CircaSpecting: People, Tech, and Business

My NEW Favorite Place on Earth

I just returned from a week in central and southern Oregon, the highlight of which was a few days' stay at Crater Lake (www.nps.gov/crla).

Crater Lake is the most beautiful place I've ever been, topping comfortably the former title-holder Lake Louise in Alberta.  CL is positively massive, in 2 or 3 dimensions...so massive that pictures simply don't work.  For instance, in 2 dimensions, it's roughly a circle 5-6 miles in diameter -- so the surface area is about 20-25 sq miles, or 15,000 acres.  It's so massive, I kept losing my sense of scale when sitting on a peak looking down into the lake; until one of their 40-foot boats drove into view like a bug skating on the water's surface.  (If you look closely in the picture below, that white line just in front of the island is a boat AND about 60 feet of white wake trailing the boat.)

In the third dimension, its water is roughly 2,000 feet deep.  The crater bowl ABOVE water is 700-2000 feet high, depending upon where you are around the lake.  Geologists estimate that the peak of the volcano was 3-5,000 higher than the rim before it blew.  Thousands of feet up plus thousands of feet down plus tens of thousands of feet in any direction...that's alot of space.  The amount of material that was blasted out of that volcano was simply too great for my mind to grasp, sitting in a boat in the middle of the lake.  A ranger told me the blast was 100 times greater than what happened in 1980 at Mount St. Helens.

And, I must apologize profusely to the people at Disneyland/Disneyworld.  I have always mocked as unreal the absurdly-blue water in their rides.  Well, maybe Walt went to Crater Lake before he designed the park, because the water there looks like God knocked a big bottle of blue food color into it.

CS Lewis said that the intelligent response to natural grandeur was awe: an awareness of our relative insignificance and limitations.  No one I saw or heard during this trip was talking about their jobs, accomplishments, ideas, genious, platform, etc.  All of us, though strangers, were sharing a communal moment of awe.  We were in church, so to speak, and everyone was being reverent.  It was beautiful on many levels.

Everyone must go.

PS - Just to set the record straight...you CAN swim in Crater Lake.  You can even dive into the lake from a 20 ft boulder on the shoreline.  And, yes, it's COLD.

Shock: Reading Really IS Fundamental

I just finished reading the excellent book The Dumbest Generation, by Mark Bauerlein.  Everyone (parents, grands, dinks, solos, kids, whatever) should read this book.  Contrary to the title, it's not just a critique for youngsters.  It’s a jewel, with some wonderful reminders (and LOTS of supporting statistical evidence) applicable to many people of all ages:

1. People who read a lot have a huge edge over people who don’t.
2. Ignore tradition at your peril.  Arguing with tradition and/or creating replacements are ok, but ignorance is inexcusable.
3. The next adult generation (18-24 today) faces some new challenges, but there is no new math, no new logic, no new human nature…in other words, you are not as special as your teachers/parents/peers have told you.

His rationale, in his own words...

At any present moment, a culture spills over with ideas and images, sayings and symbols and styles, and they mingle promiscuously.  As time goes by, though, the transient, superficial, fashionable, and hackneyed show up more clearly and fall away, and a firmer, nobler continuity forms.  We think of jazz, for instance, as the tradition of Armstrong, Ellington, Park, Monk, Fitzgerald, Getz and the rest, but at the time when they recorded their signature pieces, jazz looked much different.  The cream hadn’t fully risen to the top, and “Parker’s Mood” and “Blue 7” appeared amid a thousand other, now forgotten songs in the jazz landscape.  Only with the passage of time does the field refine and settle into its superior creations.

So, ...

Before you sally forth into the world, heed the insight of people long dead who possessed a lot more talent and wisdom than you.

As practical suggestions, Bauerlein recommends reading (or re-reading) the following classics as proper seasoning for our thoughts on everything from politics to relationships to commerce to whatever:

Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
Walden: Or, Life in the Woods, Henry David Thoreau
Middlemarch, George Eliot
Rip Van Winkle, Washington Irving
Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon
Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Literature and Revolution, Leon Trotsky

The power of "I was wrong"

I don't watch much TV since West Wing went off the air.  But, I love the lead character in House, played by Hugh Laurie.  I mean, aside from the fact that he's got more character flaws than a $10 diamond -- he's completely, brilliantly, insane. 

That's right, I think brilliant insanity can be a good thing. 

William James once wrote that the insane can actually reveal to us some ignored truths about reality, because they don't feel obligated to respect our group-hallucinations.  In other words, I like House because his character shows us how silly many of our supposedly "normal" perspectives are.

To wit, in an episode that aired (rerun?) last week, Dr. House taught a class of newbie residents (the "normal" people), using a difficult but real-life case from his past.  When the students were given insufficient information and asked to choose between two mutually-exclusive treatments, one of which (but they don't know which) would certainly kill the patient, roughly half chose the treatment which turned out to have saved the patient.  House then commented that the other half of the students just killed the patient, at which point one of them objected "but we can't be blamed", on the grounds that there was really no way to know for sure which treatment would work.

To which Dr. House replies with this gem:

I am sure this goes against everything you've been taught, but right and wrong do exist.  Just because you don't know what the right answer is -- even if there's no way you could know what the right answer is -- doesn't make your answer right or even OK.  It's much simpler than that: it's just plain wrong.

Nobody wants to be wrong.  But, nobody's perfect.  We need to get past this obsession with not being wrong.  It's debilitating.  Don't be paralyzed by the possibility of being wrong.  Be informed; use your head and your heart... and make a decision when needed.  Then, when you are wrong ... own it; learn from it; and move on.  Great security, comfort, and confidence derive from honest self-appraisal.

Imagination is Elastic

The bigger the space occupied by your product -- the more specific and detailed and tangible and exhaustive (exhausting?!) your description of what it will do for your customers -- the less room is left for ... the customer.  For his or her imagination, for the unique mark, for the creative -- for identity.  Imagination is very elastic; it will contract to nothing if you leave no room for it.  (Kathy Sierra wrote a great post on this topic, here.)  No matter how wonderful our product’s features, we have to remember: it’s the imagination of the user that binds the features, holds the whole together, and makes the product come alive. 

Recently we've seen this demonstrated powerfully in our user labs, when people use features in ways we don't expect -- extending the definition of the product itself.  If we dictated to the lab participants exactly how to use something, we'd probably get a pretty boring regurgitation of our own views. 

So, our central challenge is to recruit the user’s imagination to the task of creating our product from the features we’ve engineered.

When products falter, the missing ingredient usually isn’t a feature; it’s IMAGINATION ... as in, the users'.  Make room for it.

Then with a pleasure which is both sensual and intellectual we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass.  Nabokov

Propositioning vs. Value Proposition

Vladimir Nabokov (Russian novelist, Lolita et al) said great writing is "a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science."  Read that again: precision/poetry and intuition/science.  It got my attention, too.

Specifically, I think this insight explains why so much technology marketing stinks: we talk on-and-on-and-on about the precision of our science, and then we try to superglue some poetic intuition onto the side.  That makes perfect sense for engineers: you start with the wonderful thing you’ve figured out how to do.  Great reasoning.  But, not great writing.

Great writing starts with an understanding of the needs, aspirations, and emotional hot-buttons of the audience.  It’s a careful, intentional study of how to engage the mind of the audience.  If you object to this as manipulation, then compare it to how one woos a lover.  It’s certainly not by starting with an inventory of SAT scores, bank accounts, degrees, career path, investment history, cars, and body mass index.  So then, are courtesy, attention, empathy, wit, appearance, and eloquence manipulative?  Or, are they simply attractive behaviors?  And, if they are attractive behaviors, to what deep-seated cognitive/biological mechanisms are they appealing?

Great tech marketing should focus 99% on precision in the emotional connection with our customers and 1% on intuitive hinting at the science beneath.  Happy courting!

Spring Cleaning Your Brain

Repotting, that's how you get new bloom ... you should have a plan of  accomplishment and when that is achieved you should be willing to start off again. Ernie Arbuckle, former dean of Stanford business school

Repetitive existence dulls your mental edge.  Equilibrium kills creativity and vitality.  So, find ways periodically to give your mind an excuse to see things from a new perspective :

• Go see an arthouse film
• Change your computer (to a Mac!)
• Repaint your office or work from a cafe one afternoon per week
• Trade your day-timer for a smart phone, or vice versa
• Attend a university lecture -- on art history or architecture or anthropology
• Change your wardrobe completely
• Switch roles with a team-mate
• Change your commute -- new time, route, or mode
• Read a science fiction epic
• Take lessons on a sport you don't know
• etc, etc, etc

My Experience re: Extraordinary Partnerships

A friend of mine attended the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting and returned with some great observations.  One of the most interesting observations regarded the extraordinary harmony and depth and power of the partnership between Buffett and Charlie Munger.  That story caused some folks to ask me what makes my partnership with Brian so amazing, and how/whether such a partnership can be engineered.  I am not a psychologist or HR expert, and I am clearly not entirely objective on this topic, so caveat emptor...

