Leadership

A lesson on reality from a call girl

One of the many things people can do to sustain a high-performing work life, is to care about what they do. This shifts the energy we usually reserve for our life and moves it to the workplace. It makes a significant difference in an individual’s ability to genuinely connect with other people and drive success across teams and projects. Making work personal is one of the simplest gas pedals people have to get things done, yet the highs it brings are matched equally by the lows.

The key to fantasy is knowing that you’re in one. So when you start thinking it’s real, things become complicated. Fantasy and reality and never-the-tween shall meet.

-Belle, Season 3, Episode 2, Secret Diary of a Call Girl

People tend not to manage their reality at work as a relationship, especially if they care. Consider the intimate relationships you have had and think of the ways you protected yourself during the moments of turmoil. Sometimes the protection is creating physical space – breaking up, separation and divorce. Other times it is far more subtle, a reminder that the person you love is upset about something and just needs compassion and support, not for you to feel angry and attacked. Are you managing your romance with work or are you pretending that it is different? How we react to changes in our reality is how we manage our relationships with it. In the workplace this is what distinguishes the best leaders.

Melt down with as few people as possible. Try to pick people you have a close and safe relationship with. If you don’t have any like that, then do it on your own, but do it nonetheless. If you care about your work, the melt down is unavoidable – it is literally the relationship having been malnourished. In business, the chances that it is getting fed all the time are unlikely. The key is to manage it separately from the prevailing brand you present as a professional. People have enough challenges dealing with their own reality, so when yours bleeds into theirs there is a level of dissonance that if not received with care tends to irritate. Regardless, taking the time to heal the complications of treating work like life is vital to keeping your mojo flowing.

Caring about what you do is powerful. It parts the tribe in two and those that care have the upper hand. It comes with additional responsibility to yourself, which is to manage your work (fantasy) as you would you life (reality). People tend to blend them and engage in the resulting complication. When you find yourself unable to distinguish, remind yourself that these two are really never meant to meet. That you introduced them to each other was a gift to you and others. If you see others going through challenging times where the emotional component is as high as business at hand, then receive it with care – it builds meaningful relationships between people that transcend the workplace. Some would say this makes for a messy world view, but I would argue it was messy when we started caring.

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26
Feb 10

Secrets are ment to be shared

Never say no to someone that is looking for a mentor. Most of the time, the limitation is not your time, but the ability of the protégé to consume the coaching and advice you impart. Almost always there is time between when you listen and share to when they come back looking for more. I also believe that it is the job of everyone to support others, regardless of their relative position in the community. Often people filter that they are willing to mentor, as to prefer only the absolute top talent. If we spent more time developing everyone, we might have better talent all around.

There is no shortage of ideas. This is one of those statements most do not agree with. Maybe we do not all come wired with this confidence, but I know it to be true. Being free with your ideas is the simplest way to enable the best thinking to flow into innovation. It also makes it irrelevant who owns which ideas – there are so many more it really does not matter. Secrets are the same way. There is no shortage of secrets to learn and sharing them does no harm.

Almost always, a protégé needs to have a certain level of experience to understand and make use of relevant secrets. It takes some time to make sense of the words you use or the situations you share. As a mentor you likely cannot practically compress everything for easy digestion. In fact, the simplest of lessons is often distilled to the point that it needs dilution. In the end, more often than not, the protégé is the gas pedal. When that pedal gets stuck, it will be your own inability to communicate at high enough bandwidth – help these folks get strapped to the fastest rocket ship you know.

People think that if they share what they know they will lose their power. This is the absolute wrong way to think about things. Creating a legion of individuals everywhere that grow to be giants is the ultimate in success and likely power. It transcends the walls of your organization and is the right thing to do for humanity. We need to take better care of each other.

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30
Jan 10

Creating happiness by doing what you love

Artists are great teachers of doing what you love. Their success is determined by the demand for their work – viewed or purchased. They often struggle financially and with the fine line of being commercial while staying true to their vision. These challenges afflict all professions and the root cause of almost all unrest is in not loving what you do.

Consider the time and dedication that a college graduate has invested in the hopes there is employment that will align with their studies. Of those people, consider how many of them actually end up in a job that leverages their specific concentration. Many graduates end up appreciating the journey but not loving the content of their travels. Some refer to it as rounding out ones intellect – essentially proposing that it is not important what you study as long as you study something. What if our college bound youth actually had help figuring out what it is they love to do, instead of worrying about which electives they should take to get into a college? What if the measure of entry to higher education was a clear affinity or passion for any domain? Certainly, one could argue that college is a time for finding this out – an excellent plan to increase the participation in master and doctorate degree programs.

