I've made a couple of observations regarding the persistence of cities vs. the tendency of corporations to die. A reader pointed out a New York Times article: A Physicist Turns the City Into an Equation wherein said physicist begins to analyze corporations, as well.
The physicist, Geoffrey West, likes to try to figure out why things are the way they are. He studied the biology of scaling, where for example an elephant is 10,000 times the size of a guinea pig, yet needs only 1000 times as much energy to live. He made a compelling case that it's the internal infrastructure that made this possible.
He began applying this logic to cities, which he discovered have massive economies of scale -- by living in a city, you are far greener than living in the suburbs. In addition, when a city doubles in size, every indicator of economic activity (including, alas, negative things like crime) increases by 15% per capita. Everyone is able to do more things and thus enrich their lives (at least, according to how we usually measure enrichment). It would appear that the face time and accidental connections produce more creativity (and cities that give up public spaces in favor of suburbs fare much more poorly).
Cities almost never die, whereas the modern corporation has an average lifespan of 40-50 years (interestingly, the working lifetime of one person). West discovered that, as the number of employees grows, the profit per employee shrinks: "... efficiencies of scale are almost always outweighed by the burdens of bureaucracy."
West compares the two: "Unlike companies, which are managed in a top-down fashion by a team of highly paid executives, cities are unruly places, largely immune to the desires of politicians and planners ... Cities can’t be managed, and that’s what keeps them so vibrant ... It’s the freedom of the city that keeps it alive.”
This gives me one metric for reinventing business. We must somehow create an organization that, like a city, becomes more efficient at creativity as the size increases. I'm not sure what that organization will look like, but it most definitely won't be a power hierarchy. And I suspect it will self-perpetuate primarily on fun (yes, it will have to be profitable, but fun will be its main driving force).
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Conference: JavaPosse Roundup, Feb 22-25
Registrations are open for the upcoming Java Posse Roundup, which I organize together with The Famous Java Posse Podcasters. It will once again be held in my beautiful mountain town of Crested Butte, Colorado during the height of ski season, and is an open spaces conference, which we've all agreed is both more fun and more educational than any other conference we've been to. We allot afternoons as free time so you can go skiing, but a surprising number of discussions happen on the slopes. Non-skiers often organize afternoon sessions and workshops.
Although the bulk of the attendees are indeed Java programmers, I find that most are also those who are interested in looking above and beyond the language to other languages on the JVM, new concepts in programming, and the business of programming. We record the sessions and you can listen to them as podcasts if you want to get a flavor of previous conferences.
The post-dinner lightning talks continue to be exceptionally popular, especially because any topic is fair game (not just programming-related subjects). We often get to know each other far better through the lightning talks than through the ordinary sessions.
As I did last year, I will be instigating numerous sessions on the concepts I've been discussing here in Reinventing Business. Last year it was an experiment to see if anyone showed up -- many did, and we had excellent conversations. Even if you're not a programmer, if you want to come just to discuss business topics I think you'll get a lot out of it.
You can find more information and register here. As we have experienced increasing numbers every year since the conference started, it's possible we will hit our size limit of 70 this year so you might want to register soon.
Although the bulk of the attendees are indeed Java programmers, I find that most are also those who are interested in looking above and beyond the language to other languages on the JVM, new concepts in programming, and the business of programming. We record the sessions and you can listen to them as podcasts if you want to get a flavor of previous conferences.
The post-dinner lightning talks continue to be exceptionally popular, especially because any topic is fair game (not just programming-related subjects). We often get to know each other far better through the lightning talks than through the ordinary sessions.
As I did last year, I will be instigating numerous sessions on the concepts I've been discussing here in Reinventing Business. Last year it was an experiment to see if anyone showed up -- many did, and we had excellent conversations. Even if you're not a programmer, if you want to come just to discuss business topics I think you'll get a lot out of it.
You can find more information and register here. As we have experienced increasing numbers every year since the conference started, it's possible we will hit our size limit of 70 this year so you might want to register soon.
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Click: The Magic of Instant Connections
Long ago, when I was living in Seattle and working on the team creating the Fluke 45 multimeter, I had one of the original Sun 1 workstations -- the more experienced software engineers had Sun-2's, but it was still pretty special to have your own "workstation" (a term we never use anymore; means "computer"). The big deal about it was that it ran your own Unix; you weren't sharing the power of the machine with others.
At home, I had a Kaypro IV (with 5 1/4 floppies), and later a Kaypro 10 (with a 10 MB hard drive!). For quite awhile, I struggled to figure out how to connect the Kaypro over a 1200 baud modem to the Unix system at work, so that I could run Gnu Emacs (which was just starting at the time; I later created the original C++-mode for it) on the Kaypro and work from home. This was my first in-depth introduction to the obscurities of Unix, via termcap -- theoretically, all I had to do was create the right termcap for the Kaypro and it would become an efficient remote terminal for Gnu Emacs running at Fluke. Testing eventually defeated me; modifying the termcap at Fluke, then going home and trying it on the Kaypro just didn't allow for rapid experimentation.
