Author: Scott Berkun

How UX can get anything they want

Posted on in design, usabilityby Scott Berkun

I’m a fan of the unconventional view that most people, most of the time, worry about the wrong things.

When it comes to the world of UX, designers, usability engineers, and the rest, they tend to complain about how little power they have, but spend little time doing skill development in how to gain influence and power.  The average designer or IA would be better served by going to a sales conference and learning sales and pitching skills, than going to yet another design event. They’re already good at design, but they’re probably not very good at pitching design ideas to non-designers.

One fallacy in how designers and HCI experts are trained is the lack of recognition that most of their careers will be spent working with people who know almost nothing about design or HCI. They are set up to be marginalized and kept in the corner of organizations, since they’re never shown that their success hinges not just on expertise, but the ability to translate that expertise into terms the people who they work with, and for, can understand. The biggest skill gap the UX world has are advocates, translators, and persuaders, people who are not afraid to sell and convince others on the value of their work.

Last year at UI14 I met Alastair Simpson, a UX manager who, in a former life, worked in sales.  I asked him to blog about how to apply his sales background to the challenges of working in UX, and finally he did.

Here’s an excerpt:

Each time I visit a conference I hear the same problems faced by UX professionals.  Not the never ending search for a perfect interface, the perfect user flow, or a usability test that passes without incident.  Most commonly it is “If I could only get the budget, my CEO just doesn’t listen to me in meetings, they seem to switch off and just don’t understand my point of view”.  In the majority of cases this is probably your problem, not theirs.  Successfully pitching your ideas and making your managers, and their managers buy into the UX problems on your site is essential in getting sign off for your projects.

Read the full post here.

I don’t think UX, or anyone, ever gets everything they want. But if you know how to sell, build trust, and choose wisely, you can often get any one thing that you want. And having the courage to do this is how respect, power and influence are earned.

Also see:

Discount: The Economist Innovation Event, March 23/24

Posted on in On Tourby Scott Berkun

There are still a few seats left for The first ever event on Innovation run by The Economist magazine.

It’s quite the roster of speakers: Arianna Huffington, Ray Kurzweil, John Kao, Paul Saffo, Jared Diamond, Robert Reich, John Perry Barlow and more (including yours truly)

There is a 10% discount offered to all of the speakers which I can pass on to you.

When: March 23/24, 2010

Where:  Berkeley, CA

Cost: $1500, with 10% discount it’s $1350

Discount code: SPKR

View the full program and schedule

The Cult of Busy

Posted on in Culture, Philosophyby Scott Berkun

When I was young I thought busy people were more important than everyone else. Otherwise, why would they be so busy? I had busy parents and busy bosses, and I assumed they must always have important things to do. It seemed an easy way to see who mattered and who didn’t. The busy must matter more, and the lazy mattered less.

This is the cult of busy. That simply by always seeming to have something to do, we all assume a person is important or successful. It explains the behavior of many people at work. By appearing busy, others bother them less, and simultaneously believe they’re doing well at their job. It’s quite a trick.

I now believe the opposite to be true. Or the near opposite. Here’s why:

  • Time is the singular measure of life. It’s one of the few things you can not get more of. Knowing how to use it well is possibly the most important skill you can have.
  • The person who gets a job done in one hour will seem less busy than the one who can only do it in five.  How busy a person seems is not necessarily indicative of the quality of their results. Someone who is better at something might very well seem less busy, because they are more effective. Results matter more than the time spent to achieve them.
  • Being in demand can have good and bad causes.  Someone with a line of people waiting to talk to them outside their office door at work seems busy, and therefore seems important. But somehow the clerk running the slowest supermarket checkout line in the universe isn’t praised in the same way; it means they’re ineffective. People who are at the center of everything aren’t necessarily good at what they do (although they might be). The bar of being busy falls far well below the bar of being good.
  • The compulsion to save time may lead nowhere. If you’re always cutting corners to save time, when exactly are you using the time you’ve saved? There is an illusion that some day in the future you get back all the time you’ve squirreled away in one big chunk. I don’t think time works this way. For most Americans, it seems most of our time savings goes straight into watching television. That’s where all the time savings we think we get actually goes.
  • The phrase “I don’t have time for…” should never be said. We all get the same amount of time every day. If you can’t do something it’s not about the quantity of time. It’s really about how important the task is to you. I’m sure if you were having a heart attack, you’d magically find time to go to the hospital. That time would come from something else you’d planned to do, but now seems less important. This is how time works all the time. What people really mean when they say “I don’t have time” is this thing is not important enough to earn my time. It’s a polite way to tell people that they, or their request, is not important to you.

