Tiny Menu

Steve Jobs demonstrated numerous counter-to-received-wisdom management strategies after his return to Apple. Notice I say "demonstrated" rather than "taught," because it is doubtful the world of MBAs will be able to go against their training and even notice the really important ones.

For example, Apple has accumulated a mountain of cash. Correct MBA Thinking would dictate that this cash be used to go on an acquisition spree, despite the fact that (1) The vast majority of acquisitions are failures (by any measure) and (2) The acquiring company is often damaged by the acquisition (witness HP).  But Apple doesn't spend their money acquiring other companies (other than the occasional small one for talent or technology). Instead, they focus on improving what they do. They leave their money in the bank until they need it for the really important things, like controlling the parts and manufacturing channels from end-to-end (I don't know about this one: is this strategy considered too mundane to be taught in business school, or is it a staple of thinking there? It's not something I've heard one way or another).

The most important idea Jobs may have contributed to the business world is that a company should

Only do a few insanely great things

This is especially challenging. It means getting rid of all the "really great" and even the "freakin' awesome" things -- how do you argue against a completely viable idea that will make money? Somehow Jobs was able to say, "Because it's not great enough." Not only was he able to recognize ideas that were and weren't great enough, he had the confidence to make the cut.

This goes against normal business thinking in so many ways. I have a hard time reconciling it because I, too, have been subliminally trained in mainstream thinking. After all, if you have a lot of resources, it seems to make sense to develop a lot of products. I think Apple did pursue a lot of ideas, but somehow it was able to only develop the really world-changing ones.

Perhaps it requires a benevolent dictator. When I began working at Fluke (my second job after graduation), John Fluke Sr. had recently died. He had always been aware of all the projects in the company, and if a project stopped looking good to him, he would terminate it -- thus keeping the company's collection of projects lean and focused, and the company's resources well-allocated. After he died, there was no one to do the pruning and the number of active projects slowly grew; there were a lot that were arguably viable but not great. There was no one to say "nope, it's not great enough."

It requires a lot of confidence. If you go into a restaurant that has a very small menu, you're in a restaurant that believes in each item on the menu. You're not there to see if they have a big enough menu to have everything on it you might ever want; you're looking for a special dining experience. Consider the resources of Apple and the size of their menu, which is quite tiny by comparison. But each item on that menu is exceptional.

Of course this idea can't be easily applied everywhere. Max's diner in San Francisco has a big menu that covers just about everything you would consider "diner food," and yet it's a great experience. But I find that it's very reliable that a restaurant that can't commit to one type of food (the worst offenders have been "Chinese and Vietnamese") is not worth going to.

Similarly, some companies can pull off the "lots of products" approach. I've written about W.L. Gore, which is completely structured around innovating new products, and they do. But it's an exception precisely because it is structured so differently from mainstream corporations.

In order to know what's insanely great, you must also know a lot about the alternatives. It doesn't mean freedom to be ignorant; on the contrary, you must know even more.

Here's a bigger challenge: It's not hard to see how just the right oh-so-rare benevolent dictator can ruthlessly trim the company's offerings down to the insanely-great core. Because we have seen that in Apple and perhaps a handful of others (we should make a list). But how do you achieve this with a self-organized company? I suspect the answer is that you can't; that instead you take the genetic/evolutionary approach -- although the typical failing in companies that generate lots of possibilities is in the process of determining what survives and what doesn't. Without a benevolent dictator there must be some way to decide, perhaps even by the team working on the project. Or possibly by the equivalent of a "law of two feet" for projects.

"Power of Hybridization" Video Online

When I spoke at CERN, they did a nice job capturing it on video. It's a talk about programming so not exactly germane here, but notice a trend that I've started to see more and more. They simply point a camera at the speaker, and at the same time show the slides right next to the speaker video. So there's no switching back and forth, which I've always found maddening. This is mostly because the videographer doesn't know about the subject, so they make random guesses as to when the screen is more important and when the speaker is. In a code-intensive talk, this means that you'll be looking at the speaker when they're describing code and you'd really like to be looking at the code. I don't really need to see the speaker that much.

With the side-by-side approach, this becomes a non-issue. You just capture the feed from the projector and mix it in, and it's ready to go (although with the CERN video I got the impression that someone had done a bit of post-processing to mix in the actual slides rather than a projector feed). Note, however, that it becomes even more important to use large fonts for your presentation text.

