Let me help:

• So Far Rivals Can’t Beat iPad’s Price (NYTimes, 3/2011)
• “Would-be rivals to Apple’s iPad have more of a chance in Europe than they do in the United States, but they need to cut prices fast to grasp the opportunity, IT research firm Forrester said on Tuesday. [...] their prices cannot yet compete with Apple, which has far larger scale in the tablet market and an efficient supply chain.” (Reuters 8/2011)
• “PC makers are struggling to match Apple’s prices” (Daring Fireball, DigiTimes 8/2011)
• “Something unexpected has happened at Apple, once known as the tech industry’s high-price leader. Over the last several years it began beating rivals on price.” (NYTimes, 10/2011)
• “The first crop of Android tablets that hit the market failed to come close to the iPad’s entry-level price of $499″ (CNET, 10/2011)

I’ve been a long-time follower of Bob Sutton’s blog, and it was about time I picked up one of his books to read. To my way of thinking, Bob has some fairly sensible advice for working with people, and I’d suggest you take a moment to hear what he has to say.

From the Preface:

“But once something was clearly not working [while writing the book], we abandoned the path quickly, stopping just long enough to figure out what we should learn before trying something new. We never stopped to worry about how much time we had wasted and never spent one minute talking about which one of us was to blame for the last dead end. Rather we were inspired by the successful firms we studied, in which setbacks and mistakes were viewed as an inevitable, even desirable, part of being action oriented. We heeded their advice that the only true failure was to stop trying new things and to stop learning from the last effort to turn knowledge into action.”

 Great advice for being action oriented — from the preface, no less!

1. Recognize that something isn’t working. (This is often easier said than done.)
2. Abandon that path quickly.
3. Figure out what to learn from the last effort, and try something new.
4. Don’t worry about wasted time, nor assigning blame.
5. View setbacks and mistakes as desirable.
6. The worst thing you can do is to stop trying new things.

My questions to you are: When did you last fail in front of your whole team (maybe even your whole company)? What did you learn? What are you trying now?

Can’t wait to read the rest of the book!

- Peter

This refers to the notion that often “something that seems normal or inevitable today began with a choice that made sense at a particular time in the past, but survived despite the eclipse of the justification for that choice.”

For instance, typewriters used to jam if people typed too fast, so the manufacturers designed a keyboard that would slow typists. We no longer have typewriters, but we are stuck with the letter arrangements of the qwerty keyboard.

When I suggest changing a technology that has been around for a while, I always argue that “it was the right decision at the time” but also that “it may no longer be the right decision”. I find this acknowledges the good work that had been done, while also giving those same people space to consider new approaches without being blamed for the old.

Video:

“There is no end-state with Agile or Lean. You’ll be improving, and continue to improve, trying new things out and discarding the ones which don’t work.”

This is what appeals to me about agile. It isn’t a destination, it is a mindset of improving continuously. I look at corporate waterfall processes, and the thing that hurts the process far more than anything else is that it is considered to be a complete and well-rounded, immutable process.

The problem is that it doesn’t work well in every situation. Facts confront the reality (yet another project delivered late and over budget!), but process isn’t blamed … the people are. “You were not following the process as closely as you should.” is the common explanation you hear. “We need better documentation!” is another. But these strike me as a rather inhumane approach. Do you really want to blame your own people (of whom you would like to remain productive, and have been added to the staff at considerable cost) when the evidence suggests that it is the process that is broken?

“It’s happening all over, in all sorts of families, not just young people moving back home but also young people taking longer to reach adulthood overall. It’s a development that predates the current economic doldrums, and no one knows yet what the impact will be — on the prospects of the young men and women; on the parents on whom so many of them depend; on society, built on the expectation of an orderly progression in which kids finish school, grow up, start careers, make a family and eventually retire to live on pensions supported by the next crop of kids who finish school, grow up, start careers, make a family and on and on. The traditional cycle seems to have gone off course, as young people remain un­tethered to romantic partners or to permanent homes, going back to school for lack of better options, traveling, avoiding commitments, competing ferociously for unpaid internships or temporary (and often grueling) Teach for America jobs, forestalling the beginning of adult life.”

Interesting read. I especially liked the bit where the Robin Marantz Henig calls out our confusion “in our scattershot approach to markers of adulthood”:

• can vote at 18
• don’t age out of foster care until 21
• can join the military at 18
• can’t drink until 21
• can drive at 16
• can’t rent a car until 25
• if students, the IRS considers them a dependent until 24
• Parents have no access to college records if the child is over 18
• health insurance under parents’ plans till 26 (or 30)

In any case, here’s a short video summery of the posts I’ve offered up on Project Oriel during the month of September. Enjoy.