Figure out what you love and do it. It is a kindness you do for those around you. No one likes the person suffering and the banter they create trying to find like minded suffering. If you know what you love then all the decisions you need to make are done in that context, simplifying all the angst of trying to do the right thing. Do what you love, do it the best you can and enjoy all the time you have doing it.

Corporate types have some of the worst afflictions of not loving what they do. They get stuck in the cycle of getting to keep busy even if they are unengaged. In exchange for a certain lifestyle people turn their day job into a side job, focusing on whatever they are passionate about in their off hours. Who has free time? Those that make it and many do.

Sophisticated corporations spend an enormous amount of time and money on career development. This keeps the cattle moving along the grazing pasture – regardless of who actually eats the grass. Of the employees that know what they want to do, they have considerable resources to develop skills and leadership. For those struggling to find their passion they are often found in the herd oscillating between getting broad experiences and writhing in the pain of no direction. Those that are unengaged are simply part of the pack grazing and stomping on the grass.

Help someone else figure out what they love and build a better world for everyone. There will always be people looking to collect a paycheck, ignore them. They are the agents of average doing and are important to getting it all done, but are the wrong people to trust in leadership positions. The passionless are directionless and dangerous to everything and everyone around them. There is room for everyone, just not in leadership positions.

To riff on the airplane safety message – secure what you love to do first and then help those around you to find theirs. We need to help those than want it to create happiness – for a better life and better world. It is not always easy to figure out what you want to do, which is why we all need the help of others. Read, share and reflect. Help comes in the shapes of books, audio, video and people. If everyone invests in doing what they love people will live longer, be more productive and enjoy happier lives.

Business / Creatvitiy / Culture / Design / Innovation / Innovation Management / Interaction / Invention / Leadership / Life / Participation / Product Development / Psychology / Social Networking / Technology / Technology Adoption — No Comments
25
Oct 09

The state of the art is falling short of dreams

Among the publications of Moses King is a curious postcard titled N.Y. 11 Future New York “The city of skyscrapers”. John Timberman Newcomb, teacher at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, wrote a piece titled The Footprint of the Twentieth Century: American Skyscrapers and Modernist Poems citing it as being published sometime in 1913-1918. I picked my copy up at a local store that sells old and used postcards.

N.Y. 11 Future New York "The city of skyscrapers" (Front)

The back reads, “Future New York will be pre-eminently the city of skyscrapers. The first steel frame structure that was regarded as a skyscraper is the Tower Building at 50 Broadway, a ten-story structure 129 feet high. There are now over a thousand buildings of that height in Manhattan, and hundreds in course of construction. The best known skyscrapers are the Singer Building, 612 feet height the Metropolitan Building, 700 feet high, and the Woolworth Tower which towers above them all at rises to a height of 790 feet. The proposed Pan-American Building is to be 801 feet high.”

N.Y. 11 Future New York “The city of skyscrapers” (Back)

For comparison, The Empire State Building is 1,472 feet including the spire, doubling what the 1900’s regarded as towering. It remains one of the tallest buildings in America and is currently number 15 world-wide. An impressive iconic structure, the Empire State Building is far from the vision that this postcard imagines.

Modern futuristic movies reach out into space (2001, Star Wars), explore extraterrestrials (ET, Alien) and robotic life (Short Circuit, Terminator). Others imagine close calls with the end of humanity (I Am Legend, Men in Black). Others yet explore genetic (Gattaca) and psychic phenomena (Minority Report). To make these movies commercially accessible they are kept edgy-plausible. In comparison, the minds of the 1900’s went far more radical imaging a metropolis of buildings stacked upon buildings with rail cars at high elevations and the possibility that a person’s world may be contained within one building. Movies have riffed on these concepts but at 750 ft, the Woolworth Tower was a far from the futuristic city New York was thought to become.

In general, the current state of futuristic thinking lacks radical imagination. The fiction has become too accessible offering probable possibilities instead of the kind of “what if” thinking that raises the societal consciousness – what could be beyond what we think.

