code/lab

The Cognitive Limit of Organizations

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 09:58:59 -0500

The vertical axis of this slide represents the total stock of information in the world. The horizontal axis represents time.

In the early days, life was simple. We did important things like make spears and arrowheads. The amount of knowledge needed to make these items, however, was small enough that a single person could master their production. There was no need for a large division of labor and new knowledge was extremely precious. If you got new knowledge, you did not want to share it. After all, in a world where most knowledge can fit in someone’s head, stealing ideas is easy, and appropriating the value of the ideas you generate is hard.

At some point, however, the amount of knowledge required to make things began to exceed the cognitive limit of a single human being. Things could only be done in teams, and sharing information among team members was required to build these complex items. Organizations were born as our social skills began to compensate for our limited cognitive skills. Society, however, kept on accruing more and more knowledge, and the cognitive limit of organizations, just like that of the spearmaker, was ultimately reached. (…)

Today, however, most products are combinations of knowledge and intellectual property that resides in different organizations. Our world is less and less about the single pieces of intellectual property and more and more about the networks that help connect these pieces. The total stock of information used in these ecosystems exceeds the capacity of single organizations because doubling the size of huge organizations does not double the capacity of that organization to hold knowledge and put it into productive use.

In a world in which implementing the next generation of ideas will increasingly require pulling resources from different organizations, barriers to collaboration will be a crucial constraint limiting the development of firms. Agility, context, and a strong network are becoming the survival traits where assets, control, and power used to rule. John Seely Brown refers to this as the “Power of Pull.”

The Cognitive Limit of Organizations, MIT Media Lab, Oct 7, 2011.

Do Things, Tell People.

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 09:18:00 -0600

These are the only things you need to do to be successful^*. You can get away with just doing one of the two, but that’s rare, and usually someone else is doing the other part for you.

If you you don’t have any marketable skills, learn some. It’s the future. We have Khan Academy and Wikipedia and Codecademy and almost the entire world’s collective knowledge at your fingertips. Use it.

Then make something that you can talk about. Make something cool. Something interesting. Spend time on it. Go crazy. Even if it’s the least useful thing you’ve ever made, if you can talk about it, make it. This part is easy, because you’re doing something you think is cool, and interesting, and if it’s useless, great, because you won’t need to support it much either!

Next, find events where the people you want to work with are. Then get a drink into you (or don’t) and talk to them about it. Relax. It’s probably interesting to them too. Even if it’s not, because you’ve made it, you sound like you know what the hell you’re talking about. That’s the important part. This is easy, too, because you’re talking about something you’ve made that you think is cool and interesting. As an added bonus, many people go to these events just to talk about cool and interesting things, so you’ll fit right in.

You would not believe how much opportunity is out there for those who do things and tell people. It’s how you travel the entreprenurial landscape. You do something interesting and you tell everyone about it. Then you get contacts, business cards, email addresses. Then you get contracts, job offers, investors, whatever. You make friends who think what you do is cool. You make a name for yourself as “the person who did that cool thing.” Then, the next time someone wants to do something in any way related to that cool thing, they come to you first.

Carl Lange

The Single Sentence Email Project

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 13:05:09 -0600

We all know we spend way too much time in email: word-smithing defensively so as not to offend, taking extraordinary effort to ensure we are clear, ensuring each carefully crafted bit of our message cannot be misconstrued.

I thought the best solution is to simply limit the volume of email. Talk face to face when possible. Of course, this has its own drawbacks.

Here’s another:

If you’re tired of email sucking the life out of your day, I ask you to place the following text in your email signature. It will help explain why your responses have become more brief, and perhaps encourage others follow suit:

Join the Single Sentence Email Project: http://gu.nu/w3H

Then, concentrate on learning a new habit: brevity. Respond to emails with as few words as possible. Aim for a sentence, but if just a word will do, use it. It will take practice, and some might dislike it. I argue that this is a fair trade for getting more time to work (and live) productively.

Deliberatism

The Rise of the New Groupthink

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 12:49:52 -0600

I totally agree.

SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.

But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption.

…

Solitude has long been associated with creativity and transcendence. “Without great solitude, no serious work is possible,” Picasso said.

