The next book I’m writing is about innovation: how and why new ideas develop the way they do. I’ve signed a deal with O’Reilly, publishers of my first book and work is well underway.
I’ve chosen innovation because it’s central to everything many of us want: for things to get better. But it’s also a misunderstood and violently misused term. It’s commonly abused in the tech sector, where you see it used as a filler word in naming and describing things: Innovation is the lorem ipsum of current bussiness and technology marketing filling in when people are too lazy to say what the mean.
The word even surfaces now in marketing literature for ball point pens and pizza, begging the questions:
Have we forgotten what innovation is?
How is innovation different from ‘good’ or ‘new’?
What are the common misconceptions about how innovation happens?
Can anyone innovate or just those born to do it?
What can we learn from innovations of the past, if anything?
Is the internet age that different in how innovations are found, developed and promoted than the work of Newton, Edison and Ford?
This is just the tip of the iceberg, and my aim is to explore these kinds of questions and answer them.
This blog post serves to invite all of you to participate in the development of the book. I’ll be discussing my ideas on this blog, linking and commenting to related findings along the way. I’m hoping you’ll chime in, give feedback and participate in the writing of a good book.
For starters:
I’m looking for nominations for people to interview. Who is the most innovative person you know? Have worked with? Have ever heard of? Give me a link or an e-mail address and I’ll put them on my list.
Are there other books, references or websites I should know about? What’s the best story of innovation you’ve read?
Or just say “Go Scott! Looking forward to the book!” 🙂
I’m a usability engineer on a major web site. Our senior managers are addicted to data. Hard core data. They make all decisions based on metrics and what the call “the metric function” – the equation that best determines what success is.
So when it comes to usability, the only studies they’re interested in are comparative ones, where I do A/B testing, or in some cases A/B/C testing. Even when we prototype or experiment, they always want the data housed in comparative data.
How do I get them out of this data rut and recognize that usability engineering involves more than generating numbers to put in charts? Or is this how most of the tech sector sees usability: a number factory?
This is one for the history books – I have quite the situation on my hands. I’m the PM for a 15 person team. My peer is the lead developer, who manages 6 programmers (of the 15). We disagreed on a major project decision, brought it to the VP, and he went my way. But since then, the lead developer has stopped talking to me. I mean, he won’t even answer my questions.
Whenever possible he tries to backfill the decision, directing his team towards the outcome he wanted, despite the VP directive. At first this was just frustrating (for me and the team), but now it makes me look incompetent and puts the project at risk. Morale is dropping, as we’re like a family where the parents have stopped talking to each other and programmers are taking sides.
Help?
Mindcamp is back – Saturday April 29th /30th. A choose-your-own-adventure conference based on popular foo and bar camps.
Interesting, if cynical, post over at next-microsoft. He mentions part of his criteria for chosing a job is how much power he would have to solve problems that impact him.
Basically the idea is this (a now corrected paraphrase of his post):
A = Number of problems you see B = Number of problems you don’t have the power to solve B / A = Victimization ratio.
So if you work in an environment where you can point out 10 problems, but are only capable/empowered to solve 4 of them (you are powerless for 6), your victimization ratio is 6 / 10 = 60%
I think this should be modified to include C) problems you can get someone else to solve for you. If you have a good manager, or even a good team of peers or reports, they may have the power to solve problems that you can’t.
I’d argue that a good manager solves problems for their team all the time that the team doesn’t have the power to solve on their own (e.g. poltical/upper management issues).
Then of course there’s D – Problems that initially you don’t have the power to solve, but can obtain if you ask for it, fight for it, or prove you’re worthy of. There’s going to be a trend line for D – how easy is it to demonstrate you’re worthy of more, and how fast is it granted to you? I think that’s more important than how much you start with.
I’d invert the value and call it The empowerment ratio. And call D the rate of empowerment.
My first book was published almost a year ago – While no one can predict book sales, that hasn’t stopped people, especially writers, from trying.
Below you’ll find a year’s worth of amazon.com sales data for The art of project management (provided by rankforest.com) with notes on my activities (This starts 4 weeks after the book was in stores because I didn’t know about rankforest until then). There are problems with amazon rankings, but they’re an easy indicator to track.
