Anyone who does a lot of projects has experience with project overviews, plans, schedules, and strategies.
Most organizations try to put those together in some kind of document called a creative brief, which then goes to a decision-making body for a go, no-go, or yes-but.
Unfortunately most creative briefs are anything but:
From Hallmark’s great little Hoops and Yoyo.
[tags] work, creative brief, projects, hoops & yoyo, john koetsier [/tags]I recently had the opportunity to spend a couple hours on the phone with Dan Zadra, chairman of Compendium, Inc., on a possible new project that we’re working on.
The initial face-to-face was with Tote Yamada, VP Sales, and Kobi Yamada, the CEO. Everything looked promising, so we followed up with Dan, who’s sort of the resident guru of Compendium. And we had a great one hour teleconference that stretched into two.
After talking with Dan, Tote sent me some of his books. (Dan has written over a hundred books.) This is the dedication in the first one I opened:
I have come to realize that we humans are equipped with a peculiar kind of telescopic vision. Looking out we can clearly see mountains of potential in everyone else around us. Looking, in however, we usually see our own potential by peering through the wrong end of the telescope.
What we see in ourselves is what we’ll get.
This I learned in depth from Bob Moawad and his staff at the EDGE learning institute in Tacoma, WA. More than a million people – young and old, from all walks of life – have attended EDGE programs nationwide over the past decade. I feel fortunate to be one of those people. Thank you Bob, for showing me how to turn the telescope around. What a view.
Wow.
…
…
(The book, by the way, is The Secret of the Slight Edge. And thanks to Peter Field of Agile Media for the introduction.)
[tags] compendium, potential, dan zadra, john koetsier [/tags]Yes, I thought so. That is a woman with a mustache on Jobster:
Just for fun, by the way, here’s my profile on Jobster. I don’t quite like the results as much as my resume, but hey – fun to try.
[tags] resume, jobster, john koetsier [/tags]I had lunch with a colleague today. He’s young, smart, and creative … and in a job where he cannot possibly exercise all his talents.
(Kind of the way I like to think of myself!)
But he has a good-paying job. And a mortgage. And 3 kids. And a wife.
So it’s hard. Hard to take the plunge. Hard to take the risk. Hard to not settle. After all, if he has a hard landing, it’s not just him at risk.
And yet, a good-paying job doing often-interesting work is not enough. It’s not enough for him, and it’s not enough for me. There are some people who won’t settle – can’t settle.
Settling means dying, even if just a little. To settle, you have to kill your dreams, or at least shut them off, wall them up.
The colleague I had lunch with is not willing to do that. I’m not willing to do that. Someone, I think Eleanor Roosevelt, said that the biggest risk is not taking any risks at all.
The challenge is risk management.
In other words, if you’re going to take a risk outside the cozy corporate womb, have your ducks in a row. Plan it for some time in advance. Have a fairly large sum of money (12 months worth of living expenses, I think) in reserve. Then go for it.
Why?
You might as well ask why we live. Life is risk. Doing the same thing over and over, always staying within the lines, always doing the safe thing, is not life.
Life is experimentation. Life is change – without change there is no life. Literally, when you stop changing, you’ll be dead.
I want to live.
[ update ]I just saw this article on risk-taking. It gives the following three reasons why people take risks:
My company has just had an all-hands-on-deck call for help in a certain department due to a huge onslaught of orders, so I, our Director of Marketing, and many others have volunteered a few days of our time to help.
After a day of doing incredibly repetititive and fairly mind-numbing work, I now better understand the value of goals in imparting artificial meaning to otherwise meaningless work.
(Not that the work I was doing was meaningless. But it was a small slice of a chopped-up workflow … which, in zoomed-in perspective, rendered the precise process I was doing meaningless. In other words, when doing it, it doesn’t make much sense. If seen as one step in a long chain of steps, it makes more sense.)
To motivate myself, I set certain goals: 100,000 units for today, for instance (which I hit). And that made the day meaningful … when otherwise what I was doing felt about as significant as moving rocks from one side of the yard to the other, and back again.
. . .
. . .
I also re-discovered what Marx thought of as the dehumanization of labor, and that I was really glad that I have a job that is not brain-optional.
As a bonus, understanding some of the processes of our company from a complete ground-floor perspective, I can see where there might be some opportunities for improvement.
If you’re involved in any kind of product development or marketing (and who isn’t in one or the other or both), don’t miss this post on the delight and magic of the familiar transposed into unexpected environments.
