Archive for March 2011
Go Make Something Happen
Mankind does nothing save through initiatives on the part of inventors, great and small, and imitation by the rest of us. Individuals show the way, set the patterns. The rivalry of the patterns is the history of the world. — William James 1906
The great part of my job is that I get to meet a lot of people in a lot of companies – everyone from the guy changing light bulbs in the hallway to senior executives and just about everyone in between.
When you meet people you can look for similarities or differences. I look for differences. There are some significant differentiators among people. There are those who have new ideas and vision and those who respond with repetition and blank stares. There are those who see opportunity at every turn and those for which opportunity is invisible. There are those that take (it is not given!) initiative and those that stand idly by waiting for something to happen or wait to be told what to do. What makes people, “remarkable”? Both the ability to see and not see those things cited above – and consistently so (read more)
The differences in people is utterly amazing.
Ownership and Power
Think of this definition of power. Power is the ability to make things happen. The evidence and a measure of your power is your ability to produce results and advance your company or organization along its mission and goals.
If you have a hard time getting started in making things happen you might want to take a look at the latest work from Seth Godin – Poke the Box. In general, starting out with something new, a new idea, you don’t know how it works. It’s a puzzle. You “poke it”. Here’s how Seth describes poking:
When you do this, what happens? When you do that, what happens? The box reveals itself through your poking, and as you get better at it, you not only get smarter but also gain ownership. Ownership comes from understanding and from having the power to make things happen.
When Facebook was gaining immense popularity someone asked Mark Zuckerberg what Facebook was. According to the story, Zuckerberg said, “I don’t know”. They asked him when Facebook would be finished. He reportedly said, “It will never be finished. It’s like fashion and fashion is never finished.” If you read about the history of Facebook you will see that Facebook evolved as Zuckerberg and the team put something out there and then watched how people used it. The capability of Facebook was an evolution based a discovery of the ways that people used Facebook that were not anticipated by Zuckerberg. It as a lot like Seth’s idea of “poking” – do something, put something out there, and see what happens. Do, observe, learn, evolve, refine, repeat.
Seth Godin is a serial entrepreneur and he has a lot of great ideas. If you don’t know who Seth Godin is then take a look at his blog.
Seth’s latest book is Poke the Box. I have read all of Seth’s books and looking forward to reading this one.
Poke the Box will help you get started with your ideas. Here’s the pitch from Seth
FCC Chairman Newton Minow 50 years later: a vaster wasteland
In the April 2011 edition of Atlantic Monthly there is an article by former FCC Chairman Newton Minow. Minow was FCC Chairman in the 1960′s and he called television a vast wasteland.
My objective at the convention was to tell broadcasters that the FCC would enforce the law’s requirement that they serve the public interest in return for their free and exclusive use of the publicly owned airwaves. Too much existing programming, I said, was little more than “a procession of game shows violence, sadism, murder, Western bad men, Western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons.” Television, I said, was too often a “vast wasteland.”
Now 50 years later Newton Minow has written an article called “A Vaster Wasteland”. The message still seems to be the same.
From the Atlantic April 2011 article:
But those were not the two words [vast wasteland] I intended to be remembered. The two words I wanted to endure were public interest. To me that meant, as it still means, that we should constantly ask: What can communications do for our country? For the common good? For the American people?
What would he like to see in the next 50 years?
Movie Review: The Social Network
I was looking forward to seeing the movie The Social Network. I read Accidental Billionaires: The founding of Facebook A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal by Ben Mezrich. I have seen Mark Zuckerberg in various interviews and have read his blog. I was halfway through reading The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That is Connecting the World by David Kirkpatrick when I saw The Social Network.
I was entertained and disappointed by the movie. I realize that Hollywood makes movies to make money and to make money the movie has to have those elements that make it compelling, entertaining, provocative, and everything else that sells movie tickets – no matter how much those aspects depart from the truth or the real history of Facebook.