Why was I so desperate to work at home? The office working conditions were not great, kind of like a cushy factory floor. There was a lot of unnecessary noise: they had speakers all over the engineering area which were constantly announcing that some marketing person had a phone call, and interrupting us out of our flow. I began coming into work late, and working late into the evening, and I discovered that around five o'clock my productivity would go up, right when people went home and it got quieter. Also, I desperately needed to take a nap during the day and there was no way to do that other than pretending to be thinking at my desk (I could have been so much more productive by taking a catnap or three during the day!). The cafeteria food was not great and only moderately healthy, nor was going to restaurants.
The idea that working at home could solve most of the problems I had with the corporate environment persisted until I eventually took matters into my own hands and started a company of one. Thus I never had that many experiments with working at home while being employed at a traditional business; some, but not enough to know the real effects over the long term.
Recently, I've had encounters with two people who have created their own multi-employee businesses and are as convinced as I was that working remotely is the way to go. From what I've seen, they've done a pretty good job, probably because they created the business with remote work in mind.
And yet it doesn't feel right to me. To clarify, working remotely is sometimes a good idea, but creating a business that is all-remote, all the time doesn't sound so good. I looked at this to some degree when I asked Why Do We Work Together? But there are deeper factors than what we can easily see as the benefits of teams, and these factors are explored in the book Click: The Magic of Instant Connections.
The authors are the brothers Ori and Rom Brafman, who co-wrote Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior, which I also found fascinating. The brothers work hard to make their writing compelling so the books are easy to read, and at the same time their conclusions are backed by solid and well-cited research.
The book makes the argument that what we usually think of as requirements for connection are often just accidents. The biggest of these is proximity: you connect with people who are nearby. In classrooms organized alphabetically, you connect with those who sit by you.
In MIT dorms after World War II, students were assigned randomly to dorm rooms because dorm management was unable to do anything else. Each dorm was a linear building, so if your room was in the middle you had more people walking by. In every case, those who lived in the middle had more social connections, and those who lived on the ends had less.
The best programming seminars I gave happened in the years before I realized that lecturing was just too exhausting and un-fun for me, and tedious and unfulfilling for the attendees. During that transition period, my goal became to shorten the lectures and get to the exercises (when most of the learning happened). I also selfishly wanted to reduce my time spent finding basic conceptual and syntax errors in student code, because I also found that exhausting. At that time, pair programming was on the rise, and after a couple of experiments I realized that when people pair, they help each other find the tedious mistakes, leaving the more stimulating problems for me. I tried numerous ways to get people to pair, but without some kind of structure I found that people would often slip back into working on their own (from years of having that imposed in school). A few failed experiments showed that people don't like to see the internals of the pairing mechanism or have it take too long. I wrote a program that took a list of names and randomly paired them with others, keeping track so the next time I ran the program it would pair everyone with someone new. The pairing happened very quickly and began working quite well.
Something interesting began happening during these seminars (which lasted 5 days). After a day or so, the noise level during exercises went up -- something I considered quite positive. People weren't just talking to their current partners, they were talking to previous partners. Often, by the end of the seminar, everyone had partnered with everyone else at least once, and we had gone from a room full of strangers into a connected group. For me, that was much more satisfying than how much people had learned about a programming language.
The book also demonstrates how perceived connections make us more open to clicking. Sociologists experimented with meaningless things like name or birthday similarity, and discovered that people are more open to each other when they believe they have "something in common." If that commonality is fabricated, it doesn't matter -- the "click" still happens. And the people who the brothers call "naturals," those who seem to be able to connect with anybody, appear to believe on a fundamental level that they have something in common with everyone.
Commonality can be created through shared experience. The strongest of these is a life-threatening situation like war, which usually forms a permanent bond among members of a team. Leadership and team-building retreats are famous for using "trust falls" to fabricate a sense of shared jeopardy. But I also found that my seminars created bonds by sharing the experience of problem-solving.
The most compelling chapter was the last one, "Personal Elevation." It relied not on science, but on your own personal experiences of how, when you're with people that you "click" with, you become a much better person yourself. I feel like I've gone through my life almost seeing this, but with it hiding behind a veil of distraction and misdirection. Once it becomes clear, you realize that the times you've been at your best come from the people you are with at those times. Indeed, the best love relationships are the ones where your partner doesn't fulfill you (the thing we always imagine we're looking for) but instead induces you to become a much better version of yourself. The biggest loss when those relationships end comes from sliding backwards into your single self, and coping with the memory of who you were when you were with them. And yet it seems almost ordained that you get a glimpse of your better self for awhile, and then must be left to create it on your own, in cycles, because ultimately you can't move to an even higher level together with someone until you can self-generate the previous level. Plus, the other person is going through their cycles and so if you're moving forward there often comes a point where the two of you have done as much as you can for each other and to remain together would mean stagnation or moving backwards.