Here is the promotion rundown from 5/1/2005 to today:
O’Reilly promoted the book in their catalog, website and bestseller list (once it got there), and invited me to write a few pieces for their website. They posted a sample chapter and allowed slashdot to excerpt another. Kathryn Barrett, publicist for O’Reilly, was fantastic, generously sending out reviewer copies to folks willing to write reviews for websites and magazines.
This blog generates good traffic but most peaks in web traffic were driven by new essays.
Who knows if these efforts help – plenty of books do well without things like this, and many with big promotion budgets do poorly. It’s complex and a topic for another post.
However it happened, the book has been a big success. Thanks to all of you for visiting, reading, buying and spreading the word about the book. Every sale motivates me to work that much harder and write that much more.
The pairing of writing books and being for hire as a trainer/consultant feeds off each other: people who like the book often hire me and people who hire me often buy the book. So for any would-be writers out there, this is a great approach for a first book.
I’m doing well and have signed to write a second book for O’Reilly – I’m on track to put another dent in that shelf.
For fun, comparative data is listed for Malcom Gladwell’s book “Blink”. Not sure what happened to him on 10/16, but it looks like he survived his largest rank-drop: from the teens down to 57.
Welcome to April (If you’re in the USA, time to get your taxes done).
Here’s this week’s situation: The raging debate in my corner of the world is PMs vs. programmers. Our management just agreed to hire another two PMs for our organization, instead of hiring another two programmers.
Most of us (the other programmers) think it’s a mistake: our biggest needs are team bandwidth and productivity, not planning, client management or crisis management. We’re afraid of the ratio of PM to programmers spiraling us down into unproductive misery. Most of the PMs around here are non-technical and can’t help much in technical decision making.
Two part question:
How do you know the right ratio of PMs to programmers for a team?
What level of technical skill should PMs have? CS degree? former programmer? C++ for dummies? Or none at all?
Our group is in the process of launching a new version of our external website, but the solo developer left before it was finished. He claims it’s 90% done. No UX priniciples were used up to this point (we were busy on actual products). None of us have time to take it over, but we have a budget to bring in someone else.
I have two fears / opportunities:
1) There’s an opportunity to teach my org a few things about how UX should be done. If we bring someone in, will they be seen as the heroic talent, saving the day, and not my UX team?
2) If the day is saved, by us or by a contractor, I don’ t want the wrong lesson to be learned. I want to make sure that everyone understands this is not the right way to go about designing things (apply design magic dust in the last stretch). So how do I get design involved without teaching management and the org the wrong lesson?
– Being the UX hero
Whenever a major magazine or paper lists their innovations of the year, I always wonder how they came up with them. We’ll, in the case of the Wall street journal, here’s the answer.
The early registration deadline for GEL 2006 ends next week, so it’s a good time to make a pitch for why you should go.
Good Experience live is the only conference I’ve been to that is self-reflective: many of the principles of design and good user experience espoused during the day can be found in the way the conference itself is run. Day one of the conference is out in the field, spending time with experts in their domain: an inside tour of the experience design of NYC landmarks like Natural history museum, MoMa and the Hall of Science. Participate in an improv experiment on the midtown streets or a learn how to apply tmusic techniques to your work. There’s also a food experience tour of my home burrough of Queens, NYC.
Day 2 are talks from Craig Newmark (Craigslist), Jason Fried (37 Signals), Seth Godin, Douglas Rushkoff, Photographers, Urban pranksters, Game designers and other interesting perspectives on making great things for people. There’s no formalized boundries here – instead you get great cross-discipline stimulation that will stay with you long after you leave.
The conference rates are still discounted Before April 5th, it’$1200 for both days, and $1500 afterwards. (Price was $900 before December 1st, but that’s behind us now).
I’ll be running a Day one tour on NYC’s sacred places. We’ll be walking around the city and exploring magical and special places, discussing how they were designed to have the effects they have. You can sign up for this or other Day 1 tours when you register.
Hope to see you there.
The announcement of the Vista delays has sparked a new round of debates about what’s going on at Microsoft. The mailbox has been full of questions for me on the subject – so here’s some insights from a former employee (’94-2003) and manager in the Windows division.