The nature of movies
So, there is the truth and there is the story telling. There is the fact and the fiction. Ben Mezrich says that the story of Facebook in his book is a construction from hundreds of interviews with people close to the story of the founding of Facebook. The Social Network is based on the book. Neither the Ben Mezrick book nor the movie was made with any consultation from Mark Zuckerberg. Sean Parker, short time president of Facebook said the movie was a work of fiction. (more)
Picking and choosing
However, The Facebook Effect written by David Kirkpatrick was done from the inside. David Kirkpatrick is a respected journalist who writes for Fortune magazine. Mark Zuckerberg invited Kirkpatrick to write the story of Facebook. Kirkpatrick travelled with Zuckerberg and was given inside access to the employees of Facebook. So, if there is access to any semblance to the truth about the story of Facebook it’s in The Facebook Effect.
The running time of a typical movie is 2 hours. So, the story of Facebook told in movie form had to be dissected and compressed to fill this 2 hr duration. What do you pick and choose? What part of the story do you tell and what do you leave out? This is the challenge of any movie based on historical events.
Books generally so not have this challenge. Books can be as long as they need to be to tell the story. The “running time” of The Facebook Effect is 15 hours – if you listen to the unabridged audio version. (There will soon be a movie of Atlas Shrugged. The audio book running time of this work is 55 hours. What sort of devestation will the movie industry make of this book?)
What you are missing
The Social Network picks and chooses the worst of Zuckerberg and perhaps Sean Parker and leaves out some of the entrepreneurial genius of both Zuckerberg and Parker that made Facebook a successful company in the real world.
The significant role of Sean Parker
What I told Mark was that I would try to be for him what no one had been for me – a person who sort of shepherds his rear and puts him in a position of power so he’d have the opportunity to make his own mistakes and learn from them. – Sean Parker
It was really beneficial for us that Sean had been a founder who had been burned. We didn’t know anything about how to incorporate a company or take financing, but we had one of the most conservative people figuring it out for us and trying to protect us – Moskovitz
In the Social Network you will not hear about the significant role that Sean Parker (co-founder of Napster and founder of Plaxo) played in the success of Facebook. Not only did Sean have extensive experience dealing with Venture Capital firms but also ensured that, through the complex negotiations with VC’s, Mark did not lose control of the company. Sean kept Marks vision on the long view against others trying to persuade Mark to monetize (generate revenue through advertising) the company early or sell it. Sean’s vision was that Facebook was not a 10 million dollar company, or a 100 million dollar company but a billion dollar company. With Sean Parker, the young Zuckerberg had an experienced advisor and mentor at his side. Parker was Facebook’s first President and held a 7% stake in the company. (more on Sean Parker here )
Zuckerbergs judgements on technolgy and product direction
Like this:
The Technical Architecture Behind Facebook
There is a lot of different elements behind the success of Facebook. Of course it’s mostly about vision, timing, the right people, venture capital, good judgements at critical points in the history of Facebook, and so on. It’s also about the availability of readily available technology and excellent technical architecture and engineering by talented people – Mark Zuckerberg playing a major role in the original programming and technical design of (the)Facebook.com from the beginning.
(the)Facebook.com also benefited from a history of the failure of other social networking systems that preceded (the)Facebook.com. One of the failures clearly in the mind of the architects, developers, and technical engineers of (the)Facebook was the failure of the social networking system Friendster. Friendster may have been more successful had it been able to scale properly to meet the demand of the user base. Friendster did not scale.
(the)Facebook.com was careful to ensure that before another segment of users was invited to register for the service (at the beginning they added schools in a very controlled process) there was sufficient capacity to handle the projected number of new users.
The Scale of Facebook
At the time of this writing there are about 400 million active users Facebook. Facebook delivers 200 billion page views per month and the service is distributed across 30,000 servers.
So, from a technology perspective, how do you architect such a system? What is the technology and architecture behind Facebook that can deliver 200 billion pages per month to 400 million active users with good response time?
The success of Open Source
There are many success cases that can be developed from Facebook. The Open Source community is a clear beneficiary of the success of Facebook. Facebook is written in open source software. Enhancements, extensions, and innovations that Facebook made to improve performance and scalability of this open source software has been given back by Facebook to the Open Source Community.
The Facebook presentation layer is written in PHP – 3 million lines of code. The database tier is MySQL. If anything validates the Open Source community its the ability of these open source tools to be able to deliver a high performance massively scalable system like Facebook.
