In Oslo last week I stopped at the Nobel Peace Center. Among the exhibits was this one which had some clever hardware/software UI combos shown in the video below. Notice the sound the big switch makes:

Posted in Design | Leave a comment »

Everybody likes to criticize NASA for various reasons. There’s the budget problems, various $100 million blunders, and of course the aging space shuttle program.

But one thing they are doing right with the Hubble telescope is planned obsolescence. This current space shuttle mission is the last act NASA will take to repair the Hubble telescope ever.

They know that in order to build whatever will replace the Hubble, they have to let go of Hubble, even if that means letting it die, so they can have the funds and resources to invest in the next thing (It’s called the Webb telescope and it’s made from Beryllium - sounds like Star Trek).

And the space shuttle is also being put to rest. With 9 missions left NASA is finally moving on, using the resources consumed by the shuttle for the next big thing.

What old ideas, products, services, habits, assumptions, excuses, will you let go of to make room for whatever you want your future to be?

If they can ditch the Hubble and the shuttle, I can ditch something too.

Posted in Innovation, Management | 2 Comments »

One perk of an independent life - I’m more free than most to travel the world and see amazing things.

Last week I was in Brussels to give a lecture at Namahn, a wonderful design consulting firm, and Joannes, the company founder, was kind enough to take me to Rene Magritte’s house, which is now a small museum. He’s one of my favorite artists of all time - to see where he worked was a very special thing for me.

One of his most famous paintings is The Treachery of Images (La trahison des images). You may have seen it before:

The text in the painting reads “This is not a pipe”.

It seems like a joke.  First time I saw this painting in college I just snickered and moved on. But later I’d realize he’s reminding you that pictures of things are not the same as things. That movies about things are not the same as the things they are about (e.g. Twittering about something is not the same as doing that thing). It’s deep, funny, interesting, philosophical and simple all at the same time, which is what I hope my work to be like.

Walking around the house he lived in, many of the objects that appear in his paintings can be found, including the pipe:

I also saw his bowler hat, the fireplaces and stairs that appeared in many of his paintings.

Here’s what I learned:

• You can be creative with anything. He worked with simple objects and made profound statements . You don’t need complex things to think complex thoughts or make important points.
• You can be serious and funny at the same time. There’s a sense of play in many of his paintings, and also various inside jokes to his wife and friends in his work.
• No one gets a free ride. I didn’t know he spent many years making advertisements and posters to make a living - many of them were on exhibition in the house. It wasn’t until later in his life that his paintings were worth enough to focus on them.
• You can work anywhere. His studio was between the only kitchen and only bathroom on the first floor of his house.  It’d be the last place I’d want to work for hours, but it clearly worked well for him.  Apparently it had the best light in the house, and he prefered working there to the much larger studio out in the back. Here’s a pic of his studio. It’s a tiny little cramped space.

Sadly I just missed the opening in Belgium of the Rene Magritte museum, which will be the largest exhibition of his works anywhere in the world. It opens June 2, 2009.

You can see many of his works here - I suspect you’ve seen some of these before even if you didn’t know the name of the man who made them.

Posted in On Tour, creative thinking, history | 7 Comments »

My essay from the new book Beautiful teams is up online.  It’s about my years on the Internet Explorer 4.0 team. And there’s a string interesting comments up already.

Why Ugly Teams win from Beautiful Teams.

If you dig the essay, check out the book.

Posted in Management, web browsers | 3 Comments »

I have a few days of fun travel to new places coming up.

If anyone has been to Brussels, Belgium or Oslo, Norway, or is a local, and has some advice for good eats or places you think I’d dig, please leave a comment or drop me a line. Thanks!

Posted in On Tour, philosophy | 14 Comments »

The cool thing about Ignite Seattle, beyond the crazy fun format (5 mins, 20 slides, 15 seconds a slide), is how positive and supportive the vibe is.  Everyone talks about cool things they’ve seen and heard, and there’s a buzz of learning and doing that’s superior to most conferences.  It’s geekish, for sure, but it also surprisingly cross-discipline. There were talks about parenting, libraries, biology, medicine, raising chickens and more.

