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What's in the Archives...

...of the blogosphere's collective intelligence.

I was going through some emails from this time last year and came across a post of Kathy Sierra's that I'd sent to Imbi. (I seem to be on a bit of a CPU bent this week.) The post was "The Power of One."

Purple Cows just don't usually come from teams working together to reach a solution. Purple Cows come from the wild-ass idea one guy had in the shower. That doesn't mean he can't be part of a team, but the more unusual an idea is, the more resistance it will get from a group, and that's often enough to suck the life out of an idea. Or it goes from being a purple cow to one that's merely a slightly darker shade of brown.

I'm not dissing teams--our books are all collaborative efforts, and far better because of it. And we consider ourselves to be on a team that includes our publisher O'Reilly. It's not teams that are the problem, it's the rabid insistence on teamwork. Group think. Committee decisions.

Most truly remarkable ideas did not come from teamwork. Most truly brave decisions were not made through teamwork. The team's role should be to act as a supportive environment for a collection of individuals. People with their own unique voice, ideas, thoughts, perspectives. A team should be there to encourage one another to pursue the wild ass ideas, not get in lock step to keep everything cheery and pleasant.

I simply don't buy into the "none of us is as good as all of us" as fact. While it's often true, it's just as often not. There are times when you can and should step back and say, "Not only am I as good as all of us, I'm actually better at this particular thing, because the entire team is headed in the wrong direction, and there's too much inertia to get the whole damn team to turn around at the same time." Obviously a manager doesn't want total anarchy and chaos from each individual thinking their idea rules and everybody else is an idiot, but somewhere there's a balance, and the heavy emphasis on teamwork/teamplayer-ness is tipped way too far in the non-individual direction.

I consider "There's no 'I' in Team" to be terribly depressing. It sounds, in fact, just like what the Borg said on Star Trek. There is most definitely an "I" in any team I'm on. I have value in, and out, of a team. I will not surrender my passion in order to be a team player. And any team who doesn't value that isn't a team I want to be part of. I do believe that a team can change the world, but it's still a team of individuals supporting each other in being brave, strong, innovative, and passionate.

There is an "I" in PASSION. (Most emphasis added.)

Indeed!

My Idea-Killing posts here and here are in a similar vein (and were also triggered by Kathy).

The point I'm also attempting to make, however, is that there are pearls of wisdom in the archives of thousands of bloggers. Those of us who are RSS addicted scan for the latest and greatest thoughts and ideas - while ignoring the ancient wisdom of mere moments ago.

Read these archives for a graduate school wealth of knowledge on Creating Passionate Users.
Or these archives on questions that lead to insightful leadership.
Or these on servant leadership lessons.
Or these from a productive slacker.
Or wander to the blogs of your favorite writers - find the gold - and share it with the rest of us.

Technorati Tags: CPU, Creating Passionate Users, Ed Brenegar, Kathy Sierra, Power of One, blog intelligence, Servant Leadership Blog, Slacker Manager

The Power of the Clueless

The ever enlightening and always brilliant Kathy Sierra on the Clueless Manifesto:

The clueless accomplish amazing things--not necessarily because we're bold, brilliant innovators, but perhaps because we just don't know any better. We see the simplicity of the forest while Those Who Know are overanalyzing the complex subtleties of the trees (and miss the point). Sometimes NOT knowing about a "problem" weakens (or eliminates) it.

Perception is a powerful tool. Believing there's a limitation can sometimes create that limitation. And for the clueless who don't know about the limitation, well, it's as if it doesn't exist. Belief matters. Not everywhere, not in everything, but more than we give credence to. (emphasis added)

I once worked in an environment where the leadership wanted me to "learn their culture" before I could provide any constructive input. Unfortunately "their culture" was actually the problem. It was like being absorbed into the Borg. While "culturally clueless", I could see the simplicity of the issues - once assimilated, I would have just became part of the problem.

UPDATE: Apparently Scoble is Clueless in Seattle.

