Noise Between Stations – Page 32

Noise Between Stations

Who are the new rebels? (Managers?)

I live in one of the art centers of the world — the West Chelsea section of Manhattan — and my opinion of today’s art can be summed up in one word: boring. Rarely do contemporary artists teach us anything, or even make us feel anything. The best art only manages commentary, as with Banksy’s mockery of Israel’s separation wall.

I’m currently reading Rollo May’s 1975 classic The Courage to Create. As he explores the dangerous work artists created through the ages, I’m reminded of my research into Music and Censorship and this quote from George Bernard Shaw…

Whatever is contrary to established manners and customs is immoral… every advance in thought and conduct is by definition immoral until it has converted the majority. For this reason it is of the most enormous importance that immorality should be protected jealously against the attacks of those who have no standard except the standard of custom, and who regard any attack on custom – that is, on morals – as an attack on society, on religion, and on virtue.

It seems almost quaint to worry about music — or any artistic — censorship now. Artists no longer force us to question our customs. Does anyone else? In the West we no longer share the meta-narrative of the Bible, so religious plurality is old news. Science so routinely announces breakthroughs we’re rarely shocked.

Our shared customs now center around work. Could there be some action so radical it forced us all to reconsider our working lives? It’s described every month in the pages of Fast Company and Worthwhile, but what if there was a figurehead, an event, or a series of events that led to a tipping point to make these magazine proclomations reality? What if all the middle managers at GE demanded different conditions the way unions do? What if a visionary CEO committed to a completely transparent corporation with activist board members demanding triple bottom line performance? Could changes like this send employees home shocked into a different understanding of how to lead their lives? What sort of conditions could make this possible?

11/9/2005
Balancing the heart and head is an old problem…

For the problem is simply how can warm passion and a cool sense of proportion be forged together in one and the same soul? Politics is made with the head, not with other parts of the body or soul. And yet devotion to politics, if it is not to be frivolous intellectual play but rather genuinely human conduct, can be born and nourished from passion alone. However, that firm taming of the soul, which distinguishes the passionate politician and differentiates him from the ‘sterilely excited’ and mere political dilettante, is possible only through habituation to detachment in every sense of the word. The ‘strength’ of a political ‘personality’ means, in the first place, the possession of these qualities of passion, responsibility, and proportion.

— Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation, 1918

11/8/2005
The world is one baby girl richer

My business partner Christina just gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. Congratulations to the new parents! You’re bound to have the smartest, geekiest, toughest kid on the block.

11/7/2005
Bottom-Up management lessons from no-collar workers

In this latest HBSWK piece, Bain’s talking customer experience. Not long ago, BCG was talking about open source-style collaboration. Naturally, we talk about the vital importance of strategic delivery too, having lived it. I clearly see many ways in which the no-collar working style — natural collaboration, little hierarchy, relationships built on trust, smooth flow of information — benefits performance from the bottom-up, in organizational ways that top-down management styles can’t.

11/7/2005
Guidant shakes with one hand and serves a lawsuit with the other

Did Johnson & Johnson heed my advice to stay away from purchasing Guidant with its unethical practices? Probably not, but I’m glad they’re hesistating. Guidant responds, typically, by suing the company that wants to buy it.

11/7/2005
500 years later, da Vinci’s bridge is constructed in Norway

A story of classic inspiration…

Norwegian painter and public art creator, VebjÃ¸rn Sand, saw the drawing and a model of the bridge in an exhibition on da Vinci’s architectural & engineering designs in 1996. The power of the simple design overwhelmed him. He conceived of a project to bring its eternal beauty to life. The Norwegian Leonardo Bridge Project makes history as the first of Leonardo’s civil engineering designs to be constructed for public use.

11/7/2005
Bill Swanson’s 25 Unwritten Rules of Management
Raytheon CEO Bill Swanson offered his 25 Unwritten Rules of Management and Jim Collins asks, “I wondered, how would his rules stack up against the behavior and leadership styles of the successful CEOs profiled in Good to Great? …the overall fit appears quite positive.”

