Latest essay is all about leaders, followers and specatators (or complainers) and why knowing where you stand and acting on it is so important.

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Made two mistakes: 1) left power cable at Google. 2) Left lights on rental car.

The loss of the power cable made every talk a Mission impossible type adventure - certainly helped prevent me from lingering self indulgently on slides (it’d be fun to make this a rule at conferences - take too long, your laptop shuts down automatically).

The dead battery in the rental car at least stopped me from worrying about the power cable.

I had thought I’d get up early Thursday morning, stop by Google and retrieve the cable, but the lack of anything resembling power in the battery of my car made this impossible. Tip: the extra money for hertz is worth it. They had a service person there to give me a jump in about 45 minutes (btw: the Sheraton folks refused to help - “against policy”. To jumpstart a car? They have a policy for that?)

I managed to get to Macromedia, on Townsend st. in San Francisco early - walked around. Odd neighborhood - semi-industrial, but with mostly high end designer furniture and home decoration stores. The one lunch spot I found didn’t open till 11am, so I went for a walk around. The Macromedia building stands out on the street - it’s a beautiful brick building with steel awning over the front stairs.

Inside I used their self-service visitor terminal to create an id, including a photo (taken from said terminal). This was the coolest id creation thingy I’d see on the whole tour. Everyone, except Sun, had systems like this one, but the whole self-photo thing was unique to Macromedia.

I was in a small room near the lobby - but we filled it. About 30 or 35 people, mostly program managers, with some documentation, engineering and design/usability folks. The group was great - lively, asked lots of questions, and made the session more interactive than average. During Q&A. which went for a good 25 minutes, someone asked the perenial PM question “Is your sock drawer organized by color?”, To which, after faking offense at the question, I answered “I don’t have a sock drawer”, and left it at that. How mysterious.

After grabbing a cookie from the pile of foodstuffs for the talk at the back of the room, I thanked Cecilia, my host, for having me, and headed off down to San Jose, for Adobe - my last stop on the tour.

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Once again, my book is taking its 5 seconds of questionable length fame with a smile - Currently in the top 5 for Amazon’s software project management books

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Just for fun, purely for the sake of experiment, I invited everyone I spoke with out to drinks at a nearby pub. Folks I knew were around, Matt, Chad, and some others, I asked personally, but for the rest - I left it to chance. At each gig I’d announce early that anyone interested in the book, in me, or some free beer, should head on down. The big question was who would show? Anyone? I prepared myself for drinking alone (not difficult for most writerly minded individuals). And besides, there was NBA playoffs to watch, and I could always annoy the bartenders by showing them my book every 10 seconds.

About 12 people showed over the course of a few hours. Given I’d never met most of these people before, I was pleased. None of them tried to sell me Amway goods or convince me that the end was near. The conversation and beer was good. I’d definitely do something like this again next time.

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I arrived at Yahoo’s building D at 3:30 - right on time for my 4pm talk. Everything inside was wonderfully purple and yellow, including the big oversized comfy recliner in the waiting area. I explored the Yahoo store in the lobby, looking for a pair of purple and yellow boxers, while waiting for my host Bob Baxley, to arrive. I knew Bob from helping with his fine book on web applications, but this is the first time I’d meet him in person.

I spoke in a small room to about 25 or 30 project managers, designers and other folks. Met Chris (?), someone who worked in Microsoft’s Mac group, and knew me from back in the day. Always fun to meet people - never know how you know someone. Always funny to throw names and see which ones jog a memory and which ones get blank stares.

I did the schedules and lies talk, and it went fine. Finished in about an hour with another 30 minutes or so for questions. The rule of thumb: if folks stay for Q&A, you did ok. Well, most of the folks stayed (The offer of free books helps I suppose).

Book tour score: 4 talks down, 2 to go. One box of books left.

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Stayed up late tuesday night working on slides for a half day at google . During the baychi talk, believe it or not, I came up with some changes I wanted to make. Didn’t get home from baychi till about 10:20pm, but was in bed before 1am.

Woke up early enough to get some exercise - I can be super cool presenter dude only if I get plenty of exercise. If I don’t exercise, the whole process of being a speaker isn’t as much fun - but If I exercise, I’m a buddhist monk (as in mellow and smiling deeply) through the whole process.

Scheduled to go on at google at 11am - Arrive early. Way early. 10:15am early. Drove around the outside of campus to see what else was in the neighborhood. I thought the campus looked familiar though I’ve never visited google before… then I saw that tall outdoor sculpture of a man - and realized it was the old Sgi campus!

