Rob Lefferts, good friend and Group Program Manager for Microsoft Sharepoint, offered me a gem of advice recently. If there is a list of laws for being a good team manager, this would be near the top of my list:

The Lefferts law of management: It is your fault.

There are a dozen reasonable excuses in any situation for why things are not going well: don’t use them.

If you need more help, it’s your job to ask for it. If someone let you down, it’s your job to plan better next time or find a way to recover. If you are the bottleneck, it’s your fault for not delegating more. Whatever the thing is that isn’t going well, you are the primary person to do something about it. If you’re not sure what to do, it’s your job to ask others for advice. If you have the title ‘manager’ in your name, step up. Practice the habit of absorbing blame for what is going on, while distributing the rewards. When all else fails, be the fall guy. If people see you take enough bullets for them, soon they’ll be taking some for you.

The net effect on even a small team can change the balance of morale. Being passionately accountable for the project creates a shield for others and makes it safer for them to invest more personal responsibility in their work. When they do, the state of the work can only get better.

When in doubt, good managers assume something important is their fault and do something about it.

Posted in Management | 8 Comments »

An interesting little MBA project from UC Irvine provides a view of books and reviews based on the point of view of particular experts. There may be something like this out there already but i haven’t seen it.

It’s called Expert’s choice - and all profits from using their site go to charity. Take a look.

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Thanks to Brady Forrest and Jen Pahilka for giving me not one but two slots this week in a high caliber lineup. It was awesome to meet and talk to so many folks in just a few days (talking to people is always where the value is). (Photo credit: James Duncan Davidson).

Its been awhile since I’ve been to a big tech conference around a singular theme (web 2.0) during its rise. To see both the promise and the hype swirling around together made for a fun couple of days. Walking the expo floor, where vendors and companies demo and pitch for your pleasure, gave me flashbacks to Internet World in ‘96 and ‘97. Back then, there were a zillion “push technology” companies, services and products. Now it’s “social media” or “web 2.0″, with a zillion companies all throwing the same jargon around and mostly failing to distinguish themselves from one another.

There are certainly good ideas in the mix, and I think Tim O’Reilly and Clay Shirky’s opening keynotes did more than any company I saw to speak for those ideas, or even attempt to describe what substance might surface from all the technology, energy and money bouncing around.

The problem for me is how infrequently people investing their lives making these things can describe how, at the end of the day, all of the potential described gets transfered into value. Or why the value provided is worth the risks and costs of using whatever they are selling (register for this, buy that, use this, etc.) It’s not a complex question, but it is the primary one I’m sure many attendees were asking: how much substance and takeaways can I fish out of the buzz?

I wasn’t surprised, but I didn’t hear anyone mention how many amazing things are made, in 2008, by organizations with little interest in web 2.0 concepts - namely Apple, Toyota, your favorite film director, or your favorite music band. Not to mention all of the great amazing things the world produced before 1994 (the year the web, even in 1.0 form, was born). That’s not to say this alone proves anything - my point is only this: it is possible to achieve amazing things, without . Thriving communities, tribes, and cultures have existed for ages. If its possible to do well without whatever the new secret sauce is, it suggests there’s an underlying element that’s not being talked about. I’m convinced there is a more refined explanation for what people might gain from buying what the expo vendors are selling, but very few people seemed capable of even suggestion one.

The unspoken nugget / explanation / marketing line that might get me jazzed is this:

We have always been collaborative. Always been social. It’s in our genes and it’s what we have evolved to do well. Good technologies enhance our natural abilities, give us useful artificial ones, and help us to get more of what we want from life. Web 2.0 and social media make the process of collaboration and developing relationships more fun, efficient, powerful and meaningful.

Ok. Now we’re talking. With a statement like this I can walk the halls of the expo, or converse with the greatest web 2.0 pundit, and have a straight conversation. Will this get me more of what I want from life? More of what my customers want from me, or vice-versa? I can make tangible arguments about what I want or my customers need and sort some decisions out. But note that the statement above is devoid of hyperbole like revolution, ground breaking, disruptive or transformative, things that are entirely subjective. If you identify a real problem well enough, you never need those words: the people who have those problems will naturally find what you do revolutionary if you really solve their problems.

