Abstraction

Interesting article in Scientific American about a study that shows the brain is hardwired such that people fit into two behavioral categories. (More likely a continuum, but for purposes of illustration I’ll keep it straightforward).

In one category, people are predisposed to alter their behavior based on new information. In the other category, people are less responsive to new information, and tend to maintain the same behavior. Although the context of the study was political (this isn’t a political blog), I think that the study is equally interesting from a business perspective as well. A quote:

Amodio says that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a forebrain region, “serves almost as a barometer for this degree of conflict.”"People who have more sensitive activity in that area,” he notes, “are more responsive to these cues that say they need to adapt their behavior,” reacting more quickly and accurately to the unexpected stimulus. On average, people who described themselves as politically liberal had about 2.5 times the activity in their ACCs and were more sensitive to the “No-Go cue” than their conservative friends.

“They are more sensitive to the need for change and more sensitive to the need to change their behavior,” Amodio says about the politically left-leaning subjects.

At an overall statistical level, I suspect that having a disposition one way or the other is not a good predictor of business success. All other things being equal, two entrepreneurs of opposite dispositions have an equal chance to succeed at the beginning of a new venture. Where it does matter is how a person copes with the unique challenges the new business will face.

For example, a person that tends to maintain the same behavior despite conflicting information may have the tenacity and drive to stick with a business plan no matter what until it succeeds. She will have the steadfastness necessary to keep the business moving forward even when everyone is a naysayer. In some business contexts, this is exactly the right person needed at the helm; the business would fail if the leader was endlessly second guessing and altering course.

On the other hand, a business plan into which people have poured blood, sweat, and tears, may be fatally flawed. In this case, the leader must be flexible enough to honestly appraise new information that conflicts with the existing business plan, and alter the course of the business based on this new information. Here, the leader that stubbornly maintained the status quo would fail.

How do you know which leader is right for which challenge? You don’t, except in retrospect. As Nassim Taleb points out, most of what happens in life is random; all you can do is put in your best effort. A person plays much less a role in their own success (or failure) than they give themselves credit for.

I’m a procrastinator. I’m a little embarrassed to say this, though I don’t consider it a personal shortcoming (I mean, I don’t think procrastinating per se makes someone an asshole). Procrastination smacks of immaturity, of unprofessional slacking. And god knows, “unprofessional” and “immature” are the absolute last things anyone would think about me .

Here’s the thing: procrastination works for me. Always has. When a deadline is close enough to begin to cause a little anxiety, I can tackle a project with a focus and flow that is harder to find when there’s no time pressure.

Imagine my surprise (and a little relief) to discover that I’ve stumbled upon a pretty effective — and clinically proven — strategy. Stress, it turns out, causes blood levels of cortisol to increase. Too much cortisol is a bad thing, but just the right amount boosts interest, attention, and motivation, producing maximum cognitive efficiency and achievement. By procrastinating until a deadline began to loom, I am creating a “sweet spot” of stress during which my performance is better than it would be had I not procrastinated.

With procrastination, though, there is a fine line separating the sweet spot from a negative downward spiral. Procrastinate too much and you risk stress levels climbing high enough to produce a feeling of outright fear. At this point, the more stress escalates, the worse mental efficiency becomes.

This cortisol “sweet spot” phenomenon has implications for leading teams. It implies that leaders must introduce gentle stress into a team to effectively motivate them, to help them reach their full potential. I say “gentle” stress to distinguish my suggestion from the stress caused by the red-faced-table-pounding behavior favored by the Steve Jobs or Larry Ellison wannabes among our corporate leaders.

“Gentle” stress means establishing specific, moderately aggressive deadlines for each project, and then frequently following up with the team member to assess how he/she is doing against the goal. Defining a deadline itself is important (work always expands to fill the amount of time available), but the (lets call it what it is) nagging creates a sense of urgency around the deadline. You are reinforcing that the deadline is meaningful, that you care about it. Creating a sense of urgency and meaning can take the team to the productivity “sweet spot.”

Related to my earlier post on how selling software to very large entities (e.g. selling software to telecom carriers) introduces unusual business challenges, I thought I’d post some key characteristics of software made for such carriers.

