First off, after eight years I’ve moved on from Percolate (we brought on a CEO at the beginning of 2018) and co-founded a new software company called Variance. We want to change the way work gets done by helping employees gain mastery over their tools. It’s early days, so not too much we’re ready to share quite yet, but we Tweeted a few highlights from a workshop we recently held. The name is inspired by the variance spectrum, which you might remember from my framework of the day posts. Also, we’re looking to hire a lead product designer, so if you’re one or know anyone who might be good for us, I’d hugely appreciate the reference (you can email me). Dinner on me if you help us find someone we hire.
Second, my daily email, Why is this interesting?, is still going strong. We’re 100+ editions in and we’ve had a great string of guests to help take some of the load off. Not surprisingly, all my writing energy has gone there, so please subscribe and if you ever have an idea for a guest spot, please let us know.
Speaking of the the NBA, I’ve been waiting for someone to write a definitive story of how the NBA came to be a “pace-and-space” league full of threes, layups, and free throws. ESPN’s Kevin’s Arnovitz and Pelton are the men for the job: “Through much of the ’90s, a basketball possession was commandeered by a coach on the sideline who shouted the set to the point guard, who transmitted that play call to the other four players on the floor. But today’s fast-paced NBA teams have tossed away most of the playbook in favor of a series of basic principles and patterns that empower the guys on the floor to make decisions based on feel. Gentry, whose teams were ranked in the bottom half of the league in pace five times in his six seasons as a head coach before his arrival in Phoenix to join D’Antoni’s staff, is himself a convert.”
The New Yorker profile of John Feeley, ex-Ambassador to Panama, is yet another story of a smart and capable person who has left government because of a combination of incompetence and purposefully harmful policies from the Trump administration.
We identity three specific negative effects in this regard: that the pyramid is a poor representation of Maslow’s [hierarchy of needs]; that the preoccupation with the pyramid obscures the context within which the theory was created and that by focusing exclusively on the pyramid, we miss the other contributions that Maslow’s thinking can make to management studies.
Suddenly, there were video stores all over America that needed to purchase at least one copy of every major new Hollywood movie. In “Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood’s Creative Artists Agency” (Custom House), an oral history compiled by James Andrew Miller, Tom Hanks recalls the effect that this had on Hollywood in the eighties. “The industry used to be so flush with free money that it was almost impossible to do wrong even with a crappy movie, because here’s why: home video,” he says. By 1986, video sales and rentals were taking in more than four billion dollars. Income from home viewing had surpassed that of theatrical release.
A “magic eye” poster is called an autostereogram: “An autostereogram is a single-image stereogram (SIS), designed to create the visual illusion of a three-dimensional (3D) scene from a two-dimensional image. In order to perceive 3D shapes in these autostereograms, one must overcome the normally automatic coordination between accommodation (focus) and horizontal vergence (angle of one’s eyes). The illusion is one of depth perception and involves stereopsis: depth perception arising from the different perspective each eye has of a three-dimensional scene, called binocular parallax.”
My friend Tim Hwang launched the Trade Journal Cooperative, wherein you pay $60 a year to get random niche trade journals sent to you. I couldn’t be more in.
These are summed up in a motto frequently cited by one of China’s leading economists, Justin Lin, who attributes it to Premier Wen Jiabao: “When you multiply any problem by China’s population, it is a very big problem. But when you divide it by China’s population, it becomes very small.” The point is simple, though easy to miss: China’s size means that any challenge it faces—unemployment, environmental degradation, social unrest, you name it—exists on an almost unimaginably large scale. But it also means that the resources available to tackle the problem are gigantic. The difficulty lies in marshaling all those resources and deploying them effectively.
Are there certain ideas that you find yourself drawn to again and again? For example, you’ve used the threshold model of collective behavior to explain both school shootings and why basketball players don’t shoot free throws underhand. I like ideas that absolve people of blame. That’s the most consistent theme in all of my work. I don’t like blaming people’s nature or behavior for things. I like blaming systems and structures and environments for things.
Ultimately, the new study finds limited support for the idea that being able to delay gratification leads to better outcomes. Instead, it suggests that the capacity to hold out for a second marshmallow is shaped in large part by a child’s social and economic background—and, in turn, that that background, not the ability to delay gratification, is what’s behind kids’ long-term success.
Ok, that’s it for this week. Thanks for bearing with me while I tried to get this out. If there’s anything I should definitely check out that I didn’t mention, please send it my way. Otherwise please share this with your friends and, if you haven’t already, subscribe to the email. Thanks and have a great week.
Aaron Dignan had a nice little 2016 post titled “New Years Resolutions for the Organization”. In it he outlines 5 resolutions organizations could/should take advantage of. I was particularly interested in number 3: Ditch Executive Reviews.