There was a time that my work focused on managing technology diffusion and amplifying the volume on innovative activity at IBM. It is a space where there is literally no shortage of work to be done at every level. While people tended to focus on the tangible build out of infrastructure or web experience that facilitated innovation access, most failed to see how important the dream was. For example. “what if 30,000 employees were always running the n+1 version of the IT experience?” Dreams are lenses that provide a critical filter and check point as things naturally evolve and depart from the original motivations.

Making innovation accessible is an important part of the Darwinian selection. A more interesting topic is pushing innovation beyond current understanding. Quite simply, the majority of innovation today is incremental or copy cat – applying something from one domain to another in hopes it might be useful in a different context. Certainly interesting exploration, but not what I would call transformative. It seems real innovation comes in the form of individuals and when they move on for whatever reason, so does the dream. Who in your world is a dreamer that has started many fires but whose fires seem to be smothered or worse yet have burned the wrong forest?

Consider what is still an impressive demonstration, Jeff Han’s demo at TED in February 2006. It is 2009 and the best we have seen of gesture based and multi-touch, pressure sensitive computer screen technology and the best we can point to is Apple’s application in their mobile devices. More importantly, notice the first demo Han shows exploring human lava lamp interactions – more sophisticated than current interaction experiences that exploration is relegated to research scientists. The few hundred of audience members, purported to be some of the most connected in the world, were impressed and unmoved to imagine a different computing world, or if imagined selfishly horded.

What is beyond web-based anything, micro-blogging, social flows and the constant meme generation? I am not tired of the world we live in, but who is imagining the world beyond. If we simply evolve from here, the future will fall short, just like the New York and cities that never became. Some cite the state of the economical climate as the reason for such underwhelming thinking. I think it has been here for many years and it would be a good time to shake it up. If you are a dreamer, a futurist, a creative thinker, why is your volume so soft? The future is here and we need bigger thoughts.

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10
May 09

Breakup with your organization without leaving

Sophisticated organizations construct relationships with the people that enable the group. Even if all you do is punch the time clock at work, part of your identity is associated with your job, the building you work in, the company you work for and the people you work with. If you actually like what you do, have skills that help you deliver in meaningful ways and the stomach to deal with the human condition, then it is in your organization’s best interest to retain you – even better if they get you to retain you.

It takes an incredible amount of clarity to both understand what is important and why it is important. A few years back an executive offered some mentoring advice to help structure the conversation of what was important to me. Consider money, recognition, visibility and content. Assign a percentage to each of these according to the contributing importance to what drives you. This and other techniques help someone understand what is important, but not why. What in the absence of why is dangerous. Deriving insight from the what is certainly possible, in fact powerful. Investigating why someone feels a certain way can be even more transformative.

Incentives are a common method of influencing behavior. The most powerful of which communicate social or professional status – titles or black credit cards. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be an executive with a fancy title, but the meaning of such a label has power within the organization and possibly with other groups that identify with similar notions. Everyone else, especially an indigenous tribe in a far away land, has no idea what it means. Creative workplaces often poke fun at organizational structures encouraging titles to be fun – Guru of Internet happiness. It is easy to not realize why what you desire is fabricated. Ensuring the “why” of “what” comes from you and not someone else is the key to freedom.

Breaking free from your organization makes you a more effective contributor. It is impossible for your relationship with an organization not to contribute to your identity. The longer you groove over the same mental and physical paths the more efficient traversing these passageways become. Realizing any path is possible often means breaking some of the psychological and physiological habits associated with the current context – the more deep the groove the more resistance and pain involved in changing. This can be an emotional break up where the individual is reorganizing and reestablishing the relationship with the organization. People tend to change organizations instead of changing their conception of the organization – guaranteed to repeat the pattern. Your organization defines you, but you can define the organization and leave and define something else somewhere else if need be. The terms of your contract are not to be a hamster in a running wheel. That is just what happens when people accept things as they are.

Agile Development / Behavior / Business / Leadership / Product Development / Software / Software Architecture / Software Development / Technology / User Centered Design / User Experience — No Comments
10
Nov 08

Prototyping can lead to remarkable outcomes

Prototyping is something software builders leave to user experience professionals and that is completely insane. Prototyping should inhabit everyone’s being. It is an opportunity at any step of any process or creation. There are too many first drafts called final drafts, especially in software.

Regardless of your software development methodology, agile or waterfall, there is always a notation that says, “Take time to prototype.” Practitioners speed by this phase as if it were distracting from the final form. Project leaders receive pressures to deliver more, in less time and at or under budget. Where in that formula is prototyping placed at the top?

