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noreply@blogger.com (Alby) — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 13:32:00 +0200

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Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos delivers graduation speech at Princeton University

noreply@blogger.com (Alby) — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 09:54:00 +0200

As a kid, I spent my summers with my grandparents on their ranch in Texas. I helped fix windmills, vaccinate cattle, and do other chores. We also watched soap operas every afternoon, especially "Days of our Lives." My grandparents belonged to a Caravan Club, a group of Airstream trailer owners who travel together around the U.S. and Canada. And every few summers, we'd join the caravan. We'd hitch up the Airstream trailer to my grandfather's car, and off we'd go, in a line with 300 other Airstream adventurers. I loved and worshipped my grandparents and I really looked forward to these trips. On one particular trip, I was about 10 years old. I was rolling around in the big bench seat in the back of the car. My grandfather was driving. And my grandmother had the passenger seat. She smoked throughout these trips, and I hated the smell.

At that age, I'd take any excuse to make estimates and do minor arithmetic. I'd calculate our gas mileage -- figure out useless statistics on things like grocery spending. I'd been hearing an ad campaign about smoking. I can't remember the details, but basically the ad said, every puff of a cigarette takes some number of minutes off of your life: I think it might have been two minutes per puff. At any rate, I decided to do the math for my grandmother. I estimated the number of cigarettes per days, estimated the number of puffs per cigarette and so on. When I was satisfied that I'd come up with a reasonable number, I poked my head into the front of the car, tapped my grandmother on the shoulder, and proudly proclaimed, "At two minutes per puff, you've taken nine years off your life!"

I have a vivid memory of what happened, and it was not what I expected. I expected to be applauded for my cleverness and arithmetic skills. "Jeff, you're so smart. You had to have made some tricky estimates, figure out the number of minutes in a year and do some division." That's not what happened. Instead, my grandmother burst into tears. I sat in the backseat and did not know what to do. While my grandmother sat crying, my grandfather, who had been driving in silence, pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway. He got out of the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow. Was I in trouble? My grandfather was a highly intelligent, quiet man. He had never said a harsh word to me, and maybe this was to be the first time? Or maybe he would ask that I get back in the car and apologize to my grandmother. I had no experience in this realm with my grandparents and no way to gauge what the consequences might be. We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, "Jeff, one day you'll understand that it's harder to be kind than clever."

What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy -- they're given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you're not careful, and if you do, it'll probably be to the detriment of your choices.

This is a group with many gifts. I'm sure one of your gifts is the gift of a smart and capable brain. I'm confident that's the case because admission is competitive and if there weren't some signs that you're clever, the dean of admission wouldn't have let you in.

Your smarts will come in handy because you will travel in a land of marvels. We humans -- plodding as we are -- will astonish ourselves. We'll invent ways to generate clean energy and a lot of it. Atom by atom, we'll assemble tiny machines that will enter cell walls and make repairs. This month comes the extraordinary but also inevitable news that we've synthesized life. In the coming years, we'll not only synthesize it, but we'll engineer it to specifications. I believe you'll even see us understand the human brain. Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Galileo, Newton -- all the curious from the ages would have wanted to be alive most of all right now. As a civilization, we will have so many gifts, just as you as individuals have so many individual gifts as you sit before me.

How will you use these gifts? And will you take pride in your gifts or pride in your choices?

I got the idea to start Amazon 16 years ago. I came across the fact that Web usage was growing at 2,300 percent per year. I'd never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast, and the idea of building an online bookstore with millions of titles -- something that simply couldn't exist in the physical world -- was very exciting to me. I had just turned 30 years old, and I'd been married for a year. I told my wife MacKenzie that I wanted to quit my job and go do this crazy thing that probably wouldn't work since most startups don't, and I wasn't sure what would happen after that. MacKenzie (also a Princeton grad and sitting here in the second row) told me I should go for it. As a young boy, I'd been a garage inventor. I'd invented an automatic gate closer out of cement-filled tires, a solar cooker that didn't work very well out of an umbrella and tinfoil, baking-pan alarms to entrap my siblings. I'd always wanted to be an inventor, and she wanted me to follow my passion.

I was working at a financial firm in New York City with a bunch of very smart people, and I had a brilliant boss that I much admired. I went to my boss and told him I wanted to start a company selling books on the Internet. He took me on a long walk in Central Park, listened carefully to me, and finally said, "That sounds like a really good idea, but it would be an even better idea for someone who didn't already have a good job." That logic made some sense to me, and he convinced me to think about it for 48 hours before making a final decision. Seen in that light, it really was a difficult choice, but ultimately, I decided I had to give it a shot. I didn't think I'd regret trying and failing. And I suspected I would always be haunted by a decision to not try at all. After much consideration, I took the less safe path to follow my passion, and I'm proud of that choice.

Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life -- the life you author from scratch on your own -- begins.

How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make?

Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions?

Will you follow dogma, or will you be original?

Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure?

Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions?

Will you bluff it out when you're wrong, or will you apologize?

Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love?

Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling?

When it's tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?

Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?

Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?

I will hazard a prediction. When you are 80 years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story. Thank you and good luck!

via: princeton.edu

People, Passion, Perseverance: You've Got Entrepreneurship

noreply@blogger.com (Alby) — Thu, 8 Apr 2010 19:55:00 +0200

People, passion, perseverance. Former AOL CEO and Chairman Steve Case describes these words as the bedrock of successful entrepreneurship. Heading into what may be a "golden era of entrepreneurship," he says that he relies on the "three p's" as assessment tools to help guide his direction and goals. When all of the three parts are in balance, an entrepreneur can achieve success like that of AOL; when they aren't, you get the failure of the AOL-Time Warner merger.

Be Like the Internet

noreply@blogger.com (Alby) — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:58:00 +0100

Be Like the Internet - 8 steps to success in a post 2.0 world

View more presentations from Thor.

Let Go: 8 Steps to Success Go! 2.0 World Let in a post 8 Steps to Success in a post 2.0 World
Letting Go: Letting Go 8 Steps to Success in a post 2.0 World 8 Steps to Success in a post 2.0 World
Losing Control: 8 Steps to SuccessControl Losing in a post 2.0 World 8 Steps to Success in a post 2.0 World
Why are some companies so overwhelmingly successful on the network? (While others seem to be killing themselves off)
Or, what makes Google Google?
We’ve seen a fundamental shift in how value is created 1. Collapse in the cost of creation 2. The network changes everything
We used to focus on building core competencies
Cheap coordination allows value to be created on the edges
We're moving from an industrial age...
...to a networked one.
Industrial age assumptions still rule.
But the networked world doesn’t work that way
The way for a business to thrive in the networked world is to adapt to the network (not the other way around)
Be Like the Internet 8 Steps to Success in a post 2.0 World
That leads to two questions: 1. Um, what? 2. Ok, but how?
Basically, get used to it being out of your control
Most of what matters to your business is happening outside your business
And it’s happening faster and faster
YOU ARE A NODE
YOU ARE A NODE you
YOU ARE A NODE y
Your new home page
Ok, sure, but practically what does this mean?
8 ways in which you* can change to... BE LIKE THE INTERNET
1. From control to chaos
Adapting to chaos: we’re naturals “They walk fast and they walk adroitly. They give and they take, at once aggressive and accomodating. With the subtlest of motions they signal their intention to one another.” William Whyte, City (1969)
Unpredictability requires new ways to plan
Iteration Iteration Iteration Iteration Iteration Iteration Iteration Iteration
Yelp: customers lead the conversation
Disney’s image in the hands of passersby
2. From convention to instinct
From red oceans to blue oceans
Southwest: ignoring sacred cows
Starbucks: coffee becomes a lifestyle
American Apparel: upstart with an attitude
3. From process to flow
The industrial model: Hierarchies and procedures
The network model: Fluid dynamics
As seen in the brain’s synapses...
As see in a colony of ants...
What is Flow? Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing, characterized by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Flow, is also another name for "ﬂux" in physics, which is the rate at which something travels through a given cross section
Product development teams are adapting to manage the speed and uncertainty of the network
Abandoning the waterfall for the washing machine
Improvising directly with customers Example: 30 Boxes
4. From documentation to collaboration
If the goal is to get into flow and avoid top-heavy process, how?
Whiteboard sessions
Cocktail napkin collaboration
Rapid prototyping
Bioteams that leverage short messaging
Pixar’s approach to movie development
“Make it OK for people to challenge an idea or two, the good ideas can withstand it and the weaker ideas fall away and make room for something [better].” -Brad Bird, Writer/Director of the Incredibles
5. From fear to confidence
Fear of competition
There’s nowhere to hide anymore
Embrace critics and whistleblowers
vs. Kaiser Permanente
The truth about the Digg revolt
Jetblue apologizes via Youtube
6. From ownership to stewardship
In service of a higher purpose
Ted Rheinold of Dogster “About week 3 I realized I wasn’t in charge anymore.”
It’s true for individual practitioners as well
Google aims to be a steward for the Internet’s decentralized nature, its core social good.
7. From walls to openness
It’s not clear where you interests end and others begin
Secrecy is obsolete
Boundaries are optional
Create ecosystems around your business
Measure success by the meaningful connections in your own network
8. From inside to outside
There’s a lot more going on outside your business
How do you need to change to BE LIKE THE INTERNET?
Develop a practice of valuing ideas on their merits and their connections
Beliketheinternet.pbwiki.com Come by our wiki to share stories about to put these principles into practice

The New Paradigm of Advantage - 20th vs 21st century

noreply@blogger.com (Alby) — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 00:22:00 +0100

The past of advantage was extractive and protective.