The Technical Architecture behind Facebook
Jeff Rothschild is Vice President of Technology at Facebook. He gave a presentation to the UC San Diego Center for Networked Systems. In this webcast Jeff goes into detail about the technology behind Facebook – the architecture, the challenges they faced in building a high performance massively scalable system, how they solved these problems, the innovations and extensions they made to Open Source code (and gave back to the community), and those challenges for the Facebook technology that still exist and for which they are seeking solutions.
Abstract: Facebook has grown into one of the largest sites on the Internet today serving over 200 billion pages per month. The nature of social data makes engineering a site for this level of scale a particularly challenging proposition. In this presentation, I will discuss the aspects of social data that present challenges for scalability and will describe the core architectural components and design principles that Facebook has used to address these challenges. In addition, I will discuss emerging technologies that offer new opportunities for building cost-effective high performance web architectures.
You can find the links to this webcast, and a summary of the technology at the links below
America vs Japan – Does culture matter when it comes to looting?
On cable TV there is a show called Bait Car. Basically, cops leave a car in a neighborhood and watch what happens. The car is fitted with a hidden camera and remote control. The camera is focused on the front seat and the car can be shutdown by remote control. The doors are unlocked and the keys are in the ignition. That’s the bait.
What are they doing? The are giving ordinary citizens an opportunity to make a choice. It’s as simple as that.
It doesn’t take long before an ordinary citizen does make a choice. And the choice is to take the car.
Is this an example of an individual optimizing his/her own economic situation? Knowing that stealing a car is grand theft is this a failure of an individuals ethical judgement? Is it a failure of society to assimilate an individual into societal norms? Or, is this act of stealing a failure of culture?
What did you see reported in the news media at Katrina?
NEW ORLEANS — Mayor Ray Nagin ordered 1,500 police officers to leave their search-and-rescue mission Wednesday night and return to the streets of the beleaguered city to stop looting that has turned increasingly hostile.
Looters used garbage cans and inflatable mattresses to float away with food, blue jeans, tennis shoes, TV sets — even guns. Outside one pharmacy, thieves commandeered a forklift and used it to push up the storm shutters and break through the glass. The driver of a nursing-home bus surrendered the vehicle to thugs after being threatened.
Read more – http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9063708/
Japan experienced an earthquake a few weeks ago. What happens in Japan during this natural disaster?
The landscape of parts of Japan looks like the aftermath of World War Two; no industrialised country since then has suffered such a death toll. The one tiny, tiny consolation is the extent to which it shows how humanity can rally round in times of adversity, with heroic British rescue teams joining colleagues from the US and elsewhere to fly out.
And solidarity seems especially strong in Japan itself. Perhaps even more impressive than Japan’s technological power is its social strength, with supermarkets cutting prices and vending machine owners giving out free drinks as people work together to survive. Most noticeably of all, there has been no looting, and I’m not the only one curious about this
Read more – http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/edwest/100079703/why-is-there-no-looting-in-japan/
I watched a lot of news coverage on the Japan earthquake. Never once did I see any video or even mention of the Japanese looting, robbing, or taking advantage of the situation for their personal advantage. Were these incidents of looting intentionally expunged from the coverage or was there no looting?
If the news was reported accurately and if there was no (or minimal not worth reporting) looting then it is an interesting contrast between the culture in America and that of Japan.
Here is one attempt to explain it
This I think explains why people are less apt to loot out of panic or fear of what has happened or what is to come. But I think there is also a clear cultural explanation of why people would not loot generally: the strong group mentality in Japanese society both fosters solidarity and instills fear of incurring shame.
The very word in Japanese used to mean “human being” in Japanese, ningen, is written with two characters (人間) that mean “person” and “between” respectively, giving the word the loose meaning of “between people.” A person is what lies between others; more directly, a person is defined by their relationships to others. Traditionally, this would be the Confucian relationships between parents and children, adults and rulers etc. Now, it would encompass the family, friends, classmates at school, or coworkers. One basically is identified through these groups (an average person introducing themselves would literally identify him or herself this way: Takeshi who works at Mitsubishi would introduce himself as “Mitsubishi’s Takeshi”). Obviously the largest of these groups would be “Japanese people” as a whole.
