Monthly Archives: January 2010

Generation Collaboration

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Read enough about the Millennial generation and its easy to become convinced that they’re all A.D.D., would prefer to go to yoga classes than put in time climbing the corporate ladder and have an overpowering sense of entitlement.

As with any stereotype there’s probably some truth in there, if by broad generalization only.  Milennials are often defined  as the generation that grew up playing baseball in leagues where every kid on every team got a trophy. This illustration is usually used to underscore their pampered adolescence. However, there might be a benefit to growing up in a world where everyone got a trophy just for playing on a team.

That benefit is an affinity for collaboration.

Growing up, Millennials were rewarded for team effort, even if that effort failed to win a game or land them on all-star teams. The message taught early on was that collaboration lead to rewards.

This is exactly what I have observed in the Millennials I’ve had the pleasure of working with. I should note here that I am turning 40 soon. That puts me squarely in Generation X. Not a far cry from Millennials but a gap nonetheness. In truth, Xer and Millennial profiles have some overlap. Both groups are noted for their comfort with technology. Both are also environmentally conscious as well as more likely to try and strike a balance between work and the rest of life. However, unlike my Gen X peers, I see a collaborative quality in Millennials which is nothing short of game changing should it survive into that generation’s senior executive years (meaning their later 40′s, 50′s and 60′s).

The Medium is the Millennial.
I suspect that the Millennial  preference for collaboration stems from having grown up with collaborative media.

For the Millennials that I have observed (and this is admittedly not a scientific perspective I am offering), collaboration seems to come as easily as switching on a laptop and tapping into Wikipedia. They are comfortable asking friends for help, crowdsourcing input and even talking to direct competitors in search of solutions. My superiors in business growing up, and my peers now, also collaborate, but it takes conscious effort and often has back room office politics attached to it. I’ve also noticed we old(er) folk are also not as intuitively adept at using collaborative technologies for our daily work routines. I might typify it this way (and again, these are very broad generalizations):

  • Boomers grew up with printed documents and interoffice memos. They default to wanting to print their emails to review them and like having ‘hard copies’ in file cabinets.
  • Xers are more comfortable marking up digital files, but they default to storing those files on a local hard drive.
  • Millennials will take their documents on any device and keep the ‘original’ in the Cloud. They default to collaborative systems like Google Docs and Google Wave (and often are frustrated when their older co-workers are not opening embracing these platforms).

Cover Your Ass vs. I’ve Got Your Back.
Notoriously self-motivated, Gen Xers learned early on that corporations (and even parents) wouldn’t necessarily be there for us.  We learned to fend for ourselves after school while Mom and Dad worked and later in the professional world as corporations did their cyclical downsizing. A positive byproduct of this self reliance is entrepreneurialism. A drawback is a ‘Cover Your Ass’ mentality that  undermines collaboration by teaching self reliance above all else. Millennials don’t seem to carry this burden. They don’t seem to worry as much about Plan B. Instead, they cover each other’s backs, helping peers – often without compensation of any kind – purely because they seem to collectively believe that by making others smarter they will gain too.

The question is how much Milennial’s  current life stage figures into their open collaboration. As Millennials move into positions where they are running companies, will they continue to be as openly collaborative? The stakes get higher as they age – building successful businesses, getting promoted, growing their stock portfolios and building out a comfortable lifestyle for their families. As they get older  will competitive instinct kick in and trump collaboration?

To be decidedly Gen X about it; The Flower Children of the 60′s became the Yuppies of the 80′s, exchanging their youthful values and second-hand clothing for big homes, fancy cars, new gadgets and tailored suits. Yesterday’s Gen X ‘slackers’ who opted for ‘McJobs’ rather than a corporate gig are now moving to the helm of companies and making their mark in the Fortune 500. One might expect the collaborative Millennials of today’s young workforce will similarly yield to the pressure to compete, succeed and acquire that is a big part of our capitalist society.

But what if they didn’t? What if the social, communal culture of the Internet with its open-source platforms, free content and commitment to the wisdom of sharing informs how they do business when they’re running businesses?