Technorati Tags: Clueless Manifesto, CPU, Creating Passionate Users, Kathy Sierra, Scoble

Killer Ideas vs Idea Killers Part Two

Originally posted at achievable leadership on January 13th, 2006.

I wrote the original Killer Ideas post back in October for my achievable ends blog. I reposted it here on December 20th. I quote Kathy Sierra in that post and especially appreciate this line:

When you're really really on to something magical, you can guarantee there will be devil's advocates, naysayers, and vicious critics every step of the way.

I picked up a book Liam is reading, this morning, and came across this quote:

Most people can see problems. That doesn't require any special ability or talent. As Alfred A. Montapert observed, "The majority see the obstacles; the few see the objectives; history records the successes of the latter, while oblivion is the reward of the former." (page 136 paperback version)

Have you ever worked for someone who is adept at finding problems (with just about anything) but has no ideas for solutions. They expect you to come up with those ideas - and they will approve them. You end up going back to them innumerable times, only to have them sigh in the end, apparently dissatisfied with anything you've come up with, "All right, I guess that's the best you can do, let's just go with that one." This is normally driven by the approaching deadline which demands a decision be made.

It's important to understand that the problem is rarely with you, but is rather with the Idea-Killing Manager. They have no idea how to motivate creative people. They live in a world where they believe they are the arbiters of all things good and effective - but can't themselves produce those things. (How they've ended up at their level of leadership has always been a mystery to me - but management is populated with these folk. Read the Mini-Microsoft blog to experience the frustration of talented people working for incompetent management.)

Richard Florida (in a Gallup Management Interview - subscription required) talks about effective ways to manage creative people:

The real art is understanding individual psychology. A concern for structure and organizational charts and programs and policies is far less important than getting the individual psychology right. The structure will take care of itself; the real challenge of the creative age is figuring out how to deal with all of these different intrinsic needs and reward structures while consistently motivating people with the rewards that matter to them. The manager's task is to create a structure that enables creativity to occur. This requires a complete and total break with the industrial organization structure, the hierarchical model.

Unfortunately, often the leader in these situations only has the hierarchical model to hold on to. It's how they justify their existence. They are the leader.

I was recently in a heated conversation with someone who is near and dear to me. He was describing issues he was having with someone on a team he led. At one point, apparently to justify something he'd said, he emphatically stated, "I AM THE LEADER!" I confess that I lost it at that point.

Positional authority is the last thing a good leader uses in conflict. Gifted leaders realize that if they have to resort to their status to prove their point, then they may have won the battle - but they've lost the war. (My error in the above scenario is that I was not effectively listening to this young leader - and he had to resort to his emphatic statement in an attempt to have me understand his position in the original conflict.)

Idea-generating, creative types need leaders who will walk along side of them. Servant leaders who will create environments in which creative people flourish. This does not suggest that creatives need to be mollycoddled or not held responsible. Florida again:

Creative people want the freedom to work on their own terms and on their own time. They want to be responsible. That doesn't mean there's no accountability, but the accountability doesn't come from sitting at a desk counting time. Instead, the accountability is: "Do you deliver? Do you meet your performance measurements? Do you produce quality work in a timely way? Do you contribute?"

And later:
(O)rganizations really need to harness the creative energy of their workforce. I think we've gone down the wrong road of trying to manage creative workers. We've tried to apply a lot of industrial management techniques, which don't work, and we have to break nearly entirely with that.

In the first Killer Ideas vs Idea Killers post I refer to Daniel Pink's book, A Whole New Mind. Pink's book is a critical marker on the path to understanding success in the 21st Century. On his website, he links to a January 11th Business Week article on the upcoming DAVOS summit in Switzerland:

(I)t doesn't get much better than this when it comes to a serious discussion about the use of design thinking as a management methodology. As Roger Martin (dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto) puts it: "I think the reason innovation and design has percolated to the top of the WEF (DAVOS World Economic Forum) agenda is that big companies the world over have woken up to the fact that they have organized and controlled their firms to the point of stultification by using ERP [enterprise-resource planning], CRM [customer-relationship management], TQM [total quality management], and other reliability-oriented systems. They need to think in a fundamentally different way to reinvigorate their firms, and so they're reaching out to design and innovation."