Wondering how to apply it to stuff I’m working on …
[tags] kathy sierra, passionate users, unexpected, marketing, product development, john koetsier [/tags]In our still-politically-correct values-neutral society where we’re ever so afraid of saying something that someone, anyone, might even just possibly get offended at, could we at least stop using the silly, silly term controlled substances?
Could we please just say drugs? Would that be OK?
George Orwell must be turning in his grave these days. As he said in Politics and the English Language more than 50 years ago:
In one of the most famous sections of the essay, Orwell quotes from the King James Bible, Book of Ecclesiastes, chapter 9, verse 11:
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
He translates this verse into “modern” English like this:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
and another favorite of mine …
Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, “I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.” Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.
(This mini-rant was inspired by some research I’m doing into educational technology, including online lessons and courses … and the frequent use of the neological “controlled substances” that I’m seeing in the health sections of so many sites.)
I mean, how much more euphemistic can you get?
Controlled means illegal. Substance … has there ever been a more meaningless, vanilla, empty word than substance … means drug.
I love education.
So busy teaching us to call spades implements for the purpose of excavation.
[tags] drugs, controlled substances, george orwell, PC, political correctness, jargon, john koetsier [/tags]OK, this is too cool to keep secret.
Remember that hotfrosty thing I’ve been talking about a bit lately?
Well, tomorrow I’ll be meeting two fashion design classes: one grade 11, one grade 12. And we’ll be having a little design contest.
It’s focused on one of the hotfrosty core products.
I think this is going to be good …
. . .
. . .
(Incidentally, some of the best product ideas, enhancements, and refinements lately have been coming from my wife, Teresa, who has been pounding out prototypes and dreaming up innovations. Thanks!)
[tags] hotfrosty, open source, design, innovation, creativity, product development, john koetsier [/tags]I never thought I’d see the day:
Yes, I am a card-carrying member of the Fabricland Sewing Club. The shame, the shame!
Here’s the deal: I’m building some prototypes for a new product. For inspiration, and for product design, I needed fabric. Lots of it. Apparently, you get a 40%-off discount when you’re a member.
The rest is history.
Eleanor Roosevelt said that the future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
Do you dream?
Do you believe?
I think that dreaming is an essential survival skill in business, in work, in life.
I’ve just come through a month without dreams. A month of projects, tasks, requests, work. Basically, stuff.
The problem with stuff is that stuff happens. Stuff accumulates. And then stuff obliterates.
Passion dies. Enthusiasm fades. Curiosity subsides. Joy flees: stuff has conquered. We have seen the enemy, and the enemy is us.
In case the problem for business, for work, is not perfectly clear, here it is: creativity depends on all those good things I’ve just mentioned. Just try to be creative without passion, enthusisasm, curiosity, joy.
Good luck.
Without creativity, nothing new and exciting happens. Without creativity, you are just one more drone in the faceless masses. Without creativity, your business is just one more me-too nothing-new ho-hum big stinking deal.
You need dreams.
You need big beautiful dreams.
And then you need to believe.
When a company has no dreams, there is no belief. Without belief – in something, anything – the company has no soul. Without a soul, it’s a dead man walking, an empty automaton … a skeleton that’s still, somehow, stubbornly, moving.
But don’t expect anyone get excited about it. Not the people who work there – to them the company is a payment on a car, on a mortgage. And if not the people who work there, why the wider world?
You must have a dream. They must be beautiful dreams. And then you must believe. Otherwise, what’s the point? Go flip burgers, and ask would you like fries with that.
This morning, at 6:07, I found a dream. It is beautiful.
And I believe.
Up at 6:20 this morning (late), skipped breakfast. Left house at 7:20.
At work at 8:10 – working in Bellingham today. Juggled projects and priorities until noon, then had lunch with my boss, Kevin. Worked until 4:45.
Home at 5:45 (border lineup was huge). Eating until 6:00. 15 minutes of hockey – Buffalo Sabres beating the Carolina Hurricanes 1-0, then out with Gabrielle, Aidan, and Ethan to Ethan’s baseball practice.
While Ethan was practicing with his team, I threw the ball with Gabrielle and Aidan – they’re both getting better at catching and Gabrielle is really starting to throw well. Some hitting practice too – Gabrielle straightens her arms a little too early on some of her swings, but she’s working to avoid that and had 3 or 4 big, big hits.
