Business / Relationships — No comments
31
Dec 11

The diversity of doing

When I am scouting for talent I lead with the belief in diversity, in all ways – race, gender, discipline, thought etc. – because it makes for a better, more creative, compelling and competitive organizations. Somewhere in that principle there is an assumption that the person gets things done, since people that don’t are unlikely candidates. It occurs to me, now reflecting upon a momentous year of doing that its not enough to simply get things done. Getting things done just demonstrates a person’s ability to work their work. More important than getting things done is what and how they decided to get it done. Evidence of this level of thought and engagement can be found in the variety of experiences an individual has especially if they do not set the direction for their organization.

It’s estimated that the average human has 60,000 thoughts a day. This is not surprising. What is disconcerting is that 90% of the thoughts you have today are the ones you had yesterday. Deepak Chopra, M.D.

Ever since I read this passage as a teenager one of my goals was to do better than repeating 90% rethink. One way I tried to accomplish this was to be endlessly curious about anything and everything. I carefully investigated, considered and questioned what appeared to be an unrelated set of interests. Of course, I was the rhyme to my reason knitting together my evolving point of view and discovering what makes me tic.

Experiences in doing are not only tied to a person’s day job. In fact what someone is interested in on the side is often more interesting than the remarkable but expected accomplishments of talented professionals. For me, this year launched a new chapter in my family with the arrival of my daughter in August.  She is currently amazed by her hands, that they are useful and more recently that they are her own. Babies may be sponges, learning all the time, but parents are blessed with the opportunity to learn as well in a deep and personal ways. Sleepless nights are rewarded with knowing how precisely delicate a baby’s breath can be – subtly sweet and endlessly delicious. Our daughter gets the majority of our attention and in turn the things we use to make time for get brutally prioritized (Did you notice the gap in posts!). It also drives a new level of communication and compromise as mother and father work as a team to ensure things get done despite the competing desires.

Recently I was on a three month assignment to a large customer in the healthcare industry working through what cloud computing could mean for their business. This was an opportunity to diversify – as a professional and as a family. Sadie was just old enough to travel and my wife was on maternity leave – off to California we went. I had the luxury of working full time as part of the customer, leveraging my connections into IBM to help drive value. From first day to last it was endless learning about the good, bad and ugly from some very special people. It has irreversibly changed my understanding and insight – a priceless experience. For my family it was an adventure trying out a different land and experiencing the time warp of not being in Eastern Standard Time. Points of view are relative to the perceiver and it helps to be reminded how fragile that “reality” is.

We settled on a great area of Oakland called Rockridge. It reminded us of Brooklyn – strategically located with more diversity in people, food and shopping. It also came with stadium seating of the Occupy Oakland dance and what seemed like daily violence. California in general seems to need to go to driver education. On any given morning a mostly sober population of motoring public gets into no less than half a dozen accidents on the major roadways. I know there are a lot of people etc. but have you seen the size of these roads?! Like anything there are many contributing reasons, but it begs the question as to why a place has such an impact on its people – so is true in the workplace.

If diversity of doing is a desirable element in developing greater talent and creating remarkable teams then there too is a responsibility to create a climate and environment to enable such performance. One without the other is having this amazing thing called a hand, but not knowing its yours.

Business / Design / Technology — No comments
19
May 11

Treading water in the shallow end of social

It has been a few years since I was actively thinking about social software and the distance likely adds validity to some more recent observations. One of the simplest ways to integrate end-user facing technology is to aggregate information. The rise of the portal for good or bad encourages this concept of adding tiles on a grid enabling you to overwhelm yourself with information – intelligently or not. Visual aggregation as a method of integration is really an unacceptable place for social software to plateau. The most successful experiences create a context for multiple streams to come together. However, more could be done to integrate complimenting information and capability so that a new expression is created instead of a schizophrenic newspaper no one really wants to read or interact with.

Consider what you have seen in the social software landscape and ask yourself why the actor is almost always the sense maker. Why is it that there is an explosion of great social islands but a pathetic showing on how to leverage that information to create richer, contextual spaces? Most of the time solution designers attempt to create context employing a nicely designed banner and carefully selected color pallet. Unfortunately, the skin is only but a small element of context and while I believe that people are ultimately required to appreciate the meaning of a given confluence, we could do a better job surfacing interesting information and enabling interaction. One of the fatal flaws with traditional portals is the visual and physical boundary of information. There was a time when products enabled connecting one portlet to another, but failed to resolve that portlets do not inherently know how to collaborate with each other, a design activity outside of the technology. Unfortunately, some of our best examples of dynamic experience modification are also some of the most annoying commercial applications. You have to love the real-time markup of content where hovering over a word opens a thought bubble and video obscuring the content. Given a strong page framework and similar techniques integration could be this fluid and easily less irritating – a very simple example, abused, justly hated and hopefully soon to be abandoned.

Opportunities to do more have been around for years, and yet it feels as if the social technology landscape has just stalled. The best work is not even web bound, but device focused now. There is so much to do; I would think it would inspire people to push a little harder to realize the next revolution of user experience instead of hanging out in the kiddy pool all day.

Business / Culture — No comments
18
Feb 11

Traveling the last mile with next wave generation

Technologist types geek out on their art like few other professionals. The closest sibling is the research scientist that is pursuing truth because of the common belief that someone should. Leadership is often seen in the form of creating and communicating vision – the direction and target for success. One of the leadership plagues is the tendency to focus on building to the letter of a vision and not ingest it in spirit. If every project was able to achieve the fullness of the leader’s vision one might argue the vision to be limited. Embodying the spirit of the vision ensures that whatever is done aligns with the guiding light.