This means people who are always busy are time poor. They have a time shortage. They have time debt. They are either trying to do too much, or they aren’t doing what they’re doing very well. They are failing to either a) be effective with their time b) don’t know what they’re trying to effect, so they scramble away at trying to optimize for everything, which leads to optimizing nothing.

On the other hand, people who truly have control over time have some in their pocket to give to someone in need. They have a sense of priorities that drive their use of time and can shift away from the specific ordinary work that’s easy to justify, in favor of the more ethereal, deeper things that are harder to justify. They protect their time from trivia and idiocy. These people are time rich. They provide themselves with a surplus of time. They might seem to idle, or to relax, more often than the rest, but that may be a sign of their mastery not their incompetence.

I deliberately try not to fill my calendar. I choose not to say Yes to everything.  To do so would make me too busy, and I think, less effective at what my goals are.  I always want to have some margin of my time in reserve, time I’m free to spend in any way I choose, including doing almost nothing at all. I’m free to take detours. I’m open to serendipity. Some of the best thinkers throughout history had some of their best thoughts while going for walks, playing cards with friends, little things that generally would not be considered the hallmarks of busy people. It’s the ability to pause, to reflect, and relax, to let the mind wander, that’s perhaps the true sign of time mastery, for when the mind returns it’s often sharper and more efficient, but most important perhaps, happier than it was before.

This post was inspired by Marrissa Bracke‘s essay Why I stopped working with busy people.

Also see:

Quote of the week

Posted on in quote of the xby Scott Berkun

“After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil – everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble. You feel an intense, out of the skin awareness of your living self – your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it. In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There is a kind of largeness to it, a kind of godliness. Though it’s odd, you’ve never more alive then when you’re almost dead.

You recognize what’s valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what’s best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.”

From The Things They Carried,  By Tim O’Brien

Don’t be original, just be good

Posted on in Creative Thinking, design, Innovationby Scott Berkun

As another way of making the arguments I made in Good beats innovative nearly every time, here’s graphic design legend Paul Rand (who designed famous logos for IBM, UPS, Enron,Westinghouse, ABC, and NeXT).

At about the 3:00 mark he says ‘don’t try to be original, just try to be good’

Paired with the video, this short lecture by Rand is a good introduction to visual design thinking: better than many textbooks I’ve seen.

“When you say ‘design,’ everybody has their definition which doesn’t correspond to yours. There are many good definitions. One is the synthesis of form and content. In other words, without content there’s no form. And without form, there’s no content. A work of art is realized when form and content are indistinguishable. When form predominates, meaning is blunted. But when content predominates, interest lags. But the genius comes in when both of these things fuse.

Without the aesthetic means, that it’s not done for love, but it’s done for some alterior motive, because it sells, because it’s popular, because it’s crazy…

Graphic design is one of those phrases that doesn’t mean anything, because anything that’s graphic is graphic. Painting or dancing, if you see it, or writing, if you see it, it’s graphic. The genre of art, of graphic design, of painting, is art. That’s the genre. It’s all art.

The vocabulary, or the language, of art, or of aesthetics: order, variety, contrast, symmetry, tension, balance, scale, texture, space, shape, light, shade and color. This is the language of form.

Don’t try to be original, just try to be good. That sounds naive, but it’s true.

Without aesthetics you can’t find the truth. To do things with quality.

Art is an idea that has found its perfect form. There are too many possibilities, no matter how perfectly you do something, in can still be improved.”

How to convince anyone of anything

Posted on in Philosophy, Public Speakingby Scott Berkun

[This topic was requested with a slightly different title:  How to make a convincing argument.]

The word argument itself makes people think of lawyers or divorce proceedings, which are poor connotations if you’re hoping to charm someone into agreeing with you. It’s worth shifting to the more positive word: convince. The goal is to persuade, to make them want to agree with you and feel happy, smart, or right, when they do. This has higher odds of success than trying to pin them into a mental submission hold, using logic to corner them into admitting stupidity. If you use your smarts to wrap someone’s mind into a pretzel, don’t be surprised if when you leave it will return to the shape they had before. And resent you for twisting them up too.

You should know that all of us are bad at convincing others and at being convinced by others. We’re even bad at acting on ideas we’ve agreed with for years. Read about  Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, Socrates… some of our greatest minds, perhaps our greatest people, tried to convince their followers of  simple ideas (e.g. do not kill, love thy neighbor, the golden rule), ideas which were ignored and perverted by many of their followers in less than a generation. If this crowd of notables couldn’t pull it off with the name of god, the threat of damnation, or the gift enlightenment behind them, the odds for us can’t be great. Set your expectations accordingly.

No matter how persuasive you are most people will not hear you. Most people will not change. But why do you need anyone to change? It’s a question most compulsive arguers never ask. Perhaps all you need is to be heard, or feel smart, which can be done in other ways. The goal of sharpening of your own mind through the process, a goal you can’t fail at no matter how others respond, can be achieved without convincing anyone of anything. This might lead you into the pleasure of actual conversation.

If you must, a secret for pitching, persuading, selling or inspiring is to focus on the individual person you’re talking to. There is no magic recipe for convincing large numbers of people of something all at the same time.  That’s very hard to do. But if your goal is to convince one person of something,  you can listen to their interests and beliefs, using that knowledge as a foothold for the ideas you want them to consider. If you are talking to 5 people, identify the most influential or interested person in that room. That’s where you should start. A classic mistake is obsessing about the pitch or the argument, while ignoring the landscape of who is present in the room, their moods and their goals.

Instead, work the opposite way. Shut up and listen. Take time to understand the people or person you are trying to convince. Understand their goals, their core beliefs, their preferred kind of thinking (data driven, story driven, principle driven, goal driven) – what views do they already have and why?

It’s hard to convince anyone of anything if your mind isn’t just as open as you are demanding theirs to be. The best outcome of all might just be that in listening and learning you discover good questions you need to consider about your own beliefs and positions.

But most people find this boring. They can’t get their egos excited about thinking, much less listening. And then they attack blindly with generic arguments and fail. And then they blame the people they know nothing about, but want so much from, for their own failure. But if you can be generous of mind, and patient in effort, you will understand them. And once you understand them you might find the common ground where opportunity lives.

Also see:

TurboTax Design FAIL

Posted on in design, ui review, usabilityby Scott Berkun

I’m so hopeful when I install the new version of something. Everyone is. An upgrade, the payment of cash for the new version, is an extremely hopefully act. I imagine they’ve fixed some things, made some nice improvements, and most of all, have taken into account the things I did with the old version.

And thinking like a designer, the best time to make me feel I chose wisely in upgrading, instead of buying a competing product, is in the first few minutes of use, known in the lingo as the OOBE (out of box experience).

So here it is, in 2010, that Intuit TurboTax fails me again.

As an aside, Yes, I know, I have not be failed by TurboTax in the same way the folks in Haiti have been failed by the universe at large.

Problem Solving & Kobayashi Maru

Posted on in Creative Thinking, designby Scott Berkun

Over on my post Do constraints help problem solving, Aaron asked:

I’m currently completing a dissertation titled Development in Product Design is driven by a response to changing constraints rather than innovation for my 3rd year BA Product Design course. You have stated that constraints can be eliminated on purpose, I can understand how they can be created but not eliminated? have you got any example of this in practice?

The best attitude when trying to solve problems is everything is negotiable. Just because someone says the car they want you to design must be red and ten feet tall, or done by Friday doesn’t mean it actually needs to be those things. Most constraints people give are made up: they haven’t been rigorously examined to find the real boundaries.

Maybe instead of being ten feet tall, what they really want is a car they can fit comfortably in, given that the client is Shaquille O’neal.

And perhaps it’s not a red car they want, but just a car that looks cooler than their neighbors car.

Or instead of it all being done Friday, only one important part needs to be done, but the rest can be done by Monday.

People confuse being specific with being accurate. Having details and numbers doesn’t mean you understand why those things are the right choices.

The challenge in creative work, especially with clients, is how to explore their constraints without annoying  them.  And then get them to happily acknowledge these are the true problems, rather than assuming their description of their problems is sufficient. The reason why so many projects fail is the lack of this skill on all sides: clients, executives, designers, engineers and customers all stink at this process, and dismiss it as irrelevant.

The fancy word for this is requirements elicitation. But it really just means thinking hard and carefully about requirements, understanding they are a kind of design unto themselves. Someone has to diligently sort through those that contradict, and identify those that are  poorly formed or unnecessary. Prototyping and sketching helps sort this out, but that’s just part of the process.

The best book I’ve ever seen on this is Exploring Requirements, By Weinberg. It should be required reading for anyone who solves problems for anyone else.

But the big problem is, of the few phrases more boring in this world than project management, requirements gathering is definitely one of them. It needs a slicker name. I hate jargon but I’d be all for something snazzy that gets them to care more about this kind of thinking. (Require-magic? Constraint-O-Rama? Hmmm).

Sometimes you can find a way to make two different constraints reduce down to one, making the problem simpler to solve. A constraint (e.g. requirement) might not be eliminated, but can be bent, shifted, twisted, rephrased, or entirely manipulated (See Kobyiash Maru) to serve your purposes.

A favorite example: for decades the problem with bringing the internet into developing countries was the expense of digging tunnels to put in power, phone and cable lines. The advent of cell phones, where towers are built above ground and no wires are needed, eliminated the constraints around digging and cabling. For many people in the world today their first phones, and first web browsers, are cell phones. A constraint was entirely eliminated by design.

Good ideas can sometimes eliminate seemingly immovable constraints.

Funniest man on TV: Craig Ferguson

Posted on in Cultureby Scott Berkun

I don’t watch much TV, but one of my favorite things to watch is Craig Ferguson’s Late Late show on CBS.

He’s been on after Letterman there for years and despite how funny he is, and how good the show is, very people seem to have ever heard of the guy.

The LA Times just did a great piece about him and the show that captures much of why I like it so much:

“We have no promotion, we’ve got no money — it’s the cheapest budget of any of the late-night shows — probably Carson Daly’s too. We get nothing. But we do have a huge advantage in that they let us do what we want. And I would take that trade.”

The lack of autonomy always explains mediocrity. In companies, in teams, in movies and on TV. It’s often the corners, where fewer people are looking, that the good stuff is happening.

Given the freedom he clearly has, there is something wonderfully unhinged and real about his behavior on the show, something unlike anything else on major television. His monologues in particular are more like live stand-up comedy with an A-list comic working a B-list town, free to take risks, than the top tier late night shows where the star and the staff can’t hide the weight of national Nielsen ratings on every syllable. He’s something of an opposite of Jay Leno, who has always seemed so stiff and formulaic to me. Conan I always liked, but Ferguson is a bit darker, with a sharper blade, and it’s never quite clear what’s going to happen.

Read the full article here, or jump right in and check out his show.

My biggest mistakes

Posted on in reader's choiceby Scott Berkun

In a series of posts, called readers choice, I write on whatever topics people submit.

This week’s reader’s choice post: My biggest professional mistakes.

I’ve been thinking about this post for weeks, as I have many mistakes to pick from.

I do try very hard to learn from them, but the ones listed below have stuck with me more than others. In some cases they are mistakes I’m likely still making now.

Here are my top mistakes:

  1. Not staying with the same boss/group. When I was there (’94 to ’03), after a long stint on the IE team, I jumped around Microsoft every couple of years, putting my curiosity and passions ahead of climbing ladders. I wanted a diversity of experiences – I had four job titles in nine years at Microsoft – but this made it harder to get promoted and, in some cases, to earn respect in the MSFT culture. The advice I give people often is pick your manager first. A great manager will negate most other work problems, whereas an awful manager will negate most other work pleasures. Good managers get promoted and often their best people rise with them. For what I do now, my diversity of experience is an asset, but my career at Microsoft suffered for it. From an industry/career perspective, continuing to work for Joe Belfiore, Chris Jones or Hadi Partovi would have been a wiser move.
  2. Abandoning my network. When I moved from job to job at Microsoft I basically abandoned most of the friends and contacts I’d made. I liked many of these people and built trust with them, but I was too much of a loner, and in my early 20s just didn’t understand the value of those connections and relationships until they were gone. I worked on the early days of the web, ’94 to ’99, and met tons of people at other companies and start-ups, but didn’t understand what that could have meant for my own learning, growth and connections. I still struggle with it now, as I’m very self-reliant and tend towards introversion, but there is a respect granted to people by simply indicating you remember who they are. I try to reply to every email I get and acknowledge any nod of recognition, as in a way my fan base is my extended network. But it’s a struggle.
  3. Doubts about self promotion. My greatest struggle as an independent is how to sell myself to others while still keeping my sense of integrity and dignity intact. I believe in work and that good work gets spread more easily than the rest. But being a writer is tough – there is a ridiculous amount of competition for people’s attention and book buying dollars. To succeed I have to help it along. I know Walt Whitman sold his books door to door, and even wrote anonymous reviews of his own books. But I’m no Walt Whitman. And I don’t like people who a) are better at sales than at making whatever it is they are selling, b) who promise the impossible to create sales, or c) shamelessly inflame and hype purely to generate attention. My mistake here, given how long I’ve been online, is seeing others who have had more success, with less talent and quality of work, because they have fewer doubts about self-promotion. But I don’t think I want more book sales or web traffic if I have to lose my self-respect to get it. I know these are not mutually exclusive (e.g. subscribing to this blog or finding me on twitter could be easier), but I struggle with finding the line every day.
  4. (Not) giving fans a way to be fans. Related to #3, I know some of you would call yourselves fans of my work. Or at least one of my books. But there’s no fan club, or fan list or any easy way for people to be rewarded for feeling this way. This is oh so dumb. I’d love to do more to reward people who are my supporters, and do more to help them spread the word, but I don’t know quite how to make this happen, in part because of #3. I am truly grateful and try to use this blog (and this reader’s choice thing) as a way to give back. But I suspect there’s more I can do. If you’re a fan, how can I help you to spread word of my work? I’m all ears. (Update: there is a berkun-fan mailing list and a Facebook fan page)
  5. Not publishing my novel. My ambition is to write about everything. I don’t want to be just a management writer, or creativity author dude. I want to be, simply, a great writer. I want to work to be smart, honest and expressive enough to write well about almost anything, and apply the way I think about the world to as many things as possible, The only way to develop into this is to keep writing about different things (which explains the diversity of topics here). I have a novel I’ve kicked around for years, and publishing it, even by myself, even if it sucks, demonstrates I can attack writing challenges wider than what I’ve done before. One of my (now failed) goals for 2010 is to finish it up and get it out there.
  6. Not following in Tufte’s footsteps.My primary goal is to write, and I will speak, teach and consult to make that possible. I’ve toyed with the seminar business for years, and I’ve studied what Edward Tufte and others have done. In Tufte’s case, he does the same basic full day lecture in several cities, for ~$380 per person, and fills 800+ person halls. The numbers here speak for themselves. I’m sure he started small and grew this business, as I would have to do to even attempt anything like his level of success. But managing the logistics, promotion, etc. of this has very little appeal compared to the simplicity of being a for-hire speaker at other people’s events. Once a machine like this is running, the creative costs for me would be low, and the revenue stream would be useful in driving me to take bigger risks as a writer.
  7. Not learning to draw. I’m a visual thinker, at least some of the time.When I work with people on anything, I work at whiteboards and on big sheets of paper. But I can’t actually draw with sufficient aesthetics to warrant posting them here, or including them in books. This is a liability. But it’s one I plan to correct this year, as one of my goals for 2010 is to learn to draw. I’m working from Drawing on the Right side of the brain, and it’s going well so far.
  8. I’m a creative lone wolf. I love the idea of an Algonquin Round Table or the Inklings, a group of creatives who meet regularly and help each other with their work. I don’t have one and never have. There are people I get feedback from now and then, but I’ve failed to build a group, or join one, that I rely on or contribute to. Writers are just weirdos, I think, and I include myself in this. We’re an annoying, arrogant, needy bunch. Most of the groups I come across are people mostly in other professions who dabble in creative pursuits, and those conversations rarely put anyone on equal footing. I’ve rarely had mentors in my life, although I do see the value and wish I knew someone I respected who was interested in playing that role. Or had a group of talent folks with mutual respect, who help each other produce more and better work.

I have some very dramatic and entertaining failures in my professional life, but they were momentary things. It’s these mistakes above that stay with me and, in some cases, are ones I’m still making. I think about them often perhaps because it’s not too late, and if I could sort them out, everyone would win.

Quote of the Month

Posted on in Philosophy, quote of the xby Scott Berkun

Stephen Fry: If an alien was looking down on us and inspecting our language they would see the worst things we do on this planet is we torture, we kill, we abuse, we harm people, we’re cruel, and those are the things of which we should be ashamed.