Ok, enough industry talk. Here’s some shop talk for anyone that saw me speak: I’d give my performance at my innovation workshop a B and the keynote a C+. The keynote was mostly new material and, surprise, I never found my rhythm. I gave it my best but it wasn’t a great 10 minutes. The other funny thing is that the tech crew warned me the remote doesn’t go backwards - it’s kamikaze style - a warning I shrugged off as I couldn’t imagine in a ten minute talk needing to go backwards. Well, guess what, I did. I could have asked them to go back if I’d wanted but didn’t, it wouldn’t have saved my performance anyway :)

Workshop slides here: How to Innovate on Time

Posted in On Tour, Software/Web development, Web 2.0 / social software | 4 Comments »

Liz Danzico kindly interviewed me about creativity and related things over at the AIGA website. Includes mentions of puppy torture, flashes of lightning, and ridicule for the book Who Moved my Cheese. Full interview here.

Posted in Myths of Innovation | 1 Comment »

Here’s this week’s linkfest:

• What every freelancer should know. Advice from a salon.com writer on traps and tricks.
• Where are all the great ideas? Harvard Business Review editor asks where should we be looking for the next wave of big ideas?
• Mistakes pro bloggers make. Solid advice on contracts for blogging and what rights to fight for. (Hat tip, Working Girl)
• Report of amazon.com changing prices per user. According to this report, they dynamically change prices based on their profile of you in some cases.

Posted in linkfest | 1 Comment »

O’Reilly just kicked off some PR for the release of Making things happen with a write-up on their blog a spiffy new press release, and to celebrate they’re giving away a free copy of the book.

All you have to do is head over to the O’Reilly PR site, and enter a comment describing the perfect project manager.

Winner chosen by Kathryn on April 15th.

Posted in Making things happen | 7 Comments »

I can’t tell you how many times, even in notable magazines, I’ve read movie reviews that spoil the movie. It’s the most criminal, careless thing a critic can do: steal the narrative potency of someone else’s work. Even if it’s the worst movie in the world, a decent critic can tear it apart without spoiling the film.

So the other day on netflix I saw this - a spoiler warning:

On every review any user can flag reviews for spoilers.

Thank you Netflix.

Posted in Design, usability | 4 Comments »

• Strange Maps. Some blogs have perfect titles.
• It’s a train, no it’s an office, it’s recycling! Folks in London use old subway cars as their office.
• Indexed, the book. If you remember the clever website of cool diagrams on index cards, then here’s the book.
• The last lecture: a love story for your life. More on Randy Pausch, his life and his famous lecture.

Posted in linkfest | No Comments »

Last week I upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress. I’m a huge Wordpress fan, I love what these guys do, and I was psyched to see what they’d done this time around.

Total time: 9 minutes. This was end to end, from downloading their software, to reading instructions, to the moment I was able to make my first post. And this included an extra 2 minutes where FileZilla imploded and I had to start over.

Summary: Thumbs up. Go get it. Most of the changes are for the positive, the UI is cleaner, my top gripes (text-editor and thumbnails) have been fixed, and there are some new minor features. Top complaints are UI fit and finish, there are some gotchas that should have been caught.

Kudos:

• Text editor is much improved: less buggy, fewer perf issues, and better media support. People spend 80% of their time in WP here so happy to see investments to core use here.
• Site wide search instead of just blog posts - obvious win.
• The UI visuals shows some style love - in many places, like the comments view, the style choices make it easier to scan long lists. Other nice touches include a flag next to the comments tab when there are new unmoderated comments.

  

• Many under the hood improvements that I don’t fully understand or expect to use but feel good about anyway.
• Automatic plugin updates. Nice, though this broke for a few plugins I had. Expect the kinks will be fixed by plugin authors from here on out.
• The install is just a few steps and takes minutes with no special skills required.