In short, innovation, creativity, design -- whatever you want to call it -- is the new Six Sigma.

The overarching question shaping the Davos program is, How do you operationalize innovation? How do you go beyond giving lip service to creativity, which is where 95% of all U.S. corporations are today, to enabling managers and employees to truly innovate on a regular, sustained basis.

Hierarchically-motivated, idea-killing managers are doomed in this 21st Century, creative reality of business and social sector management. They are unable to motivate creative people and will not be able to keep them on their team.

So what do you do if you work for this kind of leader now, and there is little chance of them moving out of that position anytime soon. Well, it's probably time for you to move to a more satisfying, live-giving work environment. Richard Florida comments:

For managers, CEOs, or political leaders, the challenge is "How do I motivate? I see that the old, top-down, hierarchical, follow-me, my-way-or-the-highway style of leadership doesn't cut it anymore." The leaders who will be successful today, in business or politics, will be those who can stimulate and harness the creative capabilities of the greatest number of people.

Work for that kind of motivating, creativity-harnessing leader - and become one yourself.

Life's too short to work for, or to become an Idea Killer.

Technorati Tags: A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink, Gallup Management, idea killer, Kathy Sierra, killer idea, leadership, puppy, Richard Florida, Servant Leadership

Review: Good to Great and the Social Sectors

Almost two years ago, someone strongly advised Imbi and I to read Good to Great to better understand this person's leadership style. We were very impressed with the book and subsequently read Jim Collins earlier book, Built to Last. (Which is the order that Collins now recommends they be read.) There was much in these two books that seemed applicable to non-profit or NGO leadership but there were some things that particularly did not fit - how to measure the success of non-profit organizations in terms other than money, as well as governance issues - a CEO of a for profit company plays a different role than the leader of a non-profit.

What follows is my review of Collins' new monograph addition to G2G.

Technorati Tags: Built to Last, Frances Hesselbein, G2G, Good to Great, Good to Great and the Social Sectors, Jim Collins, review, social sector leadership

Did Someone Say "Chickens?"

Ed Brenegar points to a great new blogger - who makes his living in the chicken business, Brad Respess. Brad's L.A.D.s - Learning After Doing has been added to my must read list. I'll use one of the quotes that Ed points to:

Have you ever been in a meeting where one guy who is very smart and very experienced talked the entire time? Any time his subordinate asked a question, he cut off the answer in mid-sentence and answered himself? Didn't it come across rude and arrogant and surprising that someone at his age hadn't learned differently?

The consultant and I talked about that being one of my weaknesses - thinking that I have all the answers; being arrogant enough to cut people off and interject, cutting people off and others down. Is it an attempt to show off to a peer and show that you are somebody? Is it an ego stroking tool? Or is it arrogance that causes you to think that no one else is qualified, smart or wise?

Brad gets blogging - intelligent conversation, transparent honesty, well written with a definite point of view. Keep posting Brad and I'll keep reading.

Technorati Tags: blog, Brad Respess, Ed Brenegar, leadership, learning, chickens

A Life Hack that Works

I've talked about Getting Things Done in a number of posts - and commented on my apparent inability to get reading it done. LifeHacker points at this Guardian story of David McCandless' success with GTD.

Just four weeks ago, my desk was a shrine to disorder. It was cluttered with letters, takeaway menus, MiniDiscs and dead batteries, while stacks of printouts lay everywhere. A skyscraper of stuff towered in my inbox, untouched for months.

Now it is pristine. My intray is empty. My desk is clear. A smile is on my lips and I am getting things done. All thanks to one book.