The one big question that the book brings up but doesn't ask, because it cannot answer, is this: Can you click with just anyone? Think back, and you see that you do in fact click with people with whom you are physically proximate, and that you "have things in common with." But the brothers strongly suggest that the resonance that we attribute to fundamental similarities is, in a sense, an accidental illusion -- we have convinced ourselves that we only resonate with people under certain conditions of commonality, when in fact those conditions may simply be an excuse to resonate, an excuse produced by accidents of co-location and apparent similarities. Numerous experiments show that when those conditions are fabricated, the clicking happens anyway. And those rare "naturals" who seem able to click with anyone might just be people who have figured out (usually subconsciously) that you connect with people simply because they are people, and not because of some arbitrary constraints we have mistakenly correlated with connection. The people hardest to connect with (and I include myself in this category, in some phases of my life) are the ones who have decided that connections can be made only with those who have the "right" characteristics. This probably describes the core of all human strife, and shows why "naturals" who can connect with anyone are so precious.
The book leaves you wondering -- again, because it's probably not possible to answer the question -- whether you can learn to be a "natural."
Highly recommended: a small book, easy and entertaining, and it will make you think differently about your connections with people in the world.
At home, I had a Kaypro IV (with 5 1/4 floppies), and later a Kaypro 10 (with a 10 MB hard drive!). For quite awhile, I struggled to figure out how to connect the Kaypro over a 1200 baud modem to the Unix system at work, so that I could run Gnu Emacs (which was just starting at the time; I later created the original C++-mode for it) on the Kaypro and work from home. This was my first in-depth introduction to the obscurities of Unix, via termcap -- theoretically, all I had to do was create the right termcap for the Kaypro and it would become an efficient remote terminal for Gnu Emacs running at Fluke. Testing eventually defeated me; modifying the termcap at Fluke, then going home and trying it on the Kaypro just didn't allow for rapid experimentation.
Why was I so desperate to work at home? The office working conditions were not great, kind of like a cushy factory floor. There was a lot of unnecessary noise: they had speakers all over the engineering area which were constantly announcing that some marketing person had a phone call, and interrupting us out of our flow. I began coming into work late, and working late into the evening, and I discovered that around five o'clock my productivity would go up, right when people went home and it got quieter. Also, I desperately needed to take a nap during the day and there was no way to do that other than pretending to be thinking at my desk (I could have been so much more productive by taking a catnap or three during the day!). The cafeteria food was not great and only moderately healthy, nor was going to restaurants.
The idea that working at home could solve most of the problems I had with the corporate environment persisted until I eventually took matters into my own hands and started a company of one. Thus I never had that many experiments with working at home while being employed at a traditional business; some, but not enough to know the real effects over the long term.
Recently, I've had encounters with two people who have created their own multi-employee businesses and are as convinced as I was that working remotely is the way to go. From what I've seen, they've done a pretty good job, probably because they created the business with remote work in mind.
And yet it doesn't feel right to me. To clarify, working remotely is sometimes a good idea, but creating a business that is all-remote, all the time doesn't sound so good. I looked at this to some degree when I asked Why Do We Work Together? But there are deeper factors than what we can easily see as the benefits of teams, and these factors are explored in the book Click: The Magic of Instant Connections.
The authors are the brothers Ori and Rom Brafman, who co-wrote Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior, which I also found fascinating. The brothers work hard to make their writing compelling so the books are easy to read, and at the same time their conclusions are backed by solid and well-cited research.
The book makes the argument that what we usually think of as requirements for connection are often just accidents. The biggest of these is proximity: you connect with people who are nearby. In classrooms organized alphabetically, you connect with those who sit by you.
In MIT dorms after World War II, students were assigned randomly to dorm rooms because dorm management was unable to do anything else. Each dorm was a linear building, so if your room was in the middle you had more people walking by. In every case, those who lived in the middle had more social connections, and those who lived on the ends had less.
The best programming seminars I gave happened in the years before I realized that lecturing was just too exhausting and un-fun for me, and tedious and unfulfilling for the attendees. During that transition period, my goal became to shorten the lectures and get to the exercises (when most of the learning happened). I also selfishly wanted to reduce my time spent finding basic conceptual and syntax errors in student code, because I also found that exhausting. At that time, pair programming was on the rise, and after a couple of experiments I realized that when people pair, they help each other find the tedious mistakes, leaving the more stimulating problems for me. I tried numerous ways to get people to pair, but without some kind of structure I found that people would often slip back into working on their own (from years of having that imposed in school). A few failed experiments showed that people don't like to see the internals of the pairing mechanism or have it take too long. I wrote a program that took a list of names and randomly paired them with others, keeping track so the next time I ran the program it would pair everyone with someone new. The pairing happened very quickly and began working quite well.
Something interesting began happening during these seminars (which lasted 5 days). After a day or so, the noise level during exercises went up -- something I considered quite positive. People weren't just talking to their current partners, they were talking to previous partners. Often, by the end of the seminar, everyone had partnered with everyone else at least once, and we had gone from a room full of strangers into a connected group. For me, that was much more satisfying than how much people had learned about a programming language.
The book also demonstrates how perceived connections make us more open to clicking. Sociologists experimented with meaningless things like name or birthday similarity, and discovered that people are more open to each other when they believe they have "something in common." If that commonality is fabricated, it doesn't matter -- the "click" still happens. And the people who the brothers call "naturals," those who seem to be able to connect with anybody, appear to believe on a fundamental level that they have something in common with everyone.
