could. Just which jobs we consider complicated and which ones we consider elementary, even crude, is a judgment too often made not on the true nature of the work but on the things that attend it—the pay, the title, whether it’s performed in a factory or an office suite, in blue jeans or a gray suit. And while those are often reasonable yardsticks—a constitutional scholar may indeed move in a world of greater complexity than a factory worker—just as often, they’re misdirections, flawed cues that lead us to draw flawed conclusions about occupations we don’t truly understand. We continually ignore the true work people and companies do and are misled, again and again, by the rewards of that work and the nature of the place it is done. (Location 1388)

IT MAY NOT be much of a surprise that bosses and economic theorists don’t fully appreciate the complexity in many jobs. Both groups, after all, are interested mostly in performance, never mind how it’s achieved. More surprising is the fact that coworkers are often just as poorly informed about what the person one desk over or two spots down on the assembly line actually does all day. When they do give the matter any thought at all, they almost always conclude that the other person’s job is far less complicated than it is. (Location 1474)

confounding variable of all is introduced: the customer. Of all the organizational x-factors that most defy understanding, it’s the consumers who actually attend the movie or buy the goods or services a company offers that are the hardest to parse. And of all the things that make that job so difficult, the first and biggest is figuring out what those customers want in the first place. (Location 1525)

Is there some larger law that governs all of these things—trees, humans, institutions, worlds? Are the fruit fly and the city and the planet in some ways the same things—separated not so much by what they are but merely by how long they hang around? If so, the question then becomes: What determines that longevity? And the answer might be nothing more than size. Understand how small things scale up and large things scale down and you may just crack the basic riddles that allow them to function at all. (Location 1656)

For any creature, the amount of energy burned per unit of weight is proportional to that animal’s mass raised to the three-quarters power. In other words, the smaller you are, the more calories it takes per pound or ounce or gram to keep you alive; the bigger you are, the more frugally you use what you consume. This explains why the smallest animals may regularly gobble many times their body weight in food in a single day, and larger animals, while they eat far more in absolute terms, consume only a fraction of the weight of their much greater bulk. (Location 1669)

It’s a basic principle of legislating and rule-writing that the more time you have to noodle with a body of laws, the more complex they will become. The federal income tax code began as a simple levy on money earned—not quite a flat tax, but something close. Today, it’s a body of laws and enabling regulations more than 3,500 pages long. The most powerful amendment to the United States Constitution is the first, ratified in 1791, which ensures four primal freedoms—religion, speech, press, and assembly—and does so in an economical forty-five words. The twenty-fifth amendment, ratified in 1967, deals with the exceedingly narrow business of clarifying the line of succession when the president is ill or disabled, and requires four separate sections and 389 words to get that little job done. The constitution as a whole is a triumph of simplicity, able to fit on a single sheet of parchment when it was first drafted, and even today, strung with additional amendments, still containable in the stapled pages of a small booklet. The later-arriving constitution of New York State goes on for 45 small-print pages. California’s, drafted later still, runs for 110. (Location 1972)

“Once,” Chow recalls, “when I was coaching in college, we came up with the idea of putting footage of all of the plays we’d run in games and practices on a video disk, which we’d give the players to study in the off-season. I was recording the narration, and midway through I stopped and said, ‘Any player who has actually watched this far, call me and I’ll give you $100.’” The entire team received the disk; only one player ultimately called. “These are kids,” says Chow. “Sometimes we had to remind ourselves of that. They couldn’t possibly be thinking about this stuff as much as we were.” (Location 2040)

However many languages we acquire, we learn to handle them surgically. We start off accumulating mostly words that describe objects, words that describe actions, and words that position those things and events in time and space. Then we learn the words that can shade the meanings of all those other words. We feel an innate difference between words like fragile and delicate, sturdy and solid, magical and enchanting, sorrowful and melancholy, even if we could never articulate precisely what those differences are. What’s more, this is not the (Location 2530)

go that it starts to make sense. The skyscraper is simply too big and complicated for most people to fathom fully—its size alone putting it outside what ought to be the skills of a physically tiny creature like ourselves—and yet new ones get built all the time. It takes deconstructing the building piece by piece and step by step, reverse-engineering it back to the point at which its girders were forged, its bricks were baked, the very first spade of earth got turned, to begin to get a sense of the cellular process by which such an architectural organism comes into being. (Location 2538)

aren’t paying up front are paying down the line. In the computer industry, the overall cost of customer support adds $95 to the cost of every new unit sold, according to a 2003 (Location 2826)