The future of advantage, on the other hand, is allocative and creative.

20th century

Extractive. Over two decades, Microsoft has honed its extractive edge, coming up with cleverer and cleverer ways to extract profits from customers and suppliers. But Microsoft's just a flea on Wall St's elephant — who mastered extractive advantage by finding ways to, ultimately, extract trillions from you, me, and our grandkids. Extractive advantage asks: how can we transfer value from stakeholders to us, 10x or 100x better than our rivals?

Protective. Think Microsoft's the master of 20th century advantage? Think again. Monsanto's Round-up Ready strategy protects genetically modified crops with proprietary herbicide that crops need to flourish. The result? A protective advantage: Monsanto's made sure that farmers are locked in to Monsanto as tightly as possible. Protective advantage asks: are buyers and suppliers locked in to dealing with us, 10x or 100x more tightly than to rivals?

21st century

Allocative. Google's advantage was built on allocating attention to content and ads better than its rivals. Google's real secret? Relevance, media's measure of how efficiently attention is allocated. Match.com is building an allocative advantage in, well, matching people with partners. Allocative advantage asks: are we able to match people with what makes them durably, tangibly better off — and can we do it 10x or 100x better than our rivals?

Creative. Apple's advantage is, of course, radically creative: built on creating insanely great stuff that turns entire industries upside down. Next month, the iPad promises to do what the iPhone and iPod did before it. The power's in the creativity, not just the technology: Apple's thinking different yet again. Creative advantage asks: is our strategic imagination 10x or 100x richer, faster, and deeper than our rivals?

The New Paradigm of Advantage on Prezi

The future of advantage is radically different from the past for a simple reason: because it's economically better.

20th century advantage focuses firms on simply extracting resources from people, communities and society — and then protecting what they extract.

21st century advantage focuses firms on creating new resources, and allocating them better.

The former is useful only to shareholders and managers — but the latter is useful to people, communities, and society. The old Microsoft was useful to shareholders, but a lot less useful to society — and that's exactly how Google and Apple attacked it, and won.

An economy built on extractive and protective advantage is a giant, endless Ponziconomy. Value is transferred from one party to the next — but little is created anew. That's what we're finding out the hard way.

Only through creative and allocative advantage can we rebuild a more meaningful economy.

Via: blogs.hbr.org

Internet is Freedom (Speech at Italian Parliament)

noreply@blogger.com (Alby) — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 13:59:00 +0100

Another incisive and insightful presentation by Lawrence Lessig (@lessig) :
Internet is Freedom (Speech at Italian Parliament - 11/03/10)

Here the full meeting (link)

Clay Shirky on Cognitive Surplus

noreply@blogger.com (Alby) — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:18:00 +0100

Clay Shirky (@cshirky) has noticed the trend of talented people putting five or six hours an evening to work instead of to waste. Add that up across a million or ten million people and the output is astonishing. He calls it cognitive surplus and it's one of the underappreciated world-changing stories of our time.

Clay’s latest book is “Here Comes Everybody”, about organizing without organizations.

Transcription

I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders--a lot of things we like--didn't happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

It wasn't until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened--rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before--free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan's Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement.

This hit me in a conversation I had about two months ago. As Jen said in the introduction, I've finished a book called Here Comes Everybody, which has recently come out, and this recognition came out of a conversation I had about the book. I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, "What are you seeing out there that's interesting?"

I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus--"How should we characterize this change in Pluto's status?" And a little bit at a time they move the article--fighting offstage all the while--from, "Pluto is the ninth planet," to "Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system."

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn't know what to do with it at first--hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn't be a surplus, would it? It's precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.

The early phase for taking advantage of this cognitive surplus, the phase I think we're still in, is all special cases. The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make these kinds of things work: there's an interesting community over here, there's an interesting sharing model over there, those people are collaborating on open source software. But despite knowing the inputs, we can't predict the outputs yet because there's so much complexity.

The way you explore complex ecosystems is you just try lots and lots and lots of things, and you hope that everybody who fails fails informatively so that you can at least find a skull on a pikestaff near where you're going. That's the phase we're in now.

Just to pick one example, one I'm in love with, but it's tiny. A couple of weeks one of my students at ITP forwarded me a a project started by a professor in Brazil, in Fortaleza, named Vasco Furtado. It's a Wiki Map for crime in Brazil. If there's an assault, if there's a burglary, if there's a mugging, a robbery, a rape, a murder, you can go and put a push-pin on a Google Map, and you can characterize the assault, and you start to see a map of where these crimes are occurring.

Now, this already exists as tacit information. Anybody who knows a town has some sense of, "Don't go there. That street corner is dangerous. Don't go in this neighborhood. Be careful there after dark." But it's something society knows without society really knowing it, which is to say there's no public source where you can take advantage of it. And the cops, if they have that information, they're certainly not sharing. In fact, one of the things Furtado says in starting the Wiki crime map was, "This information may or may not exist some place in society, but it's actually easier for me to try to rebuild it from scratch than to try and get it from the authorities who might have it now."

Maybe this will succeed or maybe it will fail. The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don't pan out. But the ones that do are quite incredible, and I hope that this one succeeds, obviously. But even if it doesn't, it's illustrated the point already, which is that someone working alone, with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough of the collective goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource you couldn't have imagined existing even five years ago.

So that's the answer to the question, "Where do they find the time?" Or, rather, that's the numerical answer. But beneath that question was another thought, this one not a question but an observation. In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: "Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves."

At least they're doing something.

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it's not, and that's the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

And I'm willing to raise that to a general principle. It's better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, "If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too." And that's message--I can do that, too--is a big change.

This is something that people in the media world don't understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race--consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you'll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it 's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

And what's astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do something interesting, is that they're discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they'll take you up on that offer. It doesn't mean that we'll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we'll do it less.

And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you?

Well, the TV producer did not think this was going to be a big deal; she was not digging this line of thought. And her final question to me was essentially, "Isn't this all just a fad?" You know, sort of the flagpole-sitting of the early early 21st century? It's fun to go out and produce and share a little bit, but then people are going to eventually realize, "This isn't as good as doing what I was doing before," and settle down. And I made a spirited argument that no, this wasn't the case, that this was in fact a big one-time shift, more analogous to the industrial revolution than to flagpole-sitting.

I was arguing that this isn't the sort of thing society grows out of. It's the sort of thing that society grows into. But I'm not sure she believed me, in part because she didn't want to believe me, but also in part because I didn't have the right story yet. And now I do.

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, "What you doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse."

Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

It's also become my motto, when people ask me what we're doing--and when I say "we" I mean the larger society trying to figure out how to deploy this cognitive surplus, but I also mean we, especially, the people in this room, the people who are working hammer and tongs at figuring out the next good idea. From now on, that's what I'm going to tell them: We're looking for the mouse. We're going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, "If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?" And I'm betting the answer is yes.

Thank you very much.

For a good presentation

noreply@blogger.com (Alby) — Sat, 6 Mar 2010 15:31:00 +0100

Books:

Blogs:

presentationzen.com

Tools:

Videos:

Something to suggest?

Let me know here (comment) or give me a tweet (@albybisy)

Andrea Pontremoli : La forza del sogno

noreply@blogger.com (Alby) — Thu, 4 Mar 2010 12:02:00 +0100

"La forza del sogno è quella di disegnare qualcosa dove agli altri vogliono essere" Andrea Pontremoli

Via: venicesessions.it

Unlearn Your MBA

noreply@blogger.com (Alby) — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 17:20:00 +0100

David Heineimeier Hansson (@dhh), the creator of Ruby on Rails and partner at 37signals in Chicago, says that planning is guessing, and for a start-up, the focus must be on today and not on tomorrow. He argues that constraints--fiscal, temporal, or otherwise--drive innovation and effective problem-solving. The most important thing, Hansson believes, is to make a dent in the universe with your company.

The Peter Principle

noreply@blogger.com (Alby) — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 14:51:00 +0100

The Peter Principle is the principle that:

"In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence."

It was formulated by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their 1969 book The Peter Principle, a humorous treatise which also introduced the "salutary science of Hierarchiology", "inadvertently founded" by Peter. It holds that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently. Sooner or later they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (their "level of incompetence"), and there they remain, being unable to earn further promotions. This principle can be modeled and has theoretical validity. Peter's Corollary states that "in time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out his duties" and adds that "work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence".

