The industrial age challenged us to rethink the limits of the human body: Where does my body end and the tool begin? The digital age challenges us to rethink the limits of the human mind: What are the boundaries of my cognition?

It’s tragically ironic that the tagline for Douglas Rushkoff’s book incorporates an Old Testament reference to the Ten Commandments, since Rushkoff writes in his introduction that the Jewish race has, since the time of Moses, merely promoted an “enduring myth” where the contents of those stone tablets is concerned.

Regardless, Rushkoff’s perspective is fascinating and worth some contemplation:

• Are we just learning to use programs or are we learning to make programs?
• Do we favor the distracted over the focused, the automatic over the considered, and the contrary over the compassionate? Why?
• Do we merely grant our kids access to the capabilities given to them by others, or do we empower them to determine the value-creating capabilities of these technologies for themselves?
• Do we pursue new abilities, or do we fetishize new toys?
• Are we optimizing our machines for humanity, or are we optimizing humans for machinery?
• Do we think and behave differently when operating different technology as we do given different settings?
• Are we allowing computers and networks to discourage our more complex processes–our higher order cognition, contemplation, innovation, and meaning making–in addition to copying our intellectual processes (i.e. our repeatable programs)?

…and these are questions that arise after reading just the introductory chapter…

Apparently Rushkoff’s book grew from a short talk he has given on the subject, and there is substantial commentary to wade into just on the talk alone. [1][2]

Contemplation. Something that can all to easily become sacrificed on the altar of busyness. Something to fight for, protect and prize. Warmly embracing why.

Here’s to a 2011 that is more focused, considered and compassionate!

[1] http://rushkoff.com/2010/03/25/program-or-be-programmed/
[2] http://boingboing.net/2010/03/30/rushkoff-program-or.html

Last month I read In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing and am finally posting my thoughts on this book by Matthew May.

First of all, it’s a well-written book that applies its message to itself.

I’m glad that I found it after my previous read, since it covers similar ground in places as does Subject To Change but ends up exploring different vistas, too. As a matter of fact, I can relate the contents of this book to several previous reads, and In Pursuit of Elegance has refined my thinking drawn from past reading through deeper correlation and, well, elegance.

“To find elegance, you must appreciate, embrace, and then travel beyond complexity.” The pursuit of elegance is more like chess than checkers. Elegance is “far side,” not “near side,” simplicity; it is at once symmetrical, seductive, subtractive and sustainable.

Concerning this book’s refining effect, take the somewhat popular subject of kaizen–a principle and a practice of “change for the better.” A student of kaizen creates a standard, follows it, and finds a better way. A student of kaizen understands that there are two types of work: value-adding and non-value-adding. In the pursuit of value-adding work, one must be wary of muri (overload), mura (inconsistency), and muda (waste).

Up to this point, I focused more on muda (waste) as a concern, drawing from lessons learned in The Machine That Changed the World while contemplating software factories. However, May writes: “Muda is the easiest to target because it is generally more visible. But muri and mura are often the more evil of the sins, as they can be the actual cause of all muda.” Yes, of course!

Taiichi Ohno, Toyota engineering pioneer and the man behind kaizen, taught his colleagues that new thoughts and better ideas do not come out of the blue, they come from a true understanding of the process. [Aside: Developing and applying empathy is an important theme in Subject To Change.] Writes May: “By requiring keen observation before action, by demanding that one look beyond the obvious surface symptoms to better see the deeper causes, by never giving answers and only asking questions, Ohno taught people to stop and think.”

Make decisions that are based on observation, not assumption (or necessarily inference alone). Therefore, actively form your mental model through firsthand observation (empathy) to ask “What is possible?;” don’t passively succumb to the “ladder of inference” and prematurely ask “What should be done?”

I recently finished reading Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World, and I can recommend this book to anyone who wants, for example, to build software that resonates with its users.

Here are a list of thoughts and quotes this read produced:

• Empathy is an understanding of a person or group’s subjective experience by sharing that experience vicariously that can be developed and cultivated through practice (i.e. it’s not innate). Using your sense of empathy can help you focus on the experience you want to deliver in a manner that is effective for those who will engage with it. Don’t confuse customer briefings with developing customer-focused empathy; there’s more to it!
• Experience accounts for motivations, expectations, perceptions, abilities, flow, and culture.
• Parity isn’t a strategy; neither is being the best.
• Don’t craft the story of a product in isolation form the actual creation of that product.
• Human life is complex–embrace this reality; don’t ignore it. Capture complexity with qualitative research (e.g. conduct interviews to elicit stories about experiences). Differentiate process (i.e. the how and why) from outcomes (i.e. the what, where, and when).
• Sometimes experience strategy isn’t about hiding complexity as much as it’s about managing it (e.g. distribute complexity across a system so as not to overwhelm at any particular point). That is, the overall experience should never become too complex. There needs to be coordination among the experiences touch points, allowing each to fully exhibit its strengths.
• “You have to recognize that a system will degrade, and make it such that such entropy doesn’t shatter the entire experience. The true success of experience design isn’t how well it works when everything is operating as planned, but how well it works when things start going wrong.” For example, provide meaningful seams into which people can insert themselves (i.e. leave an impression).
• Great experience is difficult to plan for, and almost impossible to specify.
• Good experiences require systematic coordination with the customer in mind (i.e. a focus on qualitative customer insights).
• “Design is a way of approaching problem solving, decision making, and strategy planning that can yield better outcomes.”
• “[Design-centric organizations] peer into the needs and desires of their customers, identify patterns of behavior, refine ideas that tap into those behaviors, then push into the unknown–or at least the uncertain.” -Roger Martin
• “You can’t build a design competency overnight; it requires difficult changes in process, skills, and perhaps most importantly, culture.”
• In my development organization we deploy a risk-driven iterative development process, with phases we call inception, elaboration, construction and transition. I’d liked the book’s description of “the fuzzy front end,” which I would liken to inception (e.g. “anticipation exceeds insight”).
• “Good ideas need to fail early and often so you can arrive sooner at a great one.” Process won’t turn mundane ideas into stars–nor will great effort (strong execution). Therefore, avoid premature execution of an idea. For example, presuppose multiple solutions and suggest alternatives based on partial data. Define constraints that drive great solutions (e.g. think like a newbie, leverage empathy (that you’re developing, right? ).
• “Strategy should bring clarity to an organization; it should be a signpost for showing people where you, as their leader, are taking them–and what they need to do to get there…. People need to have a visceral understanding–an image in their minds–of why you’ve chosen a certain strategy and what you’re attempting to create with it…. Because it’s pictorial, design describes the world in a way that’s not open to many interpretations.” -Tim Brown

On Monday, I noted 11 years with EMC (via its acquisition of Documentum). I can certainly say that “change happens” in the content management space and my own career.

My first engineering responsibilities were centered around the Documentum Desktop (aka Desktop Client) offering–client/server architecture implemented as a mixture of C++ and VB. Then I was called on to drive the first major release of WDK, a web-based application implemented in Java, JSP, HTML and XML. Next stop: creating an integration bridge between Documentum and authoring environments like Office, Adobe and XML editors (i.e. Application Connectors), which was specified as an N-tier architecture implemented as a mixture of C# (on the desktop) and Java (on the middle tier. Currently I’m focused on providing a rich set of services (i.e. local Java APIs, WSDL-based web services and RESTful web services) that drive a diverse set of applications, each with its own presentation layer technology decisions (e.g. Flash/Flex, ExtJS/DWR, etc.).

And “tomorrow” this will all be subject to change once again…

After reading Simplexity: Why Simple Things Become Complex (and How Complex Things Can Be Made Simple), I find myself taking pause. It’s harder than usual to coalesce my thoughts.

This book is an easy enough read, but it’s also a bit disconnected. As author Jeffrey Kluger suggests, “simplicity and complexity may masquerade as each other,” but I’m still left feeling like the mask hasn’t been adequately identified or removed. Perhaps I expected too much from the text. After all, as the author points out, complexity research is still a young scientific pursuit–an unsettled (formative) field. If the science is young, the pop science equivalent seems all the more premature.

I do have a few take-aways to share from my read, though:

• View a conference as a group of people exchanging information and insights, keynoting ideas and tempering whatever action is eventually taken by exploring lots of options first. Conferences are indeed great opportunities for milling and annealing–it’s the networking, stupid! Thanks to Simon Guest and his vision to bring open space to events like the Microsoft MVP Global Summit and the Microsoft Strategic Architect Forum (SAF), I’m surprised that more conferences don’t feature open space more prominently.
• With respect to social signaling, signaling abilities are influenced from building group connections. For example, a signaler you know well becomes more persuasive than a signaler you don’t. The amount of time your spend with other individuals changes their ability to influence you and your ability to influence them. (I realize that this take-away is rather obvious, but it bears (personal) repeating.)
• Referring to work by Mark Gottfredson and Keith Aspinall, I appreciated becoming aware of a so-called Model T analysis to find one’s innovation fulcrum and stay perched there upon the respective complexity arc.
• Having seen the power of strongly held beliefs myself, I appreciated the following turn of words in evidence of complexity confusion: “The entrenched anthropology of the place, however, turned out to be more powerful than the new lessons.”
• “A bunch of isolated [sports] conferences is like a bunch of isolated economies. If you don’t allow them to mix, they stay primitive because you have no way of comparing them.” -Ken Massey (For example, will CMIS impact the ECM industry in ways similar to inter-league play in MLB?)
• “We pride ourselves on being the only species that understands the concept of risk, yet we have a confounding habit of worrying about mere possibilities while ignoring probabilities, building barricades against perceived dangers while leaving ourselves exposed to real ones.” (So, what do you confuse for a snooze alarm that should be a wake-up call, or vice versa? What is only temporarily agitating that deserves longer-lasting follow-through? What is over- or under-thought?)
• “The nature of people who love electrons and bits is very different from the nature of people who love atoms.”
• “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.” -Louis Armstrong

Toward the end of his work, Mr. Kluger states: “Understanding the hard science of a thing is not always the same as being able to make any use of that knowledge.” I still need to understand the hard science of complexity (e.g. go beyond software engineering’s essential complexity versus accidental complexity debates). Simplexity wasn’t my ticket to this performance.

Since reading Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking and The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, I’ve been looking forward to Malcolm Gladwell‘s next book. Outliers: The Story of Success didn’t disappoint, and I recommend reading it yourself.

As the book’s title suggests, Gladwell’s text is about success and outliers; however, he engages the reader from the get-go by starting with a definition of outlier expressly to follow-up by quickly suggesting a concrete redefinition of what is truly an outlier and what determines success. Gladwell challenges the reader to think in less-conventional terms (e.g. thinking about health in terms of community–beyond just the individual): “…there is something profoundly wrong with the way we make sense of success.”

Outliers has two parts, focused on opportunity and legacy, respectively. Part one emphasizes “from-ness” (i.e. from where (e.g. birthplace), from when (e.g. time, era, norms), from how (e.g. culture, legacy), etc.). In doing so, part one indicates by one example after another why merely personal explanations of success don’t work.

     Where are you from?

Do you see the consequences of the way we have chosen to think about success? Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung. We make rules that frustrate achievement We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of the those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And, most of all, we become much too passive. We overlook just how large a role we all play–and by ‘we’ I mean society–in determining who makes it and who doesn’t.

Gladwell states, “Achievement is talent plus preparation.” He then goes on to uncover patterns of achievement and underachievement as well as patterns of encouragement and discouragement. He focuses on the work ethic of those who are purposeful, single-minded, intentional–who achieve success by working much, much harder.

• Adversity presenting itself as opportunity
• Developing skills amidst obscurity
• Meaningful – complexity, autonomy and a relationship between effort and reward in doing creative work
• “Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.”

For example, the “10,000 hour rule” is discussed (i.e. its typically takes 10K hours of deliberate practice to develop true expertise and world-class mastery). The point of the discussion is not to admire those who earn such mastery as much as it is to understand the kinds of obstacles most of us encounter in the pursuit of such commitment. Furthermore, it concerns the creation of (more) equal opportunities for practicing in order to reach greater common potential: “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.”

     Are you regularly practicing what your core profession requires
     (e.g. modeling, design, coding, testing, writing)?

“Success arises out of a steady accumulation of advantages.”
“Extraordinary achievement is less about talent than it is about opportunity.”
     Talent: intellect, “general intelligence,” innate ability
     Opportunity: imagination, savvy, “practical intelligence,” surrounding
     community, family background, demographics, virtues and values
     (e.g. frugality, initiative, sacrifice)

“General intelligence” and “practical intelligence” are orthogonal (i.e. presence of one doesn’t imply the presence of the other); therefore, keep clear and separate (i.e. don’t confuse one for the other).