Brian and I have worked together for more than 10 years.  So, an obvious issue is time: we did not "just add water" -- we worked at partnership for a decade.  Over that decade, I've seen three important ingredients added in various amounts at various times:

Compatibility
Brian and I share similar backgrounds, philosophy/world-view, and life goals/priorities.  Not identical, but overlapping sufficiently to ensure -- even when contracts and incentive programs and MBOs and project plans disagree -- to ensure that we will tend to see situations through the same moral/ethical lens.  That's vitally important, because things can get pretty gray.  Now, that does not mean we never argue.  Next to my wife, Brian and I debate more than anyone else in my life.  But, even our debates stem from a shared passion for finding the best solution, not for "winning."

Complementarity
This is the most obvious and most frequently-cited basis of effective partnership: if you're a marketer, find an engineer....etc.  The only proviso I would add is that our partnership, while complementary, contains a significant amount of functional overlap.  Neither of us is an extreme technician in a unique domain.  I suspect this is related to the compatibility issue discussed above.

Commitment
Brian and I have an extraordinary provision in our employment agreements: if you quit, you forfeit all of your equity.  And, we left good jobs and went into personal debt to fund that venture.  Hmm.  What's that about?  Well, to make a long story short, you really need to know that the other guy/gal is 100% certain to be there in the long-run.  Otherwise you can't focus completely on your task, because you'll want to spend time/energy looking over his/her shoulder (for a variety of reasons).  But, if you know that he/she is going to be there, you can trust that he/she won't tolerate bad/late work any more than you would.  The bottom line is this: great partnerships are not casual or convenient.  They are intentional and costly.

The net result of those 3 C's is an extraordinary form of Trust.  It pervades everything we do.  It allows each of us to focus.  It allows us to take risks.  It makes our communication radically more efficient.  It insulates us against provocations.  It allows us to speak in stereo to a large organization.  It inoculates the company against the virus of office politics. 

In other words, it just makes work a better experience.

Now THAT is Cool: Skyrails

Though I work in technology, most technology makes me yawn.  The jaw-dropping, genius, cool-n-useful tech innovation is a rare thing.  But, I found something today that makes me babble on in a stream of Wow and Cool and OMG!

Skyrails

There are so many amazing, engrossing, and effective applications of this tech.  Nice work, folks.

Friday Grab-bag: Gasoline Prices and Consumption

Sometimes when you throw together some loosely related data, interesting observations jump out at you.  We've all seen quite a bit of reporting on gasoline prices lately, so I was curious how we stack up vs. other countries on some interesting gasoline metrics:

• Annual per-capita gasoline consumption (the AREA of the circle)
• Avg per-gallon price paid at the pump (the X axis)
• Per-person gasoline spending relative to personal income (the Y axis)

Disclaimer: This data is ROUGH -- hence the "grab bag" title.  It was pulled together in a few minutes from CNN, the World Bank, and the IMF -- and the time periods vary for the different measures.  Caveat emptor.

Wow.  We consume so much more gasoline per person, that even though our prices are a lot lower than most elsewhere in the non-OPEC world, we end up spending a larger proportion of our paychecks on gas.

Usability, Early Adopters, and Crossing the Chasm

We've spent a great deal of time and money this year running observation labs to evaluate user cognitive processes, toward the goal of understanding how to make Lyza (www.lyzasoft.com) software that is both powerful and easy to use.  While this research has been invaluable, it also contained a trap we did not foresee.

Initially, we thought that Early Majority users would express higher expectations for usability than did Early Adopters.  But, they did not.  Their expectations for good usability were almost identical.

At first, this puzzled us and made us wonder if we were perhaps ready for the hockey stick of the mass market.  (Given the optimistic psyche of entrepreneurs, this trap is particularly dangerous.)  Then, we noticed something else -- Early Adopters showed significantly higher tolerance for a gap between their expectations and the product's actual usability.  EA's were just better able to get past, work through, or work around perceived deficiencies than were Early Majority users.  Fortunately, the labs allowed us to go beyond simply asking about expectations and allowed us to observe the differences in behavior and tolerance. 

Many new tech projects see a stabilization of expressed expectations at some point, encouraging them to scale-up marketing of their products in hopes of tapping the exponential growth curve in the first graphic.  But, they jump in without the significant additional investments of money and staff required (see second graphic) to improve the product faster than expectation-performance gap tolerance is declining in their target market (see "The Cliff" in the first graphic).  I think these conclusions are simply another perspective on the now-classic Crossing The Chasm argument: don't count your money based upon Early Adopter response, because there is a lot of work left and a very tight window within which to do it.  As a professor of mine once said ...

Growth consumes large amounts of money and staff.  Have stockpiles of both before you start.

The consequence: we need to hustle to grow our Lyza engineering staff ASAP.  So, if you're an expert Swing developer, send me your resume.