Home at 8:00. Kids have to get ready for bed. Aidan needs to be changed; the older kids have their ‘reading time.’ (The choice is: go to bet at 8:00, or read and stay up until 9:00.)
8:30. Aidan’s in bed, Ethan and Gabrielle are reading. I can start to relax. Teresa reminds me of some work that I need to do in the gutters. I promise my Saturday away.
Tired.
(But, it is a good tired!)
The journey continues ….
(This is not meant to make sense to anyone, yet. Unless you’ve read this post announcing a new start-up, which now has a name (hotfrosty) and a logo. Progress!)
[tags] hotfrosty, john koetsier, start-up, entrepreneur [/tags]I’m in LONG meetings every single day this week …
So I’m leaving early in the morning, coming home late. After a few things with the kids, and a couple of words with Teresa, there’s not much time for anything else.
(In case you were wondering why posts are a little sparse this week!)
Today our steering committee had our regular monthly meeting on our president’s boat, the MoGeo (pronounced Mojo).
He took us to an island across the bay, and then, on the way back, for a little tour of Bellingham Bay.
I snapped this pick of a ship’s rudder … somewhat appropriately, seeing as it was, of course, the Steering committee that was along for the ride …
You know the bit about the airplane being off-course 90% of the time … but it still gets where it’s going?
That’s true for business too. And projects. And, maybe, even careers. That’s what makes it kind of comforting to read this quote from Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel:
“I think it is very important for you to do two things: act on your temporary conviction as if it was a real conviction; and when you realize that you are wrong, correct course very quickly …. And try not to get too depressed in the part of the journey, because there’s a professional responsibility. If you are depressed, you can’t motivate your staff to extraordinary measures. So you have to keep your own spirits up even though you well understand that you don’t know what you’re doing.”
Bob Sutton, author of the recently released Hard Facts, mentioned it during an interview on Guy Kawasaki’s blog.
I feel like I’ve just been to a support group or received a group hug. I mean, Andy Grove is a legend. He’s an incredibly-respected business leader and technologist. If he felt the way I sometimes feel, maybe it’s just OK. Maybe it’s not just me … and that the frustrations and uncertainties I feel while I’m screwing around vigorously.
Listening, learning, leading: onward!
… has made it off the cutting room floor.
More to come!
(Having pity on my readers, I’ve added a link to a very small amount of context. Looking for more? Ditto last comment above.)
A building is going up near my Bellingham office – tilt-up construction in which huge slabs of concrete are poured, then lifted into place.
I’m wondering how the crane is going to get out …
This is a test of Sidewalk. Sidewalk lets you create web forms very, very simply, and stick them on your website without any application development whatsoever – and very little technical ability or knowledge at all.
Here’s my first test … tell me something that’s cool:
The best thing about this is not that anyone can do it. (OK, maybe it is.)
But the second best thing is that I don’t have to get a developer to build something. Two minutes with this tool saves me getting a developer to build something … and saves that developer an hour of his time.
The other reason that this kind of service is really, really important, is that every company or group that has a website occasionally has the need for some totally out-of-the-box wild blue-sky widget on their site. The CEO wants to check if people who buy green widgets like salted herring, or something like that.
Well, in a traditional development world, that’s somehow got to be fit into a site or application data model. It never will. And it never should.
And now, it never has to.
Credit:
I saw it first on Emily Chang’s eHub blog.
Two other players in a similar space: Wyacracker, and The Form Assembly. Cool thing about Form Assembly is that you can also do file uploads.
I’m doing some education research lately and happened to come across this article which refers to the “Canada effect.”
Some have quipped that state-level student achievement in the U.S. can be best predicted by proximity to Canada …
In other words, the most northern states typically have the best results.
However, lest we Canadians get too cockey, we need to remember that correlation is not equivalent to causation, since the article continues ….
–which in turn may be a proxy for variations among states in factors ranging from demographics (e.g., student poverty, parent education, and race) to political culture and spending on education.
Too bad there isn’t something in the air which we can bottle and sell, and trim off the national debt or something.
I had lunch with Peter Field (VP business development) of Agile Media today.
Agile’s a smallish but very very sharp marketing agency in the Vancouver, BC area that is putting all the pieces together in one place: marketing expertise, branding, image, direct marketing, plus print and web solutions that make it real.
I have to say I have endless amounts of respect for guys (and women) like Peter and his partner, Rick Gagner.