Part two, moves from opportunity to legacy and starts by focusing on cultural legacies (e.g. a culture of honor, where reputation is of foremost concern). The focus becomes about teamwork and communication (e.g. “mitigated speech”). For example, understanding cultural legacy as a way to effectively combat mitigation (i.e. developing clearer and more assertive communication where both transmitter and receiver are not a afraid to speak up or to speak straight).

To bring cultural legacy into better focus, Gladwell leverages the Cultural Dimensions work of Geert Hofstede (e.g. IDV – Individualism (i.e. what Gladwell refers to as the individualism-collectivism scale), UAI – Uncertainty Avoidance Index, PDI – Power Distance Index). For example, the United States has the highest IDV score and the fifth-lowest PDI score.

Mitigated speech and high PDI influence communication, especially when the person speaking (transmitter) and the person listening (receiver) have different orientation. In Western cultures, communication tends to be transmitter-oriented (i.e. speaker is responsible to communicate ideas clearly and unambiguously). However, in Asian cultures, communication tends to be receiver-oriented (i.e. listener is responsible to make sense of what is being said). For this reason, I believe that communication is both my responsibility and also a two-way discipline (i.e. if you don’t understand something speak up–I’m trying my best to be clear). It’s why I prefer more interactive sessions at conferences, etc.

As a mathematician by training, I was fascinated to learn that, as human beings, we store digits in a memory loop that runs for about two seconds. When you compare the fairly transparent Asian number system with the highly irregular number system in English, it starts to become clearer how English-speaking (English-thinking) student accumulate a disadvantage. Stowe Boyd goes into more detail of Gladwell’s treatment of this cultural legacy. (I need to start thinking si instead of four, qi instead of seven, etc. )

Cultural legacy suggests to me that it would be naive to apply an American timeline to the future development of, for example, China. Rice paddies aren’t fields of corn or wheat (i.e. skill-oriented versus mechanically-oriented farming tradition). So why should it take the Chinese the same amount of time to “modernize” as it did take Americans?

You’ve likely heard or seen the business cliché “Your attitude determines your altitude.” Well, Outliers posits that success is not much about ability as it is about attitude. That is, success is a function of persistence, doggedness and willingness to work hard. Success is more about out-learning than it is about being smarter. School works, but there just isn’t enough of it (e.g. 180 days versus 243 days–American versus Japanese school year). Or said another way, school isn’t the problem as much as summer vacation may be.

In closing:

• “Outliers are those who have been given opportunities–and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.”
• Success is a gift.
• “To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success–the fortunate birth date and the happy accidents of history–with a society that provides opportunities for all.”

P.S. I recently began a major revision of my Books page. You can now more easily see other book reviews I’ve posted herein. Soon you’ll be able to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein). Why? Well, if you’re nearby and you see something of interest, please ask to borrow books of interest. If you’re not (i.e. regardless of your location to me), I’m hoping that opening up my library will help to solicit feedback as to what the especially good reads are (and why). I typically have multiple books queued up to read; so, knowing what should be top-of-list from my readers would be welcome feedback. Cheers…

Update 12/26/2008: Today I was able to get to watching the second part of Charlie Rose’s show on performance where, after interviewing Malcolm Gladwell in the first half, he interviewed the author of Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else, Geoff Colvin. Mr. Colvin referenced the little known body of scientific work concerning deliberate practice, much like Mr. Gladwell drew upon it in Outliers. I appreciated Mr. Colvin’s belief, based on conversation with this scientific community, that the research frontier here is parenting.

I finished reading Nicholas Carr‘s The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google back in June, but am just now getting to blogging my thoughts on this book. Something about shipping software…

Carr carefully recounts how the electrical industry evolved, and focused on the personalities of early central players such as Thomas Edison and Samuel Insull, as if to personify the computing industry into those “DC like” and those “AC like.”

As I read this book, my thoughts centered mostly around the nature of centralized and distributed systems, and around the human desire to control and to be emancipated.

A frequently recurring conversation I have with ECM customers, concerns centralized versus distributed systems. Often this discussion is about delivering the right façades to satisfy the needs of a particular role (e.g. supporting centralized auditing and compliance functions for systems administrators, empowering line of business users via delegated (edge) administration, including user/group management, etc.).

While I get that switch refers to electricity (i.e. a light switch), I wonder if a better metaphor would involve a dial or a set of dials. I think that software delivery is becoming more adaptive and less binary (i.e. on premise and hosted, not or).

I’m reminded of the following visual by my colleague Michael Hackney that I sometimes refer to as “dialed in” software:

There are, of course, more variables (rows) than those listed above, including whether software runs on premise or is hosted (i.e. delivered as a service). I talk with customers who require unstructured content to be managed on premise and delivered via software as a service. So, I guess I take some issue with the binary nature of a switch metaphor.

As a software architect building enterprise software for such adaptation, I think about the subtle ways our perceptions, ideas, and language change whenever we begin using a new tool (e.g. writing software for a so-called cloud environment). Consider the difference between the emphases of the printed page versus the web page:

• Printed page – emphasizes logic, sequence, history, exposition, objectivity, detachment and discipline
• Web page – emphasizes immediacy, simultaneity, contingency, subjectivity, disposability and speed

Here are a few more thoughts about this kind of transformation and disruption that cloud computing can yield:

• Carr’s chapter, “The Great Unbundling,” talks to some of my thoughts in this blog [1] [2].
• Does unbundling and re-bundling of content–a form of personalization and reuse–amplify isolation or promote knowledge sharing? Am I inclined to go beyond a particular filter even if my initial need is satisfied, or do shield (block) myself from more meaningful collaboration and thought instead (i.e. divide knowledge and magnify it according to differences, content balkanization, content polarization, etc.)?
• What are the social consequences of pervasive content (i.e. content always at my fingertips)? (I’m already a bit frustrated with my Blackberry-slinging friends who feel compelled to thumb through incoming email despite being in face-to-face meetings with others.)
• Advances in IT that weaken central control, inevitably are followed by a reassertion of control. That is, control… disruption… reassertion… (repeat).
• On the Web, anonymity is just a false façade (illusion). So, does that mean the Internet can become an “integrity catalyst”?
• Consider the value of distributed content services (i.e. bringing services to content and also content to services) in light of Eric Schmidt’s statement, “When the network becomes as fast as the processor, the computer hollows out and spreads across the network.”
• Trust takes on special meaning where reliability, scalability, responsiveness (both software and customer service)
• Capacity planning becomes even more important (i.e. knowing how a function/feature contributes load, establishing the right model and metadata to track demand, load and diversity factors).
• Parallel processing and virtualization become powerful ways to deal with narrow application sets (e.g. Google) and wide application sets (e.g. Amazon), respectively.
• Let’s say that collective intelligence is something to generally foster in a consumer or corporate environment and that something fostering collective intelligence is “green.” Then how green is your content and your content services? For example, instead of just performing calculations or executing queries, does your content (services) contribute to collective “sense making” (i.e. providing answers without knowing questions), to increased knowledge sharing (explicitly and implicitly), etc.?

Lastly, as you might imagine, there have been a number of other reviews of this book. Here are a few I found interesting:

• Charles Fitzgerald (now with EMC via its Pi Corp. acquisition, after being a GM of platform strategy at Microsoft) – who reminds us of the power of reinvention (e.g. Edison and General Electric)
• Ross Mayfield – who raises issues of perception and subjective value given his work with customers at Socialtext
• Tim Bray – who does a nice job of outlining Carr’s work and validating its engaging nature (by taking the time to blog despite personal bias)
• Chuck Hollis – who emphasizes the thought-provoking nature of Carr’s work and who leveraged his interview with Carr to discuss “how,” not “if”

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

Before the end of 2007, I finished reading Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant, and then I promptly forgot to blog my thoughts (i.e. beyond this).

Cirque du Soleil is the leading example of a business successfully applying blue ocean strategy to break away from the pack and to define new space market space (i.e. it’s not a circus…or is it? It’s not adult theater…or is it?). Having been to several Cirque shows both locally and in Las Vegas, I can’t think of a better model to reference.

The authors present various frameworks in support of their strategic model focused on blue oceans:

• Four actions framework, featuring the eliminate-reduce-raise-create grid and focused on the analytics behind blue ocean realization
• Six paths framework, focusing on the formulation and execution of blue ocean strategy by looking across alternative industries (e.g. trade-across dynamics), looking across strategic groups within industries (e.g. trade-up/trade-down dynamics), looking across the chain of buyers (i.e. purchasers + users + influencers), looking across complementary product and service offerings (e.g. identify and eliminate pain points), looking across functional or emotional appeal to buyers, and looking across time (i.e. trends of interest that are decisive to your business, irreversible, and have a clear trajectory)

Reading the emotional appeal that Cemex was able to produce with its 1998 launch of the Patrimonio Hoy program–the emotion that comes from a “gift of dreams”–caused me to think about potential ways to add emotion to my own profession.

I think that there is an opportunity, for example, to cast knowledge management today in a more emotional light. Baby boomers represent a significant amount of knowledge and part of that knowledge is professional and corporate. It seems to me that this “boomer generation” can be better incented to transfer its vast experience in business, for example, by projecting knowledge management as a social cause, casting subsequent generations in a cynical but also free spirited manner, etc.

Thinking about trends of interest, I wonder what new software and services will emerge to support an education process that continues to increase its basis upon teams and collaboration. For example:

1. Support young students who already launch multiple IM windows to accomplish homework collectively with peers
2. Shift toward open, public wikis and away from closed, private documents
3. Shift toward shared authoring instead of solo authoring, increasing the need to promote proper attribution (i.e. credit where its due)–possibly beyond citations and bibliographies
4. Promote original thought and study, establishing one’s reputation as a strong contributor, team player, leader, negotiator, etc.

According to authors Kim and Mauborgne, “To fundamentally shift the strategic canvas as an industry, you must begin by reorienting your strategic focus from competitors to alternatives, and from customers to noncustomers of the industry.”

I finished my previous post on this book by asking open questions to enterprise content management (ECM) noncustomers. In closing here, my question is simply, if you have addressed content management needs but have opted for a non-ECM solution, what alternative did you go with and why? What was/is missing from ECM that if provided would change that decision?

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

Scott Berkun’s The Myths of Innovation is a refreshingly unpretentious read–one that I accomplished straightaway in an afternoon (off).

Here are my takeaways–all quotes are Scott’s unless explicitly noted otherwise:

• Innovation as an accumulation of smaller insights…connecting pieces…realizing picture (puzzle); therefore, take action to enable insights to occur more freely.
• Work passionately and take breaks to let the mind wander and the allow the subconscious to work on our behalf.
• Epiphany as an occasional bonus of working on tough problems
• “It is an achievement to find a great idea, but it is a greater one to successfully use it to improve the world.”
• “The secret tragedy of innovators is that their desire to improve the world is rarely matched by support from the people they hope to help.”
• “The greater the potential of an idea, the harder it is to find anyone willing to try it.”
• “Innovative idea are rarely rejected on their merits; they’re rejected because of how they make people feel.”
• Is your desire to find new ideas to conquer greater than your desire to protect the success you already have?
• “Wise innovators–driven by passion more than ego–initiate partnerships, collaborations, and humble studies of the past, raising their odds against the timeless challenges of innovation.”
• Imagination > Knowledge > Information

• I’ve put knowledge above information for some time know, but Albert Einstein’s belief that “imagination is more important than knowledge” (stated on page 83) captured my attention.
• How can content-centric applications do a better job of capturing the user’s imagination, let alone increate the knowledge derivative?

• Actually commit reminds me of something U2 bassist Adam Clayton said while being interviewed on the How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb DVD. His comments are captured here, although I recall them to be slightly different on the DVD.
• A group of people, a team or a band, has to commit before any real business can take place. Too often I see groups form for one reason or another without mutual commitment, and typically it’s just a matter of time until they disband, leaving some frustrated and others numb.

• “What problems does this innovation solve? Whose problems are they?”
• “What problems does this innovation create? Whose problems are they?”

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

I just finished reading Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant, and it’s caused me to reevaluate the potential impact of ideas as related to content, its management and the value derived from both.