Via: wikipedia

The Economic Motivation of Open Source Software: Stakeholder Perspectives

noreply@blogger.com (Alby) — Thu, 4 Feb 2010 16:35:00 +0100

Open source software has changed the rules of the game, impacting significantly the economic behavior of stakeholders in the software ecosystem. In this new environment, developers strive to be committers, vendors feel pressure to produce open source products, and system integrators anticipate boosting profits.

1. INTRODUCTION

The advent of open source software has produced more than lower software costs for users. It has also created major changes in the economic interaction among players in the software ecosystem.

For many, open source embodies a specific approach to software development---even a lifestyle. But it's also sound business strategy. Ron Goldman and Richard Gabriel suggest that companies should use open source software to grow their user communities and build an ecosystem around their products and services.

Open source software is typically free and comes with the source code needed to adapt it to users' needs. Most open source licenses let users redistribute the software, including possible changes, and charge for redistribution as long as source code changes are publicly available (www.opensource.org).

There are two types of open source software. Community open source is software that a community develops. Rather than a single corporate entity owning the software, a sometimes broad community of volunteers determines which contributions are accepted into the source code base and where the software is headed. Individual developers, the committers, and not a specific company, make decisions about the software, as in the case of the Apache Web server (httpd.apache.org)

Commercial open source is software that a for-profit entity owns and develops. The company maintains the copyright and determines what is accepted into the software code base and what to implement next, as in the case of MySQL and its MySQL database (www.mysql.com).

Prior work on community open source economics focused mostly on labor economics, that is, the frequently surprising amount of volunteer work that goes into open source software. Eric Raymond notes that developers contribute to open source projects for the personal gratification that comes from increasing their reputation among peers. Ernan Haruvy and his colleagues reached similar conclusions in their empirical study.

Joshua Lerner and Jean Tirole, meanwhile, argue that developers contribute to document their technical capabilities and improve job prospects with future employers. And Karim R. Lakhani and Robert G. Wolf report that enjoying their work is a key intrinsic motivation for developers to contribute to open source projects, although survey respondents also revealed that financial incentives are important.

While this explains some of the volunteer work, it doesn't explain why companies today employ people who contribute to open source projects on company time. Il-Horn Hann and colleagues found that the salaries of Apache Software Foundation project contributors correlated positively with the contributor's rank in the Apache organization. They therefore concluded that employers use a developer's rank within the foundation as a measure of productive capabilities.

In the following, we discuss the economic motivation of system integrators, independent software vendors, and software developers to explain these seeming contradictions. A particular focus is on their effects on developer careers.

2. SYSTEM INTEGRATOR PERSPECTIVE

Large system integrators, or solution providers, stand to gain the most from open source software because they increase profits through direct cost savings and the ability to reach more customers through improved pricing flexibility. Every dollar a system integrator saves on license costs paid to a software firm is a dollar gained that the customer might spend on services.

2.1 IT solutions demand curve

Customers typically want information technology providers to deliver "solutions." A solution solves a customer's IT problem, freeing the customer to focus on business rather than IT. A comprehensive solution comprises hardware, software, and services. Indeed, the IT industry earns its living by removing or reducing customers' IT worries.

System integrators deliver solutions by selling a stack of hardware, software, and services as one product. That allows the customer to talk to one company, rather than many. Figure 1a illustrates this stack together with the customer demand curve.

Figure 1. IT solutions demand curve. (a) System integrators sell a stack of hardware, software, and services. (b) Integrators can charge customers similar prices even if they use open source software.

The demand curve shows how many customers are willing to buy the system integrator's solution at a given price. On the Y axis is the customer's cost to purchase a solution, and on the X axis is the number of customers who are willing to pay for that solution at the given price. The form of the demand curve varies depending on what is being sold. However, in general, the demand curve is downward sloping: The lower the price, the more customers are willing to buy.

A system integrator's profits depend on which of the stack's components it owns and which it must buy. Usually, a system integrator's stronghold is services, which puts together the hardware and software pieces to meet the customer's need. However, if the system integrator owns only the services component, it will have to pay other companies for the software and the hardware and thereby share revenue, leaving less profit for itself.

It's therefore in a system integrator's interest to acquire hardware and software as cheaply as possible. Open source software, if an option, is typically much cheaper than closed source software, hence its use increases profits for the system integrator.

Figure 1b illustrates how with stable supply and demand, more money is made in the services part of the value stack if software cost goes down.

Software cost savings aren't easily passed on to customers for two reasons: First, customers tend to care about the whole product rather than individual components; second, large system-integration projects are complex and new competition doesn't spring up easily. Thus, system integrators can maintain their prices.

While this is one good reason for system integrators to support open source software, there's another equally compelling reason for them to support and contribute to open source software.

2.2 Business growth

The simple value stack that Figure 1 illustrates suggests that system integrators charge customers only one price. In reality, the system integrator can charge varying prices for a total solution to a prospective customer's problem. Only one thing is certain: A system integrator will want to at least cover its costs.

The price charged per customer that Figure 1 shows can be split into the system integrator's service cost, plus the markup or margin needed to make a profit. If the system integrator owns just the services part of the stack, the cost for providing that service defines the lower price limit for the work. In a reasonably competitive market, the system integrator will accept deals above this limit if it has the resources.

This limit, together with the demand curve, determines the maximum number of customers the system integrator can sell to and take on, as Figure 2a illustrates.

Switching from more expensive closed source software to less expensive open source software increases the profits of a sale through the money saved on the software. It also reduces the lower price limit for possible deals and puts a new set of more price-sensitive customers within reach. Not only does open source software improve profits on the original individual sales, it also increases the total number of potential customers.

Figure 2b shows how a switch from closed source to open source software results in more potential customers. And more potential—and presumably satisfied—customers mean higher sales and profits. The total profit is represented as the area of the gray triangle under the demand curve, showing the increase in profits when moving down the curve. Since in reality a system integrator might own many of a total solution's components, including software and hardware, more customers mean more profits through these components as well.

Figure 2. Sales margins and number of customers. (a) The lower price limit determines the customers the system integrator takes on. (b) Switching from closed source software to open source software can result in more customers and higher profits.

2.3 Pressures in the IT value stack

If it were up to the system integrators, all software would be free (unless they had a major stake in a particular component). Then, all software license revenue would become services revenue. To this end, I believe that system integrators prefer community open source over commercial open source. Only community open source software prevents vendor lock-in.

Community open source ensures that prices for software support are subject to market forces rather than one owning corporation. Community open source is a strategic weapon for system integrators to squeeze out proprietary as well as commercial open source software vendors.

3. SOFTWARE VENDOR PERSPECTIVE

Independent software vendors provide only a few software products, sometimes just specializing in one. Understanding the independent software firm strategy requires comparing open source software and closed source software cost and pricing.

3.1 Software cost and pricing

Why is open source software typically much cheaper than closed source software? In a closed source business, most of the investment in new software comes from shipping the first copy. The initial investment is recouped with increasing sales. The additional cost of producing and selling another copy is small, consisting of producing another CD or allowing for another download plus providing the (frequently minimal) free support that comes with a software license.

As the number of copies sold increases, the average cost per copy declines and the profits rise. Figure 3a illustrates the long-run average cost curve for a single software product.

Figure 3. Differences in cost and pricing. (a) and (c) show a similar average cost per unit for closed source and open source software, while (b) and (d) indicate the relationship between price and number of units sold for open and closed software.

The more mature a market for a specific software component, the higher the investment in the existing products, the higher the barrier to entering this market, the more established the existing players, and the more stable the price for the software component. A common scenario is "the 800-pound gorilla" firm that dominates a market and is surrounded by smaller players catering to market niches .

In such a market, the leading software vendor sets a price that maximizes its profits. Since the market is fairly transparent, the vendor can set just one pricing schedule, offering the product to different customers at the same price. (This is in contrast to the highly individual deals of large system integrators.) The result is frequently a flat price, as Figure 3b shows. Remarkably, the price of the proprietary closed source software doesn't directly depend on the actual cost incurred to develop, maintain, and provide the software.

The profit-maximizing price is largely independent of cost; the cost provides only a lower limit. Competition that drives prices closer to cost can't spring up easily due to the large initial investment a software product requires.

In a community open source situation, no such market-entry barriers exist. Given the right license, anyone can set up a company and start selling software. What the company will sell, of course, isn't the software itself, but its provision, maintenance, and support.

Because anyone can enter an attractive open source market, competition is fierce, and pricing will be based on markup over cost. If the markup is too high, new companies will enter the market; if it's too low, companies will leave the market. Moreover, the more mature the product, the lower the overall price.

Figure 3c shows the total cost of developing open source software. The total cost and the resulting average cost per copy sold is mostly the same as for the closed source solution. The main difference, of course, is that the different contributing companies now share this cost.

