Whenever a major magazine or paper lists their innovations of the year, I always wonder how they came up with them. We’ll, in the case of the Wall street journal, here’s the answer.

WSJ innovation competition - You can nominate here.

Here’s the list of 2005 winners.

(link from Datamation IT blog).

Posted in Innovation | No Comments »

The early registration deadline for GEL 2006 ends next week, so it’s a good time to make a pitch for why you should go.

Good Experience live is the only conference I’ve been to that is self-reflective: many of the principles of design and good user experience espoused during the day can be found in the way the conference itself is run. Day one of the conference is out in the field, spending time with experts in their domain: an inside tour of the experience design of NYC landmarks like Natural history museum, MoMa and the Hall of Science. Participate in an improv experiment on the midtown streets or a learn how to apply tmusic techniques to your work. There’s also a food experience tour of my home burrough of Queens, NYC.

Day 2 are talks from Craig Newmark (Craigslist), Jason Fried (37 Signals), Seth Godin, Douglas Rushkoff, Photographers, Urban pranksters, Game designers and other interesting perspectives on making great things for people. There’s no formalized boundries here - instead you get great cross-discipline stimulation that will stay with you long after you leave.

The conference rates are still discounted Before April 5th, it’$1200 for both days, and $1500 afterwards. (Price was $900 before December 1st, but that’s behind us now).

I’ll be running a Day one tour on NYC’s sacred places. We’ll be walking around the city and exploring magical and special places, discussing how they were designed to have the effects they have. You can sign up for this or other Day 1 tours when you register.

Hope to see you there.

Posted in Recommended, Uncategorized | No Comments »

The announcement of the Vista delays has sparked a new round of debates about what’s going on at Microsoft. The mailbox has been full of questions for me on the subject - so here’s some insights from a former employee (’94-2003) and manager in the Windows division.

For sanity - I’m an independent and this is not an apology, rant nor inside scoup. Instead it’s commentary from a management author on what’s been said and what’s going on.

• Centralized authority and MSFT culture. The most comical misperception about Microsoft is the management style - everyone think’s it’s a rigid hierarchy, when it’s mostly a consensus driven place. Everyone gets an opinion and senior managers are often more skilled at consensus management than leading teams. If there’s any one thing I’d point to for large failing projects is lack of successful central authority - With a project in trouble I’d move to centralize power in a smaller number of people and free them to run with the ball. The rub is that the culture doesn’t support this well - people still want a consensus mentality (something born of small team and start-up culture), they want to own their slice, even when it’s contributing to driving projects into the ground (or at least mediocrity). It’s in the fiber of the company and it’s hard to change.
• Talk is cheap. Every time I read rants about gutting Windows, firing all the VPs or making Windows open source I have one comment: I don’t believe you’d do it if it were your job to manage Windows. As easy as it is to yell orders from off the boat, I doubt most people, if given the helm, would put an $8 billion machine at risk. Certainly not now, as it would mean another 2 years of development. Besides, no one wants to be the one that tanked one of the greatest franchises in technological history (regardless of how that franchise was built). Even if big, bold moves are in order - I doubt most of us would have the guts to take those risks if we were personally accountable for the results. It’s a classic innovator’s dilemma situation. A better gripe is how the franchise hasn’t been managed on a steady progressive course, given how many possibilites there are for making things better without taking radical moves.
• It’s never just one thing. It’s fun and convenient to chalk up project problems to one issue. “The VPs are idiots - fire them all!” or “they were too ambitous” but there’s rarely one reason (Nothing drives faith in the easy answer more than frustration). Most of the time there are several factors that conspire together, especially if it’s a large project with large goals. There are often successful sub-teams working inside most large, problematic projects (And some are speaking out over at mini-microsoft). As a consultant, understanding (and fixing) projects involves finding the factors and accouting for them without tanking the parts that work well. There’s rarely a single move that saves the day and any problem that took months to develop is not going to be solved in a hour.
• A slip is infinitely better than a panned product. With a slip, even 6 months, people will cry and scream but the world will not end. However, with a bad release, like Windows 98ME, Bob or Netscape 5, the world just might fall on you. So while a series of slips shouldn’t inspire confidence, it does mean there is a sane person somwhere in the organization with their hands at the controls. The Vista news has been mostly negative, and no competitor has tried to capitalize on it, meaning a slip has little competitive risk.
• However, the door is open for competitors . The bad Vista PR over the last year has made a window - Linux, Firefox and Red Hat should be doing something: a viral ad, a marketing campaign, anything. But they’ve been awfully quiet and I don’t understand why. I think this is the more interesting story than what’s going on in Redmond. The MSFT Windows multi-slip ship cycle is an old (perhaps sad) story, but the silence on the battlefront deserves more attention.
• Microsoft’s PR and public management of the Vista project has been reactive and weak. I’ve never thought PR and marketing were well directed by executives (well funded, yes, but well managed or empowered, no). Many announcements and launches were messaged in the blandest, most generic ways possible (Win95 and X-box the most notable exceptions). Microsoft is inherently a conservative company (in strategy not tactics) and its always shown in its advertisements and approach to PR. For all the stereotyping of Microsoft as a great marketing company, I never saw it: Nike, Intel and Apple are all dramatically better and amplify the value of their product lines. Vista’s failures to date are more dramatic from a PR and messaging perspective than anything else. They’ve failed to articluate a value proposition (even if invented), and to bring a positive meme around the release to match or compensate for the litany of negative announcements and setbacks. The greatest failure of the project to date isn’t technological or managerial - it’s PR and messaging. A private train wreck is one thing, a public one is another.
• Windows is a bear. Much of the franchise has been based on backward compatibility and some things that should be improved in the abstract can hurt the product line - it’s a trap any successful platform faces eventually (Just look at HTML or javascript). People write code to your bugs or inconsistencies, and when you come back to fix them you realize you’ll do more damage to them than good - a quality inversion. I don’t justify how the product got where it is - but here it is. Deciding what to do in any direction is strategically and technically complicated - this shouldn’t mute the complaints of unhappy customers, but it should be noted by anyone confident they can do a better job. Quality inversions surface in any project successful enough to see a version 5, or in Window’s case, version 8 (Win 1-3, Win95, Win 98, Win 2000, Win XP, Vista).
• Sinofsky is an inspired move. The MSFT culture, historically, is heavily polarized between Windows and Office. In my day Windows were the smart-ass cowboys who liked risks and breaking rules - not surprisingly Windows had a history of confused early projects that came together only on the home stretch. Office (again, in my day) were stereotypically smart, reliable, consistent A students, who won through plans more than passion. Sinofsky (formerly the Senior VP of Office, now VP of Windows) is the first major attempt I know of to bridge those philosophical and management differences: there’s something to be learned in both directions.