Commonality can be created through shared experience. The strongest of these is a life-threatening situation like war, which usually forms a permanent bond among members of a team. Leadership and team-building retreats are famous for using "trust falls" to fabricate a sense of shared jeopardy. But I also found that my seminars created bonds by sharing the experience of problem-solving.
The most compelling chapter was the last one, "Personal Elevation." It relied not on science, but on your own personal experiences of how, when you're with people that you "click" with, you become a much better person yourself. I feel like I've gone through my life almost seeing this, but with it hiding behind a veil of distraction and misdirection. Once it becomes clear, you realize that the times you've been at your best come from the people you are with at those times. Indeed, the best love relationships are the ones where your partner doesn't fulfill you (the thing we always imagine we're looking for) but instead induces you to become a much better version of yourself. The biggest loss when those relationships end comes from sliding backwards into your single self, and coping with the memory of who you were when you were with them. And yet it seems almost ordained that you get a glimpse of your better self for awhile, and then must be left to create it on your own, in cycles, because ultimately you can't move to an even higher level together with someone until you can self-generate the previous level. Plus, the other person is going through their cycles and so if you're moving forward there often comes a point where the two of you have done as much as you can for each other and to remain together would mean stagnation or moving backwards.
The one big question that the book brings up but doesn't ask, because it cannot answer, is this: Can you click with just anyone? Think back, and you see that you do in fact click with people with whom you are physically proximate, and that you "have things in common with." But the brothers strongly suggest that the resonance that we attribute to fundamental similarities is, in a sense, an accidental illusion -- we have convinced ourselves that we only resonate with people under certain conditions of commonality, when in fact those conditions may simply be an excuse to resonate, an excuse produced by accidents of co-location and apparent similarities. Numerous experiments show that when those conditions are fabricated, the clicking happens anyway. And those rare "naturals" who seem able to click with anyone might just be people who have figured out (usually subconsciously) that you connect with people simply because they are people, and not because of some arbitrary constraints we have mistakenly correlated with connection. The people hardest to connect with (and I include myself in this category, in some phases of my life) are the ones who have decided that connections can be made only with those who have the "right" characteristics. This probably describes the core of all human strife, and shows why "naturals" who can connect with anyone are so precious.
The book leaves you wondering -- again, because it's probably not possible to answer the question -- whether you can learn to be a "natural."
Highly recommended: a small book, easy and entertaining, and it will make you think differently about your connections with people in the world.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Further "Reason" Micro-Essays
I've been saving the best of the "Reason" notes that people give when joining the discussion group (see bottom of the page for details) here and here, but those have gotten large so I'm starting a new one.
- The approach itself: from revenue based to creativity based. Declare creative products as a business target, not profit. I see every day how creativity changes the world. In this case under term 'creativity' I do understand eagerness to create something beautiful, inspiring. In other words business should follow the same path of development as each personal one: learn the world, learn yourself, develop yourself, develop the world, make yourself better, make the world better.
- The weighting algorithm that gives unjustified power to those interested more in having it than in doing the right thing for the business.
- I am a long-term cubicle dweller. Over time, in part due to new technology, my job has become significantly more flexible, in terms of hours, dress, and general culture. However, it is still probably not remotely where it could and should be. Everyone has their personal ways to think of the perfect job - If only X, Y and Z, I'd be happy and this would be a great job. For me, the best jobs give a lot of flexibility in every way. Ability to take time off when I want (assuming I have backup), take long trips, work much longer hours on interesting projects, form teams with varying people to get the job done - well, you get the idea.
- The top down nature of decision making. The failure of the old Soviet system proved that decentralized decision making is superior. There is a great deal of knowledge about the market and operations that goes underutilized in large companies. Implementing systems that let employees benefit from sharing and exploiting this knowledge will be the solution.
- To change the focus from dollars and cents to people and sense (common).
- The soul-crushing mindless conformity. Where doing the right thing as opposed to mindlessly following the official process becomes an act of subversion.
- To change "maximizing shareholder value" to "maximizing customer value". Like Apple. Google. Seth Godin. Anthony Ulwick. And some of the companies and books you've already reviewed here.
- There are many things I'd like to change, but I suspect the hierarchical/command and controls structure of organizational design is near the top of my list, along with Taylorist notions focusing on efficiency rather than effectiveness. I could go on, and on.
- I'd like to see traditional hierarchical structures left by the wayside. I'm particularly interested in the restructuring of non-profits (churches, charities, etc.). If a flat structure could be implimented successfully without the "bottom line", what would that tell us about redesigning social structures, including "for-profit" businesses?
- Making the result of work count, not the number of hours spent reaching this result. This is especially hard as I work as a contractor (if I know the English term correctly, we say something like "resource consultant" in Swedish).
- The attitude of younger employees at small business (less than 20 employees). What do you do when you've reengineered your company and your services and you realize that all the kids coming out of school are unpassionate zombies that could care less about programming. What do you do as a manager when you've done everything right? Why is it always the manager's fault? Do employees ever deserve some of the blame?