While I will post more specific thoughts on Blue Ocean Strategy shortly, I thought it worth quoting the authors’ challenge of two conventional strategy practices: focusing on existing customers and driving for finer segmentation to accommodate buyer differences:

To maximize the size of their blue oceans, companies need to take a reverse course. Instead of concentrating on customers, they need to look at noncustomers. And instead of focusing on customer differences, they need to build on powerful commonalities in what buyers value. That allows companies to reach beyond existing demand to unlock a new mass of customers that did not exist before.

Do you struggle to maintain content, whether it be documents, pictures, videos, etc. at home or at work, yet you don’t see the point of a content management system? What makes you a noncustomer?

Given ECM or content management in general, what do you value? Say it’s time. How could adopting ECM save you time or multiply your time to focus on other priorities? If you’ve already adopted ECM, how could your system demonstrate it values your time more? Where is your system costing you time rather than valuing it?

Is ECM so unique as to only apply to an enterprise–whatever that means? If you have ECM deployed at work, what do you wish you could leverage at home? Is working with content outside the enterprise all that different from features and functionality you’ve come to rely on at work? What differences, if any, are perceived, not real? Why?

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

During my recent, reasonably long (and fully unplugged!) vacation, I was able to read David Weinberger’s latest work, Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. I enjoyed this book every bit as much as I enjoyed reading Small Pieces Loosely Joined.

David begins by asking how our ideas, organizations, and knowledge itself might change if we could arrange such concepts without the “silent limitations of the physical.” He immediately suggests that in such a world, being free (as in freedom) is not the desired result; being miscellaneous is.

In the process of making music miscellaneous, iTunes et al revealed that the natural unit of music is track, not album. Translating this to the world of ECM, what is the natural unit of content (or if you prefer, information)? Is it document, or is it something else? Does the answer depend on whether you sort it all out on the way in or sort it all out on the way out?

One of the early solutions from Documentum–long before its acquisition by EMC–provided the ability to take a collection of PowerPoint presentations and present the end user with a filtered collection of individual slides to promote visibility of already authored content and therefore increase the likelihood of content reuse via assembly. (Fast forward to the present and an offering like SlideShare.) Since then, XML has taken center stage along with macro-formats like ODF and Open XML, increasing the potential for chunking, decomposition, remixing, etc.

David defines three orders of order as follows:

• First: organize things themselves
• Second: separate information regarding first order objects (e.g. catalog)
• Third: digitizing content and metadata then being extravagant about placement/categorization/fulfillment

ECM operates largely in a third order world where traditional terms such as document, content and information are exploding–requiring long-held views to be rethought (e.g. are we talking about content or metadata? What is the difference between the two? What about indexing, full-text or otherwise?). Just when you near clarity the landscape shifts again (e.g. a binary/closed document format becomes a more open envelope of embedded documents–some content, some behavior, some presentation-related, etc.; a pivot occurs that swaps foreground concerns with background concerns–authors and publications, content and metadata, taxonomies and folksonomies, indices and relationships, etc.).

Is it fair to continue talking about structured information and unstructured information in the way largely batted around today (e.g. structured information fits neatly into rows and columns, typically within a database)? Or is this characterization increasing less black and white (e.g. databases handling BLOB’s, document assembly at runtime via a managed (structured) process, etc.)?

What other premises are accepted that can/should be re-thought (e.g. there is a set of appropriate criteria for finding–one right way to find)?

Returning to iTunes, browsing Apple’s online music store requires a particular approach (i.e. genre, artist, album–in that order) to find tunes of interest to buy. However, once you return to the iTune music player software, there is more freedom to order and sort your collection–from Apple’s store and/or elsewhere. Better yet, you can create playlists (i.e. pure metadata collections) to share with family and friends–and this is so popular that practically every digital music player supports the creation, import and export of playlists.

“Now that information is being commoditized, it has more value if it’s set free into the miscellaneous.” -David Weinberger

Arguably there are a number of content-related playlists already (e.g. bookmarks/favorites and sites like Delicious, feeds based in Atom or RSS, subscription outlines in OPML). Does your content management system satisfy your playlist needs? How do you share content-related playlists at work or outside of work (e.g. like you would share an .m3u file with a friend)?

I plan to post more about Everything Is Miscellaneous; there is certainly much more to this book.

In the meantime, my feed reader is enriched thanks to David’s references to the following thought leaders: Danah Boyd, Peter Morville, and Thomas Vander Wal–plus David Weinberger, too. Of course, in keeping with this post, you’ll find my updated “playlist” with these inputs now, too.

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

I just finished reading Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, and it’s a book (and cocreated playbook/unwritten chapter) I recommend.

If you want to peek into my notes (er, stream of raw thoughts), please feel free to follow along:

• Wikinomics embodies four powerful new ideas: openness (i.e. candor, transparency (disclosure of pertinent information), freedom, flexibility, expansiveness, engagement and access), peering (i.e. horizontal, not hierarchical; leveraging self-organization; egalitarianism is the general rule for motivation), sharing (i.e. expanding markets to create new opportunities), and acting globally (i.e. removing insulation and insular thinking; thinking and acting globally–no more think globally and act locally).
• “This new way or organizing [mass collaboration, aka peer production] will eventually displace the traditional corporate structures as the economy’s primary engine of wealth creation.”
• Given mass collaboration, what lessons, if any, apply from mass production?
• “When employees are living in a hierarchical structure there’s a lot of fear. People two or three layers above resist the rules being changed. And with all that fear most people do nothing. They let the hierarchy rule.” -Kal Patel, EVP Strategy, Best Buy
• Is cooperation treated as a synonym for counter-operation? If not generally, in any specific situations? If so, why? What does this say about your business culture?
• “The pace of change and evolving demands of customers are such that firms can no longer depend on internal capabilities to meet external needs.” That is, mitigate limited time and limited creativity by going/becoming open.
• Value chains in terms of participation, results and rewards are seeing their ecosystems flatten. It’s about participation, not control–rivers more than chains (i.e. building trust > controlling; steer/guide/influence > control; “engage and cocreate” versus “plan and push”). Facilitate (embrace) natural convergence.
• “Conventional wisdom says companies innovate, differentiate, and compete by doing certain things right: by having superior human capital; protecting their intellectual property fiercely; focusing on customers; thinking globally but acting locally; and by executing well (i.e. having good management and controls). But the new business world is rendering each of these principles in sufficient, and in some cases, completely inappropriate.”
• “The new Web is about verbs, not nouns.” -Ross Mayfield, CEO, Socialtext Assuming this is true, think about grammar–what are the Web’s adverbs and adjectives?
• Net Generation (Net Gen, aka “web natives”) norms are speed, freedom, openness, innovation, mobility, authenticity and playfulness. Net Gen’ers search for flexibility, identity, ownership, authenticity, and continuous learning. Design for them.
• With respect to the Net Generation, what you ascribe value to may not be what someone else ascribes value to. Offer choice and respect it. Build trust. For example, with respect to open source software, take the time and pay attention to its culture and processes (e.g. norms, clock speeds, level of technical exchange, responsiveness). Adapt accordingly.
• It’s about thinking differently. Therefore, attack fundamental assumptions–question everything. Sitting on the fence…belongs to isolation. Only the connected will survive (e.g. web immigrants with web natives, and vice versa).
• Embracing open source should be strategic, not tactical. “Embracing open source means embracing new mental models and new ways of conceptualizing value creation.” Don’t lose sight of where the value comes from, create new value to harvest it, and earn your harvest, too!
• Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself continues to make more and more sense…
• “Smart companies will treat the world as their R&D department and use ideagoras to seek out ideas, innovations, and uniquely qualified minds on a global basis.”
• What things outside can be acquired? What things inside can be licensed? Apply fresh perspective (e.g. is XYZ a scalable asset or trade secret?).
• Shift away from “everything invented here” toward “nothing invented here.” Take back NIH as a sign of health, not cancer.
• Threadless.com is a good example of leadership to me.
• To paraphrase Jim Griffin, “You can hold more in an open hand than you can in a closed fist.”
• Success breeds complacency. Beware also cultural inertia, complex legacies, political wrangling, etc.
• “Open up your platforms to increase the speed, scope, and success of innovation. Choose not to open up and you risk ceding the game to more nimble platform orchestrators. The question every business leader in every sector should be asking is: How do I make my organization a platform for participation? How, when, and where do I open up my business? And how do I attract an energetic group of people to share the innovation load?”
• Good enough: adequate to participate or to enable participation–versus over-engineered
• All innovation is ultimately cumulative.
• In the past I’ve talked about work a fair bit between points and vectors, where a vector is more valuable in that it conveys direction and magnitude (e.g. where a particular architecture is intended to be taken and how far it can capably do so). My mental picture is growing, though, to account for not just internal vectors but external vectors, too. By accounting for unforeseen drivers and markets through collaboration and openness, direction can be adapted, for example, to achieve results of greater magnitude.
          
• “The companies that figure out how to harness the power of open platforms while providing adequate incentives to all stakeholders are poised to reap great rewards.”
• Commoditize the technology of others while monetizing it yourself (e.g. search – Alexa (Amazon) versus Google, Yahoo, MSFT–soon Wikia may do likewise to all of the above, ECM – Alfresco versus IBM, EMC, Oracle, MSFT, and RDBMS – MySQL versus Oracle, MSFT, IBM).
• Is this about a culture of generosity or a smoke screen for exploitation? Consider again, Om Malik’s blog post. Avoid commoditization of your time.
• Customer cocreation is underexploited generally. View customers as central change agents.
• “Always strive to be the best at what your customers value most and partner for everything else.” Recall Geoff Moore (Dealing with Darwin) and maintain vigilance over core versus non-core (context)–constantly evaluate core competencies (e.g. user experience) in light of customer feedback.
• “We are shifting from closed and hierarchical workplaces with rigid employment relationships to increasingly self-organized, distributed, and collaborative human capital networks that draw knowledge and resources from inside and outside the firm.”
• “Work has become more cognitively complex, more team-based and collaborative, more dependent on social skills, more time pressured, more reliant on technological competence, more mobile, and less dependent on geography.”
• Stability is dead.

Update 8/11/2007: Wikinomics provides an example of how Best Buy’s Geek Squad agents are already doing this–if you’re willing to consider “an approach to customer service” as a form of architecture.

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

I just finished reading John Naisbitt‘s Mind Set!: Reset Your Thinking and See the Future. (You can download a PDF of its table of contents, prologue and introduction here.) I can certainly recommend this book, and it has piqued my interest in one of his earlier books, Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives–a sum of local analyses can lead to a “megatrend.”

The author describes a mindset in terms of how we receive information. A mindset impacts one’s perception and one’s reality–perception of reality can be self-fulfilling when deliberate enough. In particular, Mind Set! is focused on “mindsets that are deliberately developed for a purpose.”

What purposes do I have in mind? What mindsets are required of me to achieve them?

Part one (of two) is focused on the following eleven mindsets:

1. While many things change, most things remain constant
2. The future is embedded in the present
3. Focus on the score of the game
4. Understanding how powerful it is not to have to be right
5. See the future as a picture puzzle
6. Don’t get so far ahead of the parade that people don’t know you’re in it
7. Resistance to change falls if benefits are real
8. Things that we expect to happen always happen more slowly
9. You don’t get results by solving problems but by exploiting opportunities
10. Don’t add unless you subtract
11. Don’t forget the ecology of technology

(#1) “Most change is not in what we do, but how we do it.” Mr. Naisbitt is adamant that business is more about constancy than it is about change. He advises to differentiate between the following concerns: basics and embellishment, rules and techniques, trends and fads, and breakthroughs and refinements.

(#2) “We find the seeds of the future on the ground, and not in the width of the sky.” Mr. Naisbitt also cautions: “Basic change is the result of a confluence of forces, rarely because of just one force (especially when it is against the recited wisdom).” Consider the term “news hole” and the impact of print media going away and being replaced by digital/online media (e.g. InfoWorld). Is the size of the “hole” fundamentally changing? What new disciplines are required in light of these changes? “While it is crucial to be well instructed, it is not the amount of information we collect but how consciously we receive it.” Be verifying and selective where source of information are concerned. Optimize signal-to-noise ratio. Maximize value for time spent and attention given.

(#3) “In business, politics, or private life, the gap between words and facts widens when personal pride is involved. Often it’s not the promises made but the problems hidden. In the fight for performance, the power of having to be right often takes over. Don’t be misled; check the score of the game.” Rhetoric does not beget performance. Simplification to increase transparency wards off the camouflage of complexity.

(#4) “Having to be right becomes a barrier to learning and understanding. It keeps you away from growing, for there is no growth without changing, correcting, and questioning yourself.” One would be wise to emulate Albert Einstein who was more focused on what than who.

(#5) To assemble the puzzle, value intuition over calculation; so, develop your intuition (e.g. ability to correctly time slice). Make the proper connections, and pick ripe fruits.

(#6) “Even the most talented leaders need the parade to put an idea into practice. If we have the parade too far behind and run ahead with our vision, we will be running empty miles.”

(#7) “Do not underestimate people. When they resist change–change you think they ought to readily embrace–you have either failed to make benefits transparent or there are good reasons to resist. In that case, instead of lamenting the resistance, look for their reasons for resisting.”

(#8) “Expectations always travel at higher speeds [than results].” Follow the path of least resistance (e.g. flood with ideas to see which “break out,” where and how, too).

(#9) “You don’t get results by solving problems but by exploiting opportunities.” To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, if you don’t find the circumstances you want, create them. So, rather than hunkering down and solving problems (i.e. dealing with yesterday), set sail and create opportunities (i.e. mine the future by understanding its embedding in the present). You’ll need a prepared mind, a strong will and an affinity for (or at least a high tolerance for) repetition (and therefore patience, too).

(#10) Pay attention to the principle of forced choice in a closed system. Produce and retrieve consumable levels of information (i.e. don’t be wasteful). Be selective to avoid paralysis (e.g. the number of books in my library, the number of magazines and feeds I subscribe to, etc.). Strike manageable levels, focusing on relevance and quality of sources. “Our goal should not be to create cemeteries of information, but cradles of knowledge and inspiration.”

(#11) “The more technological our world becomes, the more we need our artists and poets.” As Mr. Naisbitt explains, the artist and creative among us are especially equipped to help society accommodate technology and to help culture evolve through meaningful embrace (e.g. imagination). Regardless of your artistic bent or mine, we can all consider the consequences of our relationship with technology by asking the following questions raised by the author:

• What will be enhanced?
• What will be diminished?
• What will be replaced?
• What new opportunities does it represent?

Part two of this book involves the presentation of a set of puzzles assembled using a particular combination of the mindsets presented in part one.

The first puzzle announces: “A visual culture is taking over the world.” This take-over appears to come at the cost of literacy and the written word. Collaterally, verbal and communication skills decline, leading to less informed, less active and less independent minded individuals. In the end, human imagination suffers.

However, to communicate these days one has to project an immersive experience. More importantly, I would argue, one must develop one’s own integrity and authenticity, and consistently serve that up to his or her audience. Where content, data and information is concerned, visualization techniques that promote people as much or more than, for example, documents are increasingly important. One cannot afford to imagine their colleagues attending to their ideas. Rather must be able to qualitatively and quantitatively visualize all-important collaboration around them and progress about them. For example, when I seed an idea, who most consistently contributes to its germination?

The second puzzle articulates how we’re moving from nation-states to economic domains, not multinational corporations. Mr. Naisbitt advises the reader to study the economic activity of a domain (e.g. all products and services for enterprise content management) as the way to know the score of the game. He suggests that behavior in economic domains shall:

• Cause countries to enhance their identities by becoming more culturally nationalistic.
• Cause companies to be defined by their confederations and networks of entrepreneurs.
• Cause a mass customization of talent where individual talent is fitted to needs–globally. That is Free Agent Nation but on a global scale.

The global trading system is regrouping at a higher level; therefore, our number one economic priority must be education and training. It also sounds like a fantastic opportunity for a new breed of talent agencies to rise up and connect “players” and “teams.”

The next two puzzles dealt with China and Europe, respectively. I’m convinced that I need to visit China–reading and research alone are insufficient for me to appreciate its ramifications on my work and livelihood. I’m also convinced that if I ever start a company with global aspirations, I’ll insist on an Asian Pacific sales and marketing strategy before one focused on the European Union–recall the author’s “Mutually Assured Destruction” criticism of the EU (e.g. central planning and individual freedom cannot coexist).

The fifth and final puzzle addresses the present innovation reservoir borne out of revolutions from the 1980′s and 1990′s. Mr. Naisbitt submits that such a period of discontinuous changes begets a longer period of continuous changes–an evolutionary era of great opportunity and a period that builds on a ground already prepared.

I’ve already changed how I go about my research and how I gauge the value in contributing sources based on reading Mind Set! I’m committed more than ever to reading more of the thought-through and less of the off-the-cuff (e.g. with respect to the printed word (roughly): books > research papers > magazines > blogs).

This book has tempered my thinking and my expectations. Hopefully both are more realistic in light of applying and learning to apply several of the mindsets Mr. Naisbitt details.

Update 8/10/2007 (via The Journal of the EDS Agility Alliance): “We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.” -John Naisbitt, in his 1982 book Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

I just finished reading The Starbucks Experience: 5 Principles for Turning Ordinary Into Extraordinary by Joseph A. Michelli. I originally picked up this book given its sub-title and recurring thoughts about content management. Is CM mundane, everyday, even boring? Is it just ordinary? If it is, why is that?

Some things are meant to be in the background. They silently assist; they just work; they draw no attention to themselves per se. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they cannot also be extraordinary (e.g. principle #3: surprise and delight).

Likewise, customer experience is determined more by the people develop, market and otherwise represent the product, good or service in question. Certainly that is true of Starbucks, and I believe it’s true of any software enterprise. So, this read was an opportunity for me to step outside my own hand-crafted experience, if you will, and contrast it with a highly successful experience and approach.

Dr. Michelli distills the Starbucks Experience into five key business principles as follows:

1. Make it your own
2. Everything matters
3. Surprise and delight
4. Embrace resistance
5. Leave your mark

Throughout the book, the author provides several questions to consider under the heading “Create Your Own Experience.” While discussing “make it your own,” Dr. Michelli asks the following question: “What can you do to invest more of yourself and to get others to invest more of themselves in the process of interpersonal connection and discovery?” As a connector and collaborator, I thrive when I’m debating the merits of an architecture, listening to how customers leverage the products I build, mentoring colleagues, etc. I’m puzzled when there isn’t a natural buzz on the floor at work–why don’t others want to connect and collaborate to the same degree? (Shouldn’t everyone in the content management industry have an active blog? )

Starbucks’ Green Apron Book with its “Five Ways of Being” serves as a counter-balance to such questions: be welcoming, be genuine, be considerate, be knowledgeable and be involved. Rather than focusing on others, I should focus first on myself–how can I connect, discover and respond? True passion demands involvement.

Throughout the book, the author provides several observations to consider under the heading “Ideas to Sip On.” While discussing “everything matters,” Dr. Michelli makes the following observation: “Details affect the emotional connection (the ‘felt sense’) that others have with you.” Do I actively and fully listen to concerns? Do I act more than I speak? Am I on a soul quest or just following a mental ascent?

“Whether it’s brewing coffee, designing software, or mopping floors, a commitment to Surprise and Delight literally transforms the very nature of work. Employment stops being about the words written in job descriptions and expands to including offering unexpected experiences.” -Joseph A. Michelli

It’s important to anticipate the needs of colleagues and customers alike and to surprise those served by the business, and I agree with the author that leadership sets the tone herein. Fortunately “leader” isn’t a formal title reserved for a few either. Leader is an attribute available to you and I, and it’s individually and personally realized. For example, some lead by serving; others lead by making a stand.

“Embrace Resistance” was a chapter that underscored the importance of trust in collaboration for me. It’s common for me to seek out others, perhaps fellow architects or product managers, for example, to become effective proxies for my vision and roadmap where a particular product or project is concerned. Have I effectively conveyed my passion to him or her? Have they been able to “play it back” to me (in high-def mode even)?

I can certainly inform Starbucks that their partnership with the local Albertsons grocery store (in-store Starbucks) is failing them when it comes to the production of customer delight. Not only are my wife and I often surprised by the non-welcoming, somewhat aloof staff but the service is predictably sub-par. This is surely not the Cracker Jack-like result Starbucks invests in and expects.

My point in this recollection is that embracing resistance may involve indirect resistance, too. Someone on my behalf may inadvertently (or perhaps even intentionally) create resistance–to a product, to a feature, to an idea, etc. It’s my job to seek this out, too, engage and respond accordingly after understand legitimate issues and possible recourse.

In closing, I appreciate the author’s chapter of exhortation (i.e. personal application) in “A Final Word,” and I return back to the world of content management and to you my readership. How can I surprise and delight more effectively? Am I delivering predictable, positive experiences personally and through the products I bring to market? Where is there a resistance to use content management software in your business and workflow? What works well for you and what isn’t working as expected? How can I leave a deeper and longer lasting mark on my workplace and on my industry?

I’d love to hear from you. Thanks in advance for taking the time…

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

As author Bruce Tate says in his work, “[From Java to Ruby: Things Every Manager Should Know (Pragmatic Programmers)] is about moving minds … about risks worth taking.” As I mentioned before, this book was the latest influence in a series of influences that has caused me to develop personal competence with Ruby.

When Bruce talks up front about calling his own significant investment in Java into question–eventually retooling his consulting practice–his candor resonated with me. He wasn’t just talking about Ruby; he was walking the talk in a business-changing manner. As I began this read (completed in the same day), I came to it with a similar sense of skepticism (e.g. about touted productivity gains). That this was shared by the author was refreshingly real.

Thus far in my career one could say that I’ve played it somewhat safe where languages and frameworks are concerned. I develop in both Java and .NET (C#)–typically thinking about programming problems in C#. These communities are large, well-established and active. With the advent of blogs, there is no shortage of seasoned, sound advice to read.

I’ve established thought leadership in both communities, too, by working on expert groups, advisory boards and councils, and through professional recognition for work accomplished. This has come both through years of hard work and also in relationship with others in community–who you know and what you know has certainly proven to be true in my career.

Prior to C# and Java (as well as XML, XML Schema and XHTML), my language of choice was C++, which I still find occasion to leverage. Before C++ (and the transition to object orientation) I developed in C and FORTRAN. My first programming was in Pascal on a Commodore 64. I’ve also dabbled in JavaScript, PHP (mostly to tweak my WordPress setup), and Perl (scripting only).

At this point in time, I have no idea where Ruby will take me and have no plans to drop C# or Java any time soon. I see enough promise in Ruby that the time has come for me to invest some time and energy toward its proper use now.

I choose to focus on the following statements in From Java to Ruby: Things Every Manager Should Know (Pragmatic Programmers):

• Popular decisions may be safe but that doesn’t guarantee their correctness.
• As Dave Thomas exhorted Amazon.com, learn how to program better by learning alternative languages such as Ruby.
• “Value productivity more and inertia less.” Familiarity can breed productivity but it can also breed complacency and even contempt.
• Unproductive >> cost ineffective >> vulnerable
• “All things being equal, the more productive language is much less risky…Risk increases with time. Think of time as the perfect medium for disease. Time lets problems fester and grow. Longer cycles increase doubt and decrease morale. When you take too long, you overspend and open the window for scope creep, forcing even more cost overruns and new requirements. Time also opens windows for competition. All of these diseases take time to grow.”

Ruby gives me some pause (e.g. [1], [2]) though too:

• Ruby has no specification. Its (C-based) implementation is its specification. Charles Nutter of the JRuby project has started a spec-oriented wiki, RubySpec, but it’s too early to tell if this will indeed become a spec or not.
• Certainly JRuby represents another implementation of Ruby to consider as does RubyCLR et al. Given past history concerning Microsoft and Java, though, I find it ironic and am somewhat anxious to see Tim Bray of Sun say (emphasis mine), “[Sun would] like to ensure that the Ruby programming language, in its JRuby form, is available to the community of Java developers.”
• Current lack of advanced XML support (e.g. Schemas, Namespaces)
• Current lack of full WS-* support (e.g. Rails prefers REST as Rails is generally biased toward simplicity)
• Performance issues that occur more naturally in dynamic languages than static ones

So, I continue my Ruby adventure with eyes wide open.

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

The title of my previous post was inspired by Edward Tufte’s latest book of the same title, which I read shortly after its publication and before my daughter’s arrival into the world. Beautiful Evidence carries on in the high tradition of his previous work and I recommend it to anyone who produces or consumes information and wants to do so more effectively and concisely.

