Hard Time
Watch This
How much information can your favorite analog watch give you? Other than the time, the date and day of the week would probably be enough for most people. W. R. Berkley is not most people.
Berkley, an American billionaire, commissioned a Swiss watch maker to create the most complicated watch ever created because he already owned the previous most-complicated watch and wanted to one-up himself. Vacheron Constantin made him a pocket watch that can tell him what time it is in 24 different cities at the same time because...he's a time traveler?
In horology, a complication is basically anything a watch does beyond telling you the basic time, and this watch is aptly named. The Berkley Grand Complication has a whopping 63 complications, including a Gregorian calendar with a leap-year indicator, a Chinese calendar with a 19-year cycle, a Chinese agricultural calendar with seasons and solstices, and an astronomic calendar that shows the phases of the moon with one correction every 1,027 years.
I'm pretty sure Google has all that info too.
This 18k white gold monstrosity is so complicated it has nearly 3,000 moving parts, two faces, and weighs in at more than two pounds. It took eleven years to complete and is estimated to have cost more than $10 million. Meanwhile, if Berkley had dropped just over $1K on an Apple Watch Series 11 Titanium he could've had a wearable device in eleven minutes.
But then what would he do with the other $9,998,900?
What's crazy is the team of watchmakers originally planned to include only 36 complications, as that would've eclipsed the previous world record by three. They kept thinking of new things the watch could do and considered each complication a "special accomplishment." When they finally looked up they had sixty-three of those special accomplishments...
and a watch no one can wear.
It’s Complicated
No one ever really plans to build a monstrosity. You just keep adding one reasonable thing after another, and the monstrosity is what those accumulated reasonable things become.
I did this to myself when I tried to create a serene daily morning routine. It started with meditation, which helped set a calming tone for the day. Then I heard that journaling could also help, so I added that. Then daily readings, yoga, strength training. The next thing I knew I needed like, four hours to get my day started off on the right foot.
It was all helpful, which made it hard to cut anything.
We see this phenomenon play out at work too. You set out to create something that will enhance your work — a process, a policy — then you keep adding things that make it better.
Consider the overly-complicated interview process and how it came to be. A bad hire slipped through once, so someone — maybe you — added an extra round to the process. Then a culture-fit miss happens, so now a panel is convened. Then maybe a take-home. Every round was added to catch the next version of a miss someone already lived through, and now the whole thing is eight stages. Meanwhile, the best candidates take another offer before your process finishes, and no one can clearly suggest which round to cut because each one caught someone.
And it's not just interviews. Consider the onboarding doc meant to cover everything so new hires don't have questions. It ends up forty-pages long, no one reads it, and they still have questions. Or the security policy meant to prevent additional breaches that makes regularly-rotated 16-character passwords difficult to remember.
We call these features, enhancements, or best practices. Horologists call them what they are — complications.
Each one we add is defensible because they do what they were intended to and we're proud of them. But when we finally stop adding, we're left with a two-pound pocket watch full of special accomplishments.
Question of the Week
What's the accomplishment you'd never cut — and never call a complication?
Are you subscribed?
If you enjoyed this article and want more weird stories that make corporate life make sense, Sunday Setup lands in your inbox every Sunday at 3:30 PM ET.
Click the button below to get a weekly dose of humor and mindfulness to help beat the Sunday Scaries.