Some companies handle this by creating smaller development teams, housed in research and development or branded agile extensions of the larger delivery organization. This is where people think the prototypes come from. Does location, context or reporting structure have any bearing on how real software is?

pro⋅to⋅type [proh-tuh-tahyp]
noun, verb -typed, -typ⋅ing. –noun

the original or model on which something is based or formed.

someone or something that serves to illustrate the typical qualities of a class; model; exemplar: She is the prototype of a student activist.

1595–1605; < NL prōtotypon < Gk prōtótypon, n. use of neut. of prōtótypos original.

When I joined a skunk works team at IBM directly from college, everyone said they created prototypes. These prototypes were designed and delivered to scale to the entire enterprise. People called them prototypes to set expectations and help the traditional brass understand why a one-year project might be delivered in three months. Rarely was there anything approximating a prototype – well maybe the very first version.

There have been notable individuals that would have the courage to rewrite what they had coded to achieve greater aesthetic or optimal execution. It is a humbling, empowering and inspiring experience to throw out your current work in attempt to write it again better than before. This is the closest I have seen to developers creating prototypes and this is a rare occasion because we so easily rationalize how there is so little time, so little money and so much more to do.

First drafts make lame software, hence we iterate in hopes to accelerate the separation of curds and whey. In the end, this is not prototyping. Prototypes offer the opportunity to understand what is uniquely delivered by the solution, what is important to end-users and how the way the solution is built helps or hurts those two points. This is why the process often ends up being a user experience deliverable. The challenge and thus opportunity, is that maybe what is deemed important is unfounded. Maybe the feedback users provide is based on a poor articulation or misguided offering.

Prototyping in software development educates the architects, the developers and, in turn, the user experience professionals. By building relatively low investment prototypes through rapid development tooling, the notion of throwing the resulting build away seems palatable. It offers the opportunity to learn without entering the software delivery cycle – skipping the prototype is the quickest way not to have freedom to try things. Once there is focus on solution delivery, everyone creates a context that prevents the exploration of what is right. Everyone is left to struggle with making what gets delivers as good as it can be, given the circumstances.

This is all likely generalizable to many professions. Creative types work through revisions as part of their craft. Prototypes educate you, your team and others to the importance of the end direction. It forces everyone to approach the real work with purpose and limits the exposure to making poor decisions under pressure or pretense. Spending the time up front pays everyone back during and after delivery and yet it is not prioritized as such. Instead, we hope that professionals executing a good enough approach will deliver something remarkable.

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12
Oct 08

Creating the future while minding your business

The last day of the Buckminster Fuller exhibit at the Whitney delivered many surprising moments of genius. Visionary and inventor, Buckminster is an innovator’s innovator. He saw the value of drawing upon interdisciplinary fields to inform a unique and faceted view of the world. His work is grounded in helping people with a do “more with less” attitude that extended to environmental impact. While it is easy to hand wave this exhibition as an old time futurist, his philosophy alone was worth absorbing.

There are many ways to go about change. Over the last couple of years, innovation has become all the rage. It is seen as the fundamental approach to growth. Companies exist to deliver value to customers through the creation of products and services. Through the innovation contributed by products and services companies compete for higher sales, larger market share and if they are lucky the hearts of their clients and customers.
Companies also consider innovating on their business a key model for transformation. Many change makers push against the system to get it to change, to innovate and evolve. In the end, the fastest and most exciting opportunities are those that usurp the existing establishment. They politely and subtly thumb the current way of thinking, in favor for an alternative approach, one that could change the landscape completely. Apparently, Buckminster Fuller saw this approach as the only viable approach to change.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

R. Buckminster Fuller

The resistance to change, even from the most progressive is an adversary that drains the innovator directly. More time is spent talking than doing. People argue about subtle points to maintain the current course and speed. My father taught me at a young age that if you always do what you always have done, then you always get what you have always gotten. What is difficult here is that it takes the majority of workers to deliver on today; after all, it brings in the money to create for tomorrow. In order to remain viable companies need to invest just as heavily in inventing and innovating for tomorrow. Traditional R&D organizations are no longer the primary source of innovation and there is lots of research that suggests answers is in the masses. This is an area where maybe only a few are required to institute change.

Never doubt that a small group of dedicated people can change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has.