Two remarks by Tufte really stuck in my mind from reading his book as follows:

Making a presentation is a moral act as well as an intellectual activity. The use of corrupt manipulations and blatant rhetorical ploys in a report or presentation — outright lying, flagwaving, personal attacks, setting up phony alternatives, misdirection, jargon-mongering, evading key issues, feigning disinterested objectivity, willful misunderstanding of other points of view — suggests that the presenter lacks both credibility and evidence. To maintain standards of quality, relevance, and integrity for evidence, consumers of presentations should insist that presenters be held intellectually and ethically responsible for what they show and tell. Thus consuming a presentation is also an intellectual and moral activity.

When a precise, narrowly focused technical idea becomes metaphor and sprawls globally, its credibility must be earned afresh locally by means of specific evidence demonstrating the relevance and explanatory power of the idea in its new application. It is not enough for presenters to make ever-bolder puns, as meaning drifts into duplicity. Something has to be explained.

Tufte’s second remark refers to his contention that puns enable overreaching–previously bright ideas sprawl, grow mushy, and collapse into vague metaphors when extended outside their original domain.

Speaking of evidence-based, not theory-driven, conclusions, Beautiful Evidence captures Tufte’s evidence invention, Sparklines–”intense, simple, wordlike graphics.” More on sparklines later…

Update 8/29/2006: Via the 37signals feed comes another Tufte quote of note: “If your words aren’t truthful, the finest optically letter-spaced typography won’t help. And if your images aren’t on point, making them dance in color in three dimensions won’t help…If you look after truth and goodness, beauty looks after herself.” -Edward Tufte

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

First there was his article in Wired, then there was his blog (i.e. ideas beta test bed), and now there is Chris Anderson’s book, which I recently finished reading and highly recommend: The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More.

“The Long Tail” comes from a type of statistics phenomenon known as a “long-tailed distribution” wherein the tail of the curve is very long relative to its head.

I see that Nicolas Carr is trying to further “the debate about the extent of the Long Tail phenomenon” by capturing some of the recent dialog between Chris Anderson and Lee Gomes of Wall Street Journal. Chris responds to Lee afterward here. Before that exchange, Tim Wu of Slate penned a review of The Long Tail entitled “The Wrong Tail: How to Turn a Powerful Idea into a Dubious Theory of Everything.”

While I don’t think that long-tailed distributions are under every rock in the quarries of culture and commerce, I can’t help but wonder what the implications of The Long Tail are when considering ECM and SOA.

I sketched the following on my office white board while discussing my impressions of this book with some of my colleagues:

Example music purveyors above are listed as examples of the following economies: physical goods (atoms) in physical stores (Tower Records), digital catalogs of physical goods with warehouses help to mitigate some of the zero-sum shelf space game)(Amazon.com), and digital catalogs of digitals goods (bits) with digital distribution that is ideally end-to-end (Apple’s iTunes).

Is there a long tail for content and/or a long tail for content services and solutions? Common content management (CM) needs (necessities vs. hits) are at the head (i.e. what Gartner calls “Basic Content Services”), and specialized CM needs (niches) occupy the (substantial?) tail.

Chris’s remark–”For too long, we’ve been suffering the tyranny of least common denominator fare”–resonates with me where most mainstream ECM functionality is concerned. Checkin, checkout, versioning, branching, lifecycle, workflow, etc. are powerful atoms but they’re meant to be a means to a wide variety of perhaps domain-specific ends. They’re the words that should make up the sentences and even chapters of ECM.

Applying SOA to ECM ECM enables platform vendors like EMC to provide a range of high-value CM services to its diverse customer base. “Clumps of services” can be bundled and sold according to the target domain or industry. Customer-driven composition, instead of code-based customization, can take effect, in part, because services are free from specific user experience and because their bundling is designed to address the task-centric workplace and the need to do more with less (e.g. a bundle of ten services should yield more than ten solutions–some with user experience and others solely focused on back end automation).

It seems clear, too, that vendors engaged in this pursuit must provide more than just a “veneer of variety.” By this, I’m referring to the book’s discussion about some of the perceived paradoxes surrounding increasing choice. The author contends that the process of choosing rather than the number of choices has more to do with subsequent motivation to buy or a sense of confusion and even oppression. Is the service consumer debilitated or liberated? Are the choices ordered in ways benefiting the consumer? Is informed choice enabled?

And what about the nature of service discovery in today’s SOAs? Public UDDI-based registries haven’t panned out as originally planned, and even within enterprises, UDDI alone often isn’t a sufficient basis for discovery. If the notion of filters as presented in this book (i.e. recommendations, rankings, search, taxonomies, etc.) has application in SOA, how will standards such as UDDI evolve accordingly? Given that traditional telephone company yellow pages are essentially service provider-based ads, is “UDDI as the yellow pages for web services” enough for informed discovery within the longer tail of services, CM-related or otherwise? (Ads shouldn’t be confused with recommendations.)

The book talks about the fractal nature of The Long Tail–tails within tails and “self-similarity at multiple scales.” ECM has evolved to address a particular set of broad requirements (e.g. web content management (WCM), digital asset management (DAM), collaboration, compliance, archiving, imaging, reporting, search, etc.). Each of these industry segments represents its own tail. Each vertical served by a particular set of product offerings represents another tail. Each of these tails should be served by a set of tailored filters to increase customer confidence that specific business needs will be met. Out of this fractal environment ontologies emerge (e.g. ways to organize ECM services)–both on the part of the provider and on the parts of consumers with robust business intelligence and analytics in place to reveal discrepancies and opportunities in near real-time.

A couple of ideas hit me while I was reading: (1) Playlist sharing and OPML sharing are increasing in popularity as ways to recommend music and content to others. Why not provide the ability to share content subscriptions within ECM repositories, too, perhaps leveraging something like OPML? Consider the typical project team whose membership may change over time based on its development phase. Being able to pass such information easily to new team members could greatly decrease ramp-up time. (2) What about realizing a standard way to auto-discover OPML much like RSS/Atom (feeds) can be auto-discovered today? This realization could enable OPML-based community formation (i.e. my OPML references a set of feeds; if one of these feeds has OPML associated with it then continue to fan out; …).

In unfinished form, here some more of the impressions this books has left with me. All quotes are from the book’s author unless attributed otherwise:

• Three forces of The Long Tail: Make it – democratize the tools of production; get it out there – democratize the tools of distribution (e.g. cut costs of consumption; bits vs. atoms); help me find it – connect supply and demand
• Identify niches and serve them authentically
• Affinity-based and massively parallel culture
• Mass culture versus micro-cultures massively parallel – how to avoid divisiveness, factions, walls, etc.?
• “These days our water coolers are increasingly virtual – there are many different ones, and the people who gather around them are self-selected. We are turning from a mass market back into a niche nation, defined now not by our geography but by our interests.”
• Redefining connectivity, community, commerce, business, culture, allegiance, affinity
• Greater choice involves solving a specific need/want WELL
• Choice = competition, distraction, confusion; therefore, increase quality and experience
• “Market of multitudes” and “mass of niches”
• Consumer market of non-compliance/non-conformance versus business compliance as a potential challenge (friction) and opportunity
• Physical versus online (virtual) boundaries; enterprise versus consumer boundaries
• Professional < -> Prosumer < -> Consumer
• Consumer becomes producer: “It is when the tools of production are transparent that we are inspired to create.”
• The book’s discussion about content reuse in the form of house music makes me think that house software or house apps could be additional labels for today’s mashups.
• Availability at reasonable cost both to the producer and the consumer
• [The Long Tail as] “the true shape of demand in our culture, unfiltered by the economics of scarcity”
• “Our growing affluence has allowed us to shift from being bargain shoppers buying branded (or even unbranded) commodities to become mini-connoisseurs, flexing our taste with a 1000 little indulgences that set us apart from others.”
• How will consumers behave in markets of infinite choice?
• Recall my first impression of Rhapsody and later of Pandora (blogged both herein)
• “The biggest money is in the smallest sales.” -Kevin Laws
• “Popularity is no longer a monopoly on profitability.”
• What “norms” today are “forced” and poised to break apart? What choices, boundaries, etc. are artificial? What advantage can be gained by exposing them as such (artificial)? For example, the author suggests that 30-minute TV shows (i.e. 22 minute shows with 8 minutes of ads) are artificial: “Demand [for TV] will shift to shorter content for convenience and entertainment, and longer content for substance and satisfaction. But the arbitrary middle will not hold.”
• Re-evaluate what receives my attention? Even if it’s still deserving of my attention, should it continue to consume the same amount of my time (e.g. TiVo or your choice of DVR/PVR for TV-without-ads-and-on-your-schedule, 1.4x playback of audio, etc.)? Greater choice can raise the bar of what is worthy and what constitutes waste. It’s all about control (e.g. my control over news and the newsworthy, not someone else’s dictate that such programming occurs at 6pm or any other particular time).
• Human beings are curious; enabling exploration is compelling.
• “In a world of infinite choice, context–not content–is king.” -Rob Reid, Listen.com (Rhapsody)
• Filters – consider how to promote and encourage context via submission, especially as context would otherwise fall off and become harder to ascertain (subtleties and nuances) (e.g. consider what Pandora provides in its recommendation UI)
• Continue feeding navigation and explanation (i.e. discovery > acquisition) but understand when the destination take over the journey, too.
• Contextual pivoting (context pivots) – enabling different perspective to a given context (or jumping from one context to another)
• Google as an example of providing different contextual views (e.g. text, pictures, email, video, etc.)
• The Information Age is becoming the Recommendation Age (also the Participation Age) … recommendation = respected opinion … respect comes by reputation … reputation through interaction and engagement
• “The motives to create are not the same in the head as they are in the tail.” (aka Reputation Economy)
• “Niches operate by different economics than the mainstream.” So if you apply “scarcity thinking” to long tail content, much of it can be counterintuitive.
• Difference between push and pull markets (e.g. shrink-wrapped software vs. SaaS“)
• “One size fits one. Many sizes fit many.”
• WAS: dozens of markets of millions; IS: millions of markets of dozens
• “Transparency can build trust at no cost.”
• “Don’t predict; measure and respond.”

Finally, the author states: “Although the decline of mainstream cultural institutions may result in some people turning to echo chambers of like-minded views, I suspect that over time the power of human curiosity combined with near-infinite access to information will tend to make most people more open-minded, not less.” While I hope that he is right about open-mindedness, I wonder what the expression of this will become. Will the masses become more engaged in and committed to the process of discovering truth among opinions, or will we suffer mental atrophy and apathy by taking the easy way out and settling for merely something aligned with personal or collective bias? This is the challenge and opportunity of probabilistic systems where certainty and likelihood are concerned: you enter cone of uncertainty and are able to leave before absolute truth is acquired. Will we experience an erosion of critical thinking?

“With great power comes great responsibility,” and this applies more than ever to identifying truth in a relativistic society. Don’t confuse opinion with truth; don’t confuse judgment with discernment.

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

“Open source is an experiment in social organization around a distinctive notion of property rights…Property in open source is configured fundamentally around the right to distribute, not the right to exclude…The essence of open source is not the software. It is the process by which the software is created.”

The Success of Open Source author and Professor of Political Science at U.C. Berkeley, Steven Weber, brings refreshingly non-technical perspective and insight into the world of open source and its paradigm. He sheds light on the motivation of individuals engaged in open source activity, on how governance–setting parameters for voluntary relationships among autonomous parties–motivates or de-motivates, on political and economic impact where open source is concerned, on voluntary participation and voluntary selection of tasks as an integral part of open source coordination (organization), and on how essential and accidental complexity is addressed.

According to Steven Weber, there are eight principles that capture the essence of what people do in the open source process as follows:

1. Make it interesting and make sure it happens.
2. Scratch an itch. (Understand what conditions individuals find that the benefits of participation exceed the costs.)
3. Minimize how many times you have to reinvent the wheel. (There is no place for NIH!)
4. Solve problems through parallel work processes whenever possible.
5. Leverage the law of large numbers. (For example, consider the effective field testing Linux receives.)
6. Document what you do. (See #s 3-5.)
7. Release early and release often.
8. Talk a lot. (That is, collaborate. No playing it close to the vest!)