This would be interesting to observe. I am eager to watch Millennials assume the mantel of companies and organizations. I will be curious how their early experiences on the social web mitigate the lessons of capitalism which are far more Machiavellian. Faced with competition vs. collaboration, what will Millennials do?

The tension between ‘share’ (as in between individuals) on the one side and ‘share’ (as in marketshare) on the other, is destabilizing the foundations of entire industries (think music, publishing, technology). If they are truly Generation Collaboration then this friction between the communal underpinnings of the Internet and the capitalist trappings of business will only increase. That has been and would continue to be something extraordinary to observe.

We live in interesting times.

Failure vs. Flailure

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I’ve come across several interesting pieces that involve the concept of failure. Failure is praised as being the key to success. It is glamorized and made an essential ingredient in would-be innovative corporate cultures. When you scratch beneath the surface though, failure is often superficially represented. Failing well takes process and effort.

10,000 Hours
Malcolm Gladwell builds a strong case in Outliers that one of the things outstanding individuals in their field have in common is a lot of practice. Specifically, they accrue 10,000 hours early on in life. His point is that standout successes are less about talent than time-in (and the circumstances that allow for that level of commitment). That 10,000 hours is tied directly to failure because in those 10,000 hours there is a lot of failing going on. To make use of failure then, takes a lot of effort. If you work at something hard for 6 hours a day you get just over 2000 hours in in a year. That’s five years of extremely focused work time just to reach that minimum 10,000 hours. Given our fragmented days none of us gets in 6 focused hours. Are we setting enough time aside to accumulate enough failure to succeed?

The neuroscience of ‘gut’ intuition.
Jonah Lehrer’s book How We Decide tackles failure from another angle, decision making. He spends a good deal of time demonstrating how experts in their fields – and these are often life or death fields like firefighting and aviation – have trained and practiced so much that they’re able to sense – often without consciously knowing why – what the right decision is. This gut instinct often saves their lives. It also is directly connected to Gladwell’s 10,000 hours. That intense training time – and the inevitable mistakes made during it – is necessary to develop a useful gut instinct.

The Path of Mastery
George Leonard’s book Mastery tackles failure from yet a third perspective, that of the plateau. Rather than getting something wrong, many people in developing their skills hit periods where they simply don’t get any better. This plateau is familiar to anyone who practices sports, music, arts, etc. Those plateaus are part of the 10,000 hours commitment to an endeavor. Sticking to something even when you’re not getting noticeably better at it takes a degree of resolve. These plateaus are also periods of learning but this knowledge is accrued more subtly and often through repetition. This is akin to riding a bicycle. You may not get faster, or more successful with stunts, but every slippery road you navigate or rock you hop adds to that intuitive ability to ‘feel’ your way through. It may feel like more of the same on the surface, but underneath deeper learning is happening.

For all three authors success is a product of a commitment of energy, focus and time. It can’t be rushed. But it also can’t be squandered.

Taking Scientific Method out of the laboratory
“Work smarter not harder” is a popular cliche for the benefits of efficiency. I might recast it in terms of learning from failure. While it is popular to have a corporate culture that rewards people willing to fail, without a process to fail well, resources, money and energy can be squandered. Compounding this is the reality of the modern world. Businesses thrive on ‘first-mover advantage’ and ‘speed to market’. This creates an environment of pressure to rush things forward.  In doing so, sometimes we mistakenly embrace flailure instead of failure.

Flailure (which is my own word) is experimentation without process. It is a shotgun approach to solving problems. Try this, try that, oh, and try that too. Flailure often happens with the same energy and commitment but with no useful results. Any time a project succeeds or fails and no one knows exactly why, that is a flailure and its a tremendous waste.

We were all taught scientific method in high school. Yet for some reason it rarely finds its way outside laboratories. To make the most of those 10,000 hours of practice time we need to use scientific process. Any project – marketing, financial, operational – can be thought of as an experiment. Doing so means determining what the objective is, developing a hypothesis on how do to it, designing an experiment to test the hypothesis, controlling for interference which might obstruct evaluation of the tested factors and then recording the data properly to conclude what the smartest next step forward will be. This doesn’t require a lab coat or PhD, just a little foresight and thought upfront, before resources are spent.