Margaret Mead

No one wants what he or she has today, but if that is all the people of a company spend time doing, then how could any expect anything more than a game of catch up? Something far more radical would be to create an organizational structure that enabled the pursuit of both present and future with equal vigor.

Change is a critical part of business. Fuller’s attitude toward creation, focused on his contribution without regard to if the world was ready. The world catches up and regardless of success is influenced by the doing.

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28
Jun 08

I think ICANN

ICANN is loosening the rules around domain suffix at the detriment of having any meaning and comprehension embodied in a hostname. URLs need more thought, not freedom. Even ICANN’s CEO brings the move down to vanity plate level contribution. Apparently, the Internet was running out of space.

The potential here is huge. It represents a whole new way for people to express themselves on the Net,” said Dr Twomey. “It’s a massive increase in the ‘real estate’ of the Internet.

We have numerous examples of shooting ourselves.

Nine kids under 19 years of age will be killed with a gun today. 30% will have intentionally taken their own life. Even if we want to dispute the fact, suicide by handgun exists and people are not managing their relationship with firearms well. Consider the recent Supreme Court ruling objecting to a Washington D.C. ban on hand guns. Sustaining laws like this one does not actually make things safer, it just makes them illegal. We have speed limits and many of us do not follow those. Yet cars kill just fine at a rate of five to six thousand teenagers per year.

Some schools in some states attempt to teach safe sex. The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation reports that children have sex at around age 17. Include other forms of sex and those polled report almost 50% of males having received oral sex and 39% gave. So kids are sexually active and there is a movement to focus on not having sex, not how to do it safely or how to be smart about it. An NPR story reported…

…Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government finds that only 7 percent of Americans say sex education should not be taught in schools.

If we are in such agreement, we should start measuring how many of our children’s decisions around sex are well informed. Remove the issue of if their decision is something we personally agree with and simply ask if they felt they were informed.

No one disputes, though, that many were delighted to discover they were pregnant. “Sweet!” one of them shouted in the school nurse’s office. The school superintendent admitted: “They were not trying very hard not to get pregnant.”

From Financial Times, The ideology of teen pregnancy (Gloucester High School Pregnancy Pact) by Christopher Caldwell

Prescription drugs seem to be all the rage. Some might naively interpret that the war on drugs must be almost over if kids are turning to medicine cabinets. Or we could simply be inspired by Dr. Twomey and say that we have a massive increase in the ‘real estate’ of drug market.

Structured naming lets us work and communicate meaning. Our world works in abstractions. We cannot possibly consider the totality of our own lives, the community, the nation or the world without coming to a screeching halt. Abstractions allow us to consider just enough of reality to work with it. Loosely regulated naming is not a good thing. One lesson we can apply from corporate life is that things done by committee often fail or are fraught with issues. It lacks leadership and puts the idiocracy into the lead.

A recent article in the Atlantic, Is Google Making us Stoopid? by Nicholas Carr, talks about our increasing reliance on the intelligent Internet and our own asymptotic tendency away from our rich, educated and thoughtful past. One can only hope that Internet naming is just a fluke, that this is not just another data point of stupidity.

Behavior / Business / Community / Innovation / Leadership / Participation / Social Networking / Software / Technology / Web2.0 — 1 Comment
29
May 08

The success of participation

One of the magical things about grassroots computing – grassroots anything probably – is that any success is decided by the participants. This basic rule is what ensures support but perplexes companies who want to make money from the productive application of technology. Users of technology do not overtly care about the monetary value of technology which is what makes it even harder – we are all quite content to use something we deem useful even if – and often even more if – we are delighted by it.

One of the challenges companies fall into is trying to create a community or an online social experience where there is no compelling groundswell. Online community development and certainly grassroots computing are not about technology, so building something rarely begets either.

Web 2.0-ifing existing applications is often a sure way to move further away from productive. The only time it helps is when the existing solution has a decidedly undesirable experience and the aspects of grassroots activity might result in better outcomes. Adding a set of widgets tells people you acknowledge and recognize the movement, designing or conceiving business with social computing as a core heartbeat tells people you are the movement. If you are successful, you did it right otherwise you learned a lot.

If the barrier to progress focuses on a framework articulating the values of the past or present, then the outcome will be one that follows instead of leads. There is plenty to be done meet the expectations of traditional returns on investment, but they will necessarily either limit innovation or shape the potential successes. To be really leading edge new measures and values are required that articulate the future state. Without this it is all smoke and mirrors.

Spirited ThoughtGetting my head around my mind