Amidst this process, its motivations, etc., The Success of Open Source stuck with me particularly in the following ways:

• Referring to model open source from the perspective of a political scientist: “The purpose of the model is not to represent reality; its purpose is to place in sharp relief particular elements of reality so we can look at the model from different angles, tweak it in various directions, generalize it, and then come back to reality with a deeper understanding of what happens there.” This is a good definition for modeling and those who model.
• Eric Raymond: “Fun is … a sign of peak efficiency. Painful development environments waste labor and creativity; they extract huge hidden costs in time, money, and opportunity.”
• Software code as art (expression); software process as science (reproducible)
• The following progression in the open source narcotic can lead to job offers, VC money, opportunities to work with other greats: ego gratification >> peer recognition >> reputation >> proven worth…
• A growing abundance of computing power and bandwidth cause scarce resources like effort, intelligence and energy to become more valuable and in shorter supply. That in abundance depends upon that in which is not in abundance (i.e. classic supply and demand).
• “Network good” – “The value of a piece of software to any user increases as more people use the software.”
• Forking vs. coordination: “Too much coordination can get you stuck working in old and inefficient architecture.” Nevertheless making a strategic decision to abandon such an architecture can be quite difficult “because it means placing at risk all sorts of sunk costs and existing competitive advantages.”
• Software architecture should drive the organization about it. For example, consider the consequences of Conway’s Law: The structure of the (technical) system mirrors the structure of the organization that developed it. There may be expected, perhaps constrictive, communication paths, but there may also be silos of knowledge.
• While familiar with the concept of flaming (public condemnation), the concept of shunning (refusing to cooperate) was intriguing. I like the Troll Cap application of gentle shunning by 37signals.
• Is your brand (e.g. “Brand You”) a “valuable proxy for a promise of a quality performance?”
• Enabling distributed innovation by empowering people to experiment, creating effective feedback loops, and developing signal intelligence by recognizing legitimate signals–valuable bits of information–amidst noise.
• Exploration of new possibilities vs. exploitation of old certainties–risk of obsolescence if overly focused on refinement and iterative improvement
• Sometimes visionaries must rule the day (over pragmatists)!
• “As information about what users want and need to do becomes more fine-grained, individually differentiated, and hard to communicate, the incentives grow to shift the locus of innovation closer to them by empowering them with freely modifiable tools.”

I gather from my read that Steven Weber will publish again, and I look forward to his next effort. In the meantime, I look forward to tapping into a greater percentage of human creative motivation amongst my colleagues through the lesson I’ve learned from reading The Success of Open Source.

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

In his latest business management strategy book, Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution, Geoff Moore exhorts: “Extract resources from context to repurpose for core.” Of course, he goes on to explain what core and context are, their mutual relationship, and strategies for extract-repurpose work depending on your market type and differentiation strategy.

As an EMC | Documentum employee, I’ve been exposed to Geoff Moore’s writing and management style since I first joined Documentum almost eight years ago when it was still a separate private company and he served on its board. New hires were given hardback copies of Crossing the Chasm (eventually this became Inside the Tornado: Strategies for Developing, Leveraging, and Surviving Hypergrowth Markets (Collins Business Essentials)). So, I wasn’t surprised to see Documentum and EMC referenced in Dealing with Darwin. In fact, I learned something from his references (e.g. how the author sees our markets and our need to innovate). But back to the book itself…

Four words echo from its pages: core, context, innovation and inertia. Here are some of the highlights I took away from the author’s definitions and explanations in their regard:

• Core is that which differentiates your company to create sustainable competitive advantage, and context is everything else you do–even things that you may think generate revenue, create value, etc. Core is innovation in the service of competitive advantage; it is innovation that creates differentiation. Core competencies may not be core! Risk aversion concerning core increases the probability that innovation will go to waste. The worse form of wasted innovation is when differentiation costs are spent only to yield neutralization benefits.
• Context is tracking to norms and herd mentality/activity; it plays host to the forces of inertia. “Overfunding context breeds more context, accelerating the decline into inertia stasis.”
• “Innovation and inertia are so deeply intertwined that both must be engaged concurrently for any progress to occur.” Innovation yields differentiation, neutralization, productivity or waste. “To innovate forever…is not an aspiration; it is a design specification. It is not a strategy; it is a requirement.” Innovation should be pursued with purpose and should achieve economic advantage; it should not be sought after in a vacuum nor should it be wasteful.
• Inertia is work whose results are neutral or bad. Inertia is protective, controlling and deadening; it is impedance on the core circuit. Inertia is the legacy of the last innovation. It’s not the enemy of innovation, but it does resist it at the point of change.

The author states that the first order of business is to declare your strategy for differentiation (i.e. total alignment end-to-end around a single defining value proposition) as this act will establish core and consequently define context for your business. He discusses the role of outsourcing to realize “radical productivity”–how one group’s context can become another group’s core. Lastly he recommends a series of steps to execute–first a core/context analysis, second a resource-allocation analysis, and so on.

In closing, here are a few additional quotes/paraphrases that resonated with me:

• “There are penalties for failing to execute context properly but no reward for performing it brilliantly.”
• “Markets spontaneously organize to defend themselves against proprietary platform plans by promoting wherever possible open platforms.”
• “It is easy to be in the platform business as long as you give up all claims to an economic return.”
• Monetize a position of ubiquity only after it has been achieved (i.e. not, for example, while it’s merely assumed)–when switching costs are in your favor.
• “If you are innovating in a growth market, you must focus on one, and only one, innovation type.”

Postscripts:

• I strongly recommend subscribing to Geoff Moore’s blog. It’s already provided extension to Dealing with Darwin.
• As noted by the author, the seed for this book was the Harvard Business Review article, “Darwin and the Demon.” It appears that this article influenced another presentation by Geoff Moore here, which contains a number of figures reused in Dealing with Darwin as well as this Software 2005 presentation by Philip Lay. Actually, I simply recommend downloading the book’s figures here.
• My “future reading” list has now grown to two entries authored by Clayton Christensen: The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change Series)–a classic must-read by all accounts–and The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth.

Update 2/27/2006: [via] Death by Risk Aversion, Kathy Sierra on 1/30/2006 (yeah I’m behind in my feed reading)

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

“Eclipse is an open source project and one of our goals is to practice completely transparent development. The rationale is simple; if you don’t know where the project is going you cannot help out or provide feedback.” -Erich Gamma (foreword to Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change, 2e
, the subject of my post here) Even if your development process is slightly translucent, Erich’s rationale applies. If your development process is opaque, ask why and demand an answer.

Values bring purpose to practices. Practices are evidence of values. Principles bridge the gap between values (universal) and practices (intensely situated).

Extreme programming (XP) values communication, simplicity, feedback, courage and respect. These values are effective when applied together, not in isolation.

Mr. Beck’s four criteria used to evaluate the simplicity of a design:

1. Appropriateness for the intended audience
2. Communicative
3. Factored
4. Minimal

Feedback is the value I focused on the most during my read of Kent Beck’s text. I see the need for better heartbeat recognition, pulse taking and continual health assessments in some of the projects I lead. Establishing the right frequency and depth of project heartbeats can lead to a proper balance between process and reflection. Without periodic and regular project “physicals” it can be difficult to ascertain whether project/participant health is improving or declining. Project assessment need not be arduous or mysterious, but it does require discipline and commitment.

I was also impressed by Mr. Beck’s focus on flow. Insist on a high degree of continuous flow and quickly resolve all flow disruptions. Daily builds are not enough! Software should function correctly on a (verified) daily basis, at a minimum (i.e. always be deployable). Integration environments are critical to project flow. Metrics can lead to awareness. Awareness can lead to change and the development of practices to institutionalize change.

Here are just a few of the statements made by Kent Beck that made a particularly strong impression:

• “If you’re having trouble succeeding, fail.”
• “A concern for quality is no excuse for inaction.” The goal is to make the quality of software development good enough that there is no need for downstream QA. This means that everyone in the project is responsible for quality without exception.
• “Without daily attention to design, the cost of changes does skyrocket.”
• “Keep the design investment in proportion to the needs of the system so far.”
• On the role of Product Managers: “In XP, product managers write stories, pick themes and stories in the quarterly [release] cycle, pick stories in the [bi-]weekly [iteration] cycle, and answer questions as implementation uncovers under-specified areas of stories.”
• On the role of Architects: “Architects on an XP team look for and execute large-scale refactorings, write system-level tests that stress the architecture, and implement stories.”
• “There is so much waste in software development. The waste is rooted more in what we believe and feel than in what we do. Becoming aware of and addressing those beliefs and feelings takes time and experience.”

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

After reading The Design of Everyday Things, I knew that I would be reading Donald Norman’s follow-up, Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. My read did not disappoint either, and I have a number of principles to apply to a brand new project just getting underway.

In my semi-regular form, here is my list of takeaways:

• Training is essential to operate under high stress where creativity is an unaffordable luxury. So the more involved my software is in helping my user accomplish an immediate or critical task, the more attractive, intuitive, trustworthy, enjoyable and efficient my software must be. It should enhance focus while not producing anxiety. “Attractive things do work better–their attractiveness produces positive emotions, causing mental processes to be more creative, more tolerant of minor difficulties.”
• If my software makes it easy to quickly find pertinent content and metadata, then these assets will be continue to be valued. My software should look at this holistically (i.e. tackle the problem and not shift it from one place in a workflow to another). For example, the author gave print photography (e.g. shoeboxes) of pictures and digital photography (e.g. still need to have prints in hand) as examples of technologies that can do a better job of valuing the precious resource known as time: “One of the most precious resources of the modern household is time, and the effort to take care of all those wonderful photographs defeats their value…Digital cameras change the emphasis, but not the principle.”
• “The real challenge to product design is ‘understanding end-user unmet and unarticulated needs.’”
• “Learn once; remember forever.” This is possible with good understanding from a proper conceptual model (i.e. a good system image).
• “Physical objects have weight, texture, and surface.” Software can lead to a sort of sensory deprivation caused by a lack of stimulating interaction (i.e. missing “tangability”)–abstraction instead of emotion.
• “To the practitioner of human-centered design, serving customers means relieving them of frustration, of confusion, of a sense of helplessness. Make them feel in control and empowered.” So, how does the typical content management software frustrate the average user, etc.? What functions can offer the greatest value and therefore best address non-use?
• “Artistic integrity, a cohesive thematic approach and deep substance seldom come from committees. The best designs come from following a cohesive theme throughout, with a clear vision and focus. Usually, such [visceral or reflective, but not behavioral] designs are driven by the vision of one person.”
• “If you want a successful product, test and revise. If you want a great product, one that can change the world, let it be driven by someone with a clear vision.”
• “Noise is a vast source of emotional stress. Unwanted, unpleasant sounds produce anxiety, elicit negative emotional states, and thereby reduce the effectiveness of us all.”
• “Humans are predisposed to anthropomorphize, to project human emotions and beliefs into anything.”
• Given that cooperation (e.g. between an end user and his software) relies on trust and that trust has to be earned, it’s important to provide consistent and responsive user experience continually during use.
• My software itself is communicating with its users, apart from whatever content and/or metadata is involved. Users of my software are in communication with others, especially where content-centric processes and collaborative experiences are concerned. Without communication, loneliness sets in and the isolation that ensues quickly erodes individual and group productivity. Therefore, to provide highly successful software, I need to not only facilitate information sharing but also enable emotional connecting.
• There is a difference between being connected in an empowering sense and connected in a distracted sense. The connections my software provides need to be real and satisfying and not shallow or overwhelming. For example, the necessary context to succeed at a content-centric task must be always on but necessarily always fully visible. An recent example of this for me is my new Apple Mighty Mouse with its side button click-squeeze feature to trigger Exposé or its “nipple” click feature to trigger Dashboard. Both Exposé and Dashboard can themselves be contextually useful applications.

It will be important to keep in mind that there are three levels of the human cognitive and emotional system as follows:

• Visceral – design my software for appearance and initial reactions
• Behavioral – design my software for pleasure and effectiveness of use (i.e. know how people will use my software and pass initial usage–does it fulfill needs?)
• Reflective – design my software for self-image, memories and personal satisfaction (i.e. how can my software earn long-term use ad admiration?)

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

“Proper design can make a difference in our quality of life.” -Donald Norman

I know that when I’ve replied “cockpit error” in the past to situations involving software and its users that I’ve focused more often than not on the “pilot” rather than the “plane.” Reading the preface of The Design of Everyday Things convinced me to readjust my perspective–focusing more on the design of software and how it contributes to “cockpit errors.” …and the rest of the book didn’t disappoint either!

While I’m studying the “plane” moving forward, I’ll be look for what affordances it provides or lacks. How does the software I’m ultimately responsible for provide strong clues to its operation? Can my user know what to do just by looking at the GUI? Are simple things truly usable without explanation?

