Empires preserve their power with the stories that they tell, but just as critical are the stories they don’t—the dark silences they impose, the pages they tear out.
Because longitude represents a distance in the direction of the earth’s daily rotation, measuring it is further complicated by time. Each hour of the day corresponds to fifteen degrees of longitude. If a seaman compares the exact time on his ship to that of his selected reference point, he can calculate his longitude. But eighteenth-century timepieces weren’t reliable, especially at sea.
Because the far-southern seas are the only waters that flow uninterrupted around the globe, they gather enormous power, with waves building over as much as thirteen thousand miles, accumulating strength as they roll through one ocean after another. When they arrive, at last, at Cape Horn, they are squeezed into a narrowing corridor between the southernmost American headlands and the northernmost part of the Antarctic Peninsula. This funnel, known as the Drake Passage, makes the torrent even more pulverizing. The currents are not only the longest-running on earth but also the strongest, transporting more than four billion cubic feet of water per second, more than six hundred times the discharge of the Amazon River.
To “turn a blind eye” became a popular expression after Vice-Admiral Nelson deliberately placed his telescope against his blind eye to ignore his superior’s signal flag to retreat.
To “toe the line” derives from when boys on a ship were forced to stand still for inspection with their toes on a deck seam. To “pipe down” was the boatswain’s whistle for everyone to be quiet at night, and “piping hot” was his call for meals. A “scuttlebutt” was a water cask around which the seamen gossiped while waiting for their rations. A ship was “three sheets to the wind” when the lines to the sails broke and the vessel pitched drunkenly out of control.
Stochastic refers to a variable process where the outcome involves some randomness and has some uncertainty. It is a mathematical term and is closely related to “*randomness*” and “*probabilistic*” and can be contrasted to the idea of “*deterministic*.”
At the core, I see three critically important differences between the strongest product companies and the rest: The first is how the company views the role of technology. The second is the role their product leaders play. The third is how the company views the purpose of the product teams—the product managers, product designers, and engineers.