Figure 3d illustrates the pricing of open source software from a single firm's perspective. Because of the competition, the price charged for providing the software plus support is based on markup over cost. (The graph merging various dimensions into one 2D graph simplifies the situation, although the basic argument holds.)

Different firms will have different costs depending on their share of contributions to the open source project. However, with increasing project share, the company can charge higher prices because customers are likely to receive better service. The basic relationship remains unaffected: Price is markup over cost and varies depending on cost.

Customers love this situation because prices are substantially lower than in the closed source situation. System integrators love the situation even more because they can squeeze out proprietary closed source software.

3.2 Generating software profits

A system integrator can increase its profits if it reduces the software cost. By reducing software cost, it can move down the demand curve and sell to more customers.

Closed source software is the main obstacle to doing this: It cuts into profits on an individual sale and reduces overall pricing flexibility. Hence, system integrators have a high interest in turning closed source software markets into software markets with at least one viable community open source product.

Before the advent of open source software, entering an established and well-defended market was a risky proposition. With increasingly well-understood open source processes, setting up an open source project competing with an established closed source market leader's product is much less risky and carries a significantly higher chance of success than before. But it's not just a specific system integrator that will want to do that. It's pretty much everyone who isn't the closed source market leader.

To understand this, put yourself in the shoes of the CEO of an also-running traditional closed source company. At one point, it's becoming clear that you won't be the leading firm in your market and that your company's profits will come from market niches at best. Neither you nor your investors are happy with the projected return on investment.

Your best option now is to open source your product. You might be reducing the market's overall return on investment, but at least you'll have a second chance at satisfying your own investors by making your company a successful open source business. You'll be in good company. With a proper license for your open source product, you might well receive help from the system integrators, customers, and software vendors higher in the IT stack.

Now, assume you're the CEO of the market-leading company in some space. Thinking ahead, you have to assume that either a competitor will open source its product or that a system integrator will instigate an open source product—or both. The proactive answer to this scenario is to open source your product, even though you're the market leader and would win big in the old closed source world. But it's better to win in an open source world than not to win at all.

These two thought experiments show that community open source software has a high chance of taking new markets early on. Only strong intellectual property protection or other competitive advantages might lead a closed source company to win and keep a new market. Leaders in established markets might be able to defend their positions for a long time. They tend to dig in with complex products, established processes, customer data lock-in, and many other positional advantages. Still, open source might well prove to be disruptive enough to conquer even these markets.

3.3 Commercial Open Source

With such gloomy prospects for closed source businesses, independent software vendors have sought business models for harnessing open source software's benefits while gathering some of the profits of a closed source business. The answer is commercial open source.

The key differentiator between community open source and commercial open source is whether a community or a single entity like a corporation holds the power to make decisions about the project.

Commercial open source software is typically available for free to nonprofit users. Sometimes commercial use is free as well. Usually, companies make money by providing support services. Sometimes they make additional money by selling proprietary software enhancements.

Like community open source, commercial open source is available in source code form. Unlike community open source, however, one company controls commercial open source. This way, commercial open source software can gather some of the benefits of community open source: faster adoption, free and speedy user feedback, and possibly volunteers' code contributions. This approach is mostly a marketing strategy, however, because the company that owns the software still must do the development. Hence, the company must employ and pay the software's developers.

During the early days of an open source project, this is an advantage, as the company can provide clear direction and muster more resources than community open source projects typically can. As the project matures, this can turn into a disadvantage, as a competing community open source project might have more resources at hand in the form of volunteers.

The upside for the owning company is that little open source competition can spring up for its product. However, system integrators have a strong interest in providing alternatives to proprietary software, and this applies to commercial open source as well. Hence, this business model is likely to experience the same pressures as proprietary software.

3.4 Open source service firms

If it isn't possible to be a profitable closed source business, what does it mean to be a successful open source business? The market's answer is the open source service company, which comes in at least two kinds. One provides first-level support and implementation services; the other provides second-level support, training, and development services.

Clients of the first kind of firm are typically IT users who employ the firm's services to put the open source product into place in their IT operations. Clients of the second kind of firm typically need to get trained on the product or need to have a technical problem fixed that they can't handle themselves.

The strength of a service business usually lies in its ability to:

recruit and retain the right people,
reliably set up and execute specific service processes, and
bring to bear expert domain knowledge and unique intellectual property.

In the open source situation, this is usually labor economics. Technical skills around the open source product are a key part of determining an employee's value to a firm. Anyone who's smart enough can develop these skills because the open source software is available to people outside the firm.

Hiring and firing becomes easier because there's a larger labor pool to draw from, and switching costs between employees are lower compared with the closed source situation. Given the natural imbalance between employers and employees, this aspect of open source is likely to increase competition for jobs and drive down salaries. Lower salaries aren't as much of an advantage to the software vendor as might be expected because in the more transparent and competitive open source situation, such cost savings are likely to be (at least partially) passed on to customers.

3.5 The need for committers

An employee's position in the open source project is another key part of his or her value to a firm. The organizational setup varies between open source projects, but in some form, people always play user, contributor, and committer roles. Users use the software, contributors contribute in some form, and committers decide what contributions to accept into the project.

Figure 4 illustrates how a developer might progress through the ranks of a community open source project: A committer typically promotes a user to a contributor role implicitly by accepting the user's contribution into the software. A contributor is typically promoted to a committer position explicitly, through a prior vote of the existing group of committers and a subsequent public announcement of the contributor's ascension to committer status.

Figure 4: Positions and promotions. In open source projects, users are implicitly promoted to contributor status, while contributors are explicitly promoted to committer status.

Committers determine where the open source project is headed, strategically and on a day-to-day basis. They can typically resolve technical problems faster than noncommitters, and have high visibility to the user community. Most projects are set up so there's only a small inner circle of committers, a larger set of contributors, and an even larger user community.

For an employer, the value of employing a committer is manifold. Through the committer, an employer

gets problems with the open source software fixed faster and better,
can better align company strategy with the open source project and vice versa,
appears as a more attractive employer than competitors who don't employ a committer, and
has higher visibility with the user community and can reach out more effectively.

A major goal of any open source service company is to convert freeloading users into paying customers. A committer's visibility with the user community is an important marketing advantage that an employer can use to support this goal.

Thus, committers have a strong negotiation position with their employers. Employing a committer is important for a first-level support and implementation services company, and it's critical for a second-level support service company.

4. THE EMPLOYEE PERSPECTIVE

Open source software and service businesses make life more complicated for employees. Employees build up less firm-specific knowledge simply because there's less of it. People from the outside can replace them more easily. At the same time, an employee's day-to-day work improves non-firm-specific knowledge of an open source project that can be taken to another employer. So a developer who is fired can find a job faster than before.

4.1 Benefits of being a committer

An employee who is a committer is likely to earn higher compensation. Hann and colleagues have empirically verified this for committers to Apache Software Foundation projects.

At any time, the committer-employee can credibly threaten to leave the company, taking significant power and reputation away from the current employer. Employers often pay premium salaries just to employ prominent committers.

But how do you become a committer? Community open source projects tend to be meritocracies, judging developers by their social and technical contributions. In contrast, a company owning some commercial open source gives committer status to its employees (and takes it away) as it sees fit.

Consequently, it makes little sense for the economically rational software developer to invest time in commercial open source. The value these developers create is tied to the product and the owning company. Unless the product is in wide use or the developer wants to work only for this one company, it makes more sense to invest time in a community open source project.

4.2 How to become a committer

Developers who start projects immediately become committers. However, they now face the task of creating a successful project out of nothing. This is a highly entrepreneurial activity: Developers must promote their project while doing the actual programming work, understanding that the outcome is uncertain.

It's more common to join an existing open source project. Assuming a fair and transparent promotion process, the two main criteria that will get a developer promoted from contributor to committer are:

the developer's social and technical abilities, and
demonstrated commitment to the open source project.

This is what most project Web sites state and what developer surveys have revealed. However, these surveys rely on what developers say they do, and actual behavior could vary from what people believe motivates them.

Because being a committer can have clear financial benefits, keeping the group of committers small is in the economic interest of a committer to a successful project. Not doing so would dilute the committer's value to current and future employers. At least this would be an economically rational person's train of thought.

Counteracting the existing committers' economic interests is the need and desire to build a working community. Also, the participants in a new project are likely to appreciate every helping hand while a mature project might not need any additional committers.

Thus, the following forces possibly influence a developer's promotion:

the economic self-interest of the group of existing committers,
the committers' philosophical convictions on running the project, and
the project's need for more committers.

In many ways, investing in an open source project is like joining a startup. The earlier a developer joins, the higher the risk of the project not working out but also the more likely the ascension to committer status. The later a developer joins, the lower the risk, but also the lower the chances of becoming a committer any time soon.