Perhaps part of the magic is that it’s just one intense night - the fact that’s an evening thing and there’s always a bar at the venue perhaps changes who comes and why. Kudos to @Brady and @BryanZug and the all the folks that volunteered to help out.

Last night I was lucky and got to a talk on how to give an ignite talk, and if the video makes it online I’ll post.

In the meantime here’s what I learned last night (from memory - forgot my notebook):

• Creativity is fueled by contact with weak social links - you need points of contact that are not your primary circle to stimulate you  (Shelly Farnham)
• Assuming your users have Alzheimer is a hack for better design thinking (Roy Leban)
• There are many people with Lego-addiction and Hillel is one of them (Hillel Cooperman)
• I learned about clipping (drop vowels) and thesauri (vocabulary wins) for twitter (Jason Preston)
• If you think you’re competent, you probably aren’t  (Ron Burk)
• Native Americans/?Micronesians  had cool map technology (@kbeegle)
• All good marriages are creative partnerships (Jen Zug)

Posted in Seattle, public speaking | 3 Comments »

Here’s this week’s roundup of good stuff.

First some new stuff up on speakerconfessions.com:

• Should speakers ban or support twitter? - some nice data about how twitter was used at one popular talk.
• Learning from Make TV’s Bill Gurstelle - He’s the author of Backyard Ballistics and does live lectures as well as appear regularly on a TV show. Good stuff here.
• The myth of the tough crowd - What makes a tough crowd so bad? Do speakers create their own problems? Here’s my opinion.

And the regular web round-up:

• In defense of eye candy. Some great examples of why making things ‘pretty’ isn’t of trivial importance, and does effect people’s behavior.
• 13 things that do not make sense. It’s a great mystery to me why, given how little we know, how little time we spend talking about all the stuff we have not figured out yet. I love these lists.
• Empowerment, whether you like it or not. This hits at one of the roots of micromanagement - often the boss has less information than their report on something and needs to force them to make the call. Good stuff.

Posted in linkfest, public speaking | Leave a comment »

Of all the stories in the web world, the story of the Opera web browser is one of the most interesting, and least frequently told when it comes to understanding innovation.

Today they’re celebrating their 15th year, and it’s clear they’re going strong, claim to have market share growth and still have a sense of humor.

They’re a fascinating story because in the early browser wars (’94-’00) they were the third horse, but they consistently took larger risks, made bigger bets on design changes, bet heaviest of all players on web standards,  and were the first of the major browsers to implement now standard features like tab browsing.  But they rarely got much credit for their innovations or their intensely progressive attitude then, or perhaps even now.

Why? Did they not innovative enough? or too much? Do they need to be in the U.S. to get more attention? Or are  there other issues? There are tons of lessons to be learned from the case study of Opera, both for the 90’s and for the present.

Until someone writes one, you can do a small, fun one of your own.

If you’re interested in UX design or understanding innovation, I highly recommend giving their latest release a spin: it will be the most interesting software you’ve installed in some time.

Download Opera 9.6

Related:

• Here’s my older review of Opera 9.02
• My other posts about web browser design, including reviews of major browsers
• I’ll be speaking at Opera next month and look forward to learning more from these folks

Posted in Design, Innovation, history, web browsers | 3 Comments »

Ignite is always an awesome time. There is something so fun about the crowd that comes, and then of course there’s all the crazy stuff that happens on stage.

If you’ve never been, the format is 5 minutes per speaker. The catch is the slides are automated: 20 slides, 15 seconds per slide. The results are, shall we say, unpredictable.

It’s this Wed, 7pm at the King Kat Theater in Seattle.

