Last year I hacked away at an article about the need for a greater degree of experimentation in marketing organizations, but it never really seemed to gel quite right, and eventually I abandoned it. I’m happy to see that Joseph Jaffe completed the task in Manifesto for Experimentation. Successful executives I’ve seen already embrace this attitude when they become comfortable with tolerating risk, but it doesn’t commonly spread through organizations.
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Feedback Leads to Expert Performance
Of course we know feedback in human and product performance is important, but this study from K. Anders Ericsson is still interesting. He spent 25 years interviewing and analyzing high-flying professionals and is the coeditor of the recent 918-page book Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance.
You have to seek out situations where you get feedback. It’s a myth that you get better when you just do the things you enjoy.
Here’s a typical example: Medical diagnosticians see a patient once or twice, make an assessment in an effort to solve a particularly difficult case, and then they move on. They may never see him or her again. I recently interviewed a highly successful diagnostician who works very differently. He spends a lot of his own time checking up on his patients, taking extensive notes on what he’s thinking at the time of diagnosis, and checking back to see how accurate he is. This extra step he created gives him a significant advantage compared with his peers. It lets him better understand how and when he’s improving.
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Reviving How We Used to Think and Write
Richard Powers, winner of the 2006 National Book Award, reports how his speech recognition software has altered his experience of writing to be more like that of traditional oral culture…
…I can write lying down. I can forget the machine is even there. I can live above the level of the phrase, thinking in full paragraphs and capturing the rhythmic arcs before they fade. I don’t have to queue, stop, batch dispatch and queue up again. I spend less mental overhead on orthography and finger mechanics and more on hearing my characters speak themselves into existence. Mostly, I’m just a little closer to what my cadences might mean, when replayed in the subvocal voices of some other auditioner.
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Wilson on Change
It was recently the birthday of former American president [[Woodrow Wilson]], someone who knew about trying to be innovative and bringing about change. He pushed major legislation through Congress, entered World War I, and sought to establish the League of Nations. He said, “If you want to make enemies, try to change something.“
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Old School Scrappy Innovator: William Norris
Thomas J. Watson Jr., the head of I.B.M., which was famed for its militaristic corporate culture, was incredulous over Norris’s operation. So lean, so ragtag, so bafflingly humane. In a 1963 memo, Watson wondered how Control Data achieved with just a few dozen people what he had not with several thousand. Control Data later went on to defend its supercomputer innovation in an antitrust suit against Big Blue. It prevailed and won a settlement of $600 million.
A good example of agile innovation, from The Bleeding-Heart Rationalist.
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Jews-With-Trees
A fun story of one couple embracing the secular side of Christmas…
So as I browsed past velvet monogrammed stockings and quilted tree skirts and pine wreaths and silver-plated picture frames that doubled as stocking holders (genius!), I said to myself, as much as to my husband: “This is why I sometimes wish I celebrated Christmas. Everything looks so cozy and inviting.†And much to my surprise, he said, “We can celebrate Christmas if you want.†And like a 12-year-old, I said, “We can?†And he said, “Sure.â€
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Can invention and design be separated from production?
Louis Uchitelle asks that excellent question in the NY Times. My reaction is no: in a world of artful making, inventing without making would be difficult.
“Most innovation does not come from some disembodied laboratory,†said Stephen S. Cohen, co-director of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy at the University of California, Berkeley. “In order to innovate in what you make, you have to be pretty good at making it — and we are losing that ability.â€
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Customer-Focus When the Customer Doesn’t Even Pay
Diego pointed to this article for its uncommon attention to aesthetics, I point to it for its uncommon attention to the customer:Mr. Ennes… might be the best soup kitchen chef in New York City. On Thanksgiving, when most of the cooks at the city’s other 470-some soup kitchens simply roasted turkey, he prepared “turkey four ways,†including one with mango-ginger glaze and tropical fruit stuffing.
