Zakary Tormala, writing about our surprising preference for potential - even over achievement. Emphasis mine.
We designed several ads in Facebook promoting a comedian who was growing in popularity at the time of our study. One ad said, “Critics say he has become the next big thing,” and another said, “Critics say he could become the next big thing.” The “potential” ads produced more than three times the click-through rate and five times the fan rate.
I had never heard this term, but I like it. From an interview in Solid State Technology with Margaret Blohm, Chief Scientist and Leader of Nanotechnology at GE Global Research, emphasis mine:
Q: What challenges do you face in managing nanotechnology research programs and scientists?
The challenge of dealing with a lot of enthusiasm and making sure we stay on track with business impact and not just really cool technology. It can be hard on folks who have a good idea that’s not ready for a specific business use. An even bigger challenge is doing matrix managing. I’ve never been a fan, but I love it now. Matrix managing is the process of influencing organizations or departments or other structures where you don’t have individuals directly reporting to you, to help them recognize the mutual benefit of what they are working on.
I matrix manage the people on the various research teams. I reach in to their team and work with them. For example, a chemist is on one team and can join my team as well. It’s usually a management nightmare, but it has worked here. It’s communication both ways. They aren’t isolated from business challenges and opportunities. Matrixing helps do that.
From a good article on Susan Kare, who (among other things) designed the great early GUI icons for Apple.
In exchange for a pre-IPO purchase of Apple stock, Xerox allowed Jobs and his engineering team three days’ access to PARC to scope out the Alto and its development tools.
*So* good to deal in equity.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nick Felton, in an interview with The Great Discontent:
Certainly, the Annual Report personal project has elevated my career enormously, but it was only one of many personal projects that I tried along the way—no one gave a hoot about most of them. Not letting that discourage me, I kept trying other things. It wasn’t about finding “the idea,” but putting things out that I thought were worth doing and seeing if anyone cared. If not, I moved along.
Douglas Adams, in a 1999 post titled "How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet."
Another problem with the net is that it’s still ‘technology’, and ‘technology’, as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is ‘stuff that doesn’t work yet.’ We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‘crash’ when we tried to use them. Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs (and a couple of decades or so after that, as sheets of paper or grains of sand) and we will cease to be aware of the things. In fact I’m sure we will look back on this last decade and wonder how we could ever have mistaken what we were doing with them for ‘productivity.’
Ben Horowitz, in an old blog post titled "Why We Prefer Founding CEOs." Emphasis mine.
The music business has been continuously disrupted and revolutionized by the underlying technology since the outset. In fact, it’s still widely referred to as the “record industry,” because the entire business was created by the invention of the vinyl record. For the first few decades of the industry, songs were never longer than 3 minutes due to a technological limitation (the record would skip if the grooves were too thin). The album itself is a construct that originated with the total number of songs one could fit on a 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Minute (RPM) vinyl record. In the 80s, the invention of the CD completely revitalized the industry and led to (literally) record-breaking sales.
Despite this dynamic history, modern record company executives badly missed the most sweeping technical innovation—the Internet. How was that possible? By the time the Internet arrived, all of the original founders of the record companies had been bought out, retired, or died. The new, professional CEOs were unwilling to let go of the most basic assumptions driving the cost structure of their businesses. Specifically, they wouldn’t give up their stranglehold on distribution and the value they placed on owning the recording.
They were proficient at running the current business, but lacked both the courage and the moral authority to jeopardize the old business model by embracing the new technology. The transition would have been far easier if these executives running the companies had invented the old models. The founders of the music industry likely would have ditched old assumptions, because they would have been nuts to do continue believing an assumption that no longer makes sense.
Conversely, Netflix, run by cofounder Reed Hastings, provides an excellent counter-example. Faced with a similar transition (from distribution of the physical recording to electronic distribution of the bits), Netflix let go of its old assumption that customers wanted DVDs mailed to them, invested in innovation and produced a series of brilliant new offerings (streaming video to Xbox 360, Sony Playstation 3, Tivo, Wii, connected DVD players, and a host of devices) that are enabling them to transition smoothly. Hastings wasn’t married to the old distribution model precisely because he invented it.
From Yiren Lu's very good opinion piece in this week's NYTimes Magazine, "Silicon Valley's Youth Problem." Emphasis mine.
These are places where the C.E.O. often sits alongside the engineers, where recruiters talk about a “flat” hierarchy as a perk on par with paternity leave, where regular engineers get equity. Some of these changes have occurred out of necessity. “In the ‘80s, it was not uncommon to pay people salaries and give them few if any stock options,” Biswas said. “Now, you can’t have a company like Facebook and attract that kind of talent without offering equity.”
Ownership is *really* powerful.
David C. Novak, former COO of Pepsi, talking about Pepsi Crystal in an interview with Fast Company:
It was a tremendous learning experience. I still think it's the best idea I ever had, and the worst executed. A lot of times as a leader you think, "They don't get it; they don't see my vision." People were saying we should stop and address some issues along the way, and they were right. It would have been nice if I'd made sure the product tasted good. Once you have a great idea and you blow it, you don't get a chance to resurrect it.
From a post on Medium by the very smart team at Bolt.io:
Conduct prototype builds as science experiments not engineering exercises. Have a hypothesis about one specific thing, build something to test that hypothesis, test it, and then analyze your results. Too often startups build a full functional prototype before testing basic assumptions they’re making about their users. Reduce your prototype iteration time as much as possible, and then a bit more.