The last mile of any journey is bittersweet. A lot of energy, expense and time are expended to reach it. Often the last mile is actually thousands of miles, because the vastness of the vision is practically unreachable. The vision is the direction and target, not the plan. Building the plan to mirror the vision ensures the project will never conclude. This seems obvious, but seems to pervade all walks of business. Superficial understanding of the vision creates mediocrity.

Consider the next wave generation with a more progressive attitude towards life and work. Their relationship with the Company is fundamentally different – faithful until they find another. The idea that they would come, go and return is highly probable. Challenges exist in the brain churn as talent moves through and efforts sustain beyond their presence. Travel the last mile with the next wave generation and you will lose your talent while they grow tired of waiting for you to realize that the last mile is less rewarding. Making it even part way toward the light is more engaging and interesting. Success can be experienced and value realized – talk about really being agile!

A leader’s ability to embody a vision and practically plot a course that nurtures talent and delivers value is one of the ultimate performance measures. Avoiding last mile marathons focuses all the attention on the actions and deliverables that bring short and even long term value. An organization might still desire the last mile, but planning for it is next to dreaming. Boats use lighthouses to navigate the waters, not dock their ship.

Business / Culture / Technology — No comments
12
Nov 10

Software development is the newest blue collar trade

Traditionally computer science is a white color discipline, a cerebral activity beyond that of the typical trades. While not all computer scientists are software programmers, most of the things people touch on their computers and on the Internet run code that developers wrote. Developers may have worn white collars at one time, but are now more than ever better served if we dress them in blue.

Understanding what makes great software developers needs to become a top imperative or everyone’s desire to successfully leverage the developing economies of the globe will result in the next decade of disastrous implementation. We will all literally be digging out of the worst collection of computer code the world has ever seen. This is not to say programmers in developing countries are not capable of creating great code – clearly that would be too broad a generalization. What I am saying is that there is a core set of existing developers – waves one through five – that have created the software and network conscious of the world. That experience and knowledge is not easily portable locally or internationally. More needs to be done to consider the ways in which we grow developers. The fact that everyone is quick to move to emerging markets is simply exacerbating the fact that the Western world contains much of the building blocks everyone takes for granted.

There are classes of programmers that have never written the basic code to connect a web application to a database. They use any number of indirect frameworks to achieve what is a relatively straight forward activity. It may be laborious, but it also results in a development team that understands what is happening at every moment in the system. Delegate to someone else and your risk is that whatever was to be done is performed less well than if you performed the task yourself. There are plenty that will tell you it is a given since it’s the only way to scale yourself as a person. When we are talking about computer code the exposure is as great as the worst written code. Perfection is not required, but ignorance is worse.

I recently got passed the essay Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford and with a little positioning should be the playbook for America’s future – possibly, eventually, the world. Crawford does a delightful job exploring what it means to be engaged in a trade – its scarcity, importance and value.

My recent gap in blog posts reflects that my life got too busy to support the usual post – selling a house, buying a house, moving and building out a studio to compliment the changing lifestyle. I share this because it is likely the first time I took on the challenge of building something by hand that I would usually create with money. There is no shortage of cerebral activity in building and Shop Class as Soulcraft makes this point well. It is easy to liken it to software programming in that you need to understand fundamental principles – logic, algorithms, design patterns etc. This is not much different than a builder understanding material strength, stability and appropriate use. Programmers feel the same pride and satisfaction from code well-built as a trade person elegantly executing their craft. While there is a notion of mentorship and hierarchy the trades have a more structured concept around apprenticeship. This is a critical aspect acknowledging that some of the knowledge to be had is hard if not impossible to distil or consume in traditional forms. Experience efficiently encodes more information that our conscious mind processes, yet our beings embody the knowledge.

There is no shortage of computer programmers in the world, yet there is a dearth of individual and shared development experiences. We can’t expect everyone to live through the trials of personal computers or the Internet, but we do need to bridge the gap or not only will we repeat history, but we won’t have enough people to fix it all when it is broken. No different, Crawford points out that with the dwindling ranks in the trades the individual that understands how to do something with their minds and hands will become the most important person in the village. While I clearly agree for the need to embrace the world’s crafts, I believe we are facing an epidemic that must be reversed. Just as the established markets have created a pile of stinking code, failing to pass knowledge to newer generations, we extend the work to nations that have even less shared knowledge. We must apply the methods of the trades to software development or fail faster before the shared knowledge ceases to exist.

I will wear a blue collar any day since it transcends what use to imply class and embodies a healthier balance of being. Read Shop Class as Soulcraft and figure out how to help fix us before we are broken.

Business / Culture / Innovation — No comments
12
Jul 10

Kick out the ladder

Honda released a series of superb video shorts that will inspire anyone while moving the brand beyond the car or the motorcycle. Everywhere around us there are things to be marveled, people to engage and new ideas to explore. Yet, we spend more time focused on insignificance that will pass, alone amongst crowds and thinking about what we thought about.

All of the Honda videos are personal, intimate and provoke the question – so, now that you have seen this, what do you plan to do? These people have stories, you should have stories too. Where are you going? How do you plan to get there? Why isn’t the destination something you are not sure of – that escapes current reason – that is beyond current horizon?

Everyone knows that failure is a necessary part of innovation. However, failure often has social consequences that inhibit real innovation. To get to the future, we need to invent it. Along the way we will face trials and learn from those failures. How tolerant are you of failure? How often are you failing? How do you know if you are not failing enough? When rich with success people tend to ride the wave instead of continuing to manage their innovation on the failure line. Managing innovation often means managing culture and that is often at the root of poorly run engine.

Great people believe in impossible visions. If you don’t plan on having your own dream, latch on and believe in someone else’s so that at least you are not a passenger or a piece of furniture. Spend your day doing things that align with your personal values and you will naturally lead or find others that share the same passion.

Watch the videos. Get inspired. Kick out the ladder.

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