• It works, and continues to work — with five-9 availability — at the enormous scale required by carriers
• It solves a real world problem
• It contains sustainable differentiation
• It has no “single point of failure” (i.e. single external dependency) on which is relies to deliver value
• Avoids “specials” — one off development for a single customer
• Reflects input from customers and customer advisory boards
• (If a platform) provides robust, comprehensive SDKs
• Easy to install, particularly for PoCs
• Easy to configure, customize, and integrate
• Easy to update

So I’m reading something today and learn that the same neurotransmitter (TRPM8) that is excited by low temperatures is also excited by certain chemicals, such as menthol. I always assumed that menthol’s coolness was on account of rapid evaporation, even though it’s just as cool in a closed area (say, in one’s closed fist) as it is on an open one.

In fact, I “knew” that menthol’s coolness was caused by evaporation, even though this doesn’t stand even the slightest bit of active thought. It’s a trivial enough fact that I didn’t bother to expend any bandwidth on it at all, even as it was filed under “things I know.”

The point being that there are likely innumerable other “facts” sitting around in my brain. Hopefully the worst these will do is cause embarrassment as I wax knowledgeable at some dinner party, but I’m reminded how important it is to stay conscious of — respect, even — the breadth and depth of my ignorance.

I *knew* I should have coached my team against telling customers they are stupid and crazy. I’m hanging a copy of this on the wall immediately.

I’m vulnerable to prioritizing crap that, in the end, doesn’t matter at all. Every now and then I come across something that helps return perspective. I’m grateful for that, and I thought I’d pass it along.

Randy Pausch, a 46-year-old professor at Carnegie Mellon university, has incurable pancreatic cancer. He has been given months to live.

Two days ago, he gave his last lecture:

What we’re not going to talk about today is cancer, because I’ve spent a lot of time talking about that … and we’re not going to talk about things that are even more important, like my wife and [three preschool] kids, because I’m good, but I’m not good enough to talk about that without tearing up.

Here’s the full video of the lecture. I think I’ll go play with my son now.

In a previous post I broke a taboo by expressing my feeling that “some meetings are an important, and often neglected, aspect of good management.” (Breaking a taboo, I mean, by doing anything other than denigrating the hated meeting).

And, just as everyone, I still hate meetings. Hate them. Painful. Ugh.

But I see that Tyler Cowen has something positive to say about meetings, too:

But there is good news for the legions of meeting haters: Most meetings aren’t as wasteful as they seem.

Face-to-face gatherings serve valuable if hidden functions. For example, meetings publicize information about status. Who speaks? Who finds it necessary to praise whom? Who displays a confident demeanor? Meetings help managers and employees figure out how to build necessary coalitions. They bestow social intelligence.

A good reminder of the value of consciously maintaining focus and participating within meetings. Meetings are often the primary (sometimes the only) interaction point you will have with many colleagues, particularly those hierarchically above you. Even with colleagues you see and with whom you interact every day, meetings can serve to establish lines of authority and can build (or tear down) respect among teams.

The message: no matter how painful, how redundant, or how meaningless a meeting may seem, you should focus and squeeze as much positive, productive energy as you can out of the situation. The alternative is to risk being seen negatively — no one likes a whiner or a slacker.

Conveniently located down the street from my office is the Computer History Museum, which has a huge exhibit devoted to the evolution of computers. Just as you enter this room, on the wall to the right, is an abacus display. Continue walking and the exhibit provides a mind boggling chronology of computing, including ENIAC machines, 10Meg hard drives as big as my car, Cray supercomputers, and finally the Apple ][, TRS-80s, Atari 800s, and the PC.

By the way, if (like me) you see “TRS-80″ and immediately think “trash 80,” you’re showing your age.

My favorite part of the exhibit, by far, is the display of the more recent (say, ‘85-’95) computing devices, the ones that I used as a kid. It’s fun to look at at an 1200 baud modem and remember dialing up BBSs.

It’s fun, too, to think of how things have changed. In my mind, computing technology evolves in a kind of punctuated equilibrium (with apologies to Stephen Jay Gould). I’m not referring to Moore’s Law as an evolutionary concept, I mean dramatic, changes-everything evolution.