For posterity, here’s Swanson’s list:
1. Learn to say, “I don’t know.” If used when appropriate, it will be often.
2. It is easier to get into something than it is to get out of it.
3. If you are not criticized, you may not be doing much.
4. Look for what is missing. Many know how to improve what’s there, but few can see what isn’t there.
5. Viewgraph rule: When something appears on a viewgraph (an overhead transparency), assume the world knows about it, and deal with it accordingly.
6. Work for a boss with whom you are comfortable telling it like it is. Remember that you can’t pick your relatives, but you can pick your boss.
7. Constantly review developments to make sure that the actual benefits are what they are supposed to be. Avoid Newton’s Law.
8. However menial and trivial your early assignments may appear, give them your best efforts.
9. Persistence or tenacity is the disposition to persevere in spite of difficulties, discouragement, or indifference. Don’t be known as a good starter but a poor finisher.
10. In completing a project, don’t wait for others; go after them, and make sure it gets done.
11. Confirm your instructions and the commitments of others in writing. Don’t assume it will get done!
12. Don’t be timid; speak up. Express yourself, and promote your ideas.
13. Practice shows that those who speak the most knowingly and confidently often end up with the assignment to get it done.
14. Strive for brevity and clarity in oral and written reports.
15. Be extremely careful of the accuracy of your statements.
16. Don’t overlook the fact that you are working for a boss.
17. Promises, schedules, and estimates are important instruments in a well-ordered business.
18. Never direct a complaint to the top. A serious offense is to “cc” a person’s boss.
19. When dealing with outsiders, remember that you represent the company. Be careful of your commitments.
20. Cultivate the habit of “boiling matters down” to the simplest terms. An elevator speech is the best way.
21. Don’t get excited in engineering emergencies. Keep your feet on the ground.
22. Cultivate the habit of making quick, clean-cut decisions.
23. When making decisions, the pros are much easier to deal with than the cons. Your boss wants to see the cons also.
24. Don’t ever lose your sense of humor.
25. Have fun at what you do. It will reflect in your work. No one likes a grump except another grump.
©2003 Raytheon

Links courtesy Pete Behrens.
11/2/2005
Fairly Good Practices

Fairly Good Practices from the Agile community (of which the design and management communities can learn a lot).

11/1/2005
Amazon disintermediates the credit card companies

Why bother with micropayments when you can reach right into the bank account?

For anyone familiar with European banking, this is an obvious solution. My European friends pay all their bills directly using a standard electronic system and none of them have checkbooks. Checkbooks are an American anachronism.

10/31/2005
Cultural capabilities: JetBlue vs. Song

Song Airlines is closing. It’s sad that a better customer experience alone isn’t enough to compete, but that in itself is a good lesson. The symptom of Song’s decline was a failure to replicate JetBlue’s service, while the cause is a failure to look beyond JetBlue’s product to the true source of their success. There’s a relationship between product, process, and culture, and JetBlue’s employee-focused (not consumer-focused!) culture is what propels them.

Though I must say the popular doubts about JetBlue’s ability to preserve this culture while they grow and grow are substantiated. As a JetBlue customer, I don’t feel the experience is any better these days, I only fly them for the price. It’s time for change.

10/31/2005
Bootstrap 1.0

In response to David Hornik’s Bubble 2.0 I responded that it looks more like Bootstrap 1.0 to me. Scott blogged this topic a month ago…

With customers using a working product, decisions about what type of additional capital will be needed to scale are much easier to frame. And if you do decide to approach an outside investor, youâ€™ll be holding more of the cards. …Bootstrapping is the new black.

I think we’ll see more overall innovation in the world if smart people aren’t only spending their time at investor presentations, waiting with their hands out instead of getting down to work.

It could be more profitable too. Today’s Wall Street Journal covers the topic, reporting the amount Flickr received from Yahoo! ($25 million?) was “significantly higher than the value Accel Partners had put on the company and Accel’s proposed investment.”

There’s still a place for venture investment of course. But VCs might need to evolve, making a greater number of smaller investments.