Thanks to Mark Graban for giving me the idea for a video review post over at Lean Blog.

“History suggests the mobile Internet has potential to create / destroy more wealth than prior computing cycles based on 10x user multiplier effect (from cycle to cycle, the number of users / units increases tenfold). Regarding pace of change, more users will likely connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within 5 years.”

You don’t have to read between the lines to get that mobile is a *big* thing, and coming fast. Good read.

Illiterate may be too strong of a word, but the sentiment is correct. The key talent for people today is no longer to master a trade or a specific skill, but to become adapt at adapting to change. If you can anticipate change and react to it faster than your competitors, it doesn’t just put you a little ahead, it puts you an order of magnitude ahead.

When I started college, they said that 90% of the jobs we would be taking when we graduated 4 years later, hadn’t been invented yet. And you know what? They were right. If change is happening even faster now, what long-held perspectives must you shift to keep from being left in the dust?

“if you want to foster innovation, [let] people slip from under line management and strike out on their own, on projects they care about”

He’s talking about Dan Pink’s video, the surprising truth about what motivates us:

“A tendency to overvalue the ends of technology has become one of the most persistent features of these heady times, but so much technology has been piling up for so long that we are now beginning to see how it transforms the way we thing. We are different for using it. This qualitative change can be seen most clearly in the World Wide Web, which grew from a simple, if subtle, idea into a global unification of all human knowledge, and, perhaps, a catalogue of human experience. Confronted with a space of ideas that has grown well beyond the ability of any person to “know” it, we find ourselves navigators in a familiar but impossibly vast sea of facts, figures, and fiction. Every individual who has become a web surfer has changed the way he thinks and the way he uses knowledge. Every business, as it encounters the Web, changes completely.“

[emphasis added]

I also tend towards using it as a positive: “modern technology” “modern processes” “modern living” “modern project management” — these all carry very positive connotations in my mind. But a modern thing isn’t always perceived as a good thing to all people – you’ve heard their rallying cry “Tried and True”.

Do you see “modern” as being a bad thing? Why?

Introspective bonus points: what would cause you to change your opinion to favor modern things?

Instead of looking for the bad stuff, measuring it, and finding ways to do less — look for the good stuff and do more! What an excellent idea.

“But to create and sustain change, you’ve got to act more like a coach and less like a scorekeeper.”

I’d say duh! but many people just don’t get it with all the charts, deadlines and various scores to keep. Practice in business is too often perceived as “poor execution”. But we need to practice. That’s how we get good.

“If you use your brain power to wrap people’s mind into a pretzel, it’s likely once you turn your back they’ll squirm their way right back out to the shape they had before you got involved. And they’ll likely resent you for twisting them up too.”

He goes on to talk about tailoring your message for one person at a time, and forget about your own talking points. Good advice, and a good reminder.

“So while [techies] trump up our skills at designing “easy to use” interfaces for our applications, millions of people are still trying to figure out how to get our beautifully designed application out of its zip file or disk image.  Or where in fact the Downloads folder is. Or what, exactly, a folder is. [...] I’ve watched firsthand as people who’ve struggled to do basic computer tasks as long as I’ve known them pick up an iPhone and be cruising around within hours, if not minutes. For people who do not already thoroughly understand computers, New World devices are easier to understand and easier to use.”

Anyway, I’ll let the lyrics speak for themselves. You can buy the song here.

Cheers,
Peter

Verse 1:
Oh, for the sake of momentum
I’ve allowed my fears to get larger than life
And it’s brought me to my current agendum
Whereupon I deny fulfillment has yet to arrive

Chorus:
And I know life is getting shorter
I can’t bring myself to set the scene
Even when it’s approaching torture
I’ve got my routine

Verse 2:
Oh, for the sake of momentum
Even though I agree with that stuff about seizing the day
But I hate to think of effort expended
All those minutes and days and hours
I have frittered away.

Chorus

And I know life is getting shorter
I can’t bring myself to set the scene
Even when it’s approaching torture
I’ve got my routine

Bridge 1:
But I can’t confront the doubts I have
I can’t admit that maybe the past was bad
And so, for the sake of momentum
I’m condemning the future to death
So it can match the past.

Bridge 2:
when I can’t confront the doubts I have
I can’t admit that maybