Over the last month I’ve spent more time than usual with consultants and it is making me miserable. Is there a support group I can join? A ten step program? A nearby happy-hour? There are some great consultants out there, but damn, I wish there were more of them.
My passion for trying to get to the heart of things, to be clear and direct, makes it impossible for me to talk with most consultants for more than 5 minutes without wanting to punch them in the face. This might not be their fault – my spine shudders in revulsion when I’m faced with people who go out of their way to make things sound as complicated as possible. Consultants aren’t alone here – some academics, politicians and doctors are just as guilty, but I haven’t been dealing with those folks recently, and today, they get a free pass.
The inherent problem is this: I look at the English language as a good thing. Shakespeare did some good with it, didn’t he? Although he did invent some words here and there, I don’t think most of us need to create new words to get our points across – 200,000 is plenty to work with. In fact unless your new word enhances my understanding of what you’re trying to say instead of diminishing it, it’s hard not to see you as either a fool or a blowhard. You’re not making a new word or using obscure language to help me, you’re doing it to help you. If you look at how most consultant talk, you’d think they hated English, had a personal vendetta against it, as they seem to take such pride in burying clear thinking under layers of vacuous, disingenuous jargon.
My recent experiences have convinced me many consultants see jargon is an advantage – how, I’m not sure. Perhaps like the bait on a hook, it distracts potential clients into error, just long enough for them to open their wallets and bite on the hook. But for whatever reason I personally don’t know how to take the bait. And the result is many of my conversations with consultants (note I say many – there are exceptions) leave me feeling one of three things:
Certainly (bad) consultants aren’t entirely to blame for what they do – some clients want the made up stuff, they want to believe in things they don’t understand, or they want to rely on a outsider simply so they can blame the outsider later on.
So how do you separate the useful, well-meaning consultants from the less savory ones? What are your biggest gripes from past experiences working with consultants? I’d like to know.
(Update: also see How to call bullshit on a guru)
A recent New Yorker had another excellent piece by Malcolm Gladwell, this time about simultaneous invention, the core topic of chapter 5 of The Myths of Innovation. Much of his coverage is spot on – we underestimate how many inventions and discoveries were achieved independently, despite how specific and isolated the credit we give often is.
It’s an excellent article and I recommend it. One highlight for me is this:
Stigler’s Law: No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.
A law which Gladwell points out also applies to Stigler’s law :)
My critique begins with his coverage of Nathan Myhrvold and his company, Intellectual ventures (IV). A firm dedicated to creating what they call “an invention economy”. He never asks any questions about the conflicts between a patent system designed centuries ago to protect individual inventors, and a well-funded company created, as best I can tell, to dominate entire domains of Intellectual property through massive patent fillings and then selling them. Who is best served by “an invention economy’?
It’s not his job to raise every question – that’s my job as the reader. But since the article focuses on Myhrvold & IV, it literally begins and ends with him, the fact that he never questions his company’s place in all this paints them as a positive evolution in how invention will be done. They are loosely portrayed as heroes, an idea which I couldn’t help but find personally depressing – Not entire sure why yet, but I did feel that way.
But more important is his overstatement of artistic creations. He writes:
A work of artistic genius is singular, and all the arguments over calculus, the accusations back and forth between the Bell and the Gray camps, and our persistent inability to come to terms with the existence of multiples are the result of our misplaced desire to impose the paradigm of artistic invention on a world where it doesn’t belong.
Shakespeare owned Hamlet because he created him, as none other before or since could. Alexander Graham Bell owned the telephone only because his patent application landed on the examiner’s desk a few hours before Gray’s. The first kind of creation was sui generis; the second could be re-created in a warehouse outside Seattle.
If you talk to most writers or artists they’ll tell you about specific influences for specific pieces. Picasso said “bad artists borrow, great artists steal”. We’re pretty sure Shakespeare based Hamlet, and many of his plays, on stories and plays he’d heard before. Reading Joseph Campell or Karen Armstrong on mythology reveals the incestuous nature of stories: they breed like rabbits and steal like thieves, and to claim any creative work as Sui generis (means, roughly, something uncategorizable) usually means there’s a kind of ignorance at work about that particular kind of art, or a lack of imagination about what a category is.
And as a kicker, what is one to say about amazing song covers, Like Johnny Cash’s cover of the Nine Inch nails song “hurt”? The fact that an idea can be both deriverative and creative means our definitions aren’t that good (For reference, Cash’s version – you really should see this).
Michelangelo’s David and Picasso’s Guernica are masterpieces, but an analysis of these works by people in the field can point out influences, progressions, and connections to other works the creator knew of or was deliberately trying to emulate. Sometimes, like simultaneous invention, artists pursue similar ideas at the same time: they’re called artistic movements. It’s not the same as simultaneous invention, but it’s close enough. I’ve studied art for years and I still have trouble telling Picassos from Braques, despite works by both being considered masterpieces.
I totally grant there are differences between artistic creation and engineering invention. And Gladwell’s piece had me thinking about them for the better part of a plane flight, a gift which I’m thankful for. But his cut at the differences isn’t quite right.
The more I learn about creative thinking and about teaching, two subjects of great interest, the more depressing organized education in the U.S. becomes. I’m familiar with Montessori, Waldorf and various other well known private school brands, as well as public school programs here and there, but it’s all vaguely disappointing. I’m often left feeling there is no substitute for parents and extended family: they are the best hopes young minds have for learning what it means to think free. Perhaps that’s as it should be.
Two bright spots I’ve found are these two programs, aimed at giving kids exposure to creative problem solving in team environments. I’ve yet to see these things in action but I’d love to visit and maybe even help out with a local chapter.
Odyssey of the Mind – An international program that focuses on creative problem solving projects. It’s a world-wide competition with regional finals and programs.
Destination Imagination: Similiar to Odyssey of the mind, but offers 5 different tracks each with a different creative focus, from technical, to artistic.
If you know of other resources for parents who want to augment their kids exposure to creative thinking and problem solving skills, or have experience with either of the above programs, please leave a comment. I’d love to hear more.
My friend Rob Lefferts, VP at Microsoft, offers this gem of advice:
It is your fault.
I call this the Lefferts’ law of management. The last thing you should ever do is blame your own team. You have more power, and are paid more, than anyone else. If something is wrong, it is probably because of you. There are dozens of excuses you can use instead that point the blame elsewhere but if you want to be a good manager don’t use them.
If someone is behind schedule, communicates poorly, or made a bad decision, who coached them, or failed to? You. If people are arguing and don’t trust each other, who shaped the culture or failed to create shared goals? You. If you feel you must micromanage to keep quality high, that’s on you too for not hiring better or coaching them into growth. Whatever the thing is that isn’t going well, you are the primary person that both caused it and can do something about it. Even if you inherited a problem, it is your job to manage it. If you’re not sure what to do, it’s your job to admit you are over your head and ask for advice or step away from being the boss.
This law should be the primary working assumption in trying to understand a situation. Certainly there will be cases where someone else is at fault, but start your diagnosis by assuming otherwise.
If you are the executive, the boss, the manager or in some cases the leader, you should tend to absorb blame for what’s going on, freeing people to actually solve problems instead of pointing fingers. Be the fall guy if needed for your own boss or partners. If people see you take bullets for them, soon they’ll be taking some for you, or prevent the need for anyone to at all.
Being passionately accountable creates a shield for others and makes it safer for them to invest more personal responsibility in their work. When they do, things can only get better.
When in doubt, good managers assume anything important that’s not going well is their fault and do something about it.
[edited lightly 9-23-2016, 9-24-2020]
An interesting little MBA project from UC Irvine provides a view of books and reviews based on the point of view of particular experts. There may be something like this out there already but i haven’t seen it.
It’s called Expert’s choice – and all profits from using their site go to charity. Take a look.
Thanks to Brady Forrest and Jen Pahilka for giving me not one but two slots this week in a high caliber lineup. It was awesome to meet and talk to so many folks in just a few days (talking to people is always where the value is). (Photo credit: James Duncan Davidson).
Its been awhile since I’ve been to a big tech conference around a singular theme (web 2.0) during its rise. To see both the promise and the hype swirling around together made for a fun couple of days. Walking the expo floor, where vendors and companies demo and pitch for your pleasure, gave me flashbacks to Internet World in ’96 and ’97. Back then, there were a zillion “push technology” companies, services and products. Now it’s “social media” or “web 2.0”, with a zillion companies all throwing the same jargon around and mostly failing to distinguish themselves from one another.
There are certainly good ideas in the mix, and I think Tim O’Reilly and Clay Shirky‘s opening keynotes did more than any company I saw to speak for those ideas, or even attempt to describe what substance might surface from all the technology, energy and money bouncing around.
The problem for me is how infrequently people investing their lives making these things can describe how, at the end of the day, all of the potential described gets transfered into value. Or why the value provided is worth the risks and costs of using whatever they are selling (register for this, buy that, use this, etc.) It’s not a complex question, but it is the primary one I’m sure many attendees were asking: how much substance and takeaways can I fish out of the buzz?
I wasn’t surprised, but I didn’t hear anyone mention how many amazing things are made, in 2008, by organizations with little interest in web 2.0 concepts – namely Apple, Toyota, your favorite film director, or your favorite music band. Not to mention all of the great amazing things the world produced before 1994 (the year the web, even in 1.0 form, was born). That’s not to say this alone proves anything – my point is only this: it is possible to achieve amazing things, without -insert name of current trend here-. Thriving communities, tribes, and cultures have existed for ages. If its possible to do well without whatever the new secret sauce is, it suggests there’s an underlying element that’s not being talked about. I’m convinced there is a more refined explanation for what people might gain from buying what the expo vendors are selling, but very few people seemed capable of even suggestion one.
The unspoken nugget / explanation / marketing line that might get me jazzed is this:
We have always been collaborative. Always been social. It’s in our genes and it’s what we have evolved to do well. Good technologies enhance our natural abilities, give us useful artificial ones, and help us to get more of what we want from life. Web 2.0 and social media make the process of collaboration and developing relationships more fun, efficient, powerful and meaningful.
Ok. Now we’re talking. With a statement like this I can walk the halls of the expo, or converse with the greatest web 2.0 pundit, and have a straight conversation. Will this get me more of what I want from life? More of what my customers want from me, or vice-versa? I can make tangible arguments about what I want or my customers need and sort some decisions out. But note that the statement above is devoid of hyperbole like revolution, ground breaking, disruptive or transformative, things that are entirely subjective. If you identify a real problem well enough, you never need those words: the people who have those problems will naturally find what you do revolutionary if you really solve their problems.
Ok, enough industry talk. Here’s some shop talk for anyone that saw me speak: I’d give my performance at my innovation workshop a B and the keynote a C+. The keynote was mostly new material and, surprise, I never found my rhythm. I gave it my best but it wasn’t a great 10 minutes. The other funny thing is that the tech crew warned me the remote doesn’t go backwards – it’s kamikaze style – a warning I shrugged off as I couldn’t imagine in a ten minute talk needing to go backwards. Well, guess what, I did. I could have asked them to go back if I’d wanted but didn’t, it wouldn’t have saved my performance anyway :)
Workshop slides here: How to Innovate on Time
Liz Danzico kindly interviewed me about creativity and related things over at the AIGA website. Includes mentions of puppy torture, flashes of lightning, and ridicule for the book Who Moved my Cheese. Full interview here.
Here’s this week’s linkfest:
O’Reilly just kicked off some PR for the release of Making things happen with a write-up on their blog a spiffy new press release, and to celebrate they’re giving away a free copy of the book.
All you have to do is head over to the O’Reilly PR site, and enter a comment describing the perfect project manager.
Winner chosen by Kathryn on April 15th.
I can’t tell you how many times, even in notable magazines, I’ve read movie reviews that spoil the movie. It’s the most criminal, careless thing a critic can do: steal the narrative potency of someone else’s work. Even if it’s the worst movie in the world, a decent critic can tear it apart without spoiling the film.
So the other day on netflix I saw this – a spoiler warning:
On every review any user can flag reviews for spoilers.
Thank you Netflix.
Last week I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. I’m a huge WordPress fan, I love what these guys do, and I was psyched to see what they’d done this time around.
Total time: 9 minutes. This was end to end, from downloading their software, to reading instructions, to the moment I was able to make my first post. And this included an extra 2 minutes where FileZilla imploded and I had to start over.
Summary: Thumbs up. Go get it. Most of the changes are for the positive, the UI is cleaner, my top gripes (text-editor and thumbnails) have been fixed, and there are some new minor features. Top complaints are UI fit and finish, there are some gotchas that should have been caught.
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Even with my complaints, I strongly recommend WordPress. If you want to give it a spin, you can use their free, hosted, blogging service at wordpress.org. If you’re thinking of upgrading or switching check out this handy guide: How to update wordpress with minimal downtime.
Later this month I’ll be down in SF talking at Web 2.0 Expo. I’m doing a half-day tutorial on How to Innovate on time, plus a keynote on the Myths of Innovation. The lineup includes Blaine Cook (Twitter), Matt Jones (Dopplr), Marc Andressen (Ning), Clay Shirky, Matt Cutts (Google) and more. Among other special events, there’s also an ignite talks event, one of my favorite things to watch, on Tuesday night.
If you use this magic code websf08sbg you get $100 off the registration price.
This is exactly the kind of topic I avoid here, but since the deal hasn’t been shot dead (at least not yet) as I’d expected, it’s time to throw an opinion on the pile.
The first thing that comes to mind is the 1995 attempt by Microsoft to buy Intuit. It doesn’t seem important now but at the time it was a huge deal: it would have been the largest software acquisition in history. Inside Microsoft, where I worked at the time, the move was a surprise, much like the Yahoo deal probably was (Hot/Big companies are news leaks, so execs rarely bother with early internal memos). The DOJ said no, but regardless it represented the same type of inspired, ballsy, ‘go all in’ strategy that people forget Microsoft is known for (See Microsoft reverses course or Internet Tidal Wave Memo).
Forget whether it will work or not, this Yahoo move communicates how competitive and aggressive Microsoft still is. If Google kicks Microsoft’s ass all over the next decade, it will be a bloody war all the way. Unlike IBM, Microsoft is not going to walk quietly to the sidelines of public attention; they’re going to go out swinging. So say what you will about the strategy, but in terms of moving to take control over the battleground, Microsoft has scored a victory: they’re in the headlines, for the first time in ages, for being on the prowl, while news of Google has fallen beneath the fold. With the paint still wet on their recent acquisition of DoubleClick, it’s hard for Google to complain loudly right now.
Ok, here’s the cynicism. All mergers suck. They really do. They rarely go well and when they do it’s only after 12-16 months of hand wringing and confusion among everyone involved on both sides (not to mention the costs of defections on principle). No sane person would ever choose to merge with another company that has overlapping product lines. It’s a move that is only conceivable from the landscape view provided by executive ivory towers. VPs can say all they want about not losing jobs, but everyone knows no VP would ever say “Yes. This merger means you will be fired 3 weeks from now! Run for the hills!” It just doesn’t go that way, ever. Being employed isn’t much of a prize anyway if the job that remains barely resembles the one you loved. Of course if you hate your job, or your project, then this could be opportunity time.
But on the whole I suspect the entire Windows Live division held in a collective cry of despair the day the merger was announced, in the same way the Microsoft Money team did in 1995. It’s hard to recover from that feeling of betrayal that comes from working hard for months, loyally following your leader’s commands, only to learn, as an aside, over coffee, that someone 5 levels above you had been scheming to buy a competitor, one of the targets on your well worn dartboard, all along. In the old Microsoft days it was the stock options that carried you through. The hallway talk was “We do what’s right for the company first” but I don’t know if that line is still heard, much less believed, anymore. In some ways merger talk is a reality test: is what I’ve made better than what we’re buying? And will the newly appointed mystery date VP agree? That kind of uncertainty can’t help but tank morale.
And now, optimism. As an orchestrator, an architect, a creator, this would be one of the greatest shopping sprees for intellectual property of the last 20 years. It will be a once in a lifetime treat to be the VP who gets to pick and choose among projects and people from two vast pools of ideas grown from very different gardens. Hand that task over to a Ray Ozzie, Chris Jones or Joe Belfiore, and, if you get everyone else sufficiently far out of their way, wondrous things are possible. I’d bet any of them, or perhaps a management star from Yahoo’s ranks, could inspire the best people from both companies to stick around, at least long enough to watch the first offspring rise above the merger mess, or, perhaps, go up in flames.
Rube Goldberg was an engineering student who quickly realized he preferred making fun of engineers more than engineering things himself. His legendary cartoons of bizarre, over-engineered devices for trivial tasks have lived on well past his own lifetime.
So what do we make of people who actually try to make Rube Goldberg machines? Are they simply creative enthusiasts with a sense of humor or are they entirely missing Goldberg’s point? You decide.
This year, at one of four Rube Goldberg Machine Contests, a team from Purdue won with a 156 step machine for making hamburgers.
Video highlights of the event on gizmodo.
And you can see photos of the winning machines from the last few years on the Purdue website.
According to Apple, over January and February of this year they surpassed Wal-Mart as the largest music retailer in the U.S.
Here’s why this is amazing:
The most important but rarely told story is that Apple is no longer a niche brand. When else in history has a BMW, a Rolex, a Four Seasons, successfully transitioned into a Honda, a Timex, or a Holiday Inn? It’s rare. When high-end brands go mass market, they rarely get it right. But Apple made the transition in a handful of years without anyone even noticing.
And more interesting to students of innovation is how the story line around Apple is still about innovation despite the gaps in the stereotype. It’s rarely mentioned how they were late to the digital music game, how many of the technological breakthroughs were done out of house, or how many mistakes competitors made that accelerated the rise of the i-pod and i-tunes so fast.
It’s thrilling to see a company thrive on maintaining their standards, and entertaining to see the late followers respond. But the true innovation at work here, if it can really be called an innovation, is quality. The distinction of the Apple brand is superior aesthetic, functional and design quality, and Apple has succeeded in making quality the distinctive factor in tech purchasing decisions. Not price. Not features. But quality. And the irony is how competitors refuse to compete on this turf, retreating back to price and features.
Perhaps the most important overlooked point lesson in all this success is how unexpected it was. I doubt any marketing projection for i-tunes or the i-pod had anything like the adoption curves seen above. I suspect they predicted they’d maintain their high-end brand with it’s resulting high-end marketshare, and were as surprised as the rest of the world with how quickly the i-pod became a phenomenon. For all their well deserved success, Apple still experiences the unexpected.
Interesting article in the NYT on the way willpower works (Found at kottke). I can’t say the article itself is good, but the questions it raises are. Check this out:
In one pioneering study, some people were asked to eat radishes while others received freshly baked chocolate chip cookies before trying to solve an impossible puzzle. The radish-eaters abandoned the puzzle in eight minutes on average, working less than half as long as people who got cookies or those who were excused from eating radishes. Similarly, people who were asked to circle every “e” on a page of text then showed less persistence in watching a video of an unchanging table and wall.
Ok. Stop laughing. Don’t we all test our willpower by staring at unchanging tables and walls? I know I do. And then, for fun, I break out the impossible puzzles, just for kicks!
The real problem here is that it’s hard to respect any article that mentions a study without providing references. I refuse to grant credibility to anyone using a study to support an argument without a reference. If the study was published I can read it myself and see what it actually says. Were the participants told the puzzle was impossible? How were they recruited? Were they paid? Did they accurately represent a typical urban population in age, education, etc?
As a baseline, anyone with above average willpower has a busy enough life not to have time to participate in psychological surveys. It’s a shallow, half-baked story that’s told here, and even at that, I’m not sure any conclusions can come from it. Speculation, yes. But a hypothesis, no.
I think I possess above average powers of will, but I would never test them against things I thought were pointless. Willpower works when I’m convinced of the value of the effort, or at a minimum, the value of the attempt. I can eat better or exercise more not because of some abstract force of will, but because my perception of the value grants me greater willpower.
And then the article obsesses about describing willpower in neurological terms, missing the point. For example:
No one knows why willpower can grow with practice but it must reflect some biological change in the brain. Perhaps neurons in the frontal cortex, which is responsible for planning behavior, or in the anterior cingulate cortex, which is associated with cognitive control, use blood sugar more efficiently after repeated challenges. Or maybe one of the chemical messengers that neurons use to communicate with one another is produced in larger quantities after it has been used up repeatedly, thereby improving the brain’s willpower capacity.
What would a kung-fu master or sports trainer say about willpower? There are tons of higher level masters of teaching willpower, but since they don’t have neuroscience degrees, this article neglects to give them a voice (Yes, it’s a short article, but the above paragraph is basically an extended guess. Why use 10% of the article on a guess, when a phone call could bring an expert with data).
If we are creatures of habit and increase our abilities at just about anything through repetition, why are the mechanisms for the habits of willpower any different?
My question to you is how do you cultivate your own willpower? When do you feel most in control, and most out of control? How do you use this knowledge to serve you?
