The ever cool biznik collective is hosting me for a special author event night here in Seattle.
When: Tuesday March 16th, 5:30pm to 8:00pm
Where: Hotel 1000, 1000 1st Avenue, Seattle
You get:
How to sign up:
You have to RSVP in advance – All the details here.
I’ll be speaking at this new event, first in a series run by The Economist magazine.
The ideas economy: Innovation
Berkeley, California, March 23-24
The roster includes Jared Diamond, Ray Kurzweil, Paul Saffo, Clayton Christensen, Dan Esty, Ed Catmull, John Perry Barlow, Arriana Huffington and more.
It’s 200 people only – registration info here ($1500 a ticket).
I hope to liveblog the event if I can.
My first article for BusinessWeek is up now:
Good beats innovative nearly every time
One of the best exercises a working person can do is this: spend some time doing the jobs of the people you work with. Every manager should be required to do this once a year, even if just for a few hours. Most of us, most of the time, work with blinders on. We naturally assume our work is harder and more important than the people we depend on, or who depend on us, and the only way to be reminded of this is to put yourself in their shoes now and then.
At the UI14 conference last year I caught an excellent talk by Leah Buley, an experience designer at Adaptive Path, called UX Team of One. The core idea is in many, but not all cases, one person can effectively do both analysis (usability engineering) and synthesis (design and prototyping of new ideas) if they have the right attitude, experience and perspective, which she described in detail in her talk (slides here).
This is not to suggest singular expertise in usability or interaction design is useless. Not at all. My point is in many cases the usability and design problems are relatively simple and the reason why things are bad is not a lack of expertise, but a lack of willingness among ‘experts’ to step out of their safe expert box and fight to effect change, or a failure to succeed at it. Someone with fewer pedigrees tends to see fewer boundaries, and that’s often what a team or culture or company needs for change to happen. Many projects need basic first aid, not brain surgery, and I suspect medics, who are generalists, do better first-aid than neurosurgeons, who are specialists. Of course if I have a brain tumor, I’ll wait for Mr. Neurosurgery, but otherwise he’s not my best bet.
There are many people with PhDs in cognitive psychology, or Masters degrees in design, working on projects with abysmal usability or interaction design. The problem isn’t lack of expertise, it’s a lack of awareness for how to convert that expertise into action. Their deep expertise can be a liability if it gets in the way of getting their hands dirty.
The intellectual exercise of trying to do a project alone, where you have to play the role of product planner, project manager, designer, engineer, tester, marketer (or whatever the list of roles is in your world), even if just for a day, forces you to rethink the assumptions about each and every contribution on a project. Maybe it’s harder than you think, or maybe it’s easier, who knows? You likely have no idea since you’ve never done any of those things. If you have clients, what do you really know about their world? Project and Middle Managers are notorious for having no real sense for how all the contributions by others that they get credit for, are actually done. This is an easy disease to cure: invest some time standing in other people’s shoes.
I believe there is a core set of skills, orthogonal to traditional ideas of expertise, that defines who is effective at work or not. Call it savvy, self-awareness, organizational agility, or just plain common sense, but it’s the real factor at play at why some experts have an impact and others don’t. Playing Team of One for a day is one easy way to start getting at those skills. It gives you a language and sensibility for thinking about the people you depend on, the absence of which contributes to why they’re ignoring or frustrating you.
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Sorry for the short notice, but I arrive in Melbourne for a few days this coming Saturday. I’m speaking at the PMI Asia Congress on Monday.
If anyone is up for it, I’d love to meet some locals, and share some beers or some food. Recommendations welcome for where. Saturday or Sunday are open.
I’ll be jet lagged out of my mind, but this often makes me 30% more entertaining.
Leave a comment if you’re interested, and I’ll email everyone when I arrive to follow up.
As a follow up to my post on Microsoft and Creative Destruction, it’s worth looking at this chart, from Silicon Alley Insider.
It shows the quarterly operating expenses for Microsoft’s Online division. This last quarter, Microsoft lost $466 million. That’s 3 months.
Over the last year (4 quarters) Microsoft has lost nearly $2 billion.
And from what I remember, you’d see losses for the period before what’s shown on the chart, as the division has always struggled with profitability.

It’s an unbelievable chart. I’ve had to stop writing several times just to look at it again.
I’m certainly not arrogant enough to claim I know how to fix an entire division. But I can look at this and ask some basic questions:
If past history is any judge, Steve Sinofsky, the former VP from Office who took charge of Windows for Windows 7, might be the only weapon Microsoft can use to tackle Online. Many other VPs have been at the helm, including David Cole who was my VP for a time in the IE days, but as the chart shows, they’ve been largely ineffective at things other than spending lots of money.
In spirit of my last post, the better question is what did Sinofsky do to the Windows team to turn Vista into Windows 7? Why isn’t there a case study on this, that’s stapled onto the forehead of every manager until it’s read? And how can that be emulated in the Online division? My suspicion is this case study has not been done, and if it has, it’s either not being shared widely or it’s being ignored.