Right away, I was assaulted by an orgy of red, white and blue that makes Stephen Colbert’s set look sedate. This is the obligatory patriotic pose. When you stand in front of the American flag, you must look proudly into the distance and display the underside of your chin. It also helps to have a second shot of yourself behind you, representing that “over-reaching” quality we want from our government.

Anyway, after I absorbed the full weight of Hannity’s patriotism, I tried searching for “Shelby Steele” and came up with nothing…

I was delighted to see, however, that I can share this page of zero search results with a friend. And I can search for Shelby Steele in the Yellow Pages. Do people still use the Yellow Pages?

Undeterred, I tried searching for Obama…

Nothing. Hmm… An example of “fair and balanced” reporting? How about a search for Clinton…

OK, could be the same thing. How about a couple of searches more in line with Hannity’s views…

Wow! How about another…

So, clearly pure incompetence. Maybe it has something to do with the way every word you search for is transformed into a “Sean Hannity Keyword.”

I want to keep clicking! By far the best thing I found on Sean Hannity’s website was this…

This has to be a joke. It needs to be a joke. But there’s no way Hannity is that funny, so I can only conclude that it’s real. I’m completely hooked at this point, especially when I see…

I love this. Watch out ladies, he’s “ready for it.” He’s actually armed and ready for it, if you look at the picture. Don’t take your eyes off your drink if you’re around this guy, because he’s bound to slip you a rohypnol.  I can’t stop myself from clicking into his profile…

Who would have guessed motor racing and wrestling? I mean, the guy has a high school education. But wait, there’s more…

Wait, twenty-seven? Didn’t your personal information say you were 31?

This dude can’t be real. I’m almost sure he’s fake… but he is the “featured” profile, which either says something about Hannity’s audience (if he’s real) or his ability to run a website (if he’s fake).

I wish I had time to see more, and say more, but it’s midnight, and I’m procrastinating. I have a couple more hours of work left before I can go to bed, so I’ll just leave it here.

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.

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.

UPDATE: There’s a Part 2 now.

When I started in the web development business about a decade ago, I worked at a small agency with a few smart people, and we were basically winging it. As the dotcom bubble expanded at a frenzied pace, we grew along with it, and inevitably we had a couple of projects take sharp turns south. People suffered on both sides, and it became clear that winging it was not scalable.

We needed a process – one we could articulate to clients, propagate through the organization and of course put into action in a repeatable way.

This is what “process” is supposed to do. It exists to mitigate unpleasant surprises by telling stakeholders what they can expect from a project. It’s also supposed to save teams from continually reinventing the wheel.

I worked with my bosses at that first agency job to define such a process, and we were very proud when it was complete. Some months later I left that job for an agency on the West coast. As it happened, I arrived just as this company too was in the midst of a campaign to define a process. People from every part of the agency worked on it for weeks, and the final product was a lovely thing to behold. We made posters for the office, and glossy booklets to give to would-be clients.

My next company – a large telecom – used a version of RUP that was the most over-engineered process I’ve ever experienced. When they laid me off, I returned to the agency world. I worked for two of the biggest interactive agencies, and both had processes that were beautifully-rendered in company collateral.

It might not surprise you to learn that all of these processes looked pretty much the same on paper – characterized by big phases with catchy labels. In fact it was only in these labels where the various processes really differed – one company’s “explore” is another’s “discover.” Even the language the agencies used to sell their respective processes was the same, with a lot of emphasis on words like flexible, adaptable and proven.

Finally, it’s worth adding that all of my agency work was in the service of clients who had their own processes, so at one time or another I’ve had to use variations of waterfall, RUP, agile, spiral and triple lindy. Kidding about that last one.

They all share similarities, but the really striking thing these processes have had in common in my experience is how quickly they broke down and became meaningless when put into practice – even by solid teams of nothing but smart people.

I had been a big believer in process, but because of repeated failures I eventually came to see the whole idea of “process” as a fantasy designed to woo clients and placate bosses. I began to believe that assembling a small team of really smart people and simply allowing them to wing it is the right approach after all.

At the very least, this approach doesn’t raise false hopes. If projects are destined for chaos or collapse, isn’t better not to expect them to go smoothly in the first place?

I’m joking of course. There are many reasons projects go south, and there are many ways to help make sure they don’t. Working within the framework of a heavy duty process is not the solution, but having no process at all amounts to blind luck, because successful projects depend on the right mix of a whole range of ingredients that aren’t likely to converge if you’re just winging it.

This is starting to run a bit long, so I’m going to push the rest to a sequel. In Part 2 of this series on process, I’ll talk about the ingredients that need to converge to make sure projects go well.