While I’m starting up a new division/products/business from within a largish corporate entity, they’re doing it by themselves. Bootstrapping. And putting lots of their own skin in the game.
Intrapreneurship has it’s own challenges, but the rent is paid every month, the lights never go out, the chair is cushy, and the salary is not at risk (well, not at high risk, let’s put it that way).
Congrats to Peter and Agile, who are looking to expand right now. I won’t provide details, since I’m not sure that’s public information, but suffice it to say they have a lot of irons in the fire, and it’s impressive.
Richard MacManus at ZD Net Blogs has a great post about the coming web office, in which he argues that Google is much better positioned to succeed at creating a web office – simply because it’s a native web company, and Microsoft is not.
Note: the web office is coming, but not coming soon – as MacManus states:
My basic Web Office premise is that office software will slowly but surely migrate to the Web.
As I was reading his post, something occured to me about printing.
Printing has been one of the things that an installed, desktop software tool has always been better at than anything web. And actually, that might continue to be true.
But I wonder: how important will printing be? I think that when we are working on some kind of web office application, printing will actually, finally, long-awaitedly go (mostly) away.
Printing will be replaced by publishing.
Why print when you can just publish? And the web office will publish automatically, bloggishly. RSSishly. Mashupishly.
I don’t know anyone who is web-savvy who prints out web pages anymore – something I saw a lot of just 5 or 6 years ago. Bookmark it. If the page moves, Google still has a copy. If Google doesn’t, maybe the Wayback Machine does. Really paranoid? Save it to your hard disk.
I think the same will happen with documents. Why do you print? Well, sometimes I print to give myself a better view of what I need to edit. That may not go away. But mostly I print to share.
When sharing’s built in, printing goes away. And when work is done online (web office), you publish instead of printing.
Digg has a link to this story about a Cisco engineer who won a $10,000 longest commute award from Midas.
Mariposa resident Dave Givens makes a 186-mile drive — each way — five days a week to his job in San Jose.
The electrical engineer has been doing that commute since 1989, spending seven hours every day getting to and from work at Cisco Systems Inc.
There’s a solution:
About 3 minutes walk from my Bellingham, WA office is Whatcom Creek.
Just a couple minutes away, but quiet, calm, peaceful, and organic in every sense of the word – a very welcome break from a day inside an office!
I managed to get this photo by walking out on a fallen tree trunk that forms a nice little bridge across the creek.
Everyone hates networking … except those who truly understand it.
As a dedicated shmoozing hater, I logged into a free seminar today in my Bellingham, WA office: Darcy Rezac’s Work the Pond. (The seminar link is here, and Darcy’s site is here.) I have to say, it was an hour well spent.
I had recently read on Guy Kawasaki’s blog that the best definition of networking ever was Darcy’s: “Discovering what you can do for someone else.” Put that way – as long as it’s real, and not just a superficial gloss over an avaricious interior – networking becomes a lot more palatable.
It’s not just me meeting people and getting business cards because I think that one day I can sell something to them or get them to hire me or otherwise benefit me. It’s people meeting people and communicating and sharing and helping each other. Much easier to swallow, and much less off-putting – at least for me.
Keep reading for my notes from the seminar. Better yet, check it out yourself in a spare hour (if you have one).
A while back I posted on a Guy Kawasaki phrase, intrapreneur. It’s someone who’s an entrepreneur, but inside a large company, instead of out on his own.
Well, as someone with some experience in intrapreneurship – and someone who’s made his fair share of mistakes – here’s how to not be one. Or, at least, how not be a successful one.
Naturally, I have never made any of these mistakes. Of course not. Never happened. At least, I have no recollection … can I take the fifth? (Whatever that is.)
The best work is play, and the best play is work.
I learned that again when Ethan, our 6-year-old son, spent a fairly good chunk of Saturday making wonderful, beautiful, but especially labor-intensive birds.
And when he had finished a few, he asked Teresa if she wanted one. It was hard labor – each one took him the better part of an hour – but it was fun.
So was it work, or play?
I’ve started to think that these terms are not antagonistic but orthogonal … that the best of all possible human activities are high on both scales:
The best work is play, and the best play is work. And if you think about it, we should never settle for less … because we won’t do our best work unless it’s play, and we won’t play as hard as we possibly could unless it’s work.
I think I’m just going to decide not to settle. What about you?
This is the fourth in a series of seminar notes that I’m blogging: good talks I attended while at NAESP in San Antonio.