- The way corporations describe themselves. If I find a new company and I want to know what they do, I usually go to Wikipedia to read a clear description. Go to the companies' site and it's keywords and empty platitudes.
- I'd like to see beyond the idea that a "grown up" company values stability and status quo over innovation. I'd like people to be rewarded for creating things, not playing office politics.
- That we do not necessarily need a process, methodology or management theory to get people to work together effectively.
- Business should mean value to both employees and customers. A business idea should not be a trick that just aims at profits, instead it should be something that rejuvenates economy and creates a value ecosystem.
- I think having complete transparency at all levels could be a very important change. Everyone has to argue for their standpoint and everyone is invited to debate on all issues. My previous boss told me "you have to understand that this is not a democracy", and that really says it all I think.
- I would like business to be more interesting, both as a consumer and a producer, more participatory, so that making money merges with following some fascinating exhilarating thread. Can this really happen? Probably not, but if we can develop some model of how it can happen, we may recognize when we at least start to approach it.
Monday, December 13, 2010
Fascinating Analysis of Tech Business
The article Mobile Opportunity: What's really wrong with BlackBerry (and what to do about it) talks about RIM, but the analysis in the first part of the article applies to most tech companies, and probably most companies (tech companies evolve faster and so it's easier to see there).
The fascinating part is how failure sneaks up on success: each time an adjustment is made, sales go up and profits go up, but you're eating a different part of the adoption curve. And when everything looks the best, you're just about out of adopters -- but your company has built itself up to consume adopters at an enormous rate. When the crash begins to happen, the natural response is to do what bumped the curve the last two times ... but no more adopters means it doesn't work. And by now the company is so invested in its flagship product, and so big, that it doesn't have the cojones to innovate anymore.
The author then describes what the company needs to do (if it can figure out in time that it's walking on the precipice), but he doesn't say how they can cause the sudden cultural revolution necessary to return to innovation -- indeed, he admits that it probably won't happen.
Culture is not some strategy that can suddenly be changed -- it must be woven into the company. If that doesn't happen from the start, I doubt it can be "reengineered" into the company later.
Esalen Creativity Workshop
I'm a bit of a workshop junkie. I've had some wonderful experiences at workshops. It's a crap shoot; you never really know what you're going to get but every once in awhile something outstanding happens, which makes the mediocre ones worth it (the bad ones are easy; you either figure it out ahead of time or during the first session and you leave. The mediocre ones are the challenge: Should I Stay Or Should I Go? It's especially bad when you hear there was a great one right next door and you could have switched).
As research for the Team Creativity Workshop, I attended a workshop at Esalen called "Stoking the Creative Fires: Nine Ways to Rekindle Passion and Imagination," by Phil Cousineau & Gregg Chadwick.
Phil listed books he had written and films he had made. I've known lots of authors -- completing a book is certainly an accomplishment, but it doesn't mean you can teach. Gregg was basically described as a painter, and we have lots of those in Crested Butte. My experience in past Esalen workshops has taught me that you never know what you're going to get. They always find people who are well-accomplished, but until you're actually experiencing the workshop, you never know.
Also, there's the whole forum of lecturing. Despite many studies showing that lectures (a 500-year throwback to pre-moveable-type days when books were so precious that lecturing was used to, in effect, create a kind of copy machine) are one of the worst forms of teaching, we continue doing it because it's what we know, and easier than coming up with an alternative. To compensate, I've tried to make my own presentations closer to performance art experiences (I don't claim to have achieved this, but I try).
Thus I was completely unprepared to encounter my first genuine teacher-as-storyteller, which is Phil. Just like lecturing, one person is talking to a group, but that's the only similarity. Phil was absolutely captivating, because all he did was tell one story after another, loosely connected with quotes and ideas. It was a perfect example of "show don't tell": traditional lecturing is "telling," do this, do that, don't do this. Phil's stories were the epitome of "show," because, after being entertained by them, we each took from them whatever we were ready to take -- the ideas flowed unmolested between the cracks of our consciousness.
It turns out that Phil specializes in storytelling and has written books on or around the topic. He worked with Joseph Campbell and made a film about him (The Hero's Journey). Storytelling is kind of his thing, so it's not that surprising that he kept us all so riveted during the workshop. This amazing experience was one of those very mixed blessings: I now know what it means to captivate an audience. And my previous delusion that I was the least bit capable of doing that is permanently ruined.
In that same vein, Gregg's paintings were amazing to look at (I told him I thought he saw the world through colored tissue paper) -- so amazing that they made me despair of ever achieving anything with my own feeble efforts. At least I know what "amazing" looks like, and I will keep trying. During the painting portion of the workshop, Gregg did not make suggestions or try to get us to paint in any particular way, although we did a marvelous little Zen exercise called "Enso" which involves painting a circle with a Japanese brush, and then reading meaning about your current state of being from the result. The simplicity of the act, I think, helped open people up and got them to paint (some who came for writing did not choose to paint, although I find that crossing over can stoke the fires on both sides, something that Phil and Gregg seemed to believe).
With workshops in general and Esalen in particular, you never know when the magic is going to strike, except that it will probably be when you least expect it. This was one of those weekends.