For sanity – I’m an independent and this is not an apology, rant nor inside scoup. Instead it’s commentary from a management author on what’s been said and what’s going on.
Centralized authority and MSFT culture. The most comical misperception about Microsoft is the management style – everyone think’s it’s a rigid hierarchy, when it’s mostly a consensus driven place. Everyone gets an opinion and senior managers are often more skilled at consensus management than leading teams. If there’s any one thing I’d point to for large failing projects is lack of successful central authority – With a project in trouble I’d move to centralize power in a smaller number of people and free them to run with the ball. The rub is that the culture doesn’t support this well – people still want a consensus mentality (something born of small team and start-up culture), they want to own their slice, even when it’s contributing to driving projects into the ground (or at least mediocrity). It’s in the fiber of the company and it’s hard to change.
Talk is cheap. Every time I read rants about gutting Windows, firing all the VPs or making Windows open source I have one comment: I don’t believe you’d do it if it were your job to manage Windows. As easy as it is to yell orders from off the boat, I doubt most people, if given the helm, would put an $8 billion machine at risk. Certainly not now, as it would mean another 2 years of development. Besides, no one wants to be the one that tanked one of the greatest franchises in technological history (regardless of how that franchise was built). Even if big, bold moves are in order – I doubt most of us would have the guts to take those risks if we were personally accountable for the results. It’s a classic innovator’s dilemma situation. A better gripe is how the franchise hasn’t been managed on a steady progressive course, given how many possibilites there are for making things better without taking radical moves.
It’s never just one thing. It’s fun and convenient to chalk up project problems to one issue. “The VPs are idiots – fire them all!” or “they were too ambitous” but there’s rarely one reason (Nothing drives faith in the easy answer more than frustration). Most of the time there are several factors that conspire together, especially if it’s a large project with large goals. There are often successful sub-teams working inside most large, problematic projects (And some are speaking out over at mini-microsoft). As a consultant, understanding (and fixing) projects involves finding the factors and accouting for them without tanking the parts that work well. There’s rarely a single move that saves the day and any problem that took months to develop is not going to be solved in a hour.
A slip is infinitely better than a panned product. With a slip, even 6 months, people will cry and scream but the world will not end. However, with a bad release, like Windows 98ME, Bob or Netscape 5, the world just might fall on you. So while a series of slips shouldn’t inspire confidence, it does mean there is a sane person somwhere in the organization with their hands at the controls. The Vista news has been mostly negative, and no competitor has tried to capitalize on it, meaning a slip has little competitive risk.
However, the door is open for competitors . The bad Vista PR over the last year has made a window – Linux, Firefox and Red Hat should be doing something: a viral ad, a marketing campaign, anything. But they’ve been awfully quiet and I don’t understand why. I think this is the more interesting story than what’s going on in Redmond. The MSFT Windows multi-slip ship cycle is an old (perhaps sad) story, but the silence on the battlefront deserves more attention.
Microsoft’s PR and public management of the Vista project has been reactive and weak. I’ve never thought PR and marketing were well directed by executives (well funded, yes, but well managed or empowered, no). Many announcements and launches were messaged in the blandest, most generic ways possible (Win95 and X-box the most notable exceptions). Microsoft is inherently a conservative company (in strategy not tactics) and its always shown in its advertisements and approach to PR. For all the stereotyping of Microsoft as a great marketing company, I never saw it: Nike, Intel and Apple are all dramatically better and amplify the value of their product lines. Vista’s failures to date are more dramatic from a PR and messaging perspective than anything else. They’ve failed to articluate a value proposition (even if invented), and to bring a positive meme around the release to match or compensate for the litany of negative announcements and setbacks. The greatest failure of the project to date isn’t technological or managerial – it’s PR and messaging. A private train wreck is one thing, a public one is another.
Windows is a bear. Much of the franchise has been based on backward compatibility and some things that should be improved in the abstract can hurt the product line – it’s a trap any successful platform faces eventually (Just look at HTML or javascript). People write code to your bugs or inconsistencies, and when you come back to fix them you realize you’ll do more damage to them than good – a quality inversion. I don’t justify how the product got where it is – but here it is. Deciding what to do in any direction is strategically and technically complicated – this shouldn’t mute the complaints of unhappy customers, but it should be noted by anyone confident they can do a better job. Quality inversions surface in any project successful enough to see a version 5, or in Window’s case, version 8 (Win 1-3, Win95, Win 98, Win 2000, Win XP, Vista).