Susan Cain, The Rise of the New Groupthink, NYT via Lapidarium Notes

Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles to Good Design

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 14:01:31 -0600

While in San Francisco, I paid a visit to the SFMOMA which had an exhibition on Dieter Ram. Beautiful products. Look closely and one can see his subtle, powerful, and timeless principles applied.

Good design is innovative - The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.
Good design makes a product useful - A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasises the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.
Good design is aesthetic - The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our person and our well-being. But only well-executed objects can be beautiful.
Good design makes a product understandable - It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory.
Good design is unobtrusive - Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression.
Good design is honest - It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.
Good design is long-lasting - It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even in today’s throwaway society.
Good design is thorough, down to the last detail - Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the consumer.
Good design is environmentally-friendly - Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimises physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.
Good design is as little design as possible - Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.

If You’re Busy, You’re Doing Something Wrong: The Surprisingly Relaxed Lives of Elite Achievers

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 10:52:19 -0600

To summarize these results:

The average players are working just as many hours as the elite players (around 50 hours a week spent on music),

but they’re not dedicating these hours to the right type of work (spending almost 3 times less hours than the elites on crucial deliberate practice),

and furthermore, they spread this work haphazardly throughout the day. So even though they’re not doing more work than the elite players, they end up sleeping less and feeling more stressed. Not to mention that they remain worse at the violin.

I’ve seen this same phenomenon time and again in my study of high achievers. It came up so often in my study of top students, for example, that I even coined a name for it: the paradox of the relaxed Rhodes Scholar.

This study sheds some light on this paradox. It provides empirical evidence that there’s a difference between hard work and hard to do work:

Hard work is deliberate practice. It’s not fun while you’re doing it, but you don’t have to do too much of it in any one day (the elite players spent, on average, 3.5 hours per day engaged in deliberate practice, broken into two sessions). It also provides you measurable progress in a skill, which generates a strong sense of contentment and motivation. Therefore, although hard work is hard, it’s not draining and it can fit nicely into a relaxed and enjoyable day.

Hard to do work, by contrast, is draining. It has you running around all day in a state of false busyness that leaves you, like the average players from the Berlin study, feeling tired and stressed. It also, as we just learned, has very little to do with real accomplishment.

This analysis leads to an important conclusion. Whether you’re a student or well along in your career, if your goal is to build a remarkable life, then busyness and exhaustion should be your enemy. If you’re chronically stressed and up late working, you’re doing something wrong. You’re the average players from the Universität der Künste — not the elite. You’ve built a life around hard to do work, not hard work.

Study Hacks via Daniel Miessler

"Profit in a business is like gas in a car. You don’t want to run out of gas, but neither do..."

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 06:34:07 -0500

“Profit in a business is like gas in a car. You don’t want to run out of gas, but neither do you want to think that your road trip is a tour of gas stations.”

- Tim O’Reilly

Your Number One Priority

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 16:42:01 -0500

I think living healthier is the single biggest accelerator we could apply to improving society today. But here I am, falling prey to the same excuses – too much work, not enough time, too tired, too hard, tomorrow.

So I made a decision. I decided to re-prioritise.

For the last month, my number one priority every single day has been to exercise. I have done this to the exclusion of meetings, work tasks and leisure time.

In doing this, I realised how absurd it was to live any other way. Exercise:

increases productivity and focus

improves physical health

balances your mental state

makes you a better worker, boss, employee, brother, son, husband, lover, parent, mentor and friend.

An 8 hour work day with exercise is more valuable than an 10 hour work day without.

Justifying daily exercise as your number one priority is such an easy thing to do.

If exercise isn’t your number one priority, your priorities are wrong.

- Nick Crocker via Daniel Miessler

Questions I Ask When Reviewing a Design

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0500

I’ve been thinking more about how I review a design… in no particular order, and I don’t ask all of them every time.

What does it say?

What does it mean?

Is what it says and what it means the same thing?

Do we want that?

Why do we need to say that here?

If you stopped reading here, what’s the message?

What’s the take away after 8 seconds?

How does this make you feel?

What’s down below?

How else can we say this?

What’s memorable about this?

What’s that for?

Who needs to know that?

Who needs to see that?

How does that change behavior?

What’s the payoff?

What does someone know now that they didn’t know before?

How does that work?

Why is that worth a click?

