flights

In this week’s installment of his ‘Circuits’ column, David Pogue asks, “Are you taking advantage of Web 2.0?” By ‘you’ he means your company, and he describes the response this question got from the attendees at a recent PR conference:

“…within seconds, there were 132 responses on the screen in a huge, scrolling list. ‘Not enough money.’ ‘Don’t understand it.’ ‘No technical resources.’ ‘Not enough manpower.’ ‘No visible return on investment.’ ‘Fear of ridicule.’ ‘Fear of slander.’ ‘Fear of permanence.’ ‘Fear of the public running amok.’”

There are lots of common fears in there, and they’re all reasonable at first glance. Companies are understandably afraid of opening themselves up to ridicule and slander from a public running amok, knowing that all the messy results will live forever, just a Google search away. And they’ve seen some embarrassing failures from companies who’ve tried to embrace the new paradigm – like the Chevy Tahoe debacle, and Wal-Mart’s fake blog (or flog) scandal, to name just two incidents. So the safest bet is to simply stay away from all things Web 2.0.

The problem with this approach, obviously, is that the public is already running amok. That’s what the public does. If they want to slander you, they have YouTube and MySpace and a million other places to do it. Sticking your head in the sand doesn’t make all this stuff go away. It just makes your company look silly – or worse, aloof, uncaring and behind the times – and ultimately more vulnerable to whatever mud they might be slinging.

So if it’s unwise – or unrealistic – to stay out of the fray, then what’s the best strategy for jumping in? The other questions from the PR conference attendees fall into this category. More and more companies have recognized the need to participate, but they don’t know where to focus or how much to invest.

There are lots of success stories. Big companies like Dell and Mariott have generated good will and good press through their forays into Web 2.0, and this has surely translated into dollars. But it still comes down to the question of ROI. If one of the ultimate goals of embracing Web 2.0 is to engender good will, then how do you quantify it? How do you measure success?

I’ve just been reading some Jeff Jarvis’ recent posts about Senator Obama (like this one), and it’s a clear reminder that even a lot of smart people will ultimately cast their vote based on a general gut assessment of the candidates.

I don’t know where Jarvis sits on the political spectrum, but he dissects and parses Obama’s speech along all the same lines as the stream of other conservatives who criticized it. Jarvis makes it very clear that he doesn’t want to give Obama the benefit of the doubt – which is fair. But like the other pundits who criticized Obama’s speech, Jarvis takes some pains to manufacture the doubt.

The bottom line seems to be that people who see the world in very black and white terms (not speaking of race now) didn’t like Obama’s speech. Black and white thinkers need to push things toward one end of the spectrum or the other – a thing is either right or wrong, good or evil, us or them. These are the “J” types in Myers-Briggs. They wanted Obama to disown or denounce pastor Wright, because Wright is clearly a wrong-headed person.

Maybe conservatives tend to be “J” types, because conservatives tend to frame things this way. Tax cuts are good. Illegal immigrants are bad.  There’s an axis of evil, and these countries are part of it. Black and white thinkers don’t appreciate people who push things toward the middle, who try to highlight complexities and nuances. They think these people are weak, equivocating, slippery, untrustworthy.

Gray area thinkers are the “P” types in Myers-Briggs. We (yep, I’m a “P”) see black and white thinkers as crude, simple-minded, judgmental, prejudiced. We were exuberant in our praise of Obama’s speech because we’ve had eight years of Bush. Yes, we’ve had it. Had it with his brand of black and white thinking. It was refreshing to hear a politician talk about something in honest terms and not try to boil it down to right and wrong.

Obama loves a man who is deeply flawed. He has striven to understand the nature and origin of the man’s flaws.

Who among us is not flawed? Who among us hasn’t loved someone who is flawed? I don’t know about you “J” types out there, but we “P” folks understand that everyone is flawed.

My stepfather had a mean streak in him. He used to call me a “fag” (among other things) when he got angry, because I liked to draw and paint and cook, and because one of my high school buddies sported an earring. He pushed my mom around a couple of times. On the other hand, he taught me a lot, gave my family a lot.

He was a guy who’d had a really rough life in some ways, a guy who’d been deeply hurt and betrayed a few times. Understanding this about my stepfather helped me dismiss his verbal abuse and put it in its own box, so to speak. Should I have dismissed (or disowned) him and not just his abuse?

That’s not how love and family and friendships work. Anyone who thinks these things are black and white is kidding himself.

‘h’ is for hypocrisy.

If the premier selling point of a hybrid vehicle is fuel economy, then you have to wonder why Lexus won’t reveal how economic the 600h actually is. This information is nowhere on the Lexus website or in most of the 3rd party reviews.