Sinofsky is an inspired move. The MSFT culture, historically, is heavily polarized between Windows and Office. In my day Windows were the smart-ass cowboys who liked risks and breaking rules – not surprisingly Windows had a history of confused early projects that came together only on the home stretch. Office (again, in my day) were stereotypically smart, reliable, consistent A students, who won through plans more than passion. Sinofsky (formerly the Senior VP of Office, now VP of Windows) is the first major attempt I know of to bridge those philosophical and management differences: there’s something to be learned in both directions.
We finally got buy in to fund a future thinking blue sky design exploration for future releases of our software and websites. Problem is: we can’t decide if we should have internal designers do the work, or hire out a fancy firm. The debate is raging and I’m on the fence (and it’s my call & budget).
What’s the best way to do the following:
1) Manage an intentionally future thinking design project with few constraints
2) Decide on internal vs. out-source staff
3) Deliver something that doesn’t seem like a waste of time.
We just shipped v2 of our project – but few are cheering. To meet our dates we dropped quality on the floor (reliability, usability… you name it) and everyone knows it. There’s already talk about what commitments we have for v3, but no one has articulated what we’re going to do about raising the quality bar.
How do you (successfully) argue for time for higher quality? Has anyone worked on a project where quality was really job #1? How did it happen? Who defined (and defended) quality?
– Quality is job #1
At e-tech 2006 the theme was the attention economy – but the conversation was mostly technocentric despite attention being a 100% human resource.
In this essay I discuss a view of attention that’s centered on people – attention is the most precious thing we have and I explore why we’ve lost control of it, how to get some control back and the role of desire and intimacy in how we spend our time.
In the short notice visit department – I’ll be in Tornto end of this week speaking at the CBC (private event). Had I gotten my act together perhaps I could have found a place to speak, but that’s unlikely at this point.
However, if any locals want to meet up and chat I’m game. I’m free Saturday for lunch or coffee and possibly Friday night.
Any Toronto site-seeing recommendations? I’m a city boy so I plan to do lots of walking, photographing and eating 🙂
I do both design and usability for a midsize start-up (30 people) in the newsreader space.
We’re vulnerable (at least our VP is) to UI trends – as soon as our competitors do something, he’s running around telling everyone we have to do the same thing.
Last week, one of our competitors switched to a tag, and tag cloud UI for their website, and as the night follows day, our VP is now pushing us to redesign with a tag, and tag cloud model.
I have my own opinions, but I can’t find any ux research on tags and tag clouds – what problem do they solve? When should you use them and when are they a mistake? Should they really be the primary way to get around a website? I’m looking for both opinions and data to help me sort out my stance, but also to add some thinking to our trend-happy debates.
I work at a near v1 release start-up – we’re mostly industry vets who’ve worked together before, but we’re growing fast (7 new hires in the last month – 20% of our staff).
Some of us feel we need to write down something about how we do what we do – style guide for code, an outline for how feature decisions get made, you know – high level process stuff. It can be short and sweet, but we need a reference point.
Others feel it’s a waste of time, it never helps, and we should just be figuring it out as we go. No need to be all goody-too-shoes and orderly: we’re smart enough, as a small org, to work tight without documenting foofy things like processes.
How do you know when you need a plan for the plan? Who should write it? And how do you do it, especially for small anti-process teams, so that it’s beneficial in some way?
– Considering a plan for the plan
We didn’t take the cake, but we got a nice runner up prize.
BOOKS GENERAL
Jolt Winner: Prefactoring by Ken Pugh (O’Reilly)
As happy as us productivity (aka runner-up) award winners are, we all have to shake our heads on two counts: how did a book on prefactoring not get put in the technical category? And how did it kick the ass of five books on bigger and broader topics? Kudos to Ken Pugh – he’s got a Seabiscut of a book 🙂 Kicked our butts.
The early registration deadline for