The window of opportunity is small for those aspiring to achieve committer status in an important open source project. With the ongoing commercialization of open source, many current projects expect a committer to work full-time on the open source project. Otherwise, committer status wouldn't be granted. This, for example, is what the Eclipse project Web site states about its core projects (www.eclipse.org). However, a company is likely to let an employee work full-time on an open source project only if that person is already a committer; otherwise how many of the benefits of its contributions the company would reap is uncertain.

A developer who chooses the right project can gain and maintain a position that will increase salary-negotiation power and job prospects. The developer will enjoy those benefits as long as the project is of significance to potential employers.

Open source reinforces the trend toward employees becoming "free agents." Committers who rationally follow their economic interests are likely to be more loyal to the open source project than to their current employer because that's where their market value lies. That results in a more fluid job market where developers can be expected to move around more freely and more frequently than in the past.

5. CONCLUSIONS

Open source software has enabled large system integrators to increase their profits through cost savings and reach more customers due to flexible pricing. This has upset existing ecosystems and shuffled structural relationships, resulting in the emergence of firms providing consulting services to open source projects. This new breed of service firm in turn lives or dies by its ability to recruit and retain appropriate talent.

For such talent, in particular for software developers, life has become more difficult and exciting at once. Developers face new career prospects and paths, since their formal position in an open source project, in addition to their experience and capabilities, determines their value to an employer. Economically rational developers strive to become committers to high-profile open source projects to further their careers, which in turn generates more recognition, independence, and job security.

Via: dirkriehle.com

The Keynesian beauty contest

noreply@blogger.com (Alby) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 11:58:00 +0100

A Keynesian beauty contest is a concept developed by John Maynard Keynes and introduced in Chapter 12 of his work, General Theory of Employment Interest and Money (1936), to explain price fluctuations in equity markets.

Overview
Keynes described the action of rational agents in a market using an analogy based on a fictional newspaper contest, in which entrants are asked to choose a set of six faces from photographs of women that are the "most beautiful". Those who picked the most popular face are then eligible for a prize.
A naïve strategy would be to choose the six faces that, in the opinion of the entrant, are the most beautiful. A more sophisticated contest entrant, wishing to maximize the chances of winning a prize, would think about what the majority perception of beauty is, and then make a selection based on some inference from their knowledge of public perceptions. This can be carried one step further to take into account the fact that other entrants would each have their own opinion of what public perceptions are. Thus the strategy can be extended to the next order, and the next, and so on, at each level attempting to predict the eventual outcome of the process based on the reasoning of other rational agents.

It is not a case of choosing those [faces] that, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those that average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practice the fourth, fifth and higher degrees. (Keynes, General Theory of Employment Interest and Money, 1936).

Keynes believed that similar behavior was at work within the stock market. This would have people pricing shares not based on what they think their fundamental value is, but rather on what they think everyone else thinks their value is, or what everybody else would predict the average assessment of value is.

Subsequent theory
Other, more explicit scenarios help to convey the notion of the beauty contest as a convergence to Nash Equilibrium. For instance in the p-beauty contest game (Moulin 1986), all participants are asked to simultaneously pick a number between 0 and 100. The winner of the contest is the person(s) whose number is closest to p times the average of all numbers submitted, where p is some fraction, typically 2/3 or 1/2. If p<1 p="1">
In play of the p-beauty contest game (where p differs from 1), players exhibit distinct, boundedly rational levels of reasoning as first documented in an experimental test by Nagel (1995). The lowest, `Level 0' players, choose numbers randomly from the interval [0,100]. The next higher, `Level 1' players believe that all other players are Level 0. These Level 1 players therefore reason that the average of all numbers submitted should be around 50. If p=2/3, for instance, these Level 1 players choose, as their number, 2/3 of 50, or 33. Similarly, the next higher `Level 2' players in the 2/3-the average game believe that all other players are Level 1 players. These Level 2 players therefore reason that the average of all numbers submitted should be around 33, and so they choose, as their number, 2/3 of 33 or 22. Similarly, the next higher `Level 3' players play a best response to the play of Level 2 players and so on. The Nash equilibrium of this game, where all players choose the number 0, is thus associated with an infinite level of reasoning. Empirically, in a single play of the game, the typical finding is that most participants can be classified from their choice of numbers as members of the lowest Level types 0, 1, 2 or 3, in line with Keynes' observation.

In another variation of reasoning towards the beauty contest, the players may begin to judge contestants based on the most distinguishable unique property found scarcely clustered in the group. As an analogy, imagine the beauty contest where the player is instructed to choose the most beautiful six faces out of a set of hundred faces. Under special circumstances, the player may ignore all judgment-based instructions in a search for the six most unique faces (interchanging concepts of high demand and low supply). Ironic to the situation, if the player finds it much easier to find a consensus solution for judging the six ugliest contestants, he may apply this property instead of beauty to in choosing six faces. In this line of reasoning, the player is looking for other players overlooking the instructions (which can often be based on random selection) to a transformed set of instructions only elite players would solicit, giving them an advantage. As an example, imagine a contest where contestants are asked to pick the two best numbers in the list: {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 2345, 6345, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13}. All judgment based instructions can likely be ignored since by consensus two of the numbers do not belong in the set.

Via: wikipedia

The 3 Keys to Motivation

noreply@blogger.com (Alby) — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:41:00 +0100

"Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us", the newest book by Dan Pink, is a winner! It explains how intrinsic motivators beat extrinsic motivators, like rewards and punishments, for the more difficult cognitive tasks and jobs that are the core of what the new world of work and business are about.

What are the 3 most important intrinsic motivators?

Autonomy is our need for independent action and control over tasks, time, place, and team. One example is ROWE, the results-only work environment.

Mastery is our need to show we are "masters" of something that matters to us. The example he uses is comparing Encarta to Wikipedia (open source movement and community sharing).

Purpose is our need to matter in the larger scheme of things. Achieving your highest fulfillment does not have to be incompatible with making a living.

Via: www.careerhubblog.com

Startup Triplets: Startup Advice In Exactly Three Words

noreply@blogger.com (Alby) — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:55:00 +0100

1. Watch your cash. [tweet]

2. Pick founders carefully. [tweet]

3. Hire generalists early. [tweet]

4. Hire specialists later. [tweet]

5. Invest in culture. [tweet]

6. Avoid tempting distractions. [tweet]

7. Support customers maniacally. [tweet]

8. Avoid business plans. [tweet]

9. Write a blog. [tweet]

10. Never fudge numbers. [tweet]

11. Encourage diverse thinking. [tweet]

12. Guard your time. [tweet]

13. Defer renting space. [tweet]

14. Get enough sleep. [tweet]

15. Delay raising capital. [tweet]

16. Persist through downturns. [tweet]

17. Decide with data. [tweet]

18. Improve product daily. [tweet]

19. Recognize revenue consistently. [tweet]

20. Start charging early. [tweet]

21. Reward early adopters. [tweet]

22. Sell something today. [tweet]

23. Say “NO” often. [tweet]

24. Accept imperfect data. [tweet]

25. Recruit with zest. [tweet]

26. Nurture your best. [tweet]

27. Treat vendors well. [tweet]

28. Believe in yourself. [tweet]

29. Respect your competitors. [tweet]

30. Try something new. [tweet]

31. Build a brand. [tweet]

32. Focus, focus, focus. [tweet]

33. Iterate more often. [tweet]

34. Use your product. [tweet]

35. Live your vision. [tweet]

36. Encourage rational debate. [tweet]

37. Make decisions swiftly. [tweet]

38. Face harsh realities. [tweet]

39. Don’t break laws. [tweet]

40. Protect your health. [tweet]

41. Celebrate your successes. [tweet]

42. Cancel unnecessary meetings. [tweet]

43. Improve emloyee's resumes. [tweet]

44. Beware big bullies. [tweet]

45. Share the experience. [tweet]

46. Maintain your relationships. [tweet]

47. Keep it fun. [tweet]

48. Sales fixes everything.

49. Ship then test.

50. Do not partner.

Via: onstartups.com

A revolution happens when society adopts new behaviors

noreply@blogger.com (Alby) — Thu, 7 Jan 2010 11:35:00 +0100

Us Now takes a look at how this type of participation could transform the way that countries are governed. It tells the stories of the online networks whose radical self-organising structures threaten to change the fabric of government forever.

“A revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new tools, it happens when society adopts new behaviors” – Clay Shirky, Us Now

Via: usnowfilm.com

The Incomplete Manifesto for Growth

noreply@blogger.com (Alby) — Tue, 5 Jan 2010 01:52:00 +0100

Written in 1998, the Incomplete Manifesto is an articulation of statements exemplifying Bruce Mau’s beliefs, strategies and motivations. Collectively, they are how we approach every project.

1. Allow events to change you.
You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

2. Forget about good.
Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real growth.

3. Process is more important than outcome.
When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we've already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to
be there.

4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child).
Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.