There is an army adage popularized by General Omar Bradley “Amateurs study strategy, professionals study logistics.” The smartest strategy in the world is only a useful as its execution. If failure is an inevitable part of the strategy for success, shouldn’t we be focused on setting ourselves up to fail usefully? The alternative is crossing our fingers hoping something will work and if it doesn’t having to start at the beginning all over again.

Bringing the scientific process to our vocation begins with paying careful attention to the ‘devil in the details’. The big idea is an adrenaline rush for sure, but its ultimate usefulness – whether that idea succeeds or fails – lies a reasoned approach to the small steps taken toward realizing that idea.

iDoubt: iPad will not have the impact of iPod

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Ed Note: 01/27/10 I updated the name from iTablet to iPad to match today’s announcement re: the product name.

Now that the news of Apple’s tablet device has percolated up from the likes of Mashable to the Wall Street Journal it’s interesting to see how the story evolves. Mashable and other geekerati sites are rumor mills about features. WSJ’s article is about industry and use.

While initial hype and limited sales may come from the feature-obsessed technophile fringe, marketplace success (other than good PR for Apple just by putting it out there) will lie largely on the uptake by non-geeks. Ultimately this will come down to usefulness. It’s tempting to compare the revolution created by the iPod to what could happen with the iPad (or whatever it will be called). I don’t think it will be the same and here’s why:

Music vs. Magazines & TV
The popularity of music has never waned. Everyone listens to music. Many people, especially young people, have parts of their own identity wrapped up in it. In this way the content was never the problem for consumers, the distribution (and cost) were. MP3 compression solved these problems by making music portable, small (in terms of file size and physical size) and cheap (or free). The iPod became the defacto distribution system for MP3 files. Apple’s brilliance was in seeing the future of music in MP3 before anyone else did. They got the first mover advantage and combined with an elegant user experience iPod dominated while others have been playing catch-up. Today the eBook is solving a similar problem – portability and cost improvement. Fewer people read books than listen to music and so that revolution will be smaller.

Magazines and newspapers (one of the target content types for iPad) have a different problem. Yes, physical magazines and newspapers are more cumbersome than digital versions and would benefit in the way eBooks do from digital delivery but that’s not why newspapers and magazines are failing. If it were, moving them online and making the content free (the same tactic that revolutionized the music business) would’ve begun solving the problem. It hasn’t. Website magazines and newpapers have not stanched the bleeding and the publishers have not been able to restructure their businesses to live in the lower-revenue environment they now finds themselves in. (Neither has music entirely, but its made some progress by managing bands differently.)

Let’s start with news. News travels at Twitter-speed now, undermining the new industry’s role in ‘breaking news.’ What’s they’re left with is depth and commentary, two things they can do more professionally than amateurs with Twitter accounts. Newsweek and others have moved to an editorial/commentary format. The jury is still out on whether its interesting enough for people to keep paying for.

Beyond news there’s gossip, celebratory voyeurism, and niche interests. Perez Hilton is doing gossip and celebrity voyeurism better than People magazine. Niche interests also struggle with specialty websites. Even commentary is a tougher market as bloggers wedge their way onto the shortlist of respectable commentators.

So will making InTouch, People, Newsweek, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and other publications available on the iPad make their content more relevant to people than it is today? I’m not so sure. The reality is, increasingly people with limited time are choosing different types of content. They’re less reliant on traditional magazine and newspaper publishers not because of the distribution system, but because there are more content options available. Publishers are destined to get a smaller piece of the pie. By my observing, people can get traditional publications online and free today and they’re still choosing alternatives anyhow. Secondly, to get the same content I can get free on my laptop or iPhone now on a tablet I need to drop $1000 and potentially purchase a subscription. Why would I do that?