I’ll re-double efforts to avoid false causality and false coincidence. Are unnecessary results being logged (e.g. a handled, non-critical error)? Is any user interaction not required or overly complicated (confusing)? Does my user always have a strong sense of feedback from the software? Is the mapping among actions and results natural and intuitive, or arbitray and forced?

“The problem of determining the ‘naturalness’ of mappings is difficult, but crucial.” -Donald Norman

When the author reviewed stereo controls in cars, it got me to think about how content management could become more usable in a more 3D-like setting rather than the two dimensions afforded users today by ECM software (e.g. relationship mapping, content linking, associated discussions, hypertext, virtual documents, etc.). What about ECM software needs to be freed from a linear-only view?

With a deeper appreciation now for mental models and how they explain observations, being able to observe adequate feedback is crucial to forming a desirable impression of software and how one can go about their goals and tasks within it. It’s clearer now why perception becomes reality and how perception is shaped significantly by design. The more I can ensure reasonable ways for a user to digest the unfamiliar, the less mental energy will be required to successfully interact with new software, which should create a favorable impression and ultimately a satisfied user.

The author’s discussion concerning long term memory and short term memory gave me ideas for software improvements, too. The more my software can facilitate past-as-just-present functionality (e.g. saved searches, MRU lists, extensive undo/redo, etc.), the more mental relief can be afforded to my user.

“Try to design the system to allow for errors. Realize the normal behavior isn’t always accurate. Design so that errors are easy to discover and corrections are possible.” -Donald Norman

“The designer shouldn’t think of a simple dichotomy between errors and correct behavior; rather, the entire interaction should be treated as a cooperative endeavor between person and machine, one in which misconceptions can arise on either side.” -Donald Norman (emphasis mine)

“Seven Principles for Transforming Difficult Tasks into Simple Ones

1. “Use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head.
2. “Simplify the structure of tasks.
3. “Make things visible: bridge the gulfs of Execution and Evaluation.
4. “Get the mappings right.
5. “Exploit the power of constraints, both natural and artificial.
6. “Design for error.
7. “When all else fails, standardize.”

-Donald Norman

I’m looking forward to reading Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things next.

What’s more Mr. Norman has a blog. Subscribed!

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

Within the past month, I finished reading The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. Now I can follow-up my previous post on this book.

For expediency’s sake, here are my take-aways in rougher, list-oriented form:

• Capitalism – unequal wealth; communism – equal poverty
• RSS/Atom (feeds), blogs, tags – open, standard formats … but not open enough (e.g. annotations) … potential for integration with open, standard document-based metadata (e.g. XMP) … what I’m currently calling “fluid content dynamics” – more closely reflects the very nature of content–what do I really want to do?–capture thoughts and ideas … what is a .doc? why be forced to or choose to use Word? is the value Word provides worthy of my usage/loyalty/goals? what is the price of overkill over adequacy?
• “Standards don’t eliminate innovation, they just allow you to focus it. They allow you to focus on where the real value lies, which is usually everything you can add above and around the standard.” -Joel Cawley (e.g. e.g. VoIP – voice is free; surrounding service add value)
• “Software is not gold, it is lettuce–it is a perishable good.” -Brian Behlendorf
• “This emerging era [open-sourcing] is characterized by the collaborative innovation of many people working in gifted communities, just as innovation in the industrial era was characterized by individual genius.” -Irving Wladawsky-Berger
• Blogging as open-source intelligence gathering/dissemination
• Don’t confuse a competitive race to the top for a competitive race to the bottom (e.g. China’s global economic strategy, “ECM lite” (Gartner’s “Basic Content Services”), etc.).
• Get flat or be flattened!
• Align ILM/ECM/CM/DM to its flatteners (i.e. blogs, wikis, feeds, tag clouds, etc.). Re-engineer yourself, your workgroup, your company and your culture (think BIG!) accordingly.
• Are you transparent or translucent? I’m only the latter if I have no effective means to handle feedback.
• The Triple Convergence – new players, new playing field, new processes and habits for horizontal collaboration
• The state of being “legacy free” and the past’s drag on the present
• The Great Sorting Out – understand when friction is to be kept, modified or eliminated (e.g. legitimate barriers to entry, etc.)
• Value creation today is horizontal, not vertical–connect and collaborate, not command and control
• Power of perspective and anticipating its effects (e.g. the empowerment of those benefiting the most profoundly from flattening)
• Power of being able to assign or take action instead of asking for information because the information is already known
• IP ownership – CC mark on blogs, living wills and trusts (e.g. include “my bits”)
• Knowledge work and services (idea-based goods), not just (physical) goods, are tradeable.
• Wants today become needs tomorrow.
• “Sure, there is fear, and that fear is good because that stimulates a willingness to change and explore and find more things to do better.” -Vivek Paul
• “You have to constantly upgrade your skills.” – mediocre was never an option, but now mediocrity has been permanently kicked out of the proverbial closet (thank goodness!)
• Know how to “learn how to learn”
• Laws -> Markets -> Innovation (i.e. why I’ve been reading books on the judicial system in America and blogging about it)
• Running a marathon involves different musculature, breathing capacity and mental toughness than running a sprint
• “In China today, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America today, Britney Spears is Britney Spears–and that is our problem.” -Thomas Friedman
• Strive for the top but have a plan that accounts for arrival
• “Transformation of an enterprise begins with a sense of crisis or urgency. No institution will go through fundamental change unless it believes it is in deep trouble and needs to do something different to survive.” -Lou Gerstner
• “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” -Paul Romer
• Versatilist (Gartner) – not specialist and not generalist
• Values > Value; Values chains > Value chains
• Liberating technology that enslaves
• “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” -Albert Einstein
• “…in a flat world so many of the inputs and tools of collaboration are becoming commodities available to everyone. They are all out there for anyone to grasp. There is one thing, though, that has not and can never be commoditized–and that is imagination.”

In reply to Erik’s comment, a very sensible reason for a corporation or company to pursue outsourcing is when it must do so to effectively engage critical knowledge workers. The talent pool is global; it’s not local. I want the best candidates to be employees. I prefer to work locally and draw from my communities; however, I can see when this may not always be possible. Thomas Friedman makes the point of saying that today natural talent trumps geography.

Some of the complaint I hear to outsourcing tends to be focused on cost rather than talent. I see an emerging rationale swinging more toward talent. This is why it’s extremely critical that our educational system catch up and surpass corporate knowledge worker requirements. If we don’t educate the best and the brightest, someone else will. If we can’t attract and retain local talent, then we’ll be forced to “go remote.” (Assuming that a corporation wants to be a global leader in the marketplace.)

A cost-based competitive advantage implies a volume-based corporate economy. Knowledge work and its enabling technologies and products are not yet entirely volume commodities. To become such implies that something else–not based on cost/volume–has taken its place. Whatever this is will likely be what future talent is attracted to.

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

After finishing The World Is Flat, I picked up Winning The Future: A 21st Century Contract with America by Newt Gingrich, which I received for Father’s Day. (More on The World Is Flat in a separate post–excellent book on timely subject matter!)

I haven’t yet finished Mr. Gingrich’s book about a 21st century contract with America, but Winning The Future: A 21st Century Contract with America is a thought-provoking read. It’s not as substantial as some of the other books I’ve read recently (e.g. The World Is Flat, Men in Black), but it does offer new connections for the more detailed coverage these other books present (e.g. (threat #4) “America’s economic supremacy will yield to China and India because of failing schools and weakening scientific and technological leadership”, the historic balance of our three branches of government–that two branches combined (e.g. legislative and executive) can reign in the third branch (judicial), etc.).

In “Patriotic Immigration” Mr. Gingrich raises the subject of dual citizenship as “one of the most insidious assaults on American exceptionalism.”

Before I continue, I should state up front that I have a brother-in-law who is a dual citizen. He’s just as patriotic as I am. After passing all requirements and becoming a citizen, when he “interviewed” mutual family members, it was clear that in some cases, he knew more facts about America than some of those born in this country. So, up to reading this chapter, I really haven’t viewed dual citizenship in a bad light–I’m not certain that I do now either.

However, when taken to a logical end, dual citizenship can create a detrimental tension between two national, geographical, culture, ideal–identity–concerns. This reminds me of my own brief, prior post about absolutes versus relativism. On the surface, dual citizenship appears harmless, but when pressed all the way to the wall, it may yield an undesirable, if not unacceptable, result.

For whatever reason–probably because of my profession as a software architect–this got me to thinking about object identity. Java, C# and other languages have done away with the potential nightmare of multiple implementation inheritance supported by C++. However these languages prominently support multiple interface inheritance, which still has the potential for creating tenuous object identity. That is, if FooBar implements IFoo and IBar, is a FooBar object’s existence truly independent of its value? Of course, this depends on the function of IFoo and IBar, but my observation is that there are no formal checks in Java or C# to prevent a condition of “dual citizenship” in FooBar. And in the end, FooBar is conflicted, which will force the software above to accommodate, defend against, isolate, coax, placate, attack or ignore (at its peril) the inherent conflict.

Clearly, I’m “in process” on this connection. Thoughts?

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

The other aspect of Re-imagine! that resonates with me is its 22nd chapter, “Getting It Right at the Start: Education for a Creative and Self-reliant Age,” which Tom Peters admits he wrote in a state of rage. Education, especially concerning math and science is also a serious topic of discussion in The World Is Flat. More on this later.

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

I admit that I’ve never read cover-to-cover the book that apparently put Tom Peters on the map as a management guru (i.e. In Search of Excellence: Lessons from Americas Best Run Companies). Frankly, when I read Fast Company’s article on Tom Peters celebrating the 20th anniversary of the book’s publication–”I had no idea what I was doing when I wrote ‘Search.’”–I wasn’t sure that I’d ever read a book by him.

Re-Imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age is unique on many different levels, and some of the uniqueness works for me. This is the first business book I’ve seen with such an extensive use of color, graphics, pictures, fonts, etc. that result in a visually engaging and effective format. Prior to this publication, my exposure to publisher DK was limited to the high-quality picture-word books for kids (e.g. this). I never imagined that a business book could be done in a similar manner. (Given the book’s title, my reaction was likely anticipated and encouraged.)

On the other hand, the book ends up coming across as a collection of sound bites. Almost every phrase is catchy and that tends to dull the entire tome. Perhaps I just needed more context and build up to a few, powerful and profound main points.

Nevertheless, Re-imagine! made the following impressions on me:

• “If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.” -General Eric Shineski, Chief of Staff, U.S. Army
• The whole emphasis on PSFs (Professional Services Firms), WOW projects–for the individual, team and company
• “Beyond Solutions: Providing Memorable ‘Experiences’” offers the generational evolution of the kid’s birthday cake as a “sticky” example of moving from raw materials (flour), to goods (cake mix), to services (ready-made cakes), and now to experiences (birthday party with cake at Chuck E. Cheese’s). Raw materials cost the least but require more time. Experiences cost the most but offer intangibles beyond time reclamation.
• “Design is the heart and soul of a dream/solution.”
• Reframers’ Rule #2: “You are never so powerful as when you are ‘powerless.’” There is less scrutiny, less red tape and less process.
• Boss work that works: “Find Heroes. Do Demos. Tell Stories.”
• “The ‘Brand You’ Survival Kit” by Tom Peters: “(1) Think like an entrepreneur. (2) Always be a ‘closer.’ (3) Embrace marketing. (4) Pursue mastery. (5) Thrive on ambiguity. (6) Laugh off vigorous screw-ups. (7) Nurture your network. (8) Relish technology. (9) Grovel before the young. (10) Cultivate a passion for renewal.”
• “The Learners’ Manifesto” by Insult to Intelligence: The Bureaucratic Invasion of Our Classrooms author Frank Smith: “The brain is always learning. Learning does not require coercion. Learning must be meaningful. Learning is incidental. Learning is collaborative. The consequences of worthwhile learning are obvious. Learning always involves feelings. Learning must be free of risk.”
• Politics – noun. “Getting things done through people”–something a leader must love…politics!

When I read, I thrive on meat (mental engagement) more than candy (visual engagement). It’s interesting for me to recall my first reaction to Re-imagine! when I was still on a sugar high…how, in the end, I’m simply left wanting more…

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

I often enjoy turning on PBS during my lunch time break to see, hear and understand those interviewed by Charlie Rose. In my opinion, Charlie Rose is one of today’s top interviewers, and I find his work broadcast on PBS to be both insightful and thought-provoking. Recently he interviewed Thomas Friedman, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times (e.g. his columns at India Express – via Twenty Onward) and author his most recent book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century.