As I've noted elsewhere I think this kind of thing is going to become more and more common for lectures. You don't need to go to a conference (or a university!) to get a good lecturing experience. In the future I think anyone who lectures will have a little studio in their office (we already do with webcams and microphones and the software is getting better) and just create the lecture there, and those lectures and the quality of the learning experience will get better and better. So again, we'll have to figure out more appropriate things to do at conferences than sit and listen to lectures.

In the meantime, however, I'm going to make an effort to record and publish any future lectures that I give, either getting the event organizer to do it or carrying a camera that I can hand to an audience member. I'd love to see all speakers start to make a habit of this, but I suppose it depends on your orientation about speaking -- one way to think of it is that you don't want to publish your presentation as a way to maintain it as a scarce resource. I've encountered smart people who feel this way. I like the idea of reaching as many people as possible, however, and far more people will see the presentation this way than  those who happened to be sitting in the room that day. If that causes the interest in that particular presentation to decline, so be it. I got a lot of intellectual stimulation from creating it so it won't be so bad to create a new one (at the same time I'm already thinking of improvements to this one, which I'll be giving at CodeMash in January).

Podcasting?

I'd like to try experimenting with podcasting some of these essays. Recording me reading them (but in an interesting and animated fashion!) to see if people find it useful, would rather listen while commuting or if it helps to hear my voice or something like that.

So I have a crowdsourcing question which I hope you can help me out with. What's the easiest, most trivial way to do this, keeping in mind what I just wrote in the previous article about blockages and how experiments need to be really easy to try out.

The best one will be high quality and require only a simple sound-file upload to publish, automatically go to iTunes and smart things like that.

Thanks!

I Can Do That

During the Europe Trip, I was able to wander off and see the modern art museums in Grenoble and Stockholm. To go to a museum is to "visit the muse in her house" (rather than waiting for the muse to come visit you). My focus in recent years has been abstract expressionism for reasons I shall explain, and you can see some of the examples in the reinventing business presentation slides (even though you can sometimes imagine a connection with the paintings and the topics on the slides, my main goal is to give the audience something to stimulate the right brain because the bullet points are really just my speaking notes and not enough to look at).

I've learned a huge amount by struggling with art, but mostly this:

Experimentation must be easy

It's hard enough to try new things, and all you need is an extra obstacle or two to make it too challenging.

The first art class I took was at Pomona college, when I discovered that a sculpture course could satisfy an academic breadth requirement. Although it seemed like the easiest option, the door it opened and the questions it began have pursued me ever since. I worked with glass and welding and ceramics and decided -- because I was able to accomplish something, and perhaps because my father built houses -- that I must be a 3D artist. I continued to sprinkle art courses into my curriculum, and even took some welding engineering classes in grad school. I imagined getting a job that would allow me to have a shed in the back of wherever I lived so that I could go back and "do art"; the paying work would support the artistic pursuits. But paying work has a way of wanting to be front and center all the time.

I also discovered that "doing art" is a big ongoing struggle that you must throw yourself against again and again, and that what you are throwing yourself against isn't really the art, but the blocks and walls that nature and/or nurture have formed in your character. All the things that say "you can't do that" or "not good enough."

My solution, which has taken pretty much this far in my life to discover, is that you have to trick yourself.

1. Try to do something.
2. Discover an obstacle that makes you back away from doing that thing.
3. Ponder it a little (but don't get lost in pondering) and see if there's some way you can trick yourself around that obstacle. It's completely unimportant whether the trick is "logical" or "right" or proper in any way. It just has to get you to move forward.
4. If your trick works, move forward until you encounter the next obstacle and repeat. If not, go back to step 3.

Here's an example that came from me struggling with painting. For various reasons, the "shed in the back" was not materializing, but I could carve out a space in the house to use as a painting studio, and by using acrylics instead of oils I don't stink up the place. I had taken various short art workshops as vacations (I find the best vacation gives your brain something completely different to do so that it can't think about its normal stuff) and many of these tried to break through our self-imposed barriers. One of the cleverest changed our perception of painting; the workshop leader said that painting was not about using brushes on canvas, but rather about putting marks on surfaces. To internalize this idea, she had us paint things like a deck of cards and a shower curtain and a doormat, using all kinds of different things to mark up those surfaces.