Television is the other traditional medium that the Journal points to as being a target for the iPad. The problem again is more likely a matter of content. Watching TV has not gotten harder or more cumbersome. In fact the TV experience has been improved and made more accessible by home theatre, flat screen television, and Hulu-like web-based services etc. Yet viewership declines on programs across the board. That tells me the channel isn’t really the problem, the relevance of the content is. With only 24 hours in a day people choose what interests them, and now they can find anything they want. An increasing percentage of that content is coming from alternative providers like video game creators and pro-am content creators. Hollywood has fewer ‘hits’ in a year because people are finding interesting things elsewhere. Sure, there will always be a market for TV, but I don’t think making people pay to view it on an iPad will increase these programs ratings or share of market.

The last issue is pure practicality. If I’m already watching a downloaded movie on my iPod Touch will a 12″ screen experience on the commuter train be worth the extra $1K and the bulk in my bag (which is already heavy with a laptop)? The tablet is less portable and more expensive and delivers the same material on a larger screen. One more device in my backpack for something I can already get on devices I have? No, thanks. Short of some remarkable new functionality I can’t see how the device becomes indispensible the way my laptop and phone are.

I’m sure there will be endless hype about the iPad. Having impacted music and telephony so significantly in recent years the expectations are high and Apple has something of a Hand-Of-God reputation. But they miss like anyone else and 5 years from now, my guess is, this will be recorded as a ‘miss’ in terms of a revolutionary, game-changing device. It’s destined to be a fringe toy like the Air netbook, the original Apple Cube computer and even Apple TV. All were interesting and innovative products but they just didn’t fit in with most people’s lives.

Tableta Rosa: In a new category success may not require sales.

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Recently, I had a witty exchange  with my friend Brad on his blog (see comments section). Brad was marveling at Bumptop and a potential tablet device. He mentioned that this sexy new duo would ‘conquer the world’ and ‘change computing as we know it’. This, he said, would all happen within two years.

Not to be a buzzkill but here’s why it won’t and why even if it doesn’t, a new tablet might still be ‘successful’ for the company launching it first (probably Apple).

As ‘luck’ would have it, I had a chance to test tablet computing a little. About a month ago I broke the ulna bone in my forearm while practicing Aikido. With my mouse arm effectively out of commission I decided to resort to a stylus setup as I use my other arm for handwriting. I got access to a Wacom tablet - admittedly this is not the same as the highly anticipated tablet of the likes Apple is probably going to release. Still the Wacom device allowed me to experience working with a tablet of sorts day to day. As I did, some things became fairly clear.

Here’s the challenge to tablet computing as I see it:

To be practical, the tablet needs a keyboard-like data entry tool.
As someone who had trouble typing for the passed month, I’ve become acutely aware of just how much typing I do. Speech-recognition software is interesting (in my injured desperation I also tried it out) but it isn’t quite workplace practical yet. From the images (of dubious origin) of the Apple tablet online it seems Steve J and Co. have likely already anticipated the need for a keyboard-like interface and will include it in the device. Smart move but…

To be portable the tablet should not need a separate keyboard.
Speaking from experience; if you want to do anything more than watch videos, listen to music, surf the web, play games and possibly send short text messages (all things you can do on a smaller, cheaper, more portable smart phone), you’ll need a keyboard. However, a big part of the appeal of the tablet concept lies in the sleek simplicity of the device overall (few buttons, knobs, ports and keys) and its inherent portability. Otherwise, why not buy a laptop or desktop machine? Hauling peripherals around  isn’t going to work. So, the keyboard should be on the screen. But…

To have an ergonomically comfortable experience the keyboard will likely have to move off the screen.
Ergonomics is the big unaddressed hurdle in tablets. A tablet on a table or your lap puts the viewing screen perpendicular to the angle of your face 95% of your upright, waking existence. The tablet therefore forces the user to crane their neck in a way humans are not anatomically designed for. Stare down at your shoes for 45minutes. How’s your neck feeling?

Wacom knew this and built a stand onto the tablet I used. It made the device bulky, heavy and not especially portable but it was practical.

Conflicting needs for tablet computing.
So that’s the rub if tablets are to become consumer devices. To be portable, it should be an all-in-one device. To be practical and ergonomic it likely needs a separate keyboard for longer computing sessions. The obvious solution would be to build a folding tablet with two touchscreens. But that’s basically a laptop isn’t it?