The February issue of FastCompany magazine includes an article provocatively-titled, Is the Tipping Point Toast? about the work Duncan Watts has done researching influence. The article doesn’t exactly torpedo Gladwell‘s hypotheses, as the title suggests, but it does argue that influence is a much more random phenomenon than Gladwell and a string of high-profile marketing gurus – not to mention our own intuition – would have us believe:

[Watts] has written computer models of rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure.

Strong words, and not ones that marketing folks want to hear. But let’s back up and look at the two schools of thought at odds in this debate.

The Gladwell school (previously put forward by Ed Keller and Jon Berry in their book, The Influentials) holds that a relatively small number of elite and well-connected tastemakers is responsible for igniting the first small flames of buying or behaving that eventually spread like wildfire to become mainstream trends. Marketers like this model partly because it makes sense intuitively. We can all think of people in our lives who are consistently ahead of the curve with things, or whom we depend on as consistently reliable sources of information. It’s nice to think that if you can, as a marketer, put your message or product in the hands of these elite few, then they will do the rest of the work for you.

Watts, however, isn’t buying it. His research – a variety of computer models as well as social experiments using real people – doesn’t support the existence of this special class of powerful people. As far as he can tell, a trend can start anywhere and with anyone, as long as the marketplace is primed for it. This is borne out in a well-known experiment he conducted by building two identical online music communities where users could rate unknown songs from unknown artists. In one community, the users couldn’t see anyone else’s rankings. In the other, people could see how everyone else rated each song. He wanted to see whether word of mouth would affect the rankings in this second community, and whether any of the participants would emerge as the tastemakers.

In the first community, people rated the songs fairly evenly. But in the second community, as one would expect, favorite songs did emerge, as word of mouth took hold. Even more interestingly, in eight repeats of the experiment, different songs emerged as the favorites each time. For the most part, it wasn’t even close. The #1 song in one community, for example, was ranked #40 out of 48 in another. And there was no evidence to suggest that any participant in any community was significantly more influential than anyone else.

Watts’ experiment confirmed that word of mouth is powerful but, to the chagrin of marketers, it also seemed to show that it’s completely unpredictable.

So is the Tipping Point toast, like the article says? The most likely answer of course is no, and that both arguments are correct. There certainly are people who are influential by virtue of a large audience or expertise with regard to a particular subject. On the other hand, there are certainly many trends that started with seemingly random people.

Watts’ solution is to forget about trying to identify or engage with any supposed influencers and to focus instead on the masses. To this end he has developed a form of advertising with built-in sharing (and tracking) mechanisms designed to facilitate their spread.

Perhaps he’s onto something, but I think that developing a good mechanism for sharing is much less important than developing a good message that people will want to share. The “why” is more important than the “how.”

The currency, so to speak, of influence is the meme. There is a science to what makes a good meme. For content-based memes (as opposed to behavior-based ones like fashion trends), I like the formula offered by Chip and Dan Heath in their recent book, Made to Stick, which states that a good message is:

• Simple
• Unexpected
• Concrete
• Credible
• Emotional, and
• a Story

If marketers follow this formula, the chances that their messages will go “viral” are much greater, whether influencers are specific and identifiable elites or just random folks on the street.

The last piece of the puzzle is the marketplace, and this is something we’re trying hard to make more predictable too. Or, if not predictable, then transparent. Understanding what makes an effective meme is key to spotting them as they develop, but it’s still very difficult without reliable visibility into the marketplace. We’re aiming to provide this with some of the tools we’re developing, because this is at least as essential to the influence problem as attempting to identify some elusive special people at the top of the chain.

Bush argued that high oil prices will cause the US to import less oil, and therefore less money will flow from American wallets into royal Saudi Arabian wallets. The problem with this argument (other than the notion of protecting the exchange of our cash for Saudi palaces and ponies) is that the increasing demand for oil in China, India and the rest of the developing world will more than offset any decrease in US imports.

Saudi Arabia shrugs.

In the 1970s, before the Ayatollah overthrew the Shah, Iran was one of our main sources of imported oil. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 triggered an energy crisis when in November of that year, President Carter cut off oil imports from Iran. This marked the beginning of the end for Carter, who famously proposed to the American people that the solution to the crisis was to conserve. “Wear sweaters,” he told us.

The thing is, we’re addicted to oil, and to conserve is… well… un-American. The Reagan administration saw the light, and Saudi Arabia became our new best friend in the Middle East.

Fast-forward to 2008. Iran is still chock full of oil, so it should come as no surprise that our current president has steadfastly ignored the U.S. Intelligence Estimate finding that Iran stopped pursuing its nuclear ambitions in 2003. Iran has oil. We want it. We need it. Therefore we need Iran to be a threat, just like we needed Iraq to be a threat, because President Bush needs to guarantee access to oil.

Consider the following:

• Current US consumption of oil is 20.7 million barrels per day.
• The US strategic reserves contain 689 million barrels.
• Factor in our domestic production, and without imports we have about 60 days of oil to burn before it’s all gone.