Ditch executive reviews. We have noticed a disturbing trend lately — one where employees view a meeting with senior management AS AN ACTUAL MILESTONE for their project. Not a technical breakthrough. Not an initial shipment. Not a new retail partner. A meeting. A meeting where someone who has less visibility than they do (but hopefully more experience) can influence the fate of their most important project. This signals two problems: first, that the organization still believes in command-and-control decision making, and second, that employees have become so immersed in it they’ve assimilated it as reality. Instead of perpetuating this phenomenon, try asking your teams to work transparently, using tools like Trello and Slack, and share their learnings and metrics regularly (weekly?) in a public place — not just for management, but for everyone. You’ll be amazed what happens next. Not chaos, but true social accountability and a lot more progress. Your job as a leader is no longer about deciding… it’s about making (and protecting) the space for healthy self-organization.
This was particularly interesting to me for two reasons: One, I’m an executive and would love to be able to get away from these and two, the relationship between platforms like Percolate, Slack, Asana, etc. and the ability to make this happen. What I mean by the latter is that the transparency created by workflow tools and platforms allows for a more streamlined way of working. Because I can monitor the entire progress of a project (at Percolate we use Percolate to manage the product development process as well), ideally we can skip the big presentation (and more important the reveal) at the end. Instead, both managers and team members can contribute throughout the life of the project. What’s more, if they don’t contribute that is on them, not on the person who didn’t present the final plan. Obviously there are challenges with keeping up with every moving piece, but that’s kind of the point — keeping up with every moving piece is a fool’s game and the only way to be successful within the organization is to distribute decision-making and trust teams to work independently.
Over at the Percolate blog I wrote up a twopart series around a talk I gave at our client summit on the history of brand management and the need to create a new system of record for marketing. Part one opens:
Late last week James wrote a post called Moving from Installation to Deployment, where he laid out a framework for thinking how technology moves throughout history and where our modern age fits into the puzzle. As part of his post he introduced some ideas from an economist named Carlota Perez, who argues that each technological revolution (of which we’re in our fifth) follows a similar pattern of installation, where we essentially lay out the new technology in the form of infrastructure, followed by deployment, where we finally get a chance to build upon that infrastructure and realize its value.
Whereas part two dives into the implications and a framework for building this new system of record for marketing:
To approach the problem of scaling marketing at the rate of technology to address the increasing complexity, we have to take a page out of the P&G brand management playbook, Rising Tide: Lessons from 165 Years of Brand Building at Procter & Gamble. It points out how “P&G recognized that building brands is not exclusively or even primarily a marketing activity. Rather it is a systems problem.” This is fundamental. When you’re dealing with a huge amount of change and complexity as tempting as it is to answer the question with a one off solution, the systemic path is always more powerful. This is where we have to start in solving the challenge of rethinking marketing for this new age.
At Percolate we look for five things in product managers: Leadership, ability to get things done, communication skills, engineering knowledge, and product sense. The last is, in my ways, the toughest to interview for as part of what you’re looking for is whether or not someone has a product intuition: Do they have an innate understanding of what makes a great product? This article on how to build great products has some good things to say about where that intuition comes from and how to tune it.
On the value of talking to people:
The best way to build this intuition is to talk to a lot of people. Talk to potential users. What do they think? Talk to people who tried to build a product in your space and failed. What can you learn from their failure? Talk to competitors. How do they approach the problem? Talk to engineers in big companies. What can they tell you about the state of technology? Talk to other entrepreneurs in adjacent spaces, investors, journalists, grad students, professors, even the naysayers. The best way to get a sense of taste in a given space is to inject yourself into the industry and talk to as many people as you can.
On making sure you understand who you’re talking to and separating signal from noise:
Beware of noise. Learn the difference between your users and people who are just commenting. Everyone you talk to will have an opinion. Early on it can be tempting to design a product based on feedback from industry pundits. But a feature is only a gamechanger if the person signing the proverbial check recognizes it as one. Otherwise, it’s a distraction. Industry pundits can be extremely useful for understanding the state of your field, but they’re rarely the ones to buy your product. If you design your product around their feedback, you’ll find that there is nobody to buy it in the end.
(Further on this one is the “5 whys,” which is a Six Sigma approach that suggests asking why five times to understand the root of the challenge/opportunity to ensure that you’re solving for the right things.)
The how to build great products article also offers up a really nice framework for thinking about the different categories of features and products:
A gamechanger. People will want to buy your product because of this feature. A showstopper. People won’t buy your product if you’re missing this feature, but adding it won’t generate demand. A distraction. This feature will make no measurable impact on adoption.