Google campus has the vibe you’d expect - young, smart, and well financed. The architecture is fun. If you believe in the effect environment has on psychology, you’ll love this place. It’s stimulating and open- toys, games, volleyball court - it’s obvious the place is meant to be feel like an adult playground. And inside the buildings is much the same - big spaces, interesting shapes, open workspaces - little of the reptition and monotony found in most office buildings. (At first it reminded me of the blender, a Dr. Seus style incarnation of building A on Microsoft’s redwest campus that was remodeled into a conventional space years ago).

The talk was in a big open room in Building 43 - it felt like being inside a big piece of swiss cheese: the room was nearly triangular, with big holes leading out into other areas. The room has no doors - just two big wide slots for people to enter and leave - I’m pretty sure this was not the room they used to have their top secret uber-private conversations.

Carolyn Yates, my host, was great and showed me around, and got me set up. The tech folks were there and got me set up in 2 minutes. At 11:05, we got started. Had about 100 people there - and more showed up after we started. I remember there being a row of folks standing towards the back.

The talk was a special one - I didn’t do it elsewhere on the tour - it was about stuff I learned while working on web browsers during the first browser war. I talked about managing team size, process and specs not being evil, and the tradeoffs of business, engineering and customers. I think it fit with the issues I guessed Google was dealing with, and the audience responded well. They laughed at jokes, paid attention, and a good crowd stuck around for Q&A. Many of the questions were about Firefox, browser design and strategy, but about half were about project management and development. I should have mentioned that Adam Bosworth, currently a VP at google, was a key player in the early parts of the browser effort - they have a expert on many of these issues in their midsts.

In the afternoon I did a second section with a smaller group of project managers - the safe bet would have been to work from a set presentation, but I went informal - it was only 20 people - and I tried to build up something from questions. I’ve done this dozens of times and its usually more fun for everyone. But this session did not go well - they weren’t happy with it and I wasn’t either. The feedback I got was that more examples from my own experience would have been better - but I was afraid to focus on that as a former Microsoftie speaking on google turf - I thought it’d all be rejected if everything I said came from my war stories. So instead most of the conversation was flat, and never got into good back and forth riffs. ( If you were there, let me know what you thought - I can probably learn something). One question I should have asked, but didn’t, was whether these folks worked together or not - informal/dynamic sessions run much better if it’s an intact team, vs people in the same role in different parts of a organization.

I met several other google folks, and they were all great - asked good questions, were friendly and generous to me - But I didn’t catch nearly enough names, or business cards - a mistake I made many times on this first time solo author tour. If we met and talked, drop me a line.

I left google around 1:30pm - Just enough to time to head back to the hotel for a quick shower and something else to eat, and then off to Yahoo!

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Speaking at baychi is one of the best speaking gigs - they take you out to a friendly dinner, they give you a t-shirt, and everyone you meet who volunteers is friendly, funny and cool to work with. I spoke at baychi once before, back in 2002 (thanks to Richard Anderson) and had a great time, and was looking forward to coming back.

I did a different lecture at baychi - Sun’s talk was about schedules and lies, baychi was about projects that go wrong. Had a good crowd - I’m guessing about 100 people. Somehow in my memory, the pARC auditorium was larger, more like one of the old Microsoft lecture rooms - but I’m glad it was the size it was, since it felt full (Nothing worse than being in a stadium sized hall that’s filled with 3 people: you, the janitor, and your host).

I gave out about 15 books to folks that asked questions - which i learned was the smart way to use the promotional copies I had (a tip for any future book tour planners out there) - it got people to stay, and it got them to participate, and gave the vibe of everyone being interested in what I had to say.

As it turns out, the Q&A part is the most fun part of the whole thing for me - I know my material.. I know my slides, so it’s only so interesting to me (Especially on a tour where I get to hear myself do the same thing again, and again and again - how do rock bands do this?). But questions force me to really work and communicate, and it’s the most enjoyable and challenging part of the whole experience. If I could do shorter talks with longer Q&A sessions, I would, but few audience these days have the attention spans to sit through long Q&A sessions.

I thought it was interesting how social and human the questions were - lots of thoughts on power, working with people who don’t see disasters happening and how to deal with them, comparisons to the film industry and how it deals with similiar problems (Hi Ari), and other questions about situations folks were in. The Q&A period was fun - I don’t remember that many of the specifics, I was up there for close to two hours, but I do remember a lot of laughing, and feeling good, both in me and from the crowd. A good experience all around.

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Day 1 - Tuesday, May 10th. Started not as expected - tripped getting out of the shower, dodged the toilet, but jammed my toe during the tortured dance that was required to regain my balance. Fortunately I did manage to avoid tripping over my towel and falling flat on the tile floor. Book tours are supposed to end on naked the floor- not start that way.