McCandless identifies himself as a creative type who "recoil(s) from order". My business partner and wife, Imbi, would probably identify me in a similar manner. There is a higher order in chaos, after all. That's been my story, and perhaps I can no longer stick to it.

As soon as I post this, I'll pick the book back up and see if I can't make my way through it. Who knows, maybe in a month or so I will be able to write you a story of my own success, 43 folders and all.

Technorati Tags: GTD, David Allen, time management, todo

An Attention Deficit World

I'm sorry... What was I saying? Oh right, attention deficit. I'm trying to focus, but with all these distractions it can be hard.

Phones ring, emails chime, instant messages pop-up, someone knocks, the Blackberry buzzes - the competition for our attention seems to increase at a logarithmic pace. Studies show that for every serious interruption it can take between 15 to 25 minutes to get back on track. How are we able to accomplish anything? The New York Times reports the work interruption studies of UC Irvine Professor, Gloria Mark:

Beginning in 2004, she persuaded two West Coast high-tech firms to let her study their cubicle dwellers as they surfed the chaos of modern office life. One of her grad students, Victor Gonzalez, sat looking over the shoulder of various employees all day long, for a total of more than 1,000 hours. He noted how many times the employees were interrupted and how long each employee was able to work on any individual task.

When Mark crunched the data, a picture of 21st-century office work emerged that was, she says, "far worse than I could ever have imagined." Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What's more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task. To perform an office job today, it seems, your attention must skip like a stone across water all day long, touching down only periodically.

And how do we cope with our attempts at time management? I used to laugh at my wife and business partner, Imbi, when she would ring her computer screen with post-it notes. Mary Czerwinski, a Microsoft Research Scientist, pursuing the same research as Mark discovered that this was a common approach to coping:

When Gloria Mark and Mary Czerwinski, working separately, looked at the desks of the people they were studying, they each noticed the same thing: Post-it notes. Workers would scrawl hieroglyphic reminders of the tasks they were supposed to be working on ("Test PB patch DAN's PC - Waiting for AL," was one that Mark found). Then they would place them directly in their fields of vision, often in a halo around the edge of their computer screens. The Post-it notes were, in essence, a jury-rigged memory device, intended to rescue users from those moments of mental wandering.

One of my techniques (and I'm not a prime example of effective "Getting Things Done") in the past, was to use multiple computer screens. In a former office, I had two 21" monitors - plus I had my laptop on the desk. I arranged the screen real estate so that I could track and manage the things I needed to get done, while working on my main software tools. (Which, at that time were Media 100, After Effects and Photoshop.) Czerwinski's studies bore the effectiveness of this out - with productivity gains of as much as 44% for task completion.

Today, I use a combination of Backpack, iCal and my cell phone to help me get tasks done. I dump work information into Omni Outliner. I use Furl and del.icio.us to cache and tag web pages that I use for research. Entourage is my email client - until I can find the time and inclination to move to Mac's Mail app. Gmail is used as a place to store important documents - accessible from any computer. I have not found the perfect system to become more productive. And I'm not sure there is, in fact, a perfect system.

The search continues, however, for the Holy Grail of time & task management. Some think they've found it in David Allen's Getting Things Done. Merlin Mann's site, 43Folders, tracks the tools for the GTD "cult". I subscribe to his RSS feed. And one of these days I'll finish the book. Just as soon as I get a few more things done.

Now what was I supposed to do next...

Technorati Tags: ADD, GTD, NYT, time management

Tools for Getting Things Done

I'm slowly working my way through David Allen's very good book, Getting Things Done - How to Achieve Stress-Free Productivity. One of the first things he talks about is getting things off our minds.

I've used to-do lists on computers, Palms, etc - but never with great success. I forget to look at them or simply ignore them. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I've begun to use 37Signals Backpack to alleviate my stress and help me stay on top of my stuff. I love the email reminders - they have a set'em and forget'em quality - knowing I'll get an email at the assigned time to remind me (and I always read my email.)