It took me some digging, but I did finally find a review that addresses the fuel economy of the 600h and as you might guess from all the secrecy, it’s not great. In fact, Lexus estimates the 600h will only get about 20mpg in the city, which is just 4mpg better than the non-hybrid LS 460. Bad, but not terrible for a big luxury car I suppose. But how about the fact that the 600h will only get 22mpg on the highway, which is worse than the 460. All this for $110,000.

The bottom line is the 600h is a stupid novelty designed to help limousine liberals feel better about themselves. And based on the latest Lexus commercials – where they make the ‘h’ out to be a kind of badge of moral superiority – they seem to know it.

Two thumbs way down Lexus.

A couple of times in my career as a User Experience professional, I’ve worked for bosses whom I considered to be ridiculously (some even dangerously) incompetent. One recent boss would stroll in at 10 am and leave at 3 every day. Even during his limited hours, we rarely saw him, and I can’t remember him pushing a single initiative or idea in the years I worked at that company.

At a busy agency chock full of brilliant, hard-working people, he seemed to maintain a low profile and accomplish nothing. Nevertheless, he was promoted twice while I was there, and shortly after I left, he was promoted once again – this time to the highest-profile User Experience position in the company.

He mastered his career without doing his job. We’ve all worked with people like this, and they’re easy to dislike. Their singular skill is building alliances with people who can affect their career trajectory. They might appear to have a low profile, but they are determined in their back-channel dealings. The worst of them are passive-aggressive and two-faced, never missing an opportunity to take more credit for something than they are due, or stab someone else in the back.

How to recognize them
In job interviews, they spend an inordinate amount of time haggling for more salary and better titles. Once they’re hired, they take full advantage of executives’ open door policies. They figure out which ones they can manipulate, and they spend a lot of time behind closed doors with them. Eventually, this extends to lunches, golf outings and more, where they have ample opportunity to spin stories of their own greatness and the incompetence of everyone else.

What to do about them
If they have cast their spells on the right people, there’s not much you can do. If you work at a company where the execs are fooled by people like this, then update your resume and move on.

What to do if you’re one of them
If you’re one of these people, then you don’t know it. You think you’re awesome, and although most of your colleagues can’t stand you, the ones who can help your career are in your court. Congratulations.

At the other end of the spectrum are people who excel at their jobs but struggle to move onward and upward in their careers. In fact, being great at your job can almost guarantee career paralysis. Your company won’t promote you because it would mean replacing you with someone inferior. On the plus side, these people are much more likable than the back-stabbing, two-faced good-at-career people. You just feel a little sorry for them (or yourself, if you’re in this category) as you repeatedly watch less-qualified people zoom by in the passing lane.

Sometimes these people are vindicated – Al Gore didn’t secure the presidency, but he eventually won an Oscar – but you can’t count on it. And, come to think of it, an Oscar pales in comparison to the most important job on the planet.

How to recognize them
They are the go-to people for solving actual business problems, so their names come up all the time in ad hoc work conversations and meetings – often preceded by “go ask…” These people are in high demand, and they’re always busy with actual work.

What to do about them
If you’d like to see them get that well-deserved promotion, then sing their praises in conversations with key people (the same ones the good-at-career folks are always having lunch with). Be specific about the role you can see them stepping into.

What to do if you’re one of them
You probably know you’re more skilled and more qualified than the people who’ve passed you by, and you’re a bit baffled. You need to get on the radar of the people who can take you places. Start acting a little like the leader you want to be. Figure out how to delegate some of your busy work, then carve off a meaningful bit of your boss’s job for yourself – with his or her blessing of course.

I didn’t see Obama’s landmark speech today, but I read the transcript. I admit I was moved by it, and although there was certainly a practical or tactical element to it – in the context of his presidential chances – I think it’s important to look past that and consider his actual words.

I wish CNN agreed. Unfortunately, the whole focus of their coverage was to discuss whether the speech would work, and by “work” they meant only whether it would put to rest questions around Obama’s association with pastor Jeremiah Wright. They used Rush Limbaugh’s response of all things, to raise doubts, as if Limbaugh’s response wasn’t determined before the speech was even made, as if Limbaugh at this point is anything more than a washed up, irrelevant joke on the outer fringes of the media, preaching to an ever-smaller choir.

They didn’t talk about whether the speech would “work” in the sense of whether it will remind us that individuals are complex, that the issue of race is complex, that none of this is black and white – in any sense of the phrase. They didn’t talk about whether the speech would “work” in the sense of whether it will help us shift our attention to more concrete and ultimately solvable issues like the economy, healthcare and the environment – where people of all races share the same concerns.

It’s bullshit cynical coverage CNN, and you will lose more and more of your young audience as long as you pollute the airwaves with this kind of crap. No amount of fancy touchscreen infographics and talk of “liveblogging” will change that fact.