One very promising moment came in the dining hall, when an attendee of a different workshop asked what I was working on. When I began explaining about the team creativity workshops, this person said, "We need you to come to our company! That's exactly what our team needs!" A good omen.
As research for the Team Creativity Workshop, I attended a workshop at Esalen called "Stoking the Creative Fires: Nine Ways to Rekindle Passion and Imagination," by Phil Cousineau & Gregg Chadwick.
Phil listed books he had written and films he had made. I've known lots of authors -- completing a book is certainly an accomplishment, but it doesn't mean you can teach. Gregg was basically described as a painter, and we have lots of those in Crested Butte. My experience in past Esalen workshops has taught me that you never know what you're going to get. They always find people who are well-accomplished, but until you're actually experiencing the workshop, you never know.
Also, there's the whole forum of lecturing. Despite many studies showing that lectures (a 500-year throwback to pre-moveable-type days when books were so precious that lecturing was used to, in effect, create a kind of copy machine) are one of the worst forms of teaching, we continue doing it because it's what we know, and easier than coming up with an alternative. To compensate, I've tried to make my own presentations closer to performance art experiences (I don't claim to have achieved this, but I try).
Thus I was completely unprepared to encounter my first genuine teacher-as-storyteller, which is Phil. Just like lecturing, one person is talking to a group, but that's the only similarity. Phil was absolutely captivating, because all he did was tell one story after another, loosely connected with quotes and ideas. It was a perfect example of "show don't tell": traditional lecturing is "telling," do this, do that, don't do this. Phil's stories were the epitome of "show," because, after being entertained by them, we each took from them whatever we were ready to take -- the ideas flowed unmolested between the cracks of our consciousness.
It turns out that Phil specializes in storytelling and has written books on or around the topic. He worked with Joseph Campbell and made a film about him (The Hero's Journey). Storytelling is kind of his thing, so it's not that surprising that he kept us all so riveted during the workshop. This amazing experience was one of those very mixed blessings: I now know what it means to captivate an audience. And my previous delusion that I was the least bit capable of doing that is permanently ruined.
In that same vein, Gregg's paintings were amazing to look at (I told him I thought he saw the world through colored tissue paper) -- so amazing that they made me despair of ever achieving anything with my own feeble efforts. At least I know what "amazing" looks like, and I will keep trying. During the painting portion of the workshop, Gregg did not make suggestions or try to get us to paint in any particular way, although we did a marvelous little Zen exercise called "Enso" which involves painting a circle with a Japanese brush, and then reading meaning about your current state of being from the result. The simplicity of the act, I think, helped open people up and got them to paint (some who came for writing did not choose to paint, although I find that crossing over can stoke the fires on both sides, something that Phil and Gregg seemed to believe).
With workshops in general and Esalen in particular, you never know when the magic is going to strike, except that it will probably be when you least expect it. This was one of those weekends.
One very promising moment came in the dining hall, when an attendee of a different workshop asked what I was working on. When I began explaining about the team creativity workshops, this person said, "We need you to come to our company! That's exactly what our team needs!" A good omen.
Friday, December 3, 2010
The Business Book/Self-Help Section
I was in a Border's bookstore the other day, browsing the business book section, and began to feel that I had somehow wandered into self-help. I checked, it was across the store. And yet I was finding books that were most distinctly more of a self-help flavor than business. There was even one book, written by a guy who created a successful design firm, that was supposed to be about business but ended up being mostly about how this guy lost a bunch of weight, and how you can, too. I'm pretty sure weight-loss motivational books belong in self-help.
I suppose it's not surprising that publishers try to pitch whatever they can in business books. The expectation that business books be based on repeatable results -- well, that hope evaporated when Frederick Winslow Taylor fabricated his data and declared it to be the dawn of "scientific management." Indeed, going into the business book section is an exercise in hope.
The positive note is that the incredible mass of books classified as "business" trains us to think very critically when approaching the topic.
I suppose it's not surprising that publishers try to pitch whatever they can in business books. The expectation that business books be based on repeatable results -- well, that hope evaporated when Frederick Winslow Taylor fabricated his data and declared it to be the dawn of "scientific management." Indeed, going into the business book section is an exercise in hope.
The positive note is that the incredible mass of books classified as "business" trains us to think very critically when approaching the topic.
Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Dreams
Everything beyond the essentials necessary for life are arguably unnecessary. And yet, once we have the basics we are compelled to search for something more. But everything beyond the basics -- those things we seem to need the most -- fall into the realm of "dreams." We must have the fancier clothes and nicer car and bigger house because we believe that they will somehow fulfill our dreams of happiness. With a little distance it's easy to see these things are not the least bit essential, and yet they are the things we insist the hardest that we must have or life is not worth living. I suspect that the thing we must actually have is higher meaning, that thing that, in the striving but never reaching, gives us a deeper sense of worth. The expensive material items also require striving, which may explain the mistake -- the reach feels similar, but the results are dramatically different.
Is Employee-Centered Essential?
The reason that cities persist while businesses tend to die might be that, when push comes to shove, a city has to consider its livability. People might live in a city because they can get a job there, or because they grew up there and are comfortable with the place. But at the most fundamental level, cities compete with each other on livability. The most desirable citizens are the ones that have the power to choose the most desirable cities.