In my lifetime, there have been two of these. The first was the emergence of the PC as a common household tool. The second, of course, was the introduction of the Internet and the browser.

We are at the cusp of a third revolution, one even more significant than the others. It’s not really about the hyped concepts du jour: Web2.0, or IMS, or platforms (although all three of these are made possible by the emerging technologies). This revolution is more fundamental than that: it’s about the distribution of media, all media, via the network. I think the implications for this are truly mind blowing.

Traditional channels for media delivery exist because there was no alternative: CDs, DVDs, shrink-wrapped software, all exist because it was the most effective way to get media from the producer to the consumer. All of these will largely be gone within a decade: CompUSA will no longer sell software, Blockbuster will no longer have brick and mortar stores, music and film distributors will finally give up physically recorded media completely, television will be completely IP based.

The music and movie side to this phenomenon is well known, but truly amazing new businesses are announced daily. Ooma, for example, or Pano Logic, or Zonbu.

To date, all of the attention related to this third wave (if you will) has been focused on the services (the web2.0 and etc.) I mentioned briefly above. And yes, those companies I linked above are cool and amazing. But they aren’t the real winners.

But the real money, by and large, is gonna be made elsewhere: by the folks that make the networks and the network management, billing, and security systems. These are the systems that make it all possible; the technology that’s invisible and expected to perform faultlessly, like the telephone system. Pick up the receiver, and you get a dial tone every time.

Anyone representing a product weaves the conversation along a continuum that includes absolute accuracy, accuracy in terms of planned developed, accuracy in terms of potential development, and just plain inaccuracy.

I think it was in Dreaming in Code that I first came across the term “Shaving the Yak.” The concept has been familiar for a long time, I just didn’t have the words to express it. “Shaving the yak” refers to an focus on tools to accomplish a task instead of actually working on the task itself (e.g. Use this db, or that one? This coding language, or that one, etc.)

Sadly, yak-shaving happens to be one of my all time favorite activities. This is most evident in my book-buying: When I’m interested in a topic, I like to browse and buy books about the topic much more than I do actually learning about the topic.

My house is stuffed to the rafters with books that can serve as a chronology of my various interests over the course of the last decade or so.  You can note the many Dr. Phil books, for example, and, based on their position relative to other books, surmise that I had a fight with my wife sometime in 2001. My penchant for this book-buying has to do with feeling like I’m tackling a subject without actually having to tackle the subject.

For a long time, among my favorite yak-shaving activities had to do with personal productivity. Turns out I’m not alone, either; shaving this yak is so popular it’s got it’s own moniker: productivity prOn. There’s lots and lots and lots of web sites devoted to it, and a book, and many, many gurus. And no geeky blog is complete without a missive devoted to it.

And…I’m over it.  Thing is, my day to day work involves many onerous tasks that I’d really rather not have to do.  I think I subconsciously felt that if I were only to become super-productive, some of these tasks would take care of themselves. It’s akin to buying Quicken to fix an overspending problem.  You install it, feel like you’re making progress, and then realize that the unpleasant not-spending part is still there. (Then, irritated, you go out and buy Microsoft Money instead).

So no more shaving the yak for me.  I’m quitting the habit.  And to prove I’m serious, I’ve found a couple good books on the subject.

High among my (many, many) pet peeves is the bathroom hand-dryer, the wall mounted device that blows a sad little bleat of warm air on your hands, forcing you to either stand around and repeatedly cycle the machine or just give up and smear your hands all over the front of your pants.

Now, reminding me that the potential for a great product is often right in front of you, comes a better hand dryer.

It dries with a slim jet of air moving at 400 miles per hour. The Airblade doesn’t heat the air, so it uses about 80% less electricity than conventional machines. The dryers, which will be launched in the U.S. on June 26, are getting rave reviews from early customers. “Everybody loves them,” says George Denise, general manager for property manager Cushman & Wakefield at Adobe Systems Inc.’s buildings in San Jose, Calif. “They’re high-tech. They’re unique. They work well. And I’d even go so far as to say they’re fun.”

