Monthly Archives: April 2010

Something Else Going On

Seth’s Blog: David Byrne is angry with me:

The next time you’re sure someone is angry with you, perhaps it’s worth considering that you might be mistaken. Perhaps that customer or prospect or boss has better things to do than being angry with you. Each of us has a huge agenda, and while it’s comforting for some to jump to the conclusion that we’ve offended, it’s far more likely that the person you’re talking with merely has something else going on.

Embracing Change

iPhone Development: Steve Job’s Thoughts on Flash:

Willingness to foresee and change corporate strategy is vital to long-term success. Have you ever read the history of Reuters? Reuters started as a carrier pigeon company. When the telegraph came on the scene, they certainly could have whined and complained and even insisted that their customers continue using carrier pigeons, but they were smart enough to realize pigeons were an outdated technology that couldn’t compete with the telegraph. Instead, they invested heavily in telegraph technology. As communication technology continued to change over the last 150 years, Reuters saw the changes coming, accepted them, embraced them and, as a result, they are still around today, bigger and stronger than ever.

Half Way Through to Awesomeness

Julio’s Blog | Why Tony Stark is better than you:

Don’t side with mediocrity. If you hear someone tell you you can’t do it, assume this person has an agenda in keeping you low. Go aggressive on them. Better yet: laugh. Don’t take full negatives as truth. Your average work today is the half way through to awesomeness. They don’t have to believe that, but you do.

(Via The Shape of Everything.)

Trust Those Who Work for You

Rands In Repose: The Twinge:

As a manager, you manage both yourself and your team, and the simple fact is there will always be more of them than of you. Unless you’re the guy managing a single person (weird), you’ve got multiple folks with all their varied work and quirky personalities to manage.

Rookie managers approach this situation with enviable gusto. They believe their job is to be aware of and responsible for their team’s every single thought and act. I like to watch these freshman managers. I like to watch them sweat and scurry about the building as they attempt to complete this impossible task.

It’s not that I enjoy watching them prepare to fail. In fact, as they zip by, I explicitly warn them: “There is no way you’re doing it all. You need to trust and you need to delegate.” But even with this explanation most of these managers are back in my office in three weeks saying the same thing: “I have no idea how you keep track of it all”.

I don’t.

In addition to trusting those who work for you by delegating work that you may truly believe only you can do, management is also the art of listening to a spartan set of data, extracting the truth, and trusting your Twinges. When you do this well, you look like a magician, but when you screw up, the consequences can be far ranging and damage the project as well as your reputation with those involved.

A Far Better Technology for Engagement

RSA – Gainful employment:

Management is the ideal technology if you’re seeking compliance — getting people to do what you want them to do, the way you want them to do it. But in today’s workforce, which demands much more in the way of creative and conceptual capabilities, we don’t want compliance. We want engagement. And self-direction is a far better technology for engagement.

(Via kottke.org.)

Understand the User’s Desired Outcome

Grumpy old men, the “Inmates” and margins – O’Reilly Radar:

In “[The Inmates are Running the Asylum],” [Alan] Cooper makes the argument that too often the development process is driven by techies building the types of products that they would like to use, as opposed to really understanding the aspirations and outcome goals of their target user, let alone who that target user even is.

Worse, they often compensate for this blind spot by building products that address all use cases, including edge cases, and build a design interaction model that is a composite of that blob of functionality.

The end-result are products that are confusing, needlessly complex and that address all theoretical problems from a check box perspective, but few real problems from a specific outcome perspective.

Progress Just Moves Forward

Grumpy old men, the “Inmates” and margins – O’Reilly Radar:

The late Herb Caen, the legendary columnist of the San Francisco Chronicle, once wrote a piece about the worsening state of San Francisco and, in particular, one of its main arteries, Market Street.

In it, he lamented about how this thoroughfare was always under construction, how the city’s charms and enduring traditions were getting swept aside by outsiders, and how the place was becoming less and less hospitable to locals and long-timers, forcing Caen to wonder if, perhaps, San Francisco’s best days were behind it.

Ah, but Caen was setting us up for an unexpected upper-cut, as at the tail end of the piece, he reveals (I am paraphrasing), “Would it surprise you to know that I wrote this piece way back in 1954?”

Caen’s point was that then, as now, every generation sees their generation as the Real Generation and the Right Approach, when in truth, progress just moves forward.

Give Weeds a Chance

Five Tremendous Apple vs. Adobe Flash Myths — RoughlyDrafted Magazine:

I know when I plant a garden, I don’t do any weeding first because I want to give all forms of life an equal opportunity to spread and benefit from my efforts and irrigation. If I just planted vegetables and herbs, I’d only have things that were good. Why not also have the weeds that are already here? By not weeding, I get the things I want to grow AND the option of weeds. Who cares if those weeds will choke out any positive development and keep things just the way they were before I did any planting. Choice is always preferable to change, because change is scary!

(Via Ruben Munoz.)

The Best Way to Treat Your Customers

Seth’s Blog: When in doubt, disaggregate:

When you can’t figure out the best way to treat all your customers, the best way to price things, the best thing to offer, realize that the problem is almost always this: you’re trying to treat everyone the same. Don’t. Break them into groups with similar attributes, and suddenly the path becomes a lot more clear.

Sometimes We Have to Let Go of Problems

The Technium: The Shirky Principle:

In a strong sense we are defined by the problems we are solving. Yin/Yang, problem/solution, both sides form one unit. Because of the Shirky Principle, which says that every entity tends to prolong the problem it is solving, progress sometimes demands that we let go of problems. We can then look to marginal solutions and ask ourselves, what marginal problem is this solving that might be a more appreciated problem later on?

(Via @cshirky.)