One block that I had was in making the paintings "look like something," which I solved by pursuing abstract expressionism. I'm basically satisfied to get anything that looks pretty, although that turns out to be plenty of challenge.

When painting on my own, the first thing I discovered was that I had issues around the preciousness of things. Both canvases and paint seemed expensive (even though acrylics are much cheaper than oils). And if I did start making a painting I liked, that too became precious so I was afraid to move forward, afraid that I would ruin it. This had me stuck for quite some time.

Then I discovered canvas boards, sturdy cardboard panels covered in canvas, which are far cheaper than canvases stretched on a wooden frame. You can even buy them cheaply in packs of 24, for example. So you get a bunch of these -- you sink the cost on so many that you stop thinking about them as precious -- and resolve to somehow fill them up with paint. The terminology is important here; you're not "creating paintings," you're just putting paint on them.

Ditto with the paint itself; you have to get enough of it that you stop worrying about the cost. Indeed, the paint has a lifetime so you'll want to get busy before it begins turning to rubber.

This definitely doesn't get you over all the hurdles. But if you can't get paint onto the canvases, it's pretty hard to move forward.

"What should I paint?" is also a hard one. For this, there are books and if you go through and find something you like, you can try to do something like it (I find attempting to copy is a pitfall because inevitably it won't look the same, so it's better to just get ideas).

The rest of it comes from regular experimentation. Some people might work better if they allocate a fixed time every day; I personally find that I'm better off waiting for inspiration (There are writers who insist that you must write every day during certain hours, as well. I think the writers who are successful NOT doing that just don't write about it). Sometimes you'll go for weeks or months without doing something, and then come back to it and discover that during that time something intangible has been gestating.

The point is to keep trying, and to use whatever tricks you need to keep yourself trying. Or alternatively, to discover that something is really not your thing -- ideally, by discovering something better rather than just succumbing to your internal resistance -- and move on.

What started this essay was going to one of these museums and seeing some of the abstract pieces and thinking "I can do that." And realizing what a big step that was.

How many times have you heard someone say about abstract art, "My five-year old could do that!" My epiphany was that when someone says this their internal five-year-old is saying, very sadly, "I can't do that (anymore)." And that's only because we've accepted all the limitations that other people offer up when (sadly) explaining why THEY can't do something (this often comes across as telling, "factually," why it's impossible and you can't do it, but it's really an expression of their own loss).

One thing I've found extremely gratifying about Open Spaces events is that a subset of people see how easy it is to organize one, and they go home and do it. The direct experience (because we've been trained so hard to think that something like Open Spaces simply cannot work) empowers people to do something they wouldn't have otherwise.

This goes a long way to answering this question I've been struggling with, about the value of face-to-face events in the world of the Internet. Internet lectures are SO much better than going to a conference: a good recording of a lecture gives you the best seat in the house, you can hear perfectly, pause if you need a break, repeat sections or the whole lecture -- the entire experience is far superior to being there in person. Even questions are better, because on a forum everyone can give thought (and research) before asking, be heard, and discuss the results.

I was on the senior advisory board of the Software Development Conference for a significant number of years in the pre-Internet days. This was the biggest conference dedicated solely to programming. The conference was run by a publishing company, who put out (among others) Computer Language magazine (they later changed the name to Software Development) and who bought and vaporized the late great Micro Cornucopia (the first magazine I wrote for; It was a "business decision"). The conference made some money on registration fees from attendees, but they made the vast amount of their income from renting trade-show floor space. All the big-player companies would not only rent the space, but bring their very expensive technical people (often the main programmers) to man the booths. The idea was that the conference was delivering all the leading thinkers (those attending the conference proper) to the booths. The conference organizers often gamed the system by giving away "trade-show-only passes" to increase the traffic to the show floor and thus charge more for booth space (even though the trade-show-only people could sometimes be just "anyone off the street") but these were the kinds of things that all conferences tried to do, so the vendors would push back but generally put up with it.

The point being that the conference organizers were doing this to make as much money as they possibly could. The conference was for knowledge dissemination only so far as it could make the trade show floor appealing enough for vendors to pay the big bucks.