Read some perspectives on looting during the 2011 Japan earthquake
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2011/03/why-no-looting-in-japan-ctd-1.html
Watch some episodes of Bait Car on-line
http://www.trutv.com/video/bait-car/index.html
Police Looting WalMart after Katrina
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmQW6xLECUU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RVHDlPqZWE
Riding the bus with “Spiffy”: forging informal networks of people 10 seconds at a time
Downtown Chicago is the home of a number of large corporations. Thousands of people commute into Chicago every weekday via the commuter rail system – Metra. Many of these commuter trains terminate at Union Station in downtown Chicago. Although there is a comprehensive public transportation including cabs some corporations, as a convenience, provide a charter bus service to shuttle employees to and from Union Station.
So what’s the big deal? The big deal is one bus and, more importantly, one bus driver in particular. His name is “Spiffy” – that’s what they call him. He is in his 60′s, very well dressed, and very polite. You will find him driving the first bus back to Union Station from a particular financial services firm. The bus arrives at about 3:45pm to load passengers and leaves, on the dot, at exactly 4pm.
The Community of the Bus
Working in downtown Chicago on a short term project with a few colleagues I encountered Spiffy for the first time several weeks ago. And it was not really Spiffy that I encountered so much as it was my encounter with, what I will call, ”the community of the bus”. The community of the bus?
What is unique is that people who ride Spiffy’s bus all know each other in a curious sort of a way that I didn’t, at first, comprehend. Take a bus from the same location 15 minutes later with a different bus driver and what happens on the bus is completely different. There is no “community of the bus” on those busses.
What happens on Spiffy’s bus during the 15 minutes when the bus loads up with people and the 12 minute ride to Union Station is that the people on the bus talk to each other in a way that suggests they are a community.
I am new to the community of the bus. But I knew something unique (and interesting) was going on when I heard one of the the women tell Spiffy that one of the regular people that rides the bus was in the hospital, that she was going to get a get-well card, and would he sign it. “Sure”, he said. It was going to be a get well card “from the bus” and everyone would sign it.
How it works – 10 seconds at a time
Creating life strategies and the road to continuous self-renewal
It is a puzzle why some men and woman go to seed, while others remain vital to the very end of their days. And why some people stop learning and growing. One must be compassionate in assessing the reasons: Perhaps life just presented them with tougher problems than they could solve. Perhaps something inflicted a major wound on their confidence or their self-esteem. Perhaps they were pulled down by the hidden resentments and grievances that grow in adult life, sometimes so luxuriantly that, like tangled vines, they immobilize the victim.
We can’t write off the danger of complacency, of growing rigidity or of imprisonment by our own comfortable habits and opinions. Look around you. How many people whom you know well – people even younger than yourselves – are already trapped in fixed attitudes and habits? The famous French literary historian Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve said, “There are people whose clocks stop at a certain point in their lives.” — Amy Biehl
It is a puzzle why some people’s clocks stop at a certain point in their lives. It is an interesting phenomenon. When you hear people talk more about the past than about the future you know, for them, the end is near.
There is a related phenomenon. Aspirations and motivation. Why do some people have high aspirations and other people don’t? What is the explanation of this difference?
When I was in college, a long time ago, I was fortunate to meet some exceptional people. One woman I knew had a very clear idea of what she wanted to do and what company she wanted to work for. At graduation she applied to the company she dreamed of working for and two backups – “just in case”.
But she didn’t get an offer from the company she wanted – which was a prestigious firm. But she did get offers from her two backups. When she told me she didn’t get an offer from the first company she was noticeably upset. To try to cheer her up I told her, “Anyone would be fortunate to get the offers that you did get”. In response she said, “I’m not just anyone.” Here was an early lesson to me about people who were not one of the mass of people who will “settle” for anything less than what they really want to achieve. Fortunately for me, as time went on from college I encountered a whole string of people who were “not just anyone” and this provided considerable inspiration and role models.