Here’s Wednesday’s awesome lineup:

7PM - Doors Open

7:30 PM - Paper Tower Contest Begins - Build the tallest tower you can out of just 5 sheets of paper and tape (See Details)

8:30 - First Set of Talks
Hillel Cooperman (@hillel) - The Secret Underground World of Lego
Dawn Rutherford (@dawnoftheread) - Public Library Hacking
Roy Leban (@royleban) - Worst Case User Experience: Alzheimer’s
Shelly Farnham (@ShellyShelly) Community Genius: Leveraging Community to Increase your Creative Powers
Dominic Muren (@dmuren) - Humblefacturing a Sustainable Electronic Future
Jen Zug (@jenzug) - The Sanity Hacks of a Stay At Home Mom
Ken Beegle (@kbeegle) - Decoding Sticks and Waves
Maya Bisineer (@thinkmaya) - Geek Girl - A life Story
Scott Berkun (Scottberkun.com)- How and Why to Give an Ignite Talk

9:45 PM - Second Set of Talks
Scotto Moore (Scotto.org)- Intangible Method
Secret Guest Speaker from Ignite Portland
Mike Tykka - The Invention of the Wheel
Jason Preston (@Jasonp107) - Goodbye Tolstoy: How to say anything in 140 characters or less
Chris DiBona (@cdibona) - The Coolness of Telemedicine
Ron Burk - The Psychology of Incompetence
Katherine Hernandez (@ipodtouchgirl) - The Mac Spy
Jamie Gower JamieGower.com) - I Am %0.0002 Cyborg
Beth Goza (@bethgo) - Knitting in Code

Hope to see you there.

Posted in On Tour, Seattle | 1 Comment »

Thanks to the fine folks at O’Reilly Media, both of my books are now available on Kindle:

Making Things happen (Kindle)

The Myths of Innovation (Kindle)

I think it’s silly that the customer reviews for the regular editions don’t migrate to these kindle pages, but then again I’m still bummed all the reviews for The art of project management didn’t get migrated over to Making Things Happen, as it’s the 2nd edition of the same book.

Posted in Making things happen, Myths of Innovation, books | 7 Comments »

Interesting thread going on Slashdot about PM for beginners. Making things happen gets a nice mention.

Surprising number of mentions of PMI and PSP and other heavy processes I wouldn’t expect to hear so fast from the Slashdot crowd: Project management for beginners.

It’s funny but I still am baffled by the threading and conversation UI at slashdot. I’ve been there dozens of times but still it’s beyond me.

Anyway, I posted a response, but it’s buried so deep I doubt you’ll find it without magic powers so here it is:

Here’s my 3 (ok 6) steps for getting started before buying a book or doing anything else:

1. I’d recommend talking to your team, individually, about what things on the project are most frustrating or could be improved.
2. In each conversation ask for their advice on what you can do, and also what they are willing to do or try
3. Based on your conversations, propose one simple change that has the best odds of both being accepted, and improving things. If the team has lots of conflicts, pick something very small. If there is too much dissension, pick something you can do with just one or two others.
4. Then make the change.
5. If things go poorly go back to #1.
6. If things go well, propose the next thing from #3.

But without talking to your team, and without establishing credibility and leadership, no book, degree, or IQ, will be of any use to you as a project manager. Start with your team first and earn their trust.

Posted in Management | 5 Comments »

Here’s a gaggle of links for this week:

• Take criticism like Trump. The weird thing about modeling anything on Trump is how random his decisions on his TV show often are.
• The post windows era. Articles like this have been written for 15 years. The thing is Windows will be around for another 15 years, and will probably be a billion dollar business for that long just on inertia. Windows might be less relevant each year, but it will still sell. Frankly Windows has always been less relevant to people than the apps that run on it and that was true before the web.
• Reality of a Times bestseller. People are really surprised by how little writers get paid, yet at the same time people have no hesitation borrowing or going to the library instead of paying money to get them.
• Liner notes from the game Spore. This stuff is just cool - it’s a bit technical, but I always like behind the scenes stuff from people who were not the head honchos.
• Your business card is crap. Beyond explanation. I just hope this is a joke.
• Why discuss project failure?. Nice little list that dovetails well with why designers fail.
• Great interview with David Simon, creator of the Wire, by Bill Moyer.

Posted in linkfest | 12 Comments »