Despite the care he puts into his cooking, he doesn’t mind a little criticism. “They’re still customers, whether they’re paying $100 a plate or nothing,†Mr. Ennes said. “One thing we do here is listen to people and let them complain. Where else can a homeless person get someone to listen to them?â€
…At Broadway Community, everyone gets to eat. There is no humiliating food line to stand in. Volunteers set each of Mr. Ennes’s courses in front of the diners.
“When you force people to queue up for food, you encourage pushiness and aggressiveness and hardness,†he said. “Sitting at a table and being served encourages community.â€
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What is a human life worth?
A few years ago, when he was in his mid-40s, Zell Kravinsky gave almost all of his $45 million real estate fortune to health-related charities, retaining only his modest family home in Jenkintown, near Philadelphia, and enough to meet his family’s ordinary expenses. After learning that thousands of people with failing kidneys die each year while waiting for a transplant, he contacted a Philadelphia hospital and donated one of his kidneys to a complete stranger.
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Americans Online
The NY Times covers the new census figures…
Among adults, 97 million Internet users sought news online last year, 92 million bought a product, 91 million made a travel reservation, 16 million used a social or professional networking site and 13 million created a blog.
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Goodbye Leslie
I just learned Leslie Harpold past away. She and I didn’t know each other well; we shared some mailing lists and traded some emails. But we didn’t know each other well for a while — I can vividly remember reading her circa 1999. In my mind she is one of that small group of passionate people who loved the web from the earliest days and devoted a great deal of effort to exploring what it could be, so in some small way I feel we all owe a tiny debt of gratitude to Leslie for making the web a wonderful place.
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Get Real For Free
The [[37Signals]] Getting Real book is now available free online as well as in PDF and paperback formats. With a focus on building web apps, it’s a great perspective on using an agile/craft way of working. It’s also a clever publishing strategy, analogous to the traditional hardcover/paperback progression:
- Test and then build crazy excitement around the point of view
- Publish a PDF version inexpensively and sell tens of thousands of copies
- Release a paperback to capture additional market share (in time for the holidays!)
- Release a free HTML version that also serves as a marketing vehicle for their other products
Not too shabby.
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Maybe Don’t Call Research “Research”
Here’s a small but important lesson about getting field research done in a corporate environment. If you propose research, folks may hear that word and think R&D, and that’s not capitalizable, i.e. the cost can’t be allocated against a particular product/service. That means the cost can’t be delayed and counted against future revenues (delaying costs can be good for budget reasons or simply for the time value of money). This is because if you’re doing work for a project you have a much higher degree of confidence it will provide a return versus doing pure research & development.
If you can make it clear that the work is applied against a particular project, great, but otherwise be careful of using the word research to people who might interpret it in the accounting sense of the word. As an alternative, how about information gathering? Any other suggestions?
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Do Customer Communities Pay Off?
In HBR this month is a rare, methodical (and free) look at the financial effect of online communities via a study of eBay Germany…
Over the course of a year, we compared the behavior of community enthusiasts and lurkers with that of the control group. The differences were astonishing. Lurkers and community enthusiasts bid twice as often as members of the control group, won up to 25% more auctions, paid final prices that were as much as 24% higher, and spent up to 54% more money (in total). Enthusiasts listed up to four times as many items on eBay and earned up to six times as much in monthly sales revenues as the control users. The findings on first-time sellers were even more impressive: Compared with the controls, almost ten times as many lurkers (56.1%) and enthusiasts (54.1%) started selling on eBay after they joined and participated in customer communities.
The challenge for companies now is remembering that creating community means getting like-minded groups of people together to do things they like doing and not just installing some community software.
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Shoot Your Polling Place (U.S. only)
The Polling Place Photo Project is a nationwide experiment in citizen journalism that seeks to empower citizens to capture, post and share photographs of democracy in action. By documenting their local voting experience on November 7, voters can contribute to an archive of photographs that captures the richness and complexity of voting in America.