Is that worth scrolling?

What’s the simpler version of this?

Are we assuming too much?

Why that order?

Why would this make them choose that?

What does a more polished version of this look like?

Why would someone leave at this point?

What’s missing?

Why are we saying this twice?

Is it worth pulling attention away from that?

Does that make it clearer?

What’s the obvious next step?

How would someone know that?

Would it matter if someone missed that?

Does that make it easier or harder?

Would this be better as a sentence or a picture?

Where’s the verb?

Why is that there?

What matters here?

What would happen if we got rid of that?

Why isn’t that clear?

Why is this better?

How can we make this more obvious?

What happens when this expands?

If we got rid of this, does that still work?

Is it obvious what happens next?

What just happened?

Where’s the idea?

What problem is that solving?

How does this change someone’s mind?

What makes this a must have?

Hire For The Ability To Get Things Done

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Inability to get things done may manifest itself in multiple ways including:
Lack of urgency. Used to a large company environment where its OK if things take a few weeks longer.

Easily distracted. Heavy procrastinator.

Lazy / doesn’t work hard. Some very smart people are basically lazy. Don’t tolerate this.

Starts but never finishes things.

Lack of follow through – makes commitments but does not follow up.

Argumentative. Arguing incessantly about how to do something rather then just doing it.

Slow. Taking a long time to code (or do) something simple.

Perfectionist. Tendency to overdesign something and to spend 4 weeks building the perfect implementation versus 1 week building the thing that “just works” for 95% of the time. Sometimes the edge cases need to be covered, but in most raw startups this is not the case. On the business side this manifests as someone heavy on analysis, low on “doing”.

- Elad Gil via Daniel Miessler

Jobs and HP

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0500

When he was in eighth grade, Steve Jobs decided to build a frequency counter for a school project and needed parts. Someone suggested that he call Bill Hewlett. Finding a William Hewlett in the telephone book, the 12-year-old Jobs called and asked, “Is this the Bill Hewlett of Hewlett-Packard?” “Yes,” said Bill. Jobs made his request. Bill spent some time talking to him about his project. Several days later, Jobs went to HP and picked up a bag full of parts that Bill had put together for him. Subsequently, Jobs landed a summer job at HP. He later went on to co-found Apple Computer.

Think of how amazing this is. The founder and CEO of one of the major companies of the time, Bill Hewlett, got on the phone with a random 12-year-old he had never heard of. He then proceeded to personally make sure to assemble the bag of HP parts the kid needed.

Elad Gil via Daniel Miessler

Creative Problem Solving with SCAMPER

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0500

SCAMPER is a technique you can use to spark your creativity and help you overcome any challenge you may be facing. In essence, SCAMPER is a general-purpose checklist with idea-spurring questions — which is both easy to use and surprisingly powerful. It was created by Bob Eberle in the early 70s, and it definitely stood the test of time.

SCAMPER is based on the notion that everything new is a modification of something that already exists. Each letter in the acronym represents a different way you can play with the characteristics of what is challenging you to trigger new ideas:

S = Substitute

C = Combine

A = Adapt

M = Magnify

P = Put to Other Uses

E = Eliminate (or Minify)

R = Rearrange (or Reverse)

To use the SCAMPER technique, first state the problem you’d like to solve or the idea you’d like to develop. It can be anything: a challenge in your personal life or business; or maybe a product, service or process you want to improve. After pinpointing the challenge, it’s then a matter of asking questions about it using the SCAMPER checklist to guide you.

Consider, for instance, the problem “How can I increase sales in my business?”

Following the SCAMPER recipe, here are a few questions you could ask:

S (Substitute): ”What can I substitute in my selling process?”

C (Combine): “How can I combine selling with other activities?”

A (Adapt): “What can I adapt or copy from someone else’s selling process?”

M (Magnify): ”What can I magnify or put more emphasis on when selling?”

P (Put to Other Uses): “How can I put my selling to other uses?”

E (Eliminate): ”What can I eliminate or simplify in my selling process?”

R (Rearrange): “How can I change, reorder or reverse the way I sell?”