Before I begin this one, here are all four:
Jon Gordon is an author, presenter, and self-described “energy addict.” I attended his session at NAESP, liked almost all of it, and took these notes:
About energy and negativity
Positive people live longer, healthier, happier lives.
On walking the talk
Quote from St. Francis of Assisi: “No use walking anywhere to preach unless you walk what you preach.”
About busy people
You feel like energy vending machines. People who come up to you have lots of quarters, and they use them. Do you feel out of stock?
About health and energy
It’s mostly a matter of choices: drink water, get lots of sleep. Eat stuff made from plants, not inplants. Walk every day. Breathe deeply. Sit up straight.
He mentions the Heart Math organization, where he gets a lot of his research and ideas from.
Practice breathing and silence every day.
On choosing positive energy over negative energy
Story: a man with went to the village wise man and told him that he had two dogs inside, a positive one and a negative one. “They’re always fighting, and I don’t know which one will win,” he said. The wise man said: “Feed the positive dog.”
How?
“Be the change you want to see in the world.” (Ghandi)
Jon tells the story of a cab driver, George, who was irrespressibly cheerful. He happened to be in a bad mood that day, and didn’t appreciate it, but the driver kept smiling and making happy comments. Finally, Jon asked him why.
The man replied: “I love you.” Jon was wondering kind of nutcase he was, but then he continued. “God loves you and He made you and He made the world, and since He loves you, I love you. My job is not to drive a cab, my job is to make people’s days.”
On leadership
10 things to do to have more energy
Other tidbits
What he tells his kids when they complain: remember, kids, we’re winners, not whiners.
Eye contact when talking: women like 10-12 seconds, men only 2-3 seconds. More than that and men will think you’re challenging them.
Negativity has one good use: finding out what we don’t want.
What old people wish they had done more of
Researchers did a study of 95-year-olds and asked them what they would do differently if they could go back and do it all again.
Here’s what they said:
Now you have a chance to change something – before you’re 95 years old. What sould you change?
This is the third in a series of seminar notes that I’m blogging: good talks I attended while at NAESP in San Antonio.
Before I begin this one, here are all four:
Glenda Hatchett was the highest ranking woman at Delta Airlines, successful and well-paid, when she was asked to become a judge. Not wanting to, but feeling led by God to take it, she did, and has since become one of the most famous judges in the US (it helps that she’s on TV!)
She’s a fiery speaker: reminds me of a souther black Baptist minster preaching. Her speech was built around 2 main stories that she told: one of a 8-year old kid in her courtroom the first week of her new job, and one of herself and her relationship with her father.
My notes from her talk:
A promise to keep
Her first week, an 8-year old boy came in to her courtroom, looked around, and just starting shaking with fear. He had been left by his mother, a crack addict, at a homeless shelter. She said she’d come back for him, but she never did. He was there so the state could find him a place to live.
Glenda zipped off her judge’s robe, went down to him over the protests of her bailiff (this wasn’t the way judges were supposed to act) and gave that boy a long hug. Her promise was to help that boy, and over the next year, she did … getting his mother in rehab (several times) and finally, getting him back in home with a drug-free mother.
“Yo-yo prayers”
She didn’t want to be a judge, but she wanted to pray about her decisions. So she said a 10-second prayer about how she didn’t want to do it and tried to leave it at that. Of course, she couldn’t and the rest is history …
On failure
“There is no such thing as failure if you’re trying to get it right. You’re only warming up for success.”
One of her favorite quotes
Walt Disney had a quote for people who really impressed him: “you’re able to dream beyond your lifetime.” Think about that for a minute – that IS impressive. Do you dream beyond your lifetime? Do I? Real visionaries do. People who truly care about others do.
Write your own story
When she was little, her school in the south was segregated. And the black kids got the hand-me-down books from the white schools. Lousy, broken, ripped, mildewed – you name it.
She cried to her father: can I have a new book? Her father replied: write your own story.
She didn’t like it at the time – cried and went to her room – but that’s what she’s done with her life, and that’s what she’s motivating others to do as well: write their own stories.
This is the second in a series of seminar notes that I’m blogging: good talks I attended while at NAESP in San Antonio.
Before I begin this one, here are all four:
Christine Whitman is a former governor of New Jersey and EPA administrator. She also worked as an ESL teacher early in her career.
A couple of notes I made during her speech:
On leadership
“The best leaders are leaders because they want to do something, not because they want to be something.”
On knowing what’s going on
“Get out of the office!”
