I relate to this very strongly.
Whether in the context of building products or changing cultures, my own core interest is in seeing what drives human behavior and how people react to change. I am drawn back to the technology industry over and over not because I care about bits and bytes, but because it is the most fertile ground for behavior change that exists in our world today.
cf. something I wrote like a year ago - whether or not it holds up :)
My mailing list is live. Again. Why is it taking you so long to realize this?
The (arbitrarily) best things to read about tech, culture, behavioral economics & hamburgers.
George Packer, writing in the New Yorker:
Journalists and historians have to distort war: in order to find the plot—causation, sequence, meaning—they make war more intelligible than it really is.
There's a nontrivial value to this kind of deception, but it's a tricky balance to strike. One presumes that there are lessons to learn from war, and it follows that someone should be empowered to tease those meanings from the (literal and figurative) rubble. At the same time, I have a strong aversion to making even subtle modifications to underlying truths, and it worries me to consider that what I read is distinctly different from facts.
This same dilemma extends to other realms, including my own (as it were). Business analysis (even that which I find most insightful) and the opinions of experts are subject to all manner of distortions, and I struggle to keep those out of my own work.
If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.
I can't find a good citation for this, but I like it. I do, however, think it's worth adding that good communication skills are also very, very important - and that "well enough" is relative.
From a post titled "How Cognitive Fluency Affects Decision Making" on UXMatters. Emphasis mine.
In one study, researchers presented participants with the names of hypothetical food additives and asked them to judge how harmful they might be. People perceived additives with names that were hard to pronounce as being more harmful than those with names that were easier to pronounce. On a subconscious level, people were equating ease or difficulty of pronunciation with an assumption about familiarity. When the pronunciation seemed easy, people assumed it was because they’d previously encountered the additive and had already done the mental work of processing information about it. Since it seemed familiar, they assumed it was safe...
Researchers have found that, when a stimulus feels fluent, people are more likely to make judgments and decisions based on their first, Gut reaction. However, when a stimulus feels disfluent, people are more likely to reconsider their initial Gut reaction. Disfluency functions as a cognitive alarm that gets people to slow down and reassess a situation. From a UX-design standpoint, sometimes it’s good to get people to slow down and pay attention—and one way to do this is to deliberately make the information harder to process mentally by making its font harder to read or by using wording that is uncommon or unfamiliar.
Product photography is fun, and weird.
Today I spent the majority of my day on-location shooting The Public Radio with Zach and Colin (and with help from Hannah, Lianna and Chris). It was good, and exhausting, and fun.
When I was building bikes, I self-consciously photographed a huge portion of my life. My aim was presumably to build a personal brand that would improve the appeal of my company, but looking back I wonder how much of it was pure narcissism.
Now it's (ostensibly) different; I'm part of a larger team, and in many ways the aesthetic that we're selling is distinct from my own. Sure, I use Mason jars, and I truly enjoy FM from time to time - and when I do, I only listen to one station. But the challenges that interest me about The Public Radio are largely distinct from the reasons that (I believe) our customers would buy it, and that has a huge effect on the way I present it to the world. It frees me up, and removes self-consciousness from the equation. It makes it much easier.
Anyway. Consider The Public Radio's crowdfunding campaign begun. Stay in touch for updates.
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I became aware of Undercurrent a little over a year ago. I found them via Radiolab, where they were an underwriter; their ad caught me off-guard (in particular because it mentioned both additive manufacturing and human-refrigerator interaction), and I've spent a lot of time since then tracking the organization. Undercurrent's philosophy, talent, and focus were highly attractive to me, and I enjoyed reading about their work.
And so it's with great pleasure that I can announce that I'm joining Undercurrent in a full-time strategy role.
Mike Arauz describes Undercurrent's philosophy well here:
This is why we’ve built a team that doesn’t look like traditional consulting firms. We value someone’s ability to see how organizations need to be in the future more than someone’s knowledge of how organizations operated in the past. Our core competency is not our ability to apply rigor and proven methodologies to make safer bets and mitigate risk, it’s our insight about how the future is going to be different than the present, gained through intuition, intelligence, and creativity.
I will be continuing my work on the variety of other projects I've got going - with increased vigor, in some cases. Undercurrent has the highest density of curiosity, creativity, and excitement that I've ever seen in a workplace. I'm looking forward to being a part of it.
My coffee grinder hack works really well! I made a few cups this morning with it - and you can get your own on Shapeways!
Ben Bajarin, on twitter yesterday:
I always, *always* want to be looking down the road in fields upstream of mine. If you want to be ahead of the curve, it's critical to be tracking the curves of all the fields that inform yours.
David Cole, writing about the role of designers in a very good presentation from last year.
If the project you were working on failed — it hit the market and nobody wanted it, nobody used it — would you blame yourself? If the answer is no, then I think you don't have enough authority. If you're blaming others for the outcomes in your work, it's time to demand more.