5. Go deep.
The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.

6. Capture accidents.
The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.

7. Study.
A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.

8. Drift.
Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.

9. Begin anywhere.
John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.

10. Everyone is a leader.
Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.

11. Harvest ideas.
Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas to applications.

12. Keep moving.
The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.

13. Slow down.
Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves.

14. Don’t be cool.
Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.

15. Ask stupid questions.
Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.

16. Collaborate.
The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.

17. ____________________.
Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas
of others.

18. Stay up late.
Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you're separated from the rest of the world.

19. Work the metaphor.
Every object has the capacity to stand for something other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.

20. Be careful to take risks.
Time is genetic. Today is the child of yesterday and the parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today will create your future.

21. Repeat yourself.
If you like it, do it again. If you don’t like it, do it again.

22. Make your own tools.
Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things. Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big difference.

23. Stand on someone’s shoulders.
You can travel farther carried on the accomplishments of those who came before you. And the view is so much better.

24. Avoid software.
The problem with software is that everyone has it.

25. Don’t clean your desk.
You might find something in the morning that you can’t see tonight.

26. Don’t enter awards competitions.
Just don’t. It’s not good for you.

27. Read only left-hand pages.
Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the amount of information, we leave room for what he called our "noodle."

28. Make new words.
Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a new way of thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression. The expression generates new conditions.

29. Think with your mind.
Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.

30. Organization = Liberty.
Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens in context. That context is usually some form of cooperatively managed enterprise. Frank Gehry, for instance, is only able to realize Bilbao because his studio can deliver it on budget. The myth of a split between "creatives" and "suits" is what Leonard Cohen calls a 'charming artifact of the past.'

31. Don’t borrow money.
Once again, Frank Gehry’s advice. By maintaining financial control, we maintain creative control. It’s not exactly rocket science, but it’s surprising how hard it is to maintain this discipline, and how many have failed.

32. Listen carefully.
Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.

33. Take field trips.
The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic–simulated environment.

34. Make mistakes faster.
This isn’t my idea – I borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy Grove.

35. Imitate.
Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You'll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp’s large glass to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.

36. Scat.
When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up something else ... but not words.

37. Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.

38. Explore the other edge.
Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run with the technological pack. We can’t find the leading edge because it’s trampled underfoot. Try using old-tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but still rich with potential.

39. Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms.
Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces – what Dr. Seuss calls "the waiting place." Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all of the infrastructure of a conference – the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals – but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations.

40. Avoid fields.
Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the fences and cross the fields.

41. Laugh.
People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since I've become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are expressing ourselves.

42. Remember.
Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous moment or event. That’s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.

43. Power to the people.
Play can only happen when people feel they have control over their lives. We can't be free agents if we’re not free.

Via: brucemaudesign.com

5 examples when crowdsourcing doesn't work

noreply@blogger.com (Alby) — Mon, 4 Jan 2010 16:55:00 +0100

1. When the crowd does not have sufficient understanding or knowledge

For crowdsourcing to work you need to find the right crowd. If the technical or scientific knowledge required is rare then crowdsourcing might not be helpful unless you can find a crowd of people with the requisite foundational knowledge.

2. Where the problem is diffuse and complex

Crowdsourcing lends itself to solving clearly focused problems where there is little ambiguity or nuance – a great recent example of this was the DARPA balloon challenge.

For diffuse and complex problems it might be necessary to chunk up the challenge (if that is possible). And for problems that require painstaking layering of knowledge and information with long term focus it might not be commercially viable.

A good example of this is the discovery of longitude via crowdsourcing in the 18th century. It worked in the long run, but it took a really long time and was funded by the government. However, it might be argued that this kind of discovery would be much quicker today with computer power.

3. When you want to keep your plans secret

Clearly secrecy requires that only a few people know the secret. Thus crowdsourcing something that is meant to be a secret is probably a bad idea (unless you are executing a cunning hide in plain sight sort of plan).

4. Your problem needs to be compelling enough for contributors to care

Experience of Wikipedia indicates that people will contribute to things that are interesting to them. Thus if nobody cares about solving your problem then crowdsourcing might not be the answer.

To get an idea of how crowdsourcing works on an everyday basis there is a good discussion of how Wikipedia contributions happen by Henry Blodget in:Who The Hell Writes Wikipedia, Anyway?.

There is also a well known report by Forrester about Social Technographicsthat segments the participation of people within social networks. It shows that only a small proportion of people create or share content, a few active creators or editors, with the bulk of people lurking or not participating at all.

5. Crowdsourcing for complex problems requires dedicated resources

To undertake the kind of knowledge work required to solve complex problems contributors need uninterrupted time in the zone.

This is exemplified in some of the large open source software projects where companies pay people to work full time on open source projects for commercial advantage:

Many of the leaders of key projects (like Guido van Rossum, the inventor of Python, who works at Google (nasdaq: GOOG – news – people )) are paid by their employers to continue to lead their projects. Is there an open source community? Of course there is. But on the most prominent projects, the members of the community have jobs and are paid to work on open source because the software is so beneficial to their employers, even though it is not owned by them. True, there are hybrid models, and the smaller the project, the more likely it is unfunded. But when it becomes a big deal, open source becomes commercial.

Via: socialmediatoday.com

The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It

noreply@blogger.com (Alby) — Fri, 1 Jan 2010 22:34:00 +0100

The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain: An excellent book which contrasts what Zittrain calls the generative web, which enables builders to make new things, and the closed web of proprietary technologies. He describes the main ideas in the book in this very entertaining talk:

Via: timkastelle.org

The Gift Economy

noreply@blogger.com (Alby) — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 14:58:00 +0100

Two basic economic paradigms coexist in the world today. They are logically contradictory, but also complementary. One is visible, the other invisible; one highly valued, the other undervalued. One is connected with men; the other with women. What we need to do is validate the one connected with women, causing a basic shift in the values by which we direct our lives and policies.

I first approached the idea of giving as a basic economic and life principle when I was doing work on language and communication. Later, as a feminist, I realized that in my free homemaking and child-rearing work, I was doing gift labor-as were women worldwide.

The present economic system, which is made to seem natural and too widespread to change, is based upon a simple operation in which individuals participate at many different levels and at many different times. This operation is exchange, which can be described as giving in order to receive. The motivation is self-oriented since what is given returns under a different form to the giver to satisfy her or his need. The satisfaction of the need of the other person is a means to thc satisfaction of one's own need. Exchange requires identification of the things exchanged, as well as their measurement and an assertion of their equivalence to the satisfaction of the exchangers that neither is giving more than she or he is receiving. It therefore requires visibility, attracting attention even though it is done so often that the visibility is commonplace. Money enters the exchange, taking the place of products reflecting their quantitative evaluation.

This seemingly simple human interaction of exchange, since it is done so often, becomes a sort of archetype or magnet for other human interactions, making itself-and whatever looks like it-seem normal, while anything else is crazy. For example, we talk about exchanges of love, conversations, glances, favors, ideas.

There is also a different type of similarity of exchange to linguistic definition. The definition mediates whether or not a concept belongs to a certain category, just as monetarization of activity mediates its belonging to the category of work or not. The very visibility of exchange is self-confirming, while other kinds of interaction are rendered invisible or inferior by contrast or negative description. What is invisible seems to be valueless, while what is visible is identified with exchange, which is concerned with a certain kind of quantitative value. Besides, since there is an equivalence asserted between what we give and what we receive, it seems that whoever has a lot has produced a lot or given a lot, and is, therefore, some - how more than whoever has less. Exchange puts the ego first and allows it to grow and develop in ways that emphasize me-first competitive and hierarchical behavior patterns. This ego is not an intrinsic part of the human being, but is a social product coming from the kinds of human interaction it is involved in.

The alternative paradigm, which is hidden - or at least misidentified - is nurturing and generally other-oriented. It continues to exist because it has a basis in the nature of infants; they are dependent and incapable of giving back to the giver. If their needs are not satisfied unilaterally by the giver, they will suffer and die. Society has allocated the caretaking role to women since we bear the children and have the milk to nourish them.

Since a large percentage of women nurture babies, we are directed toward having an experience outside exchange. This requires orientation toward interest in the other. The rewards and punishments involved have to do with the well-being of the other. Our satisfaction comes from her or his growth or happiness, not just from our own. In the best case, this does not require the impoverishment or depletion of ourselves either. Where there is enough, we can abundantly nurture others. The problem is that scarcity is usually thc case, artificially created in order to maintain control, so that other-orientation becomes difficult and self-depleting. In fact, exchange requires scarcity because, if needs are abundantly satisfied, no one is constrained to give up anything in order to receive what they need.

It is said that the earth produces enough at the present time to feed everyone abundantly. However, this cannot be done on the basis of the exchange paradigm. Nor can the exchange paradigm or the kind of dominant ego it fosters continue in a situation of abundance and free giving. That is why scarcity has been created on a worldwide scale by armaments spending and other wastes of resources: $17 billion would feed everyone on earth for a year and we spend it every week on the military, thus creating the scarcity necessary for the exchange paradigm to survive and continue to validate itself.