Posted in Microsoft | 8 Comments »

This week in the ux-clinic discussion forum- Lost in the tag cloud:

Here’s this week’s situation:

We finally got buy in to fund a future thinking blue sky design exploration for future releases of our software and websites. Problem is: we can’t decide if we should have internal designers do the work, or hire out a fancy firm. The debate is raging and I’m on the fence (and it’s my call & budget).

What’s the best way to do the following:
1) Manage an intentionally future thinking design project with few constraints
2) Decide on internal vs. out-source staff
3) Deliver something that doesn’t seem like a waste of time.

- Captain blue sky

Posted in Design, UX-Clinic | No Comments »

This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum- Quality is job #15:

Here’s this week’s situation:

We just shipped v2 of our project - but few are cheering. To meet our dates we dropped quality on the floor (reliability, usability… you name it) and everyone knows it. There’s already talk about what commitments we have for v3, but no one has articulated what we’re going to do about raising the quality bar.

How do you (successfully) argue for time for higher quality? Has anyone worked on a project where quality was really job #1? How did it happen? Who defined (and defended) quality?

- Quality is job #1

Posted in Management, PM-Clinic | 1 Comment »

At e-tech 2006 the theme was the attention economy - but the conversation was mostly technocentric despite attention being a 100% human resource.

In this essay I discuss a view of attention that’s centered on people - attention is the most precious thing we have and I explore why we’ve lost control of it, how to get some control back and the role of desire and intimacy in how we spend our time.

Essay #51 - Attention and sex.

Posted in Essays | 8 Comments »

In the short notice visit department - I’ll be in Tornto end of this week speaking at the CBC (private event). Had I gotten my act together perhaps I could have found a place to speak, but that’s unlikely at this point.

However, if any locals want to meet up and chat I’m game. I’m free Saturday for lunch or coffee and possibly Friday night.

Any Toronto site-seeing recommendations? I’m a city boy so I plan to do lots of walking, photographing and eating :)

Posted in On Tour | 3 Comments »

This week in the ux-clinic discussion forum- Lost in the tag cloud:

I do both design and usability for a midsize start-up (30 people) in the newsreader space.

We’re vulnerable (at least our VP is) to UI trends - as soon as our competitors do something, he’s running around telling everyone we have to do the same thing.

Last week, one of our competitors switched to a tag, and tag cloud UI for their website, and as the night follows day, our VP is now pushing us to redesign with a tag, and tag cloud model.

I have my own opinions, but I can’t find any ux research on tags and tag clouds - what problem do they solve? When should you use them and when are they a mistake? Should they really be the primary way to get around a website? I’m looking for both opinions and data to help me sort out my stance, but also to add some thinking to our trend-happy debates.

- Lost in the tag cloud

Reference: A screen shot and some examples can be found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_cloud

Posted in UX-Clinic | 1 Comment »

This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum- Plan for the plan:

I work at a near v1 release start-up - we’re mostly industry vets who’ve worked together before, but we’re growing fast (7 new hires in the last month - 20% of our staff).

