the uneducated – even if their actions and attitudes may indirectly express this nonetheless.

Some groups are more self-aware and would be able to openly identify and articulate their common enemy – for example, a pro-freedom libertarian group may openly decry “the communists” while a liberal social group may take issue with “conservative Christians”.

Governance

• Governance is the mechanism by which a group functions and interacts with the world.
• Leaders emerge as agents of governance, without which a group ceases to function.
• Group maturity correlates to the level of formality or informality in group governance.

Governance is the “natural order” of a group that arises from its expression of power and operating dynamics. It comprises the core function of how a group operates, makes decisions, and interacts with the rest of the world.

Within any group, certain individuals, whether by force, fraud, or mutual consent, emerge as leaders, and as a result hold a greater degree of influence on group activities than other members. These individuals embody the group’s enthusiasm and energy to make it their own – their will becomes the group’s will, to a greater or lesser degree.

Without these individuals, a group would be unable to function. Human beings each have their own distinct and individual predilections, desires, and ideas about what is right – in order to cooperate, some must cede – and others must impose – their individual will to the collective. This is the fundamental difference between group and individual action.

In addition to governing the group identity, decisions, and actions, leaders perform an important function in attracting new members, removing unwanted or rejected members, and forming alliances or relationships with other groups (diplomacy).

Depending on their size and level of maturity, different groups will have differing levels of formality or informality with respect to governance. This could range from a small group of less than ten people where it is survival of the fittest, with no conscious process, to a full formal parliamentary democracy governing millions, with very rigid and well-defined rules.

Propagation

• Propagation is how a group spreads its message and multiplies its members
• It is formed as a consequence of other group attributes
• The propagating force is a one-way function with a “viral” payload

Propagation is the act of duplication and multiplication that spreads a group, like a meme, from person to person. It performs the function of increasing awareness about the group, attracting new people to the group, and spreading the group’s message into new territories.

Propagation is related to alignment in that they are both aspects of how a group engages with other groups and the outside world. The difference is that alignment takes other groups’ energy, concerns, and considerations as input, with a goal of arriving at a kind of steady state or homeostasis where both groups make some sort of compromise in order to achieve unity.

On the other hand, there is no compromise when it comes to propagation. It is rather like a laser beam, a one-way concentrated force and channeling of essence that moves across boundaries and into uncharted waters.

A group’s propagating effect is a consequence of several of its other attributes – fervor, purpose, zealotry. These combine and “spill over” into the outside world, an aggressive and forceful act to which the outside world necessarily must respond.

Transparency

• Transparency refers to the availability of information about a group to those inside and outside the group
• Internal transparency is inversely correlated with hierarchy
• External transparency is inversely correlated with exclusivity

Transparency of a group can be thought about in two ways: internal transparency and external transparency.

A group has internal transparency when the group has a high degree of self-awareness – members are conscious of the group identity and meaning ascribed to group association, and have detailed knowledge of how the group functions. In hierarchical terms, this is related to how either “flat” (egalitarian) or “top-down” (authoritarian) a group is in terms of its structure.

Groups without a lot of formal hierarchy tend to be more transparent. This is necessary in order for dynamic leadership to emerge. An informal group without transparency will cease to exist eventually. More formal and authoritarian groups often lack transparency. This is an effect of their hierarchical structure where information is shared only on a need-to-know basis.

A group has external transparency when non-members of the group are able to discover the existence of the group as well as understand its purpose, governance and character. A group's level of external transparency relates to its need to either retain exclusivity (no need to be transparent) or recruit new members (need to be transparent).

Order

• Groups produce order out of chaos
• Group identity, norms, and purpose filter and interpret group inputs

Order is the intelligent organization of chaos, the base layer of everything. One of the primary functions of groups is to make meaning and bring understanding out of a complex reality.

In this sense of organizing chaos, we can think of a group as a kind of filter or transformer through which we engage with a chaotic and unpredictable world.

A group is a shared mechanism by which individuals in the group observe, interpret, and translate the world into terms that fit the purpose, understanding, and character of the group as a whole.

Human beings long for order because it enables higher-level objectives such as stability and security, to be pursued. Groups provide this benefit to members, at the cost of some individual autonomy.

Alignment

• Groups are either attracted or repelled by aspects of other groups
• Alignment enables groups to interact and evolve by adopting or rejecting beliefs, norms, and behaviors they observe in others

Alignment is the diplomatic and self-correcting function of a group, in that it refers to how the group positions itself relative to and with respect to other groups. It is also related to distinction and exclusivity in this regard.

As groups interact with other groups, they will naturally discover affinities and aversions to various attributes and aspects of those groups.

When an affinity or aversion is discovered, the group may modify its own behavior and identity in order to more closely align with the new information. This is the mechanism by which groups evolve and change over time.

Character

• Character is that inexplicable aspect of a group that slowly emerges over time
• A group's reputation proceeds from its character.

Character is like a fundamental essence (je ne sais quoi), that embodies the energy, purpose, passion, and identity of a group into a qualitative substance that is known and felt by all.

Character is subtle and takes a long time to form. Groups with a well-developed character tend to be older and more mature. New groups build character through shared struggles and achievements.

In summary

Next time you are faced with an organizational challenge or situation, try using this framework to analyze the group situation from the perspective of each of these attributes. By doing so you are likely to uncover opportunities to improve group identity and performance.

I have seven extra copies of Obvious Adams sitting on my desk right now – you may wonder why?