And incidentally, how funny is it to see the name Ludicorp in the Wall Street Journal?

10/31/2005
Mintzberg and Liedtka think it’s time for design

In Mintzberg’s “Strategy Safari” he devotes one chapter to The Design School: Strategy Formation as a Process of Conception. But his description of the cognitive act of design is different from the classic Herbert Simon description. So I appreciated discovering Liedtka’s In Defense of Strategy as Design (pdf), summarized…

This article proposes management reconsider the usefulness of the metaphor of design as a prescription for strategy making, arguing against Henry Mintzberg’s view that it is not appropriate. It reviews literature from the field of design and defines a set of attributes of the design process – which is synthetic, abductive, hypothesis-driven, opportunistic, dialectical, inquiring, and value-driven. The article examines the parallels between designing and creating business strategy and presents the implications of such an approach for designing the processes to design and execute strategy.

(Her Strategy as Design (2MB pdf) is an updated version of this argument.)

Now it seems Mintzberg and Liedtka have joined forces, submitting a piece titled Time for Design, “…making the case for design in management, in four approaches: formulaic, visionary, conversational, and evolving.” I’m looking forward to this one.

10/31/2005
ID Strategy Symposium and the design-business chasm

Yesterday I attended the Institute of Design Strategy Symposium. The remarks were along the lines of business design we’ve been reading about. What I particularly liked was that the conversation afterwards revolved mostly around the chasm between design and business and the means by which to span the chasm, mostly in terms of language (“design” is a non-starter; “innovation” is more business-friendly but too ambiguous to do anything more than start the conversation).

My colleagues and I don’t buy the stereotype of creative designers vs. logical financial people. There are people with different skillsets and attitudes and the best way to combine them to design new options is through close collaboration (aka co-creation). The example from the Symposium came from Mike Roberts who runs a customer experience group at JP Morgan. He makes progress through direct, personal conversations with people in traditional financial roles. As my friend Bill says, “Collaboration problems are People problems. They are often best solved by increasing the communication bandwidth between people.” The next step, I think, is to work on the best ways to get these skillsets collaborating using modes of conversation, prototyping exercises, boundary objects, and so on.

10/27/2005
Worse is better (and more human-centered)
Nicholas Carrâ€™s argument against peer-production of knowledge by “amateurs” has been getting a lot of attention, but I think it misses the point.

It’s not human-centered. I don’t mean that in a make the interface easy to use kind of way, but in a make it something people want kind of way. For example:
- Weâ€™re still learning that worse is better. In many cases simplicity is more important than correctness, consistency, and completeness. This is the reason Unix won out over Lisp (and then Linux over Unix), and more people read Wikipedia than Encyclopedia Brittanica. Most of the time a fast and free resource will suffice. It’s what people want.
- The algorithm that creates MP3s can make files smaller because it reproduces only the sound that humans hear and discards the rest, instead of trying to keep all the sound the microphone hears. MP3s won out over audiophile options because people like having 10,000 songs in their pocket. Most of the time a fast and free resource will suffice. It’s what people want.
Besides, these products don’t stay “worse” forever. They start simple, gain “market share” in a disruptive way, and then are improved over time. Linux has improved considerably. Wikipedia gets better every minute. AAC is an improvement over MP3. The new breed of wikis look swanky compared to the original wikis.

The ability to launch something simple and improve it over time is a huge competitive advantage for companies like Google. Can you imagine an established company having the discipline to launch something as simple as Craigslist?

The mantra is Do The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work.
10/27/2005
The listening-to-customers wake up call
Looking back through the classic management texts I realize the call to listen to customers isn’t new. Here’s a few that counsel an emphasis on customers:
- Innovation in Marketing (1962)
- In Search of Excellence (1982)
- Moments of Truth (1987)
- Relationship Marketing (1991)
- The Experience Economy (1999)
The repetition of this message isn’t surprising as it’s easy to walk around a modern corporation and meet plenty of people who should be familiar with their customers but aren’t. My little wake up call consists of asking, “How many of your customers have you met?” even when I know the answer is “none.”
10/25/2005