Then the Internet came along and created a much, much more efficient way to disseminate information and demonstrations of -- especially -- software products. I observed the change to the conference organizers and their response was, literally, "But we make all our money on the trade show!" I had put a lot of heart into the conference and made one of my best decisions when I decided to bail because I didn't want to watch the thing auger into the ground. And auger it did, closing its doors a couple of years ago. I heard from friends who stayed on the board that the trip was not fun.

Although this is a great example of what happens when bean-counters are calling the shots (they make decisions based only on money and ignore the fundamentals that actually produce that money), the germane part of the story here is that the Internet changed the trade-show landscape, and the conference didn't adapt and therefore died.

But the Internet has also changed the lecture landscape, and just like trade shows, companies will eventually figure out that it's too expensive to send people to conferences that are just a bunch of lectures. Sure, there are the discussions and interactions that happen by accident around the lectures, but the conferences continue to treat those as happy accidents; the lectures are something conference organizers know how to control so they're sticking with that.

So why should people travel to an event?

Open Spaces are certainly one aspect of the answer: focus first and foremost on the conversations, and (ideally) don't even have lectures. I suspect we'll start having web lectures to watch before a conference, to focus and increase the impact of the discussions. But to me, it makes no sense to travel unless you're going to spend your time discussing, interacting and having transformational experiences.

That last one, "transformational experiences," is the biggie. It means that you start out saying "I can't do that" and end by saying "I can do that." The experience of an Open Spaces conference is great, but the transformation comes from seeing it happen (because you're convinced at first that it can't).

A seminar or workshop based on the old lecture-only or lecture + exercises formula is ultimately doomed. Oh sure, people will keep doing them for some time, but they will diminish. With the Internet, lectures and exercises are no longer scarce resources and the web is actually creating better alternatives. This is why I stopped doing them, because they just started feeling more and more wrong, more time-wasting (plus they felt tiring, whereas when I do an Open Spaces event, I'm sad there's not another one the very next week).

At the Java Posse Roundup, people spontaneously started having afternoon workshop sessions where they typically explore some new technology, sometimes with the help of someone who knows about it, but often not. At the Scala Summer Camp, we took this idea and made it the center of the event. Everyone explored what they wanted, at their own speed. It worked really well, but in both examples we just created time and space for people to pursue their interests; essentially a conference/workshop version of 20% Time.

As the Internet gets better, even these kinds of things will begin happening online (why not?). The really special events, however, the ones you must travel to, will be the ones that transform you, that make you say "I can do that." These, I think, will be exercises, games and simulations that can only be done in a group (eventually the games and simulations can be done online, like playing World of Warcraft, assuming it can be done without losing the subtle communication cues; we might have to start wearing dots on our faces like Andy Serkis did to create Gollum).

I have no desire to return to lecture-and-exercise seminars, although I did try to break out of the humdrum style of that form (more, shorter lectures and randomized pair programming for exercises). It feels like going backwards. I'd much rather create transformational experiences. But I feel a bit of resistance to engineering the experience (probably because I've had so much success by providing minimal structure and then Letting Things Happen). As I've said in this article, we need tricks to get through our blockages. But just as everyone starts in a different place and moves at a different pace when learning anything, I'm guessing that the tricks that you need are different than the ones that work for me.

So the ideal travel-to event will have a basic structure that supports the spontaneous creation of experiences, games and simulations. All I have to do now is figure out what that structure is. Which sounds kind of daunting, but ...

I can do that.

A Mind-Expanding Trip Through Europe

My speaking trips to Europe only occasionally involve stipends; financially they are often break-even ventures. Thus the trip must pay for itself in other ways, typically experiential. This trip was about stretching boundaries, and it definitely accomplished that. I visited Barcelona (and Spain) for the first time, saw both a synchrotron (which generates high-energy x-rays to examine the fundamental structure of all kinds of things) and parts of the CERN collider, getting personal, mind-expanding explanations of both machines. I gave presentations at both these facilities. I also spoke at a conference in Grenoble, France, for those who program such machines and gave a presentation arguing for Scala as a first programming language for the local Grenoble user group.

Lately when giving technical presentations I get this awkward, uneasy awareness that the combined knowledge in the room is far greater than what I’m speechifying about. This is fallout from Open Spaces, where you collect information from people in the discussion rather than listening to only one person. So I think my discomfort comes from knowing that we ought to be crowdsourcing our knowledge together rather than me disseminating my limited experience.