Om Malik pointed to a new free To Do List Management service that launched today - Remember the Milk. The reminders alone are killer - via SMS, Instant Messaging and/or email. It's simple, attractive interface makes to do list management very easy & features iCal and RSS integration. And of course, as a Web 2.0 service, it features good collaboration tools. I've signed up to use it.

The tabbed interface (which I set up in seconds) shown here makes organizing my life that much easier. RTM provides you with an email address that allows you to send items to it via any email client. I'm not quite ready to pack Backpack in, but I'll be playing with RTM this week. I've already recommended it to my wife and three teenagers.

Hopefully none of us will forget the milk again!

Technorati Tags: AJAX, GTD, Remember the Milk, time management, todo, Web 2.0

Management Humility

How often do we hear about leaders admitting to making a mistake? And then working hard to correct that mistake?

CHFI is an MOR radio station in Toronto (that I worked for briefly while at university) that had a very popular morning show host, Erin Davis. As stations are wont to do, she was fired two years ago in favour of a "hipper" team. The audience reacted angrily to her departure and the show's ratings tanked. About six weeks ago, I began to notice billboards announcing Erin's return to the station. I was surprised. This isn't a normal turn of events. The Globe and Mail's Wallace Immen tells the story:

Behind Ms. Davis's dismissal was Julie Adam, the general manager and program director of CHFI, who fired the light-rock station's drive-time star in June, 2003, replacing her with a pair of urban hipsters, then known as Mad Dog and Billie, from a sister Rogers station with an edgier sound.

And behind Ms. Davis's return is the same Ms. Adam, who not only wooed her back but admitted "I made a mistake. A big one" as part of a public apology posted on the station's website to the radio star and her fans.

Immen goes on to say:

Managers who own up to their mistakes, apologize and learn from them, rather than covering them up, will find that it works in their favour, says Dorothy Hutt, director of the Ottawa office of executive coaching firm Collaborative Leadership Institute Inc.

"With all that is happening in the world, people are asking for leaders to be more responsible for their actions, and there is a real hunger for leaders who inspire. When openness is real, it generates trust and people will be inspired to do their best," Ms. Hutt says.

Too many leaders have too much of their own egos invested in their positions. They couldn't possibly admit that they are wrong. The sad thing in this Cluetrain world is that the rest of us already know the truth. (And are blogging about it.) We can spot the Emperor's New Clothes in a nanosecond. Transparency is the only answer and ultimately the transparent leader benefits more than the "infallible" idiot*. (*Tom Peter's & Napoleon Dynamite's word.)

Thanks to a good buddy of mine in Winnipeg for pointing out this Toronto Story!

Technorati Tags: CEO, humility, leadership, management, Cluetrain

I Love Tom Peters

Some days (well, actually most days) Tom nails it. I downloaded Tom's Project 05 from his site and am reading the section - CEOs are Idiots. (Napoleon Dynamite and Tom share a particular love for that word.) His Point 9 particularly grabbed me:

CEOs Are Idiots Who ... Spend Too Much Time in the Office, Not Enough Time in the Field; Fail to ColdCall at Least One Customer per Week; Are Surrounded by Sycophants; Have Low Tolerance for Contention.

That “great guru,” Texas Bix Bender (whoever the hell he is, but he’s written a book), gets it exactly right: “A BODY CAN PRETEND TO CARE, BUT THEY CAN’T PRETEND TO BE THERE.” So does the president of Logical Machines Corporation:
“YOU CAN’T LEAD A CAVALRY CHARGE IF YOU THINK YOU LOOK FUNNY ON A HORSE.”
And of course, Gandhi. “MY LIFE IS MY MESSAGE.”

I’ve written it before: You = Your calendar.
You can’t cheat on your calendar!
You Are (Precisely) How/Why You Spend Your Time.
PERIOD!

And all I can add is Amen!

Technorati Tags: CEO, Tom Peters