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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