March Madness is here, and my productivity is already suffering (case in point: here I am blogging about March Madness in the middle of my workday). I’ve started working on my bracket and looking around the Internetz for a little help. I don’t know whether to trust the wisdom of crowds, the experts or my own careful analysis. There are resources on the web to support each of these strategies, and I thought I’d write up a quick survey…

Crowdsourcing your picks

Yahoo Sports has a new application called the “Team Ranker” that’s sort of like a Hot-or-Not for the various matchups. One risk in this strategy is that the rankings might be dominated by people who know nothing about college basketball and make their picks more or less at random. Fanboys might be a problem too. Duke, for example, has a lot of haters, so no matter how viable a contender they might be, I would worry about people expressing their desires (e.g. for Duke to lose) instead of their predictions in some cases. Finally, the tournament seeds and rankings are driven – in a way – by the collective opinions of a crowd, so even if Yahoo’s Team Ranker is dominated by true college basketball aficionados, I would expect the results to follow the seeds.

Turning to the Experts

I’ve done well with this strategy in past tournaments, but taken as a whole, the experts tend to follow the seedings, so you still have to use your gut to a certain extent. The other challenge is that the expert commentary you can find is pretty disjointed. There are a lot of bits and pieces out there – separate breakdowns by region and conference, lots of hypothetical head-to-head matchups, etc., and it’s difficult to synthesize it into any kind of cohesive set of picks. That said, the free resources I tend to look at are the obvious ones:

• CBS Sportsline
• ESPN
• Sports Illustrated
• The Sporting News
• College Hoops Net

DIY Analysis

Today I found a pretty nifty online tool called Bracket Brains for analyzing all the tournament matchups. If you pay them $15, you can save any analysis you do, and you get a bunch of other features, but you can also get a lot of utility out of it for free. It incorporates a Hot-or-Not style picker like the Yahoo Team Ranker, but it provides a whole range of parameters you can tinker with to help you make your picks.

You can adjust how you think various slices of things like recent performance, strength of schedule and Vegas spread will factor in to the matchup. You can look at similar matchups from past tournaments (based on the parameters you set). You can even view a map showing the distance traveled by each team to the game venue. As you tinker with all these parameters, you can watch the projected outcome of the matchup in question change in real time.

The guys at 37 Signals have a list of what they call “red flag” words that often come up in business communications and can get teams into trouble. Words like “only” and “can’t” (as in, it should only take you a day to add this feature, and we can’t ship the product without it) lead down rat holes of feature creep and finger pointing.

For me, one of those red flags is “what if…”

What ifs are the sparks that ultimately generate every interesting, fresh, unconventional idea. They are the stuff of all the brainstorm sessions and experiments that characterize the really exciting parts of the product development process. What ifs produce ideas, and ideas are easy, so when a team is in the slog of getting things done, it’s hard not to get way ahead of them with lots of big and interesting ideas. You start to anticipate every possible scenario and edge case. You think about ways your product might tap into new markets before you’ve even addressed its core market.

Ideas are also impatient. They pile up behind the older ideas, and they push and they push until a few get through. And then a few more, and a few more, and while you may have started with something simple, you now risk ending up with this:

(Click thumbnail to enlarge. Photo courtesy John Maeda)

On the other hand, what ifs can be part of a sanity check. Asking “what if…” can be like hitting the pause button, allowing you to step back, size things up and gauge whether they’re on track. What ifs can also help you subtract and simplify. It’s a great exercise to look at your ideas and ask, “what if we got rid of…” and “what if it just…”

I think the “It’s about time” clock is a great example of this kind of thinking:

These guys asked themselves how many people really need precision around what time it is and effectively said, “what if clocks only told you what you need to know – in plain English?”

This isn’t to say that thinking small is always better than thinking big. Each has its place, but either way, “what if…” is a phrase to look out for in business communications. When you hear it, make sure it’s leading you in the right direction.

The state of Texas recently held an “e-vote” to choose a new license plate design. There were five designs in the running, and over 450,000 people cast their vote for the worst one. Just my opinion, but Design Observer agrees with me.

This always seems to happen when design meets democracy. Letting the masses into the design process always leads to cluttered, overdone hodgepodge or bland, predictable treacle.

But there’s an obvious paradox here. Namely, if we are designing for these same masses, then who are we to say their opinion is wrong? On what basis can we defend what we consider to be good design?

The inventor of Dungeons and Dragons has run out of hit points. Gary Gygax, the man responsible for some of my most unproductive yet beloved hours died this week.