Another option would be to use the tablet like a sub-laptop. Keep the working peripherals at your workstation and tote the tablet from place to place. So much for writing long blog posts at Starbucks though.

(It’s worth mentioning here that the consumer marketplace isn’t the only one and tablets may have numerous business uses in warehouses, sales floors, bank branches, etc.)

A bump in the road for BumpTop.
This brings me to BumpTop. Admittedly it is very sexy and feels like we’re inching toward the interfaces from the movie Minority Report. However, 3D space is tricky for people to work with. To date 3D in computing has not been especially successful with the computing masses (think VRML or SecondLife). While 3D is cool in video games, experientially playing Halo is a lot different than writing a business report or compiling research. Interestingly most of BumpTops examples are more entertainment oriented – cropping photos and such. That’s fine if your hardware device is an entertainment toy like an iPod Touch. But when serious use is called for, you’re back at the keyboard dilemma.

What is often forgotten by techy pioneers is just exactly how technologically literate the average computer user really is (and as importantly – feels like committing the time to learn to be). There’s a reason Web 2.0 has has seen a simplification, not complication, of website interfaces. To make sharing- the backbone of the social web – accessible to all, websites need to be navigable by all, and that means K.I.S.S. Similarly videogames, even two-fisted Wii games, have a very limited feature set during game play, nothing near the complexity of needs a device must meet to do common work computing.

For my money, I’m not convinced 3D navigation of computer files offers any benefits aside from sexiness and novelty in its current state. When we’re a little closer to Minority Report, then I might change my opinion but don’t count on that in two years.

So will a tablets be successful? Well, first define what ‘successful’ means.
Like Netbooks, the earliest adopters and technophiles will glom onto tablets, snap them up, show them off and talk about them like the Second Coming. Also like Netbooks, their ‘real life’ utility will be limited and their mass adoption modest at best unless the product developers find ways to make the tablet ergonomically friendly and generally more practical while also keeping it portable. For the low four-figure pricetag they’re talking about, if the tablet is just a big iPhone it will be a rich geek’s toy not an indispensable piece of hardware. Maybe that’s a profitable marketplace, I don’t know.

Interestingly a fabric-based, flexible and wireless keyboard might span the portability-practicality gap. If you could fold the keyboard into the device and take it out only when you need it, then that $1000 XL iPod Touch you just bought might make a business write-off on your tax return afterall.

Or, perhaps the tablet will be smaller and more Kindle sized – a size ‘L’ iPod Touch which retails at what current iPhones do now. That’s the consumer gadget marketplace and it can be profitable for sure. Then again, 82% of mobile phone users are still using the simpler, cheaper ‘feature phones’ and haven’t even gotten a smart phone yet. Makes that 2-year world conquest still harder to believe.

Of course the reality could be that like fax machines, the whole tablet concept is an interim advancement whose shelf life will be limited.

Does the tablet need to sell to be ‘successful’?
I’ve often thought Apple puts out some new products (the Air laptop, the old Cube, the Newton way back when) less to actually sell them en mass than to keep their street cred as the innovator in hardware. To the degree an Apple tablet is just a big iPhone/iPod Touch, perhaps development wasn’t super expensive and the street-cred earned will help Apple retain the clout it needs to dominate the market in mindshare. After all, even if you can’t afford a $1000 toy, you can get the iPod touch – tiny, old school version – for a few hundred bucks and soak up the sexiness of being an Apple touchscreen dude.

From a marketing perspective that would essentially be product development as brand advertising – something that put Apple on the map with the inclusion of a mouse on home PCs (c1984) and again with the colorful iMac bubble computers (c1990s). In fact, the earliest iPods had this effect and in general the whole iPod/iPhone category has gotten a lot of people rethinking their commitment to the Wintel platform in general for their home computers.

Given the cost, reach and efficacy of a year-long national TV campaign, developing the tablet was probably cheaper and will be more effective as an advertisement for Apple the brand.

Maybe that’s all the success the tablet needs to make it worthwhile.