These questions force you to think differently about your problem and eventually come up with innovative solutions.

via http://litemind.com/scamper/ via http://danielmiessler.com/blog/creative-problem-solving-with-scamper

How LinkedIn used Node.js and HTML5 to build a better, faster app

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0500

This morning, LinkedIn launched its gorgeously overhauled mobile app. We’ve already told you all about the new features, but for developers, the most exciting part is what’s going on under the hood.

The app is two to 10 times faster on the client side than its predecessor, and on the server side, it’s using a fraction of the resources, thanks to a switch from Ruby on Rails to Node.js, a server-side JavaScript development technology that’s barely a year old but already rapidly gaining traction.

The innovative mix of technologies, from hybrid native/HTML5 front-end to node.js on the server-side, improved performance and development time.

On Creativity

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0500

From Wanken:

John Jay of Wieden + Kennedy was recently named one of the most creative business people in 2011 by Fast Company. His position as W+K’s executive creative director takes him between all of the W+K offices in an effort to breed those cultures into the main headquarters in Portland.

In this video John Jay talks about his creative process. He takes a step back and approaches his interpretation of process from a wise view. What I’ve drawn mostly from this is that it’s about conversation. Most importantly it’s about listening to what people have to say and then taking that to make it relative and understandable to other people.

The last thing that I’ve drawn from this that I agree with is that you should always place yourself around people that you aspire to be. It’s really about surrounding yourself with positive energy. It sounds cheesy but it makes a world of difference.

What Happens to User Experience in a Minimum Viable Product?

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0500

If you want to be lean, the idea of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is popular these days. This is where you build something with as little as possible so you can learn and figure out if you’re headed in the right direction or not. Something that comes up quite a bit when rapidly iterating taking a concept to a production is what features to leave out and how can leave holes in user experience. Here’s an article that clearly conveys that quality in user experience should not suffer just because you’re building an MVP: What Happens to User Experience in a Minimum Viable Product?

I want a base level of quality execution across all features. Whenever I commit to building or expanding a feature, I’m committing to a baseline of effort on the user experience. That way feature complexity — scope — is always the cost multiplier, not user experience. There aren’t debates about experience or how far to take it. The user experience simply has to be up to base standard in order to ship, no matter how trimmed down the feature is.

This is an excellent point to keep in mind when building prototypes, proof-of-concepts, and betas: It’s ok to trim features, but the level of quality should be set ahead of time and that’s not something we trim.

Iterating an Idea vs. Building a Monumental Expression of the Idea

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0500

During an internship with Maxis, the creators of SimCity and the Sims, designer and programmer, Chaim Gingold engaged in some high-tech forensics and gained insights on innovation, prototyping, and factors that lead to successful projects.

Maxis was in the thick of The Sims Online, and the other intern and I were placed in the hallway outside of Will’s office, next to the Elvis shrine, on folding tables. Under my “desk” was one of Will’s old Macs, a fancy machine from the mid-90’s, which, to my delight, we hooked up. Spending the summer at Maxis was like going to Santa’s workshop at the north pole, and finding out how the elves made the toys.

The old Mac was like a treasure cave, a historical archive of blueprints, prototypes, projects, and concepts. I could study the source code to some of my favorite games, like SimAnt, SimCity, and SimCity 2000. But that wasn’t even the best part. I found an ambitious Maxis project about tribal civilization from the early 90’s that was never completed. It was like a murder mystery. Why had this project died? The hard drive was full of prototypes for a secret project, which turned out to be The Sims. Apparently, Maxis had been working on the game for a long time, and many aspects of it had been prototyped in isolation, including a 2.5d character animation system and editor, the motive and decision making AI, and a house editor. The code to the last prototype was clearly a hacked version of the SimCity 2000 engine. I found a program that used genetic algorithms to procedurally generate SimCity-style buildings with a blind watchmaker style interface. That program had clearly been written as efficiently as possible, not from a run-time point of view, but from an implementation standpoint. It was using the SimCity 2000 code base as a host organism for some rapid experimentation. Will’s imagination had clearly been running faster than proper software engineering practice allowed.

Read the full essay: Catastrophic Prototyping and Other Stories. It’s a well-articulated, fun read. Along the way, I gleaned some new perspectives on what to focus on when building out your idea. As a commenter wrote, his prototyping rules of thumb are almost tattoo-worthy.

Dive into the presentations on his site if you want more.

