The folks at Firefox are helping their passionate user base take out an ad in the New York Times so that the world can hear about the Firefox experience.
It’s a cool marketing idea; not quite open source, but something close. No doubt the imitators will dive in, but Firefox has filled the idea vacuum with this one. Brilliant.
I’m obsessed with the process of bringing cool things to life. I admire the TED Prize, because it isn’t about being a genius or a superhero — it’s about doing great stuff. The 2004 winners are Bono, photo-artist Edward Burtynsky, and medical device pioneer Robert Fischell.
Some say that rockers are but court jesters, but some use their fame as a bully pulpit. Bono has done this; the TED site leaves us with one of his remarkable thoughts: "What are the blind spots of our age? It might be something as simple as our deep down refusal to believe that every human life has equal worth."
To my mind, the environmental issues facing us today are beyond comprehension. What do a billion people look like? What does it feel like to lose an organism forever? Photos by Burtynsky can help deliver the message in a way that breaks through the fuzz.
Many people create products which claim to change people’s lives, but which really only affect lifestyle. For example, an iPod is way cool, but it differs from my 80’s Walkman only by degree. Robert Fischell creates things that fundamentally change lives. His work is the standard by which that statement must be judged.
In this brief essay on the 1939 Mercury, Donald Norman shows how powerful his Visceral, Behavioral, Reflective model is as a tool to understand designed objects (especially cool ones).
Neal Stephenson answered some questions on Slashdot recently, and made a point about “Dante” writers versus “Beowulf” writers. Dante writers are beholden to patrons such as universities and fellowship grants, are more likely to be part of the establishment, and have to adhere to external expectations. Beowulf writers, on the other hand, write whatever the hell they want and might find a mass market along the way, critics be damned. In business terms, they’re high beta folks, high variance. As Stephenson puts it:
… people on the Beowulf side may never have taken a writing class in their life. They just tend to lunge at whatever looks interesting to them, write whatever they please, and let the chips fall where they may. So we may seem not merely arrogant, but completely unhinged.
I think there’s a parallel to entrepreneurial finance here: do you take Dante money for your company from an establishment source (VC, Angels, etc…) and allow them to dictate your behavior somewhat, or do you Beowulf bootstrap and follow your own destiny? Food for thought.
If you’re not interested in efinance, read the Slashdot stuff anyway, as there’s a particularly cool bit about a LNG tanker. Excuse me while I perform some Red Lotus incantations.
CYA Notice No. 660 from the metacool legal team: This post exeeds the dorkiness exposure limit set by management.
“Research should be defined as doing something where half of the people think it’s impossible – impossible! And half of them think hmmmmm, maybe that will work, right? When there’s ever a breakthrough, a true breakthrough, you can go back and find a time period when the consensus was, ‘Well, that’s nonsense.’ So what that means is that a true, creative researcher has to have confidence in nonsense.”
– Burt Rutan
"You need a very product-oriented culture. Apple had a monopoly on the graphical user interface for almost 10 years. How are monopolies lost? Some very good product people invent some very good products, and the company achieves a monopoly. [But] what’s the point of focusing on making the product even better when the only company you can take business from is yourself? So a different group of people starts to move up. And who usually ends up running the show? The sales guy. Then one day the monopoly expires, for whatever reason…but by then, the best product people have left or they are no longer listened to."
– Steve Jobs
Things which I believe drive this dynamic in organizations:
1) As Clay Christensen has noted, succcessful organizations drive for ever-increasing margins over time. This dynamic forces changes in the organization’s internal mission and raises the profile and validity of sales and financial people.
2) People who do the creative work of product development are different from the people who do the routine (but very important) work of managing call centers, tracking accounts receivable, talking to shareholders, and keeping the lights on. Thing is, routine people are more likely to get satisfaction from being managers, rather than from focusing on content, which is what creative people like to do. So the routine people rise in the organization, mismanage the creative people, and nothing gets good gets created — witness Apple without Jobs.