Complaints:

• Leap of faith upgrade. Doing hand copying of files is very 1980s. I read the instructions ten times to make sure I had it right, and even then I had the willies while waiting for both the files to be copied, and to see the new dashboard working. The intermediary UI didn’t calm my fears at all. Say what you will about Windows or Mac software, but great relief comes from pushing an “install” button, and watching one little progress bar while the software does all the work. Instead in WP there’s a useless page offering no clue how long it will take, and given my hand-copying of files, no way of knowing if I’d screwed something up. To be fair it did take about 20 seconds, but they were the most stressful I’d had all day.

  

• Admin redesign. This felt not quite finished. It’s definitely improved but has 1 step back for every three forward. It’s a space heavy design, with several levels of hierarchy floating in dreamy soft blues and whites. If it’s really a dashboard it should be more software app like than a webpage, but it feels more like the later. The core problem is 4 levels of UI, with varying left right dominance, creates a visual ping pong (left, right, left). Plus there are mismatches of prioritization: The Write a new post button, the most used button on the page, is off the right, while the text “Right now” gets prime real estate on the left.

  

• Tab confusion. The UI rules for tab are simple, peers share the same tabs so people know what is on the same level as what. But there are three orphaned tabs all the way on the right that turn out to be peers to the stuff on the left. No idea why they’d do this. Similar problems on the top with a dashboard tab all the way left, and three orphans on the right (Help/Logout/Forums)

  

• Settings confusion. Much of the UI in wordpress is config related, but is there really a need for three different hierarchies for Manage, Settings, and Plugins? Some of the UI in each can be compressed (e.g. Privacy has one option and doesn’t deserve it’s own page). Even after a week of use I find it hard to remember which top level category to go to for what.
• My everyday tasks are still hard to optimize . This is my top gripe. I’m a very basic, vanilla user. I post 2 or 3 times a week, text and link heavy, with images and thumbnails in most posts. That’s it. No media streaming, no dashboard customization, no multi-users or anything whiz bang at all. Yet I still find it clunky to add images, check links, preview and review, and worse, despite having done it 5000 times there’s no efficiency path. No shortcut keys or tricks to make my routine faster.

Nitpicks:

• The Comments listing should default to showing unmoderated comments. That’s the primary view people with moderation on need to see when going to the comments page.
• On the home dashboard page, first page people see, the word dashboard appears 3 times, all on the leftmost column. The second one is highlighted to indicate it’s active, so the third one isn’t necessary. If people don’t notice the red highlight means it’s active then change the highlight, don’t add another instance of the word.
• Moving the category field to the bottom of the post page is a huge pain. Most people use categories so they hit this set of checkboxes for every post. The current layout forces two scrolls: one to get down there, and a second to scroll the list of categories. This UI should be in the critical path of the UI design for the post page.
• The add media UI is overkill. First, clicking on that tiny little image button takes over the whole screen. Blam - I thought I’d broken something. It’s a jarring, horrible transition. Going modal is ok, but don’t hit me over the head. There are other issues with the flow in this UI: not sure what use cases it is designed for, but everything seems to require lots of steps (And what does Crunching mean? Downloading seems more accurate).

  .

Even with my complaints, I strongly recommend Wordpress. If you want to give it a spin, you can use their free, hosted, blogging service at wordpress.org. If you’re thinking of upgrading or switching check out this handy guide: How to update wordpress with minimal downtime.

Posted in Software/Web development, ui review, usability | 5 Comments »

Later this month I’ll be down in SF talking at Web 2.0 Expo. I’m doing a half-day tutorial on How to Innovate on time, plus a keynote on the Myths of Innovation. The lineup includes Blaine Cook (Twitter), Matt Jones (Dopplr), Marc Andressen (Ning), Clay Shirky, Matt Cutts (Google) and more. Among other special events, there’s also an ignite talks event, one of my favorite things to watch, on Tuesday night.

If you use this magic code websf08sbg you get $100 off the registration price.