I would generalize this statement to all professions, all roles. I would also add that responsibility is key to this equation as well, and that responsibility isn't given - it's taken.
"In today's high speed environment, stop motion footage of a city at night with cars turning quickly makes you think about doing things efficiently."
Ben Thompson, in a post titled "Newspapers are Dead; Long Live Journalism."
“But [Insert Newspaper Name Here] has great journalists! They’ve won Pulitzer Prizes! And our democracy needs newspapers!” Unfortunately, advertisers don’t, and newspapers are paying the price for having long ago divorced the cost of their content from the value readers place upon it. To put it another way, it’s not that “the Internet has unbundled advertising from content creation,” it’s that advertisers (rightly) don’t give a damn about journalistic ideals. It is incredibly tiring to hear newspaper defenders talk as if advertising dollars are their god-given right, and that Google and Facebook are somehow stealing from them, when in reality Google and Facebook are winning in the fairest way possible: providing better value for the advertiser’s dollar.
I think this is very pretty.
With any luck, I'll have an update on my coffee grinder driver in the next few days. The bottom line is that it's live and working, and you should holler at me if you're interested in testing one!
I just want to point out: *this* is how we send things around the world. Paper. Pens. Carbon copies.
I'm pretty sure that this is totally insane.
Marc Andreessen, writing about the future of the news business. Emphasis is mine.
The best approach is to think like a 100% owner of your company with long-term time horizon. Then you work backward to the present and see what makes sense and what remains. Versus, here is what we have now, how do we carry it forward?...
There are some artifacts and ideas in the journalism business that arguably are counterproductive to the growth of both quality journalism and quality businesses. It’s why some organizations are finding it so hard to move forward.
An obvious one is the bloated cost structure left over from the news industry’s monopoly/oligopoly days. Nobody promised every news outfit a shiny headquarters tower, big expense accounts, and lots of secretaries!
Unions and pensions are another holdover. Both were useful once, but now impose a structural rigidity in a rapidly changing environment. They make it hard to respond to a changing financial environment and to nimbler competition. The better model for incentivizing employees is sharing equity in the company.
I tend to agree that unions and pensions are outdated, but it's often difficult to relay the complexity of the situation without sounding overwhelmingly conservative. Andreessen's suggestion is more interesting: replace unions and pensions with equity. I find this quite agreeable.
Gabe Newell, in the second part of his interview with WaPo, on how he approached his entry into the gaming industry.
It seemed like the big mistake would be to get into a business where you couldn't tell if you were any good at it because you could throw a lot of money away and find out that you really had nothing to add.
This sounds so simple, but I find it totally profound.
Ben Thompson, in a post titled "The Cost of Bitcoin." Emphasis mine.
The implication for apps is clear: any undifferentiated software product, such as your garden variety app, will inevitably be free. This is why the market for paid apps has largely evaporated. Over time substitutes have entered the market at ever lower prices, ultimately landing at their marginal cost of production – $0.
The same story applies for music, movies, content, etc., and this has fundamentally changed what it means to do business on the Internet. It’s why, for example, WhatsApp was so valuable to Facebook: attention is the true finite resource, and how it’s commanded is, in some ways, besides the point.
Bitcoin and the breakthrough it represents, broadly speaking, changes all that. For the first time something can be both digital and unique, without any real world representation. The particulars of Bitcoin and its hotly-debated value as a currency I think cloud this fact for many observers; the breakthrough I’m talking about in fact has nothing to do with currency, and could in theory be applied to all kinds of objects that can’t be duplicated, from stock certificates to property deeds to wills and more.
Nobel Laureate and longtime bell Labs researcher Arno Penzias, in an excerpt from his book "Harmony." The focus here is organizational change at Bell Labs, presumably in the 1990s. Emphasis is mine.
The change didn't take place overnight, but over time our behavior has changed radically. Today about half our researchers work full-time in partnership with colleagues from other parts of AT&T. Similar changes have taken place in management as well. While most research managers have kept their titles and the trappings of office, their jobs have undergone 90-degree turns. Instead of looking up and down, so to speak, they now spend most of their time looking sideways.
For example, each research director now works with one of AT&T's business units, making sure that its needs get attention. The directors also make sure that Bell's researchers have access to potential customers for their work. These directors work not just for the sake of the people in their own organizations but rather for the research operation as a whole. With organizational roles now more clearly defined on the basis of function rather than scientific discipline, management's primary attention has shifted to external interactions.
Recasting first-level management roles has proved the most challenging undertaking. Experienced researchers themselves, managers had worked hard to ensure the best possible research in their departments. But "best" as they defined it. In one particular case, this meant producing the world's most powerful laser diode--a record-breaking experiment. It won the "best paper" award at a major professional conference. While certainly not unworthy, this internally generated pursuit of excellence paid insufficient attention to the priorities of potential customers. While colleagues in our Lightwave Business Unit sought more powerful lasers, they might have preferred to trade some of that device's performance for compatibility with their existing fabrication methods.