I discovered D & D at a summer camp just after I finished eighth grade. Before that, I was a normal kid, playing volleyball with other kids… outside. Then I wandered into one of the cabins where a bunch of boys with braces and eyeglasses, who had never talked to girls, huddled over mysterious pieces of paper and rolled strange gem-like dice. These guys were the stereotype of D & D kids, and I was hooked.

In my post yesterday, I questioned the value of “process” in web and software development and discussed my successes and failures both with and without it. The biggest problem with process is that it deludes people into thinking they have the fundamentals in place to guarantee a successful project. Process is too often a crutch in this way.

Over the course of decade and a long list of projects, I’ve worked with variations of waterfall, agile, RUP and other methodologies, and I’ve also done my share of winging it with no formal process at all. Process or not, I’ve learned that the successful projects I’ve worked on all had certain ingredients in common. Namely…

Smart people.
This is a no-brainer, but a team of smart people is key because smarter people work faster, make fewer mistakes and are able to adapt to unforeseen changes. All it takes is a one weak link, however, to cause things to break. You can’t rely on smart people alone.

Leadership.
A film has both a producer and a director. A restaurant has a chef, a manager and a maître d’. People need freedom to lead their respective domains, but smart people inevitably disagree with each other, and smart people without a recognized leader is a recipe for scope creep in the worst possible way. Everyone wants to put their best work into the mix, and a committee approach encourages quantity of ideas. Ultimate power needs to roll up to a single, clear authority with the tools to make good decisions and resolve conflicts within the team.

Constraints.
Frank Lloyd Wright once said, “Man built most nobly when limitations were at their greatest.” Jason Fried of 37 Signals says, “Embrace constraints.” Artists recognize that constraints help focus one’s creativity. In web and software development, constraints usually come in the form of hard deadlines or agreements around scope (often a bit of both). But constraints must be balanced with “a healthy disregard for the impossible,” as Marissa Ann Mayer – VP of search products and user experience at Google – put it. Innovative ideas by nature will often push at the very edges of constraints, so there should be some flexibility. The key to balancing constraints with a “disregard for the impossible” are good filters for managing new ideas. Which brings me to…

Filters.
You don’t want to discourage innovative, unconventional ideas, but you need some way to filter them. The same goes for the more typical dynamics that lead to scope creep. Stakeholders second guess their decisions. Important customers complain about something or make specific requests. Some jackass in a meeting spouts off about some edge case, and boom… more stuff to cram into the project. Leadership (see above) is important here, and so are constraints like deadlines and scope. New ideas mean an increase in scope, which means moving the deadline. Either that, or something already in scope drops out. Each incoming idea needs to be considered, scoped and prioritized against everything else. Edge-case thinking just needs to be stopped. This is what I mean by filters – a change-management process that the team leader needs to enforce. Too often, outside ideas are subject to this process, but ideas originating within the team get a free pass. Filters need to apply to everyone equally.

Simplicity.
This is its own kind of filter. The team and the stakeholders need to understand the essence of the thing they are building. They need to look at it holistically and know what it needs to do in order to be considered complete. It’s important not to look at features in isolation, because this encourages people to explore every possible expression of every nook and cranny of every feature (edge cases again). Instead, the team needs to determine only what is essential to each feature as it relates to the whole. Finally, the team needs to understand that the product can grow and evolve after it’s launched, so “complete” doesn’t mean perfect.

An understanding of “X” factors.
I mean “X” as in multiply. There is a list of things that add risk to a project and multiply its challenges and complexity. I’ll discuss these in detail in a follow-up post, but among them are:

• nature of client
• size and “spread” of team
• complexity and novelty of the thing being built
• time between designing and building
• depth of QA
• distance – with regard to both time and personnel – between deployment and maintenance

Good Tools.
Smart people can survive with just email and whiteboards. That might be the bare minimum, but I’ve had good experience using wikis and simple PM-ware like Basecamp.

Padding.
Because shit happens. A good project manager knows it’s necessary to add 50% to every individual person’s estimate of time and effort, and then add another 20% or so across the board for good measure.

A good contract.
Too many contracts are essentially crafted by BD people who don’t understand what a project will really take, and who don’t have a vested interest in whether it actually succeeds. Too many contracts fail to consider the “X” factors, or encourage constraints, simplicity or leadership.

Transparency.
Otherwise known as communication. But “communication” is a cliche, and every team thinks it’s doing a good job communicating to stakeholders. The bottom line is, stakeholders need a strong consensus around the essence of the thing being built. They need to understand the change-management process (filters), and they need to see steady progress.

Even knowing all this, I’ve still worked on projects that have gone awry. But it has always been because we failed to follow something on this list. The good news is, when a new project starts to take a southward turn, I just take an inventory of the ingredients above, and when I identify what’s missing, it’s usually not too late to put the project back on track.