Bush’s commitment to keeping oil lines open is not sinister in itself. The reality is, our economy would cease to function without foreign oil, and that would hurt every single one of us, probably more than we can imagine. If Bush had simply told the truth – we need a steady supply of oil from Iraq in order for our economy to function, therefore we need a more stable and sympathetic regime there – he would not have gotten the necessary support from Congress or the American people. So he used terrorism as a pretense.

Now Bush is trying to do it again, with Iran.

The war in Iraq is about oil. Few people would dispute that. Some would say it was waged simply to take the oil, while others argue that it is being waged in order to create a stable regional ally who will reliably sell us oil. It’s probably the latter, but it doesn’t really matter. The war is about oil.

To ensure access to Iraq’s oil, we are paying $275 million per day. How much would it cost to expand the war to Iran?

So, to summarize, we consume an enormous amount of oil. We have dangerously little oil of our own, so we need everything we can get from the Middle East. To maintain this dynamic of dependence, we are willing to invest $275 million per day and hundreds of thousands of American lives (because it’s not just the lives lost that we are investing, but the hard work of all the soldiers) in a war.

This is the true cost of oil, which is not represented at the pump. The $3-plus that you pay per gallon does not include the costs of tax subsidies to the oil industry, the subsidies for the extraction, production, and use of petroleum, the military costs of protecting access to oil supplies – not to mention health care costs for treating respiratory illnesses ranging from asthma to emphysema, or finally, the costs of climate change. If we factored all this into the price of gasoline, it would cost about $15 per gallon, according to a study (pdf) by the International Center for Technology Assessment.

Are we getting a good return on this investment? Does it have a future? What else could we do with $275 million per day and the hard work of hundreds of thousands of people we’re spending just on the Iraq war?

$275 million per day works out to about $100 billion per year which, according to one study, could pay for…

• Reforesting the earth (6 billion)
• Stabilizing water tables around the world (10 billion)
• Restoring all the world’s fisheries (13 billion)
• Protecting topsoil on the world’s croplands (24 billion)
• Providing universal basic health care to everyone on the planet (33 billion)
• Providing universal primary education to every child on the planet (12 billion)
• And finally, for good measure, closing the condom gap (2 billion)

Before you get into a tizzy, the figures above reflect additional money that would need to be spent on the various initiatives, rather than the total figures. These are all things, like the military, that only cost us money. They don’t generate any, which is why I didn’t compare the military spending on the Iraq war to money we could invest in, say, developing alternative energy sources. We’d actually make money if we did that.

It’s good to know we have our priorities straight.

I’ve had some exposure to Omniture SiteCatalyst, WebTrends and a few other analytics platforms – many of which require training and experience to really get their full benefit. Many times as a consultant, I met clients who religiously deleted the regular email reports sent by their analytics package of choice, because they didn’t understand it, or what they understood of it was not interesting. Simplicity often trumps power.

This is what Google has become astonishingly good at.

Search, maps, email, AdWords, AdSense and now analytics and OpenSocial (plus much more of course). On the surface, these are useful, reliable, elegantly-designed services. They other thing they have in common is what they give Google.

Each of these provides Google with a powerful window into what people want from the Internet. Maps, for example, tells Google a lot about what people want from local search, as well as other real-world behavioral data around travel and commerce.

Google Analytics and the OpenSocial API represent gold mines for Google with regard to the data they get access to.

Using the same philosophy, but with a slightly different goal in mind, Google admitted that a big reason for launching their free 411 service was to gather data for developing speech recognition algorithms.

With their hands on all this data – especially data that no one else can gather very well – Google effectively becomes the world’s most powerful information broker. They can use the data to improve their own products or power new ones, of course, but they can also sell it in a marketplace where there’s an almost limitless demand for it. They will surely make some of it available in the form of APIs, but probably in ways that will enable them to gather even more data.

Which brings me back to the title of this post.

If you’ve built a business that depends on a category of data that Google might covet, especially data that’s not adequately represented in Google’s portfolio, then there are two ways Google might rock your world.

In the first scenario, you are like Omniture or MapQuest. Your goal has been to provide an essential service, and you haven’t really given the data that flows through your application very much thought. Maybe you even made it a core principle of your business to keep your eyes and hands off that data, to protect what is proprietary or private to your customers. Finally, your service is not all that difficult to build. Outlook: Google replicates your business and claims a devastating (for you) slice of your market.

In the second scenario, you’ve built an application or service that is utterly about a particular kind of data. In fact, you are aware that if the application that uses it were to simply go away, or if your initial target market were to become suddenly irrelevant, you know you could build something different using the same data – or sell the data itself. Finally, the data that drives your application is unique and difficult to acquire, and you’ve spent a lot of time and effort on that core problem. Outlook: Google makes a killer offer.

What business will Google target next? Will they kill an incumbent or bless a scrappy startup?