Travel to other countries is always a challenge, especially during the first days. Everything is different so brain filters that you normally use are unavailable. You seem to have no choice but to look at and try to absorb everything, which results in mental overload and perceptual shift. If you’re reading this I suspect you’ve had the experience when you can feel new neural pathways being formed, albeit begrudgingly. They really don’t want to make the effort so the effect is a weird, somewhat unpleasant discomfort in your head. But it is this very feeling we must pursue in order to expand our mental capabilities (or else begin losing them).

I had several experiences that point out how spoiled I’ve become when it comes to traveling. Almost always, someone is there to get me at the airport and make sure I get places. This time, I had several experiences wherein I had to figure out how to get from point A to point B all by myself. And there were certainly some episodes of being lost and wandering around in circles pulling my luggage (I could have taken a cab but I had been assured that the distances did not justify it). When I eventually random-walked to my destination, I felt a different kind of satisfaction. Proof that I was capable enough to go someplace where I couldn’t read the signs and still find my way. The very ability I need for this (Reinventing Business) project.

While I was in Stockholm giving the keynote at the Scandinavian Developer’s Conference, Mattias Karlsson, the head of the Swedish Java User Group asked me to speak at their meeting. Mattias also arranged for us to visit one of the companies there so I could learn about the structure and culture of that company (we signed NDAs so I must necessarily be vague about the visit).

Mattias suggested that I finish the JUG evening meeting by not talking about something technical, but instead giving a presentation about the Reinventing Business project. I resisted, protesting that that I have only questions rather than answers about this subject, and that this is a group that wants to know about programming. He assured me that they often have “off topic” presentations, so I acquiesced, deciding that I could use mostly existing artwork and put together the presentation without too much effort, especially because it was only a half hour.

There are cities in the U.S. that have a reasonably active user group culture; the Silicon Valley comes to mind. The user group culture in Stockholm is several levels above anything you’ve ever seen. Indeed, there are so many user group meetings going on every night, all the time, that it’s like a constantly-running conference. These are held in good-sized halls and they require pre-registration and they fill up. Our hall held 220 people and registrations ran out very quickly, but if you aren’t coming you are requested to cancel so someone else can fill the seat, and even though no one is actually scalping tickets people tend to try to game the system and show up assuming there will be enough unfilled seats from people who registered but forgot to cancel. Indeed, Mattias told me that one of his biggest problems is angry people because he can’t provide enough seats for a particular presentation.

When you’re happy to get a couple of dozen at a user group, it’s rather mind-blowing when you see numbers like this. And it’s not just the Java User Group; apparently most of the user groups have this kind of thing going on. This is a seriously different culture.

And it goes a long way to answering my question of why Scandinavians seem to be so productive and innovative in the world of computers. The list is long, especially when it comes to language designers: Niclaus Wirth (Pascal), Bjarne Stroustrup (C++), Guido Van Rossum (Python) and Martin Odersky (Scala) are probably the most well-known names. Maybe it starts with the weather and long dark winters that make indoor and intellectual activities a natural path, but the Scandinavians have taken this and turned lifelong learning into a foundation of their culture (in the programming world, at least).

My presentation was the last of 5 or 6 -- they started at 5pm and it was about 8 when I began. I was surprised by the enthusiasm and questions afterwards, and I didn’t have that uneasy feeling from the technical talks, probably because my presentation was filled with questions and at no point did I suggest that I had any answers, so the result was perhaps more opening than narrowing.

Here are the slides for the presentation

Note that this is a link to a (live) Google document so it may change over time (ideally, these changes will represent improvements).

Although I suggested to Mattias that he video the presentation and put it on the web, he later said that the guy who does this doesn’t always show up, and didn’t show up that night. I realized afterwards that this would be a good justification for buying a new video camera: If I think that a video of a presentation is a good idea, I’ll ask for a volunteer and hand them the camera.

Fearless

I recently had a discussion with a small group about the structure of new businesses; in particular how to keep the culture from being destroyed as the business grew. Especially if the growth is anything more than moderate.

We were talking about the goals for the company, the short list that sets the tone. The nature of open-spaces discussions asserted itself and one person had a flash of insight. "No fear!" he blurted, elated.

It's obvious once you see it. Who wants to work where you are afraid? That fear can take many forms, but  it always keeps the best things from happening, and produces a downward spiral.

Think about where you work. Are you afraid to do things?