I ran across a couple of papers on these related areas of life aspirations and ongoing self-renewal
The first is about building a life through establishing goals, ambitions, and a mission for your life. The second is about self-renewal – ensuring that the clock does not stop at a certain point in your life. Together, you have a plan.
Here are a few excerpts from the fist paper - 15 things you can do to build a life
- … Explicitly understanding and shaping your beliefs is critical to “aligning your star.” At the end of the day, what do you really believe in? What matters most to you? What is your “life’s work”?
- Always aim high. Stretch your goals to drive you toward your full potential. Define yourself by your aspirations, not by circumstances or past practices.
- The essence of a life strategy is to establish goals and ambitions (and dreams!) along the dimensions that matter most to you during various phases of your life.
- Place yourself in a position to fail occasionally; it provides evidence that you’re stretching your boundaries, and will enhance your development
- Develop yourself – no one has as much incentive as you to see yourself succeed. Take full accountability for learning, and never stop. Seek out mentors and teachers from all aspects of your life.
- Without honest, objective feedback, you will not achieve your life’s potential. As painful as it may feel, continually assess your strengths and failings across life’s many dimensions. Avoid the delusion of wishful thinking
You can read the full text of all 15 of these in the “Build your life…” paper at the end of this posting
Here is an excerpts from the second paper – “The Road to self-renewal”
How to build an innovation machine
In the national interest…
What is the key to America’s competitive advantage in the world of globalization? This question is simply a restatement of the general question of competitive advantage that corporate executives and boards of directors (and shareholders) have been asking for decades. What is new is that companies no longer compete locally; they compete globally. What is new is that America is part of the global economy. As American business goes so goes America. There is a national interest in making American companies the most successful and competitive in the world. You can read President Obama’s 2011 State of the Union Address to see how this all hangs together.
How do we compete?
Corporate strategy is only about 50 years old. Prior to this there really wasn’t an idea of a Strategy. What companies did was “planning”. And planning was mostly an extrapolation of the present into the future. There were no major bumps in the road; it was unlikely that a Black Swan would show up; and Planners did not require too much insight or smarts to make a linear projection of the present into the future.
Well, that all changed with deregulation and globalism. It was not so simple anymore. The recognition that corporate strategy was more like chess than a game of tic-tac-toe gave rise to some of the legends of the strategy consulting business – Boston Consulting Group, Bain Consulting, McKinsey, and the contribution of the Harvard Business School in the form of people like Michael Porter.
The past 50 years of corporate strategy from the view of consulting
What these strategy consulting companies gave us over the past 50 years was various machinations of how companies can best compete – against each other and into a non-linear future. We got things like the experience curve; the growth share matrix; secret strategies from Bain who only worked with one client in an industry. McKinsey gave us “The Evolution of Strategic Management”: Financial Planning (meet budget); Forecast-based Planning (Predict the future); Externally oriented planning (Think Strategically); Strategic Management (Create the future) and the 9 Box Matrix. Michael Porter from Harvard Business School came up with the value chain the 5 forces model of competition (suppliers, customers, substitutes, competitors, new entrants) and generic strategies (low-cost leadership, product differentiation, market specialization). After this was a focus on strategy as re-engineering with an emphasis on process improvement (Michael Hammer) and time-based competition (George Stalk). After this was strategy as financial engineering – leverage, takeovers, etc;
It’s good to be a strategy consulting firm. Revenues of the “Big Three” strategy firms in 2005 was $4 billion, $1.5 billion, and $1.2 billion respectively from McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, and Bain. And that’s up from basically nothing – BCG opened its doors in 1963 and the rest followed. Not bad and you get the consulting fee no matter if the strategy works or not. Some consulting firms will write you a nice report on what your strategy should be but you won’t find them sticking around for the execution of that strategy or the results. About three-quarters of the top US businesses use BCG, Bain, or McKinsey or some combination of them.
So, what’s the point?
So what’s the point? In all of this do you see any mention of people as strategy? No. For nearly 40 years strategy was conceived primarily in terms of organizational structure, positioning, and allocation of financial resources. Where are the people? People and motivation made a brief showing in 1982 with the publication of “In Search of Excellence” by Peters and Waterman ( both McKinsey consultants) but faded away in a few years. Of the 43 enterprises identified as ‘excellent’ by Peters and Waterman one-third were in financial difficulty five years after being surveyed, a few years later – all but five were.