Industrial-age companies can always convince themselves that the bottom line trumps all. It seems perfectly reasonable to say, "in the name of profitability we're going to make life here more and more miserable," with the subtext, "if you don't like it you can always go someplace else because we'll still be here making money, baby!" It doesn't matter that we've discovered again and again that it's really hard to make money when people don't want to be there anymore.
Some companies like Zappos have customer-centered goals, and on the surface that seems like it could work. Treat customers as well as you possibly can, and that attitude should spill over to employees, right?
When I was a kid I had this illusion about a such a place. If the customer experience was that great, it must be a terrific place to work. When I was twelve or so, I decided I wanted to work at Disneyland! (Specifically, I wanted to be an audio-anamatronics engineer. Robots are cool!). I was so focused on this that my dad took me up there to talk to the company. I have a memory of the front of the building, but after that it's a blank. I suspect the trauma of having my dream crushed by the reality of seeing how it was an ordinary job was too great and I've buried the experience.
Years later, when I was finishing my undergraduate degree at UC Irvine, I met students who worked at Disneyland. It seemed there were two kinds: those who had worked there and hated it so much they couldn't bear the place, and those who were still working there because they could hold onto the dream by compartmentalizing their experiences and saying, "yes, it sucks here but I want these customers to have the great experience I had." The latter group is what Disneyland thrives on -- they've built such a compelling dream that they have a steady stream of employees who want to be part of it, no matter what the cost. That dream is powerful enough that the company can be abusive and get away with it, just like companies in previous centuries could be abusive simply because they had a stronghold on jobs and could force people to accept those conditions by controlling whether they worked at all. Disneyland has created something unique and still has that power, whereas the world in general is being changed by increasing choice. Choice lets the most desirable employees go elsewhere, and that forces those in power to (albeit slowly) begin to behave themselves.
Choice is the enemy of power. (Choice doesn't care about this, and that makes power all the madder).
Industrial-age companies can always convince themselves that the bottom line trumps all. It seems perfectly reasonable to say, "in the name of profitability we're going to make life here more and more miserable," with the subtext, "if you don't like it you can always go someplace else because we'll still be here making money, baby!" It doesn't matter that we've discovered again and again that it's really hard to make money when people don't want to be there anymore.
Some companies like Zappos have customer-centered goals, and on the surface that seems like it could work. Treat customers as well as you possibly can, and that attitude should spill over to employees, right?
When I was a kid I had this illusion about a such a place. If the customer experience was that great, it must be a terrific place to work. When I was twelve or so, I decided I wanted to work at Disneyland! (Specifically, I wanted to be an audio-anamatronics engineer. Robots are cool!). I was so focused on this that my dad took me up there to talk to the company. I have a memory of the front of the building, but after that it's a blank. I suspect the trauma of having my dream crushed by the reality of seeing how it was an ordinary job was too great and I've buried the experience.
Years later, when I was finishing my undergraduate degree at UC Irvine, I met students who worked at Disneyland. It seemed there were two kinds: those who had worked there and hated it so much they couldn't bear the place, and those who were still working there because they could hold onto the dream by compartmentalizing their experiences and saying, "yes, it sucks here but I want these customers to have the great experience I had." The latter group is what Disneyland thrives on -- they've built such a compelling dream that they have a steady stream of employees who want to be part of it, no matter what the cost. That dream is powerful enough that the company can be abusive and get away with it, just like companies in previous centuries could be abusive simply because they had a stronghold on jobs and could force people to accept those conditions by controlling whether they worked at all. Disneyland has created something unique and still has that power, whereas the world in general is being changed by increasing choice. Choice lets the most desirable employees go elsewhere, and that forces those in power to (albeit slowly) begin to behave themselves.
Choice is the enemy of power. (Choice doesn't care about this, and that makes power all the madder).
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Managed Out Of Business
I just listened to the RadioLab episode on cities. In it, they point out that a city, once established, rarely goes away -- it usually takes a disaster for a city to vanish (even Detroit is already showing signs of revival; the ultra-cheap prices are attracting artists who are buying up blocks). They contrast this with the surprisingly high vanishment rate of businesses; very few survive over time.
There seems to be something built into businesses that drives them to oblivion. My first guess is the power structure, which puts the power to make life-threatening mistakes into the hands of a few, then insulates those people from the important information needed to see what's going on in the world -- information that the other 98% of the company can see, but cannot say. As a result, when you get on board such an institution, you get to watch it be driven perilously close to cliffs, and ultimately over those cliffs. The people driving are in a cockpit which is at the far back end of the huge vehicle, and they mostly see the vehicle and not where it's going, yet they are tasked with steering it. Everyone else is in the lower parts of the vehicle, close to the ground so they can see (and be terrified) when it heads for a cliff and when parts of it hang over empty space.