Posted in Microsoft, On Tour | No Comments »

This is exactly the kind of topic I avoid here, but since the deal hasn’t been shot dead (at least not yet) as I’d expected, it’s time to throw an opinion on the pile.

The first thing that comes to mind is the 1995 attempt by Microsoft to buy Intuit. It doesn’t seem important now but at the time it was a huge deal: it would have been the largest software acquisition in history. Inside Microsoft, where I worked at the time, the move was a surprise, much like the Yahoo deal probably was (Hot/Big companies are news leaks, so execs rarely bother with early internal memos). The DOJ said no, but regardless it represented the same type of inspired, ballsy, ‘go all in’ strategy that people forget Microsoft is known for (See Microsoft reverses course or Internet Tidal Wave Memo).

Forget whether it will work or not, this Yahoo move communicates how competitive and aggressive Microsoft still is. If Google kicks Microsoft’s ass all over the next decade, it will be a bloody war all the way. Unlike IBM, Microsoft is not going to walk quietly to the sidelines of public attention; they’re going to go out swinging. So say what you will about the strategy, but in terms of moving to take control over the battleground, Microsoft has scored a victory: they’re in the headlines, for the first time in ages, for being on the prowl, while news of Google has fallen beneath the fold. With the paint still wet on their recent acquisition of DoubleClick, it’s hard for Google to complain loudly right now.

Ok, here’s the cynicism. All mergers suck. They really do. They rarely go well and when they do it’s only after 12-16 months of hand wringing and confusion among everyone involved on both sides (not to mention the costs of defections on principle). No sane person would ever choose to merge with another company that has overlapping product lines. It’s a move that is only conceivable from the landscape view provided by executive ivory towers. VPs can say all they want about not losing jobs, but everyone knows no VP would ever say “Yes. This merger means you will be fired 3 weeks from now! Run for the hills!” It just doesn’t go that way, ever. Being employed isn’t much of a prize anyway if the job that remains barely resembles the one you loved. Of course if you hate your job, or your project, then this could be opportunity time.

But on the whole I suspect the entire Windows Live division held in a collective cry of despair the day the merger was announced, in the same way the Microsoft Money team did in 1995. It’s hard to recover from that feeling of betrayal that comes from working hard for months, loyally following your leader’s commands, only to learn, as an aside, over coffee, that someone 5 levels above you had been scheming to buy a competitor, one of the targets on your well worn dartboard, all along. In the old Microsoft days it was the stock options that carried you through. The hallway talk was “We do what’s right for the company first” but I don’t know if that line is still heard, much less believed, anymore. In some ways merger talk is a reality test: is what I’ve made better than what we’re buying? And will the newly appointed mystery date VP agree? That kind of uncertainty can’t help but tank morale.

And now, optimism. As an orchestrator, an architect, a creator, this would be one of the greatest shopping sprees for intellectual property of the last 20 years. It will be a once in a lifetime treat to be the VP who gets to pick and choose among projects and people from two vast pools of ideas grown from very different gardens. Hand that task over to a Ray Ozzie, Chris Jones or Joe Belfiore, and, if you get everyone else sufficiently far out of their way, wondrous things are possible. I’d bet any of them, or perhaps a management star from Yahoo’s ranks, could inspire the best people from both companies to stick around, at least long enough to watch the first offspring rise above the merger mess, or, perhaps, go up in flames.

Posted in Management, Microsoft | 1 Comment »

Rube Goldberg was an engineering student who quickly realized he preferred making fun of engineers more than engineering things himself. His legendary cartoons of bizarre, over-engineered devices for trivial tasks have lived on well past his own lifetime.

So what do we make of people who actually try to make Rube Goldberg machines? Are they simply creative enthusiasts with a sense of humor or are they entirely missing Goldberg’s point? You decide.

This year, at one of four Rube Goldberg Machine Contests, a team from Purdue won with a 156 step machine for making hamburgers.

Video highlights of the event on gizmodo.

And you can see photos of the winning machines from the last few years on the Purdue website.

Posted in Innovation, Teaching/Training, creative thinking | No Comments »