It all goes back to a fateful day when a mentor of mine (Gary Bencivenga) invited me to visit him at his home in Garden City, New York, and he gave me this book. He left a note in the book, saying:

It has been more than a decade since Gary wrote me this note.

To those who don't know him, Gary is just another person. But to those who know him, he is considered to be one of the greatest copywriters of all time. He performed more than $1 billion of scientific split run advertising tests in his career.

In addition to giving me some great advice in his living room that day, this book has benefited me greatly over the years.

I have made a point to re-read the book many times. In fact, I would revise Gary's exhortation and suggest the book can be read any time you are stuck in anything or unsure how to proceed, which can happen quite frequently.

In addition to reading the book frequently myself, I also give it out to others. I recently bought a dozen new copies and so far I gave away five. I usually give it to people that I meet in person as a small gift, but only if I think they will read it and benefit from it.

The book is a story and an experience, especially the first time you read it. I strongly recommend reading the printed, physical book.

I have seen at least one article on the internet saying that Obvious Adams is a cult classic and hard to find. I am not sure how true that is, but it certainly could be since the book is printed by a small family press.

The book is short, around 39 pages total. It can easily be read in a single sitting.

Rating: 5/5 highly recommend

My father was an entrepreneur. He taught me the value of hard work and dedication. He built an impressive company in his lifetime, especially given his background. He supported four children and sent them all to college. He sold the company and was able to retire.

Empire Metal Supply was ahead of its time with the Internet and the world wide web. Amerimelt.com went online in 1996, one of the earliest websites on the internet and a leader in its industry.

My first job was stuffing envelopes for customer mailings as a teenager in the 1990's. I was later promoted to network administrator and set up a small network of MS-DOS and Windows machines.

The critical application was accounting. I remember the accounting system, from Peachtree, had specialized data backup requirements. I wrote scripts (*.BAT files) to conduct routine backup tasks. The media used were floppy disks and tapes.

My father had a reputation for fairness and reliability in the tri-state area (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut). He served customers across a wide variety of industries from manufacturing to machining and construction.

He developed specialized products including Amerimelt®, a domestically produced alloy product, and Pluszero®, an innovation in sizing bars to a very high degree of accuracy for precision applicatioins.

Empire Metal Supply lives on under new ownership to this day. It is a legacy on Long Island and will continue to serve customers for years to come.

Lightning Network is growing in popularity and many believe it is the answer to bitcoin scalability. In order to understand Lightning Network more, I recently set out to build and run a lightning node from scratch on my spare Linux machine.

To start, I downloaded the LND source code from github. I had some local environment issues to fix such as installing Go and a series of other dependencies. I saw the docker distribution and tried that rather than worry about my local environment.

Unfortunately I had issues with docker that proved even more difficult so I went back to configuring my local environment, setting environment variables, configuration files in ~/.lnd/, admin.macaroon, etc.

Rather than download the entire blockchain, I configured LND to use neutrino. Finally got it working and ran ./lnd from the command line. Opened another terminal.

Then I used lncli to set up a wallet and generate a bitcoin receive address. Deposited some bitcoin to the node. Spent some time studying the various endpoints that could be called with lncli and the API signatures. Tested out a bunch of lncli commands to get a feeling for interacting with the node endpoints.

I decided to open an initial channel of 200,000 sats. I picked a well-connected and well-known node to open a channel with, fulmo.org. I noticed there was an option in the command to open a new channel which allowed for pushing a balance to the remote node.

I decided to retain 100,000 in local balance and push 100,000 to the remote node. I thought this would be a good idea to start out with some inbound capacity but I soon after learned this was a mistake. (When the channel is closed, that amount will go to the remote node. A small cost for a big education…)

Once this channel was open, after a few hours I decided to search the internet for my node. I googled the public key of my node and found a result on 1ML. I went through the process to claim my node. This process involved opening a channel in a specific amount to 1ML. This would be my node’s second channel of 278,171 sats.

My lightning node 1ML profile page: https://1ml.com/node/030f59c7ce0a35969c114f8818b7cd151e00e34ba3601f370e53d5a86dc6221c73

With two channels open, it was time to test sending and receiving some payments.

While doing some additional research I heard about RTL, a front-end to the same functionality available through lncli. After resolving a number of nodejs dependencies (including gratuitous use of the ‘--force’ modifier), and setting few configuration flags, I got RTL running and navigated to localhost:3000

RTL dashboard for LND node 030f59c7ce0a35969c11

I used the RTL interface to update the fee policy on my channels to 0 mSat base (as suggested by lightning researcher René Pickhardt), 1 mSat fee rate

Observations so far:

• Payments over 70,000 sats consistently cannot find a route
• Payments between 20,000 and 50,000 sats work most of the time but not always
• In the typical case payments have 4-5 hops
• In the worst cases there are 15 hops or no route at all
• No receive routes found for Blue Wallet or LNTXBOT invoices
• Gossip messages are being broadcast

Next steps:

• Increase capacity to 0.1 BTC (10 well-connected channels 0.01 BTC each)
• Retest sending 100,000+ sat payments
• Retest receiving in any amount

My take-away is this:

Lightning Network circa 2022 reminds me of the 1995-1999 era web. It’s fun, it’s confusing. It sort of works, well enough that everyone sees massive potential. It feels inevitable, like it is only a matter of time until this is everywhere.

In the meantime, there is much work to do. What a time to be alive!

Update! The story continues: Part 2 is now available here