If we identify the gift paradigm with women's way, we see that it is already widespread, since women arc the majority of the population. Many men practice it to some extent also. Noncapitalistic economies such as native economies, often have major gift-giving practices and various important kinds of women's leadership.

I believe, for example, that many of the conflicts between women and men that seem like personal differences are really differences in the paradigm we are using as the basis for our behavior. Women criticize men's big egos and men criticize women as being unrealistic, soft touch. bleeding hearts. Each tries to convince the other to follow his or her values. Recently, many women have begun to follow the exchange paradigm, which has the immediate advantage of liberating them from grim economic servitude - and the psychological advantage that monetarization defines their activity as valuable. But the servitude itself is caused by the exchange paradigm.

As people change from one paradigm to the other, there is probably some holdover of the previous paradigm, so that women who take on exchange often remain nurturing while men who take on giving remain more ego-oriented. I see this in the case of religions, in which men legislate other-orientation, often according to exchange, excluding and disqualifying women. Indeed, they make altruism seem so saintly that it is impractical for the many (while ignoring that it is often the norm for women). This is like the madonna-whore syndrome, where the woman is either over- or undervalued, worshiped or despised. Altruism is made to seem above our reach, often with a self-sacrificing side (because of the scarcity - exchange economy), or seen as wasteful, spendthrift; charity is given by patriarchal religions in exchange for the soul.

The gift giving done by the big exchange ego does not work, as we have seen on the scale of aid between nations. There are strings attached by the donor country, which pauperize the recipients. Another aspect of the conflicts of paradigms is that housework or other unmonetarized women's labor is seen as inferior, or nonwork; valuing it is subversive to the exchange paradigm. Perhaps women's labor is paid less than men's to maintain it in a disempowered gift stance. What we need to do is not to pay women's labor more, but to change the values altogether, eventually disqualifying monetarization and exchange.

How can a noncompetitive, nurturing paradigm compete with a competitive one? It is always at a disadvantage because competition is not its motivation or its value. Yet it is difficult to not compete without losing, thereby validating the other's stance. Another major problem is that if satisfying a need is free, one should not require recognition for it. But by not requiring recognition, women have themselves remained unconscious of the paradigm character of their actions and values.

Yet clearly the ego-oriented paradigm is pernicious. It results in the empowerment of the few and the disempowerment, depletion. death, and invisibility of the many Since the ego is a social product, artificial in some ways, it needs to be continually re-created and confirmed. This can also be done by violence against the other, including sexual violence Anyone in the position of the other is ignored, denied, excluded, degraded to confirm the superiority and identity of the dominant egos. I would like to avoid any moral discourse on this point (in fact, I see guilt as internalized exchange, preparing to pay back for the wrong one has done) and simply see the problems as logical and psychological consequences of the paradigms. Vengeance and justice require a balance of accounts. But we need kindness and nurturing, When we find that 85 percent of people in prison have been abused as children, we must realize justice is not the issue. Like charity, justice humanizes the exchange just enough to keep it from changing. We need a world based on giving and for giving, not retribution.

At this point, it seems that it is important to create transitional structures by which giving can be validated. Such strategies as cause-related marketing, where profits are given to social change projects to satisfy needs, use exchange for giving. The social change funding movement also empowers giving especially when it comes from an abundance rather than a scarcity model. But so do all the people in the peace, feminist, healing, and therapy movements who devote their time and energy to satisfying human and social needs. We are doing the right thing, but we don't know why. Sometimes, we even disparage other-orientation while we arc practicing it, because the exchange model is so pervasive and strong. We need to give our money, time, and attention to the change in values, and both new and traditional economic alternatives not dependent on exchange and the market. Women need to realize that our values and energies are important outside the family as well as inside. Social problems are themselves needs that we must satisfy. Our other-orientation must become the norm.

Then the ancient dream that the powerful will lay down their arms and the rich their goods might come true, led by women of the world. We can, for example, move within the "first world" to forgive-the "third world" debt. I call your attention to the word for-give.

Genevieve Vaughan is a feminist activist who is writing a book on the gift paradigm, and trying to live it by creating Thc Foundation for a Compassionate Society, as well as Change of Heart, Inc., a cause-related marketing business. This article is excerpted from her presentation to Thc Other Economic Summit, Houston, 1990; an expanded version appears in thc Spring 1991 issue of "Woman of Power."

Via: gift-economy.com

10 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Giving Up on Your Dream

noreply@blogger.com (Alby) — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 00:01:00 +0100

1. Why did you want to pursue this goal to begin with—and has anything changed?
You had a good reason for committing to this plan. Maybe you visualized a financially free future once you started this new business, or you realized you’d live longer and healthier if you lost 40 pounds.
Odds are you still want those things as much as you did before; you just stopped believing you could have them because your attempts have yet to yield results. Now you have to ask yourself: if you push through the discomfort will it be worth it in the end?

2. Have you been operating with too much information?
With so much information at our fingertips on the good ole World Wide Web, it’s easy to overwhelm yourself with more knowledge than you can apply. You read e-books and blogs, participate in teleconferences and coaching sessions, and join user forums to talk about getting things done.
One of two things happen as a result: you spend more time planning to act then acting; or you devote minimal energy to multiple plans instead of committing to one solid approach. Instead of drowning in all the data, why not narrow it down and start again from a less overwhelming space?

3. Did you set a smart goal? SMART goals are:
Specific—you know exactly what your world will look like when you achieve this goal.
Measurable—you have a specific plan to mark your progress as you go.
Attainable—you have the attitude and aptitude to make your goal reality.
Realistic—you’re willing and able to do the required work.
Time-bound—you’ve set a concrete timeframe for completion to create a sense of urgency.

If you didn’t set a SMART goal, you may have set yourself up for failure. How can you possibly make something happen if you don’t know exactly what you want, or didn’t really believe you could do it? Are you really willing to walk away when you didn’t give yourself every opportunity to succeed?

4. What’s the worst that will happen if you keep going and don’t reach your goal?
Often when I want to turn around it’s because I’m afraid of failing—afraid other people will be disappointed in me or judge me, or afraid I’ll have wasted my time. In all reality, no one ever judges us like we judge ourselves.; and we always grow and learn through the process of striving, regardless of what we attain.
If you don’t keep going, you’ll never know how far you could have gone, and you’ll miss out on being the person you’d become through the effort itself. If you do keep going, well, it’s like this quote: “Shoot for the moon, for even if you miss you’ll land among the stars.”

5. Are you afraid of succeeding?
One of my biggest problems is that I don’t like responsibility. There are many things I’d like to do, but I resist because I don’t want the power to impact, hurt, or disappoint other people. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have dreams—it’s just that I’m just scared of what achieving them will entail.
If you can relate to this feeling, perhaps you’ll respond well to the mantra I’ve been repeating: great power comes with great responsibility, but it also brings great rewards. If you play it safe, you won’t hurt or disappoint anyone, but you also won’t help or inspire anyone. And equally important, you won’t help or inspire yourself.

6. Are you acting on impulse or emotion instead of thinking things through?
Sometimes our emotions give us hints about what we want and what we should do, but other times they’re just responses to stress, and maybe even indications we’re on the right track. If you act in that moment of intense emotion—be it anger, fear, or frustration—you may regret it once the wave has passed.
So sit back. Take note of what you’re feeling. Feel it fully, without judging it or yourself. Then act when you’ve gotten to the other side. At least then you’ll know you made your decision in a moment of peace and clarity.

7. Would you enjoy giving a loved one the honest explanation for why you gave up?
And I mean honest. Would you like telling your daughter, I stopped trying to quit smoking because cigarettes are more important to me than having more golden years to spend with you? Would it be fun to tell your mother I decided not to go to school because I’d rather spend time with my boyfriend of three months then prepare for a career that will ensure I won’t end up jobless and homeless?
If you lay out it out like this, odds are you’ll realize you had a really good reason for doing this difficult thing, and no matter how challenging the process is, it’s worth plowing ahead.

8. Would your life be better if you gave up on this goal?
This may not sound motivational, but sometimes giving up is actually good thing. Perhaps you set a completely unrealistic goal, and its pursuit is filling you with a constant set of inadequacy and anxiety. Or maybe the goal isn’t in yours or your family’s best interest, and it’s better to get out before you invest so much time it’s near impossible to walk away.
You could easily use this as a justification to delude yourself, so think about it carefully. Is this goal really a good thing, when you weigh all the consequences of its fulfillment?

9. How much have you already put in?
A concept studied in social psychology called “the sunk cost principle” indicates the more we’ve invested in something, the less likely we are to prematurely walk away.
How invested are you? How much money and time have you devoted? How many sacrifices have you made? Are you really willing to chalk it all up as a loss because you’re not feeling confident in your abilities?