Why is Jeff Bezos Not Scared of Failure?

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0500

During an Amazon shareholders meeting earlier this week, the following question was asked as to whether or not the company is being innovative and taking enough risk:

If it’s still Amazon’s philosophy to make bold bets, I would expect that maybe some of them wouldn’t work out, but I am just not seeing that. So, my question is where are the losers?

Founder, president, and CEO, Jeff Bezos had a rather impressive response:

We started working on Kindle almost seven years ago…. There you just have to place a bet. If you place enough of those bets, and if you place them early enough, none of them are ever betting the company. By the time you are betting the company, it means you haven’t invented for too long.

If you invent frequently and are willing to fail, then you never get to that point where you really need to bet the whole company. AWS also started about six or seven years ago. We are planting more seeds right now, and it is too early to talk about them, but we are going to continue to plant seeds. And I can guarantee you that everything we do will not work. And, I am never concerned about that…. We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details…. We don’t give up on things easily. Our third-party seller business is an example of that. It took us three tries to get the third-party seller business to work. We didn’t give up.

But if you get to a point where you look at it and you say look, “we are continuing invest a lot of money in this, and it’s not working and we have a bunch of other good businesses,” and this is a hypothetical scenario, and “we are going to give up on this.” On the day you decide to give up on it, what happens? Your operating margins go up because you stopped investing in something that wasn’t working. Is that really such a bad day? [emphasis added]

So, why is Jeff Bezo not scared of failure? Because, if you do it right, the risk is contained - you never get to the point where you’re betting the farm. And if you need to throw in the towel, it’s not a bad deal: You’ve immediately freed up money and resources to try something else that works.

Read the full response, which contains additional insights, at GeekWire: Jeff Bezos on innovation: Amazon ‘willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time’.

Are You Solving the Wrong Problem?

Tue, 31 May 2011 00:00:00 -0500

In the late 1950s, a British industrialist named Henry Kremer created a prize for an airplane powered only by the pilot’s own body. Teams entered and there was certainly no shortage of innovative construction techniques and aerodynamic designed. However, after more than a decade there as no winner.

Then an engineer by the name of Paul MacCready came along.

Paul realized that what we needed to be solved was not, in fact, human powered flight.

That was a red-herring. The problem was the process itself, and along with it the blind pursuit of a goal without a deeper understanding how to tackle deeply difficult challenges.

Read how he solved the problem and ultimately won the prize.

Innovation in Unlikely Pairings

Fri, 27 May 2011 00:00:00 -0500

We often hear about how innovation is often not a brand new idea or something that arrives in an “Ah-Ha!” moment. Rather it’s combining things we already know in new or different ways. Here’s an example of such an innovation…

This is a solar-powered trash can my friend across in Philly (we have some in Austin, too).

My first thought was “why would you power a trash can?” It turns out there’s an electric trash compactor inside powered by a battery which is charged by the solar panels. According to the manufacturer, these consume “4-5x the trash volume of standard trash bins, lowering by up to 80% the costs associated with trash collection and the associated vehicle activity – which includes fuel costs, wear & tear, and carbon emissions.”

The unlikely pairing of a lowly trash can and a simple solar panel resulted in an innovative way to save money and reduce CO2. Isn’t that amazing?!

Business Class: A Fresh Way to Look at Freemium

Mon, 23 May 2011 00:00:00 -0500

I’m sure most of you know Freemium is a business model where a basic product or service is offering is free, but charges money for premium for advanced features or functionality. You probably use such products all the time. Pandora, Hulu, Evernote, SpiceWorks, SurveyMonkey, as well as 40% of Apple App Store games incorporate this business model, making it extremely popular in the online and mobile space.

The traditional way most folks look at freemium is a stripped down (limited features, time, capacity, etc.) version of the real thing; however, I ran across a different perspective over at Information Architects - Business Class: Freemium for News?

John Gruber (Daring Fireball) summarized it as follows:

Stop trying to figure out ways to block the flow of information with paywalls. Allow everyone the same access to the content — in the way that every passenger gets transported from A to B on an airplane — but allow people to pay for a superior experience.

Same information. Different experience.

Although the article is mostly concerned with the domain of news sites and paywalls, I think there are parallels to any kind of freemium product.