That great products ideas are everywhere, if you only know where to look, reminds me of an aphorism — there is, right now, a tiny company (or just an idea for a company) destined to grow into a billion dollar monster. If you missed your chance as an early employee at Google (or wherever), don’t sweat it; the next Google (or Oracle, or YouTube, or whatever) exists today, right now, somewhere. All you have to do is find it. They’ll hire you, no problem. Also, once you find it, you have to stick with it even when everything is going to hell and you’re sure it’s going to be a miserable failure. Easy, right?

One of the things I love most about living in Silicon Valley is how it celebrates geeks. Everything that is geeky, everything that made high school a miserable experience, is the norm here. It’s embraced. If it happens makes you very rich, it’s even sexy. People that aren’t geeky, or are at least associated with some geeky endeavor, are assumed to be cognitively impaired in some fundamental way. Not in a “you are stupid” way, but in a “you don’t really get it” kind of way.

It’s necessary at this point to admit that every non-geek I know (including my wife) would rush to emphasize that they in no way wish to “get it,” nor do they feel their life is in any way poorer for not “getting it,” and where the hell does a geek get off denigrating another person anyway, for God’s sake, not to mention the many things that geeks “don’t get,” including, all too frequently, personal hygiene and a modicum of conversational ability.

But I digress.

My point, such as it is, is that I just learned about the Tech Shop in Menlo Park. From the Tech Shop home page:

TechShop is a fully-equipped open-access workshop and creative environment that lets you drop in any time and work on your own projects at your own pace. It is like a health club with tools and equipment instead of exercise equipment…or a Kinko’s for geeks.

I think that such a great place could only exist in Silicon Valley. Anyway, kudos to Guy Kawasaki for pointing it out. Very, very cool.

As an ex-comedian (no longer funny), business presentations can be disconcerting. I am always scanning the audience for their reactions, and it’s hard not to feel that I’ve failed somehow if the crowd seems bored. I know, I know. Business isn’t entertaining. More to the point, my current business of networking protocols and the management thereof isn’t entertaining. There’s no way to make it entertaining, either. I suppose I could begin a presentation by saying that “a priest and a Rabbi walk into a bar arguing about MPLS dynamism,” but damned if I know where to go from there. Besides, everyone knows that men of the cloth are more into L7 than they are routing methodologies.

But I digress. Believe it or not, it turns out that many presentations today have some room for improvement. They are, research shows, somewhat boring (in the coma-inducing sense of “somewhat”) and less effective in terms of conveying information.

Initially I thought I’d throw in a sample or two of these poorly-done slides, but I figure it’s not necessary. Everyone has seen them: the slide has a 3-5 word headline, and a series of bullet points. The more technical the presenter, the more bullet points and the smaller the font. For example, a presentation given by a VP of marketing will have about 3 bullets using a 30 point font. A VP of engineering has 30 bullets using various random 10 point fonts pasted from different documents and never normalized.

Research shows that slides that use a sentence instead of a 3-5 word headline are more effective. Further, using images instead of bullets is more effective still. Write a sentence on top, such that reading the headlines of slides tell a little story. Then use pictures down below. Simple as that:

This alternative slide design features a succinct sentence headline that states the main assertion of the slide. That assertion is then supported by evidence presented in a visual manner. Presented in Figure 1 and Figure 2 are excellent examples of this design.

Does this make the presentations more entertaining? No. But it does make ‘em more effective:

Recent experimental tests have shown that the assertion-evidence slide design is superior to the traditional design at communicating technical information to an audience. Studies have shown that using the assertion-evidence design in the teaching slides of a large STEM course led to statistically significant increases (p < 0.001) in the knowledge and comprehension levels of students of course material [Alley et al., 2005].

If you haven’t seen David Pogue’s article about product manager’s it’s worth a read.  Money quote:

Good P.M.s, like good criminal lawyers, must sometimes be actors, making their case with conviction and passion when they’re representing a loser.

In the most highly stressed projects, people at all levels talk about the schedule being “aggressive,” or even “highly aggressive.” In my experience, projects in which the schedule is commonly termed aggressive or highly aggressive invariably turn out to be fiascoes. “Aggressive schedule,” I’ve come to suspect, is a kind of code phrase — understood implicitly by all involved — for a schedule that is absurd, that has no chance at all of being met.

Tom DeMarco, Slack