Some of us feel we need to write down something about how we do what we do - style guide for code, an outline for how feature decisions get made, you know - high level process stuff. It can be short and sweet, but we need a reference point.

Others feel it’s a waste of time, it never helps, and we should just be figuring it out as we go. No need to be all goody-too-shoes and orderly: we’re smart enough, as a small org, to work tight without documenting foofy things like processes.

How do you know when you need a plan for the plan? Who should write it? And how do you do it, especially for small anti-process teams, so that it’s beneficial in some way?

- Considering a plan for the plan

Posted in Management, PM-Clinic | 4 Comments »

We didn’t take the cake, but we got a nice runner up prize.

BOOKS GENERAL
Jolt Winner: Prefactoring by Ken Pugh (O’Reilly)

Productivity Winners:

• Innovation Happens Elsewhere: Open Source as Business Strategy by Goldman, Gabriel
• Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project by Fogel (O’Reilly)
• The Art of Project Management by Scott Berkun (O’Reilly)

Here’s the full list of award winners . Quite the day for the O’Reilly folks.

As happy as us productivity (aka runner-up) award winners are, we all have to shake our heads on two counts: how did a book on prefactoring not get put in the technical category? And how did it kick the ass of five books on bigger and broader topics? Kudos to Ken Pugh - he’s got a Seabiscut of a book :) Kicked our butts.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

For the last 3 months i’ve had various problems with my phpbb installation, the software used to run the forums/discussions on this site -spam, hacks, config issues, upgrade problems, etc. But I’ve sorted things out - and the forums are back up.

Forums are here.

Good news: it doesn’t explode when you look at it funny.
Bad news: To post questions or replies, you have to log in.

To dodge evil waves of spam, registration has to happen. Sorry - no other way. I’ve looked for replacements to phpbb, but all the forum packages seem the same to me (or have similiar shortcomings).

If you want to post a question to Ask berkun, but don’t want to log in, just go to the painless anonymous comments form.

It still looks like it’s been hit by an ugly stick (as does this generic blog template) - but that’s next.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

In every office, in every building, there’s a manager who’s never there. They’re always double booked for meetings, running from important thing to even more important thing - and even when you see them in the flesh they have a cell phone in one hand, a blackberry in the other, and a line of people waiting outside their door. No matter how patient you are you can never get them 1-on-1 with their full intention intact. He’s so hard to get to, you sometimes see people squeeze their way into his attention by following him on walks to the bathroom, the kitchen or his car.

When I was new to the industry I used to think the uber-busy manager was a kind of god - If they’re so busy, doesn’t that mean they’re very important? I used to think so, but not anymore.

Everyone in the tech-sector goes through a phase early in their career where they’re proud of their hours. At software and consulting companies everwhere, circles of 20 something friends debate, over drinks each night, who’s put in crazier hours - “I worked 70 hours last week”, “70? I worked 70 hours in 3 days.” “3 days? I worked 70 hours this morning, before breakfast.” And on it goes. It’s a kind of dumb male pride in size of things, rather that quality or, god forbid, actual hapiness. To work 70 hours is a statement of work, not of progress. For every idiot working 70 hours there’s a smarter, wiser man who’s doing the same amount of work in 50 because he’s paying more attention to results than the clock. I’d rather be, and rather hire, that man.

It might take a few years for this realization to happen, but soon one or more of that circle of friends will ask “Why I am spending 70 hours a week at work when I want a girlfriend, a dog, and maybe even a life?” The ever-busy manager is the one person who never fully asks that question. They’re stuck in the mode of volume, pride based on being busy rather than making good things happen.

A good manager will discover that if they are unavailable to the people who work for them, then they can’t be of the best use to their team. If they can’t manage their time so that the important people, the ones who call him/her boss, see him as available for them, they’ve failed in the most fundamental way. Most work he does can be done by others - but giving advice or lending support as “the boss” is a role unique to him.

I had a manager once who insisted on reading his e-mail and typing responses through our 1-on-1s. He’d pretend to give me focus by typing without looking most of the time, but I never saw his soul in his eyes - it was more in the e-mail than with me. I soon found myself cutting our 1-on-1s as short as possible (and reading job postings).

Anyone truly important and powerful should recognize that if they don’t have time for important things, it’s their job to delegate tasks away until they do. If they can’t do that then they’re posers - they don’t have real power at all. A VP should never be so involved in the daily business that they’re not able to jump in to fight unexpected fires or teach the new and inexperienced lessons, special advice straight from the VP, that take more than 30 seconds or a half-assed e-mail. Those are the special things that only the truly powerful can do.

So reconsider who you give respect to: the manager that’s never there, or the one that’s always there when you need them.

Posted in Management | 13 Comments »