10. What would you tell someone else if they were in your shoes?
Would you tell your best friend to throw in the towel because she can’t possibly reach her goal? Or would you practice your finest motivational speech and help her see what you see in her potential? Unless you’re secretly a frenemy who hopes she fails in life odds are you’d push her to be her best—so why not push yourself?
It may sound kind of cheesy, but you need to be your own best friend. You, more than anyone in this world, deserve your belief and motivation.
If you’ve gone through all these questions and still feel resolute about the decision to give up, you have my blessing to abandon your goal. (Bet you feel so relieved!)
If you don’t—if there’s some lingering doubt—keep working toward that dream that fills you with passion. Take a different approach if you need to. Enlist new assistance. Scale back your time commitment to something you can more easily maintain. But whatever you do, don’t give yourself a reason to one day utter the words, “I quit because I was scared.”

Via: tinybuddha

How to Come up with Good Ideas for Startups - the Scribd Story and the Trip Method

noreply@blogger.com (Alby) — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 16:16:00 +0100

How to Come up with Good Ideas for Startups - the Scribd Story and the Trip Method

Don’t chase the money, chase the dream

noreply@blogger.com (Alby) — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 22:36:00 +0100

At LeWeb last week in Paris, Tony Hsieh delivered a very inspiring speech about his company - Zappos - and the importance of company culture. We have highlighted below the main points of his message and explained why we think that these ideas are very relevant to Sandbox.

Define your core values

A company that has a good culture makes well in the long term. Companies have to commit to them and avoid making compromises, which also means hire and fire people based on these values. For Tony, the right way to start a company is to define its core-values.

Don’t chase the money, chase the dream

It is crucial to have a vision that goes beyond money and profits. Don’t begin a business with the objective to earn money. Do what you are passionate about and as you will do it well, the money will follow. Ask yourself what would you be so passionate about doing that you would do it for 10 years without earning a dime.

Once you have a strong vision, you will find it much easier to motivate yourself and your employees. You can motivate people with financial incentives or fear, but true motivation goes along with inspiration. If you can inspire your employees making them share your vision, you don’t need to worry about motivating them anymore.

Keep asking why

Ask yourself what you are pursuing in life: buying a home? getting married? Once you have the answers, ask why again. Why do you want to buy a house? Why do you want to get married? Eventually, everyone ends up with the same answer about what they pursue in life: happiness.

What is happiness about?

There are four factors that create happiness:

1. Perceived control
2. Perceived progress
3. Connectiveness
4. Meaning (being part of something bigger than yourself)

Once you have understood them, you can apply them in your business to better motivate your employees: Zappos for example gives small promotions every 6 months instead a big one every 18 months, increasing the feeling of progress among its employees.

The 3 types of happiness

Tony sees 3 types of happiness: pleasure, engagement and meaning. Most people start looking for the first one, hoping to then be able to reach the others, which is the wrong way to go.

- Pleasure is for example about buying new things. It works well, but only as long as you can sustain it.
- Engagement is about feeling passionate about what you are doing. It works better than pleasure, but is not sustainable either.
- Meaning is about finding in life what provides happiness in the long term. Finding meaning creates a long-lasting feeling of happiness.

Via: sandbox

Does every startup need a Steve Jobs?

noreply@blogger.com (Alby) — Fri, 4 Dec 2009 23:08:00 +0100

What does Steve Jobs really do for Apple?
I had a recent conversation on Apple’s incredible design culture and what it would take to create that in a startup. In many ways, it seems like an insurmountably difficult challenge to play the role of Steve Jobs, with his god-like sense of product aesthetics and interactions.

And yet, Apple has hundreds of products and experiences – hardware, software, HR materials, commercials, etc. Steve Jobs certainly doesn’t have time to work on the design of every Apple product, and of course has 35,000 employees to manage. So what does Steve Jobs really do, to create the amazing design culture at Apple?

And more importantly, can a startup hope to even start to capture the same kind of culture?

Well, let me give you my best guess

IDEO’s product framework for Desirability, Feasibility, and Viability
First, let’s take a quick detour and talk about IDEO’s perspective on new product development – this is documented as part of their 100+ PDF on human centered design, but also recounted to me by my patient girlfriend who works there.

The idea is that all products ultimately come from an epic struggle between three perspectives: Desirability, Feasibility, and Viability. IDEO focuses on new products from the desirability side, which means they think about how to make sexy products with clear value propositions, and think technology and business goals flow from that. Most of their Fortune 500 clients do not act this way, of course, which is why they have to hire IDEO.

Here’s the diagram included in their HCD toolkit:

The way this was retold to me is that these factors map into functional parts of a business:

Viability = Business focus (marketing, finance)
Feasibility = Engineering focus (technologies, agile process, etc.)
Desirability = Design focus (customers, aesthetics, etc.)
Business-focused product perspective: Viability
For business-oriented products, the focus might be on any of the following:

“hot markets”
making money
funding potential
distribution
metrics
The idea there is that you get to a product via one of these first-order items. A business-oriented entrepreneur might identify a market, then try to come up with a product within the market – for example, “wow, Zynga is making $250M/year, and fish games are big. I should come up with a social gaming product too.”

I would also argue that “corporate” thinking (including MBAs and biz plan competitions) fundamentally revolve around this approach – the most important thing becomes the analytical discussion around the business, rather than the core user experience itself. Financial metrics and market sizes become the dominating point of discussion – I would argue also that most venture capitalists fall into this bucket.

The big “religions” in this perspective are frameworks like Built to Last, Crossing the Chasm, Customer Development, Blue Ocean Strategy, even Efficient Market Hypothesis. You might also count Six Sigma, all the stuff in McKinsey quarterlies, etc.

Engineering-focused product perspective: Feasibility
For technology-oriented products, the focus might be on the following:

programming language and development stack
cool technologies or libraries
engineering processes (agile or otherwise)
For people who use this as a first-order filter, you might end up with a line of thinking like, “BitTorrent is really cool, how do we build a business around it?”

I would also put engineering processes like agile into this, because that can easily become a first-order item in how to build a product as well. Agile won’t work for every team, for every product, in every situation, and yet it’s viewed as an all-purpose hammer – does that really make sense?

The big “religions” in this perspective are frameworks are agile, scrum, open source, etc. I might also count the “ecosystems” like Rails as a unique culture with its own set of beliefs and conventions. Frameworks like “Lean Startups” ultimately combine both Business and Engineering goals, via Customer Development plus Agile.

Design-focused product perspective: Desirability
For design-focused products, the focus might be on:

context, culture, and goals
customer goals and product experience
design aesthetics and interactions
The first-order filter in this case might be “Sick people go to hospitals and have a terrible experience – how do we improve that?” The tools employed at this initial stage might include user research, development of personas and user goals, and rapid prototyping to explore many product concepts.

The big “religions” here are led by Apple and their aesthetics and standards. And of course folks like IDEO and their “design thinking” ideas.

How business and engineering goals encroach on the desirability of a product
Reading through the above, perhaps you have identified yourself as prioritizing one versus the other. And in general, the prioritization of the three different goals drives what kinds of product experiences you can build.

From the perspective of making a sexy, highly desirable product, you’ll find lots of objections from business or engineering:

“spending money on visual design is too expensive”
“polishing a product will make the process too slow”
“this product is boring to implement”
“can you redesign this product so we can build it in 1 week sprints?”
“this target user is great, but we want the product to be more powerful and support more audiences”
“but Zynga doesn’t do this, can you just copy them?”
“why build so many prototypes that get thrown away? That’s costly and slow”
“if you added X to this product, it would put us into strategic market Y”
etc.
How do you handle questions like the above?

All of them are great questions, and of course the right answer means you have to find a balance in the approach. But what is the expense towards the core of your product experience?

Back to Steve Jobs – what does he really do?
Long story short, my hypothesis is that Steve Jobs is one of the rare CEOs who is very focused on product desirability. In battles with the business and technology goals, desirability will almost always win out.

So his role isn’t that of a designer, but rather Chief Design Advocate. This means:

he makes it clear that products should be “insanely great”
he recruits a top design team, and protects them from competing goals
he is willing to spend money, adjust technology processes, all for the goal of highly desirable products
he convinces financial analysts, industry pundits, etc. that product design is very important
To me, the amazing part about this is: Any company can do it.

Maybe not as good as Jobs, but they can decide to make it a priority – but few companies do. With the pressure of quarterly earnings, what competitors are doing, and employee aspirational desires, the focus moves off of killer experiences for customers – that’s no good.

If the above is true, then any of us can be the Steve Jobs of our team. Start by prioritizing design and desirability, and place it on a better footing relative to engineering and business goals. Learn the tools, develop your own religion, and start building great product experiences.

It almost sounds so easy!

http://andrewchenblog.com/2009/12/04/does-every-startup-need-a-steve-jobs/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+AndrewChensBlog+(Andrew+Chen+(@andrew_chen))&utm_content=Twitter