This article gives one of the more perfect examples: Montgomery Wards and Sears Roebuck disrupted the retail industry using their version of the internet -- mail-order catalogs -- and became kings of the world. My first real job in high school was at Montgomery Wards, and it became one of the inspirations for me to not want to work for a corporation, and helped me think that all corporations were soulless life-sucking machines (of course, that could just be retail). As it turns out, the Internet did not kill Wards; they basically committed seppuku by ordinary bad management. Sears, however, almost died from the web, and as the article points out this is a little weird because Sears jumped into the internet business early with Prodigy.
So Amazon comes along and decides they are going to build a system to order products through the internet. On the face of it this is ridiculous because Sears already had everything in place. The only difference was that Sears used catalogs and Amazon was using the internet. Sears had all the distribution points, shipping, support, service, etc. They should have crushed Amazon. Crushed them, because Amazon had to build all that stuff -- the hard stuff, as the article points out -- from scratch! Amazon didn't have a chance, and yet they ended up crushing Sears in the mail order business because somehow, the managers at Sears couldn't see what was happening. Who knows, maybe it was simply because Amazon started out in books and Sears decided they weren't in the book business. Even weirder, I had a lot of trust for Sears (still do, actually), and yet Amazon somehow managed to build more trust to the point where I don't think anymore about ordering from Sears. I just go to Amazon.
Blockbuster is similar. Netflix came along and started slowly, steadily eating Blockbuster's lunch to the point where they started closing stores and going into Chapter 11. It didn't happen suddenly, there were no surprises. Everyone working at Blockbuster could see it happening except those running the company.
The stories are endless. Consider Bell Labs, filled with arguably the smartest people on earth, but built around a particular business model, that being the comfortable monopoly on telephone communications. Why, when that ended, couldn't this large group of geniuses figure out how to keep such a precious resource together?
It seems like a large part of the problem is the fundamental idea that, once you set up a business, you can assume that certain things about your business model will remain static. This is not surprising because industrial-age businesses had very little change. Once you build a pencil factory (and the business was often equated to the factory), what about creating pencils will ever change? Is it any wonder that such business models are so fragile, and that businesses created on the industrial pattern cannot survive change?
In the next-generation organizational model, which is what I'm seeking, we must assume:
There seems to be something built into businesses that drives them to oblivion. My first guess is the power structure, which puts the power to make life-threatening mistakes into the hands of a few, then insulates those people from the important information needed to see what's going on in the world -- information that the other 98% of the company can see, but cannot say. As a result, when you get on board such an institution, you get to watch it be driven perilously close to cliffs, and ultimately over those cliffs. The people driving are in a cockpit which is at the far back end of the huge vehicle, and they mostly see the vehicle and not where it's going, yet they are tasked with steering it. Everyone else is in the lower parts of the vehicle, close to the ground so they can see (and be terrified) when it heads for a cliff and when parts of it hang over empty space.
This article gives one of the more perfect examples: Montgomery Wards and Sears Roebuck disrupted the retail industry using their version of the internet -- mail-order catalogs -- and became kings of the world. My first real job in high school was at Montgomery Wards, and it became one of the inspirations for me to not want to work for a corporation, and helped me think that all corporations were soulless life-sucking machines (of course, that could just be retail). As it turns out, the Internet did not kill Wards; they basically committed seppuku by ordinary bad management. Sears, however, almost died from the web, and as the article points out this is a little weird because Sears jumped into the internet business early with Prodigy.
So Amazon comes along and decides they are going to build a system to order products through the internet. On the face of it this is ridiculous because Sears already had everything in place. The only difference was that Sears used catalogs and Amazon was using the internet. Sears had all the distribution points, shipping, support, service, etc. They should have crushed Amazon. Crushed them, because Amazon had to build all that stuff -- the hard stuff, as the article points out -- from scratch! Amazon didn't have a chance, and yet they ended up crushing Sears in the mail order business because somehow, the managers at Sears couldn't see what was happening. Who knows, maybe it was simply because Amazon started out in books and Sears decided they weren't in the book business. Even weirder, I had a lot of trust for Sears (still do, actually), and yet Amazon somehow managed to build more trust to the point where I don't think anymore about ordering from Sears. I just go to Amazon.
Blockbuster is similar. Netflix came along and started slowly, steadily eating Blockbuster's lunch to the point where they started closing stores and going into Chapter 11. It didn't happen suddenly, there were no surprises. Everyone working at Blockbuster could see it happening except those running the company.
The stories are endless. Consider Bell Labs, filled with arguably the smartest people on earth, but built around a particular business model, that being the comfortable monopoly on telephone communications. Why, when that ended, couldn't this large group of geniuses figure out how to keep such a precious resource together?
It seems like a large part of the problem is the fundamental idea that, once you set up a business, you can assume that certain things about your business model will remain static. This is not surprising because industrial-age businesses had very little change. Once you build a pencil factory (and the business was often equated to the factory), what about creating pencils will ever change? Is it any wonder that such business models are so fragile, and that businesses created on the industrial pattern cannot survive change?
In the next-generation organizational model, which is what I'm seeking, we must assume:
- Everything can change. No part of the business can be assumed "safely static."
- The only people who can recognize and respond to change is: everyone in the company. We cannot waste human potential by putting it in boxes and saying "this is your job, ignore everything else."
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