Outsourcing has been a hot issue for awhile now, especially in the high technology realm I occupy professionally, and its debate won’t be going away until it’s assumed. Nevertheless, outsourcing can be a source of anxiety and concern as most change is capable to generating–if not for you and I, for the people we may work with and/or for. So, as I observed the optimistic response from Mr. Friedman to Mr. Rose’s questions, I wanted to get a firsthand, deeper sense of the author’s perspective. (Thanks, Costco, for the great hardback price.)

The global competitive playing field is being leveled; the world is being flattened. There seems to be little to dispute in these statements; however, there is less constructive discussion about how to response progressively and effectively to this reality. Mr. Friedman closes his opening chapter saying, “It is the ambition of this book to offer a framework for how to think about it [i.e. 'the great challenge for our time...to absorb these changes [from a flattening world] in ways that do no overwhelm people but also do not leave them behind’] and manage it to our maximum benefit.”

Here are some of my initial takeaways:

• Globalization agent: country (1.0), company (2.0), individual (3.0 – present)
• Division of work forming: grunt (execution) vs. creative (strategic design, service)
• “Everyone has to focus on what exactly is their value-add.” -Jaithirth “Jerry” Rao
• “There is no real end to what can be done by whom.” -Vivek Kulkarni
• Organizations need to flatten, too, and rapidly in order to source decisions and work optimally.

As noted in my post title, this is just a prelude–after all, I’ve only finished the first chapter (“While I Was Sleeping”). Indeed, I get a keen sense that I’m about to wake up and receive a large portion of effective hindsight. Googling “‘Charlie Rose’ ‘Thomas Friedman’” suggests that I’m a bit late to the review party (e.g. Slate). Nonetheless, prepare the fire house!

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

In his book Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America, Mark Levin lays out a compelling case for why: “It’s time for a serious national debate about the role of the judiciary in modern America.”

• Why a balance of power as our founding fathers declared is vital to each person’s freedom, regardless of personal political views
• Why intent and its clear expression are crucial–in their absence interpretation (right, wrong and very wrong) is inevitable
• Why being wary of actions (or lack thereof) that secure “the right not to feel uncomfortable” is important
• How diversity can be synonymous with reverse discrimination
• How significant the price of nebulous terms and subjective analysis can become over time

I found Mr. Levin’s comment about working on the inside (e.g. siding with a majority to limit its scope) to be insightful in other business contexts–an active take on “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” (but don’t be a lemming!).

When Mr. Levin got to discussing “right to privacy” issues (his chapter, “Death by Privacy”)–something I’ve been mulling over in the context of desktop search and search in general–I was intrigued by the following passage that talks about Justice Hugo Black’s dissent in the 1965 decision in the case of Griswold vs. Connecticut : “One of the most effective ways of diluting or expanding a constitutionally guaranteed right is to substitute for the crucial word or words of a constitutional guarantee another word or words, more or less flexible and more or less restricted in meaning…’Privacy’ is a broad, abstract and ambiguous concept that can easily be shrunken in meaning but which can also, on the other hand, easily be interpreted as a constitutional ban against many things other than searches and seizures.”

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

Last week my wife, son and I, along with my brother, celebrated my parents’ 40th wedding anniversary. Congrats, Mom and Dad!! We did so on the island of Maui, staying in the Kaanapali region in a luxury condo high-rise next to the beach. It was our second time to Maui, but the first for my folks; so extra attention was paid to ensure they got the most of their vacation. My son was content to swim in the little, and sometimes, big, pool and to make “sand castles” (read my brother and I feverously build while my son destroys, smiling from ear to ear) on the beach. However, everyone enjoyed the luau, the catamaran-based snorkeling excursion–actually snorkeling in general, and the visit to the Maui Ocean Center. We saw most all of the tropical fish varieties that one can see, sea turtles (red and green), dolphins and even breaching humpback whales.

Among my Dad, my brother and I–each of us armed with a Canon Digital Rebel SLR, we shot 2.5 GB of pictures–nearly 900 maximum quality images of family, landscapes, animal life and plant life. Back to back, I probably shot an additional solid 60 minutes of video; so, we’ll have plenty of memories for years to come.

On the road to Hana we discovered the innovation irrigation system on that part of Maui, which includes a series of diversion feeds, dams and canals that collectively serve to capture runoff water that would otherwise simply return to the Pacific Ocean and to divert it to the Taro, Pineapple, Macadamia and other fields. This got me to thinking about other useful systems of resource diversion to avoid waste and to enrich others (e.g. poverty and food, old electronic components and systems like computers).

While I was absolutely disconnected during my vacation, I did read as I like to do in general, but especially in this state–again, no technology or technical books allowed! My first read, Prince of Fire (the fifth book in Gabriel Allon series by author Daniel Silva) was purely for entertainment and to effect a rapid de-tox/disconnect from the previous week’s work efforts. Effective, indeed! My second read, Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America, dealt with the current state of our judicial system and therefore was far more thought-provoking, if not disturbing. More on Mark Levin’s book in my next post.

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

My previous encounter with the work of author Malcolm Gladwell told me that I should pursue his other work; so, as is often the case for me, I looked further back in time and read his first book, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. I wasn’t disappointed.

“Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.”

The author sites three essential characteristics of epidemics in general, not just the medical sense of the term:

1. Contagiousness (unexpected property)
2. Little causes can have big effects (geometric progression – abandon expectation of proportionality – effect that is far beyond proportion for its cause)
3. Change happens not gradually but at one dramatic moment (i.e. epidemic rise or fall – the Tipping Point)

“We are all, at heart, gradualists, our expectations set by the steady passage of time. But the world of the Tipping Point is a place where the unexpected becomes expected, where radical change is more than possibility. It is–contrary to all our expectations–a certainty.”

The author poses two essential questions that arise from observing successful and unsuccessful collaboration–question he then sets out to address in the rest of his work:

1. “Why is it that some ideas or behaviors or products start epidemics and other don’t?”
2. “What can we do to deliberately start and control positive epidemics of our own?”

The author suggests three essential agents of change:

1. Law of the Few – i.e. Mavens, Connectors and Salesmen; kinds of people critical to spreading information
2. Stickiness Factor – ideas have to memorable and move us to action
3. Power of Context – acute environmental sensitivity; behavior is a function of social context

About the Few:

• Mavens – data banks; provide the message
• Connectors – social glue; spread the message
• Salesmen – persuade to accept and act upon the message

“Six degrees of separation doesn’t mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.”

I (correctly) assumed up front that I am not a Salesmen, but I wasn’t sure about being a Connector or being a Maven.

According to the author Connectors possess a combination of curiosity, self-confidence, sociability and energy. “The closer an idea or a product comes to a Connector, the more power and opportunity is has.” Connectors understand “the strength of weak ties.” I am not a Connector (e.g. scoring only 13 out of 250 on the name test).

I am a Maven on the other hand. “To be a Maven is to be a teacher. But it is also, even more emphatically, to be a student.” A Maven is one who accommodates knowledge and is active in sharing it, too; interest in and curious about everything; wants to help because he likes to help; motivation is to educate and to help, not to persuade.

About Stickiness:

• Example sticky message: “Innovation in one part of the ecosystem benefits the entire ecosystem.” -> “Innovation for all!”
• Thought: Rich clients have to be more sticky than their counterparts, since the latter (thin clients) have inherently greater reach.
• Sticky => usablity + __ (immersivity?)
• Attention that returns education is sticky.
• Active vs. passive involvement; engagement vs. viewing; on the verge of learning/discovery vs. on the verge of boredom
• Word of mouth can be sticky (e.g. GMail invitations – as much who had the invitations to hand out as the invitation itself).

About Context:

• “In ways we don’t necessarily appreciate, our inner states are the result of our outer circumstances.”
• Workplace aura: e.g. extra security measures that are “in your face”: badge readers, key pads, security fobs, closed doors, roaming guards
• Broken Window theory – “an epidemic can be reversed, can be tipped, by tinkering with the smallest details of the immediate environment”

A few random thoughts during my reading:

• What really matters are little things – a stark counterpoint to the analogy provided by walnuts and popcorn kernels in a glass jar.
• “Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context. The reason that most of us seem to have consistent character is that most of us are really good at controlling our environment.” By promoting/seeking change, how is character development accelerated?
• Groups play a critical role in social epidemics–that of magnifiers–but not all groups are equal in their effect.
• When innovating be sure to solicit the help of “translators” so that the innovation can move beyond the Early Adopter and cross the chasm to reach the Early Majority.

Final takeaways:
(1) “Starting epidemics requires concentrating resources on a few key areas.”
(2) “Those who successfully create social epidemics do not just do what they think is right. They deliberately test their intuitions.”

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

After becoming aware of Malcolm Gladwell through a Fast Company article, I was intrigued by the thesis of Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking and went out immediately to purchase a hardback copy. I’m glad that I did, and I just finished my reading of this important book for those facing the pressures of work or life while doing your best to make accurate decisions literally in the blink of an eye at times.

Three tasks for this book per its author:

1. Convince you of the fact that “decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.”
2. Answer the question: “So, when should we trust our instincts, and when should we be wary of them?”
3. Convince you that “our snap judgments and first impressions can be educated and controlled.”

There are so many key thoughts put forth by the author; here is a sample (quoting the author unless noted otherwise):

• “I believe…that the task of making sense of ourselves and our behavior requires that we acknowledge there can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis.”
• “‘Thin-slicing’ refers tot he ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience.”
• “We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that–sometimes–we’re better off that way.”
• Challenge to researchers: “Snap judgments and rapid cognition take place behind a locked door.”
• “When we ask people to explain their thinking–particularly thinking that comes from the unconscious–we need to be careful in how we interpret their answers.”
• “There are times when we demand an explanation when an explanation really isn’t possible, and…doing so can have serious consequences.”
• “People are ignorant of the things that effect their actions, yet they rarely feel ignorant.”
• “Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can change our first impressions–we can alter the way we thin-slice–by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions.”
• “Taking rapid cognition seriously–acknowledging the incredible power, for good and ill, that first impressions play in our lives–requires that we take active steps to manage and control those impressions.”
• “Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out.”
• “Truly successful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.”
• “In good decision making, frugality matters.”
• “When we talk about analytic versus intuitive decision making, neither is good or bad. What is bad is if you use either of them in inappropriate circumstances.” -Paul Van Riper
• “When you remove time you are subject to the lowest-quality intuitive reaction.” -Gavin de Becker, referring to security protection personnel during a moment of recognition
• “When we make a split-second decision, we are really vulnerable to bing guided by our stereotypes and prejudices, even ones we may not necessarily endorse or believe.” -Keith Payne
• “Our unconscious thinking is, in one critical respect, no different from our conscious thinking: in both, we are able to develop our rapid decision making with training and experience.”
• “Every moment–every blink–is composed of a series of discrete moving parts, and every one of those parts offers an opportunity for intervention, for reform, and for correction.”

As I was reading the pages of Blink, I had the following thoughts:

• Focus on what matters; filter out all else. (Easier said than done!)
• Come sideways at an issue instead of head-on for a more efficient path to truth.
• Time-slicing is effective when it is allowed to be transparent and mysterious (i.e. when it is free of crippling and confusing attempts to analyse).
• Rapid cognition is not foolproof, nor is it a panecea. However, it is truly powerful and deserves more of my attention.
• Is there a fog around ECM that cannot be lifted? For example, when does BI and BA impede business?
• Creating conditions for successful spontaneity isn’t a random exercise; it involves regular drilling and practice.
• Be in command (i.e. state intent/goal) and out of control (i.e. don’t micromanage/stifle creative problem solving).
• Allowing people to operate without having to explain themselves constantly enables rapid cognition.
• Lee Goldman’s decision tree/rule reminds me of patterns in software development–essential information (clarity) versus too much information (paralysis).
• No sighted person ever drinks Coca-Cola blind. Brand visualization is important!
• Being an expert involves knowing what you know and being able to articulate it. It implies that your snap judgments and first impressions are resilient.
• The notion of unpacking the human face through analyzing action units explains to me why sometimes when I laugh to the point of tears, my head not only hurts but should–the distinct muscular movement involved exercises out of shape muscles.
• The information on our face is going on inside our mind; it’s not merely a signal of this internal activity.
• Emotion can start on the face, not just end up there from internal feelings.
• Are dogs empathetic because they are able to more naturally process the facial expressions of their owners?
• Information is useful when it’s not burdensome.

Next, I look forward to reading Malcolm Gladwell’s previous book, < The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.