The non-bathroom/naked part of the day started with a trip to Sun Microsystems - The Newark campus is up north and across the bay, but staying in Sunnyvale it only took 20 minutes to get there. I arrived early and Met Aimee - the host of the series i was speaking at. She was great (though initially, and understandably, tired from lugging the 50lb box of books O’reilly had sent from her car). While waiting for Aimee at the front desk in building 16, the woman at the desk confirmed that i was, in fact, in the quietest lobby she’d ever been in. It was almost relaxing being there (minus the latent fears i had as a former Microsoft employee entering Sun Microsystem turf). I signed the usual visitor/NDA forms, got a badge, and followed Aimee inside.

At the talk we had about 40 people show up, plus another 15 or more on conference call.

Pros: Good, smart crowd. Good questions, and no one fell asleep or threw anything (two hallmarks of decent presentations). They laughed at some of my jokes. Cons: 25 minute struggle with a projector, which included an inquisition about my laptop, ane it’s inability to produce proper video - but I was vindicated, as a replacement projector worked fine. Gave away half the box of books, saving the rest for lecture #2, the biggest (or so I thought) of the tour - baychi, later in the day. One of the good questions I got included a good pointer for a book I should check out about a biography of Cray (the supercomputer dude) and the way he organized teams.

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I’m well aware of how misleading these kinds of rankings are, but apparently the book is currently listed on amazon as:

#771 in Books
#19 in Computers and Internet

I know, I know, I know.. wait 20 minutes and those numbers will double. It’s like the guy who sprints out to take the lead in the first 5 seconds of the NYC marathon, he waves to the camera, and then you never see him again. I’m that guy. But while I’m somewhere out front, I’m smiling :)

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Ok. I need your help. I’m a first time, relatively unknown, author. Getting a book published is a minor miracle in itself. But about 50,000 books get published every year, and very few of them stay on the shelves for long. If you’re interested in me, the book, or the future books you imagine me writing, I need a favor - I need your help to make the book sucessful.

Here’s what you can do:

1. Buy the book.
2. Write a review of the book on amazon, on bn.com, oreilly.com, or your own blog/website.
3. Talk to other people about the book and show it to them. Show ‘em the blurbs and sample chapter.
4. Know any college professors? Professional group leaders? Managers? These are all folks that might be interested in a good book to give to their teams/students/groups.
5. Go to your local bookstores and ask if they have the book. Simply asking about it, even if you don’t buy it, draws it additional attention from booksellers. It helps.
6. Know someone that works at a public radio station? writes a business or technology column for a paper or magazine? Or a event/conference that needs a public speaker? I’m glad to be interviewed or talk about topics from the book.
7. Post some questions or comments in one of my forums or join the pm-clinic.

Thanks for your support - I can use all the help I can get.

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Here are the final tour dates for SF

Now thru May 20th

• The Well: Online interview with Scott Berkun

Tue, May 10th

• 11am, sun Microsystems (newark campus), talk: schedules and other lies
• 7pm Baychi, talk: What to do when things go wrong. Open to the public.

Wed, May 11th

• 11am & 1pm, Google, Mountain View, talk: lessons from the browser wars
• 4pm, Yahoo, talk: Schedules and other lies
• 6pm7PM, Faultline Brewing Company - Purely an informal social thing. Share drinks and food with this new author. I’ll have a bunch of free copies of the book to give away. All are welcome to come and chat over some beer. Talk about the book or anything you like. I’ll sign books or other things if you desire.

Thur, May 12th

• 12pm, Macromedia
• 3pm. Adobe

If you’re interested in the Wednesday meetup, leave a comment so I’ll look for ya :)

Posted in On Tour, On writing, The Art of PM book, Travel | 13 Comments »

The transport of books from the publisher, to actual stores, is something of a mystery. It’s supposed to take 10-15 days for books to leave the publisher, make it to distributors, and to stores. But since these things move of trucks, in big skids, and spend time in various warehouses, or waiting to be stocked on shelves, there’s no specific dates for these things. Just ranges of time.

Today i dropped by the local Borders and asked about my book. They told me it wasn’t in yet, but they didn’t know why, since it’s official publication date was 4/25/2005. They said they’d ordered 20 copies, and she told me where they’d be shelved. Beyond that, she had no idea.

So here’s a favor I’m asking: if you don’t see the book, ask. The more folks that ask about the book, the more likely they’ll order some if they weren’t planning on it. The more folks that ask about a book and buy it, the more likely it is they’ll stock it, or put it somewhere others might find it.

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