Among the best things we do is we breed children, we raise them, we make love to each other, we adore each other, we are affectionate and fond of each other.

How odd the language for the awful things is used casually all the time, ‘oh the traffic was agony’,’it was hell’, ‘it was cruel’, ‘it was torture waiting in line’ You use words like torture? That’s the worst word.

Yet if you use the F word, which is the word for generating the species, for showing physical affection to one another, then we’re taken off the air and accused of being wicked,and irresponsible and a bad influence to children.

Now we’re part of this culture so we often don’t question it, but if you think of someone from outside… it is very strange.

Craig Ferguson: We are very weird fuckers indeed.

From the most excellent late show with Craig Ferguson (youtube).

(Seattle) Berkun + Wine + You: special event

Posted on in On Tour, Seattleby Scott Berkun

The ever cool biznik collective is hosting me for a special author event night here in Seattle.

When: Tuesday March 16th, 5:30pm to 8:00pm

Where: Hotel 1000, 1000 1st Avenue, Seattle

You get:

  • A signed copy of Confessions of a Public Speaker
  • an evening of fine wine and appetizers
  • A presentation by yours truly on creativity and persuasion
  • Plenty of socializing and fun before and after
  • All this for $40 ($35 if you are a biznik member)

How to sign up:

You have to RSVP in advance – All the details here.

Speaking at The Economist Innovation event

Posted on in On Tourby Scott Berkun

I’ll be speaking at this new event, first in a series run by The Economist magazine.

The ideas economy: Innovation
Berkeley, California, March 23-24

The roster includes Jared Diamond, Ray Kurzweil, Paul Saffo, Clayton Christensen, Dan Esty, Ed Catmull, John Perry Barlow, Arriana Huffington and more.

It’s 200 people only – registration info here ($1500 a ticket).

I hope to liveblog the event if I can.

Why you should be a team of one

Posted on in design, Managementby Scott Berkun

One of the best exercises a working person can do is this: spend some time doing the jobs of the people you work with. Every manager should be required to do this once a year, even if just for a few hours.  Most of us, most of the time, work with blinders on. We naturally assume our work is harder and more important than the people we depend on, or who depend on us, and the only way to be reminded of this is to put yourself in their shoes now and then.

At the UI14 conference last year I caught an excellent talk by Leah Buley, an experience designer at Adaptive Path, called UX Team of One. The core idea is in many, but not all cases, one person can effectively do both analysis (usability engineering) and synthesis (design and prototyping of new ideas) if they have the right attitude, experience and perspective, which she described in detail in her talk (slides here).

This is not to suggest singular expertise in usability or interaction design is useless.  Not at all. My point is in many cases the usability and design problems are relatively simple and the reason why things are bad is not a lack of expertise, but a lack of willingness among ‘experts’ to step out of their safe expert box and fight to effect change, or a failure to succeed at it. Someone with fewer pedigrees tends to see fewer boundaries, and that’s often what a team or culture or company needs for change to happen. Many projects need basic first aid, not brain surgery, and I suspect medics, who are generalists, do better first-aid than neurosurgeons, who are specialists. Of course if I have a brain tumor, I’ll wait for Mr. Neurosurgery, but otherwise he’s not my best bet.

There are many people with PhDs in cognitive psychology, or Masters degrees in design, working on projects with abysmal usability or interaction design. The problem isn’t lack of expertise, it’s a lack of awareness for how to convert that expertise into action. Their deep expertise can be a liability if it gets in the way of getting their hands dirty.

The intellectual exercise of trying to do a project alone, where you have to play the role of product planner, project manager, designer, engineer, tester, marketer (or whatever the list of roles is in your world), even if just for a day, forces you to rethink the assumptions about each and every contribution on a project. Maybe it’s harder than you think, or maybe it’s easier, who knows? You likely have no idea since you’ve never done any of those things. If you have clients, what do you really know about their world? Project and Middle Managers are notorious for having no real sense for how all the contributions by others that they get credit for, are actually done. This is an easy disease to cure: invest some time standing in other people’s shoes.

I believer there is a core set of skills, orthogonal to traditional ideas of expertise, that defines who is effective at work or not. Call it savvy, self-awareness, organizational agility, or just plain common sense, but it’s the real factor at play at why some experts have an impact and others don’t. Playing Team of One for a day is one easy way to start getting at those skills. It gives you a language and sensibility for thinking about the people you depend on, the absence of which contributes to why they’re ignoring or frustrating you.