It had to wait until nearly the year 2000 before there was a recognition of people as part of corporate strategy. It was built on McKinsey’s idea of “tradable privileged assets” – brands, patents, trademarks – that could be sold or, more importantly, bought.
Someone extended this idea to include “intellectual capital” which constituted the “new wealth of organizations”
People – The New Wealth of Organizations
People as strategy took three forms: People as intellectual capital; people in networks and the competitive advantage this brings; and strategy as private equity firms.
Just a side note. When traditional strategy consultants got a look at how a global network of programmers were able to come up with Linux as a serious competitor to Microsoft without the benefit of an explicit strategy or central control these big-league strategy consultants “got schooled”. The success of Wikipedia against a traditionalist like Encyclopedia Britannica was another wake-up call that something serious was going on which had eluded them.
How to build an Innovation Machine
So, how do you build an innovation machine focused around people as strategy and the power of networks of people in collaboration? There are many experiments by companies that are taking the risk just to see what would happen.
Releasing Innovation by Breaking Paradigms: seeing what no one else can see
To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle
— George Orwell
It’s well-known that Apple, in the innovation and creation on new products, does not ask customers what they want and they don’t use focus groups. Why? For the same reason that Henry Ford didn’t ask his customers what they wanted. In another famous quote from Ford he said that if he asked people what they wanted in terms of transportation they would have told him, “a faster horse”. If you asked computer users in the late 1970′s what they wanted would they tell you, “more and better DOS commands“?
Do you build a company by giving people what they want? Yes. But, sometimes customers don’t know what they want until you show it to them.
Seeing what no one else can see
Sometimes, you don’t even have to have the paradigm-breaking idea yourself. You just need to see something that others can not see – even if its right in front of their face. So goes the story of how Steve Jobs “took” the GUI, Smalltalk, and ethernet right fron under the gaze of executives of Xerox PARC.
Adele Goldberg, who had been a researcher at the PARC when Job’s made his visit made this observation:
He [Steve Jobs] came back, and I almost said ‘asked’ but the truth is ‘demanded,’ that his entire programming team get a demo of the Smalltalk System, and the then head of the science center asked me to give the demo because Steve specifically asked for me to give the demo, and I said ‘no way.’ I had a big argument with these Xerox executives, telling them that they were about to give away the kitchen sink, and I said that I would only do it if I were ordered to do it, cause then, of course, it would be their responsibility, and that’s what they did.
Here is a quote from Steve Jobs on what he saw at PARC
They showed me really three things. But I was so blinded by the first one I didn’t even really see the other two. One of the things they showed me was object-oriented programming – they showed me that but I didn’t even see that. The other one they showed me was a networked computer system… they had over a hundred Alto computers all networked using email etc., etc., I didn’t even see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me, which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I’d ever seen in my life… … and within you know ten minutes it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this some day.
Larry Tesler, also a PARC employee:
After an hour looking at demos, they understood our technology and what it meant, more than any Xerox executive understood after years of showing it to them.
And so it goes. And so it continues to go; to this day… and into the future. For as long as there are innovators that can see what no one else can see to move us along the path for one generation to embrace what the previous generation found incomprehensible and unthinkable. Do you want a faster horse? What is the source of this insight?
Siftables
Here is another paradigm-breaker of human-computer interfaces. They are called “Siftables”.
These “computer chips” know where they are in relation to each other; they know their orientation in 3-space; and they can communicate with each other. Their behavior and digital media rendition changes in relation to proximity and arrangement of the chips to each other; their orientation in 3-space; and the messages they send to each other.
Breaking paradigms of a traditional screen, mouse, keyset and tablet? Is this a better fit for digital media just as the GUI was a better fit for computer interaction back in the 1980′s when people saw the first GUI and compared it to DOS?
Watch this TED talk and demo and see if this is a better way for humans to interact with digital media… Then check out the links and videos of early GUI history, an article on the innovation process at Apple, and finally the BumpTop desktop metaphor…