3) Tibor Kalman once said "success = boredom". If a product line is becoming mature, and if the company is unwilling or unable to roll out new lines of products, the good product people will leave in search of more interesting challenges. Who wants to be the guy trying to take another $0.01 of cost out of an already optimized mechanism?
4) Product success drives financial success, which leads to going public, which leads to short-term financial pressures and the generation of a gigantic bureaucratic hairball. That hairball tangles the creative product people and binds them, limits them. As the rather creative fellow Richard Branson says, "If it’s a private company, you can get away with more. If it’s my money, then if I lose my money, no one else has been hurt by it."
© Valentin Sama (taken with a 1936 Leica)
Photographer, teacher, writer, and raconteur extraordinaire Valentin Sama has a cool new blog. It’s concerned with all aspects of photography, from tools to techniques to philosophy.
It’s also full of beautiful photos like the one above (“My Batman Shoes”).
CYA Notice No. 658 from the metacool legal team: Sama is my uncle
CYA Notice No. 659 from the metacool legal team: Your experience may vary, but Sama’s blog works best if you read it in Spanish.
Attended Stanford’s EDAY over the weekend, and had my hat knocked in the creek by the event’s final speaker, the Grand Poo-Bah of Cranium, Richard Tait. The theme of EDAY was “the power of play,” so who better than a gaming company Grand Poo-Bah to tie a bow around things?
Tait’s spiel focused on his own version of the 4 P’s: Passion, Productivity, Profitability, and Play. Some particularly chewy nuggets:
Passion:
Productivity:
Profitability:
Play:
Speaking of bonus items, here’s a charming PDF by Tait which nicely summarizes his thoughts on culture, meaning and innovation. I’m still looking for my hat…
"We try to evolve and evolve a product until the inevitability of it almost appears undesigned."
– Jonathan Ive
"Each individual should work for himself. People will not sacrifice themselves for the company. They come to work at the company to enjoy themselves." – Soichiro Honda
That Honda the company is a champion innovator is due in no small part to the culture created by Honda the founder.
What I find so interesting about this quote from Mr. Honda is his focus on the concept of enjoyment. When was the last time you heard any industry magnate, let alone a Japanese one, say it’s all about individual enjoyment, not about the greater good of the company?
Many business thinkers write about managing innovation, as if innovation were a thing. But innovation is ultimately the expression of a set of behaviors originating in the individual. So rather than focusing our energy on understanding the output of those individuals (innovation), we should think instead about how to lead those individuals so that they can be as innovative as possible. Could creating a culture of innovation be as simple as cultivating a culture of enjoyment? Mr. Honda says "yes": If you’re at Honda, then, the central task of leadership is about creating work that leads to enjoyment, and innovation will follow. It’s not unlike the leadership philosophy of Bobby Cox.
But what does enjoyment mean? Is the implication that work needs to be "fun", as in dot com fun? Is it about air hockey tables and free M&M’s? Should employees be walking around with inane smiles on their faces? I don’t think so. My guess is that Mr. Honda believed in the kind of enjoyment which leads to a state of flow. Csikszentmihalyi (the originator of the concept of flow) wrote this illuminating discussion of enjoyment in his book Good Business:
The experience of happiness in action is enjoyment — the exhilarating sensation of being fully alive… Enjoyment, on the other hand, is not always pleasant, and it can be very stressful at times. A mountain climber, for example, may be close to freezing, utterly exhausted, and in danger of falling into a bottomless crevasse, yet he wouldn’t want to be anywhere else… At the moment it is experienced, enjoyment can be both physcially painful and mentally taxing; but because it involves a triumph over the forces of entropy and decay, it nourishes the spirit.
Nourishing the spirit. Experiencing the thrill of triumphing over adversity. Happiness in action. When was the last time you heard those words associated with managing innovation? Next time someone in your workplace couches innovation in terms of by-the-numbers processes, jargon, and esoteric management theories, just ask them this simple question: how do you plan to enable people to enjoy their work?