Melbourne meetup – Sunday!

Posted on in On Tourby Scott Berkun

Sorry for the short notice, but I arrive in Melbourne for a few days this coming Saturday. I’m speaking at the PMI Asia Congress on Monday.

If anyone is up for it, I’d love to meet some locals, and share some beers or some food. Recommendations welcome for where. Saturday or Sunday are open.

I’ll be jet lagged out of my mind, but this often makes me 30% more entertaining.

Leave a comment if you’re interested, and I’ll email everyone when I arrive to follow up.

What Microsoft gets for $2 billion

Posted on in Management, Microsoftby Scott Berkun

As a follow up to my post on Microsoft and Creative Destruction, it’s worth looking at this chart (from Silicon Alley Insider).

It shows the quarterly operating expenses for Microsoft’s Online division. This last quarter, Microsoft lost $466 million. That’s 3 months.

Over the last year (4 quarters) Microsoft has lost nearly $2 billion.

And from what I remember, you’d see losses for the period before what’s shown on the chart, as the division has always struggled with profitability.

It’s an unbelievable chart. I’ve had to stop writing several times just to look at it again.

I’m not arrogant enough to claim I can fix an entire division. But I can ask some questions:

  • Who in senior leadership has earned promotions or raises during this time? I’m not saying this is impossible, but it does deserve some serious explaining.
  • What fundamental assumptions are at work here that someone is still protecting?
  • How would things be different if this division were operating as it’s own company? Clearly whatever leverage and resources it’s getting from the rest of Microsoft hasn’t been of use to the bottom line. If it were it’s own company one of two things would have happened by now: 1) It’d be out of business or 2) It’d be doing things very differently.
  • What are the counter examples in this division that are profitable? And are their other groups rallying around their success and trying to learn/leverage/borrow from them?
  • In the last 50 years how many corporations have run entire divisions with this level of operating loss over four years or more? And what was the outcome?

If history is a judge, Steve Sinofsky, the VP from Office who took charge of Windows 7, might be the only weapon Microsoft can use to tackle Online.  Other VPs have been in charge, including David Cole who was my VP for a time in the IE days. But they’ve been ineffective at things other than spending lots of money.

In spirit of my last post (Microsoft and Creative Destruction), the better question is what did Sinofsky do to the Windows team to turn Vista into Windows 7? Why isn’t there a case study on this, that’s stapled onto the forehead of every manager until it’s read? And how can that be emulated in the Online division? My suspicion is this case study has not been done, and if it has, it’s either not being shared widely or it’s being ignored.

Wednesday linkfest

Posted on in linkfestby Scott Berkun

Here are this week’s good links:

Three design lessons from the best vehicle of all time

Posted on in designby Scott Berkun

When it comes to design and leading industries, we like to think it’s the amazing that wins the day. But there are great examples from that point in the other direction.

Sometimes the simple, cheap and reliable, if you can pull it off, is what the market and customers truly need. If I asked you what is the greatest selling powered vehicle of all time, what would you say?

I doubt you’d think it was this: the Honda Super Cub motorcycle. It sold 100 million units in 2017 (according to Honda at least), and has had the same basic design for 50 years. It’s durable, affordable and easy to fix.

While I’d never suggest the best selling design equates to being the best, it certainly puts it in the running. I believe if people studied why unexpectedly successful designs, like the Super Cub or the AK47, they’d understand what people actually need and how to make it (See Good beats Innovative, on BusinessWeek)

Some things you can learn from the Super-Cub:

  • People often over-estimate their needs. Much like the history of the VW Beetle, doing the core things people need very well is rare. And if you can market it right, as VW did for the bug in America, you can dominate markets with simplicity.
  • A set of small inefficiencies can create a larger efficiency. The Super Cub doesn’t have the best engine, or tires, or handling. But because those things are simple designs, are easy to repair, and simple to use, the gestalt of the overall product is efficient to use and manage.
  • Targeting a small market can generate designs that do well in large markets. The history of OXO Good Grips is they were trying to design kitchen tools for people with arthritis and other co-ordination issues. They discovered later their designs were valuable to everyone.

Can you think of other inexpensive and simple designs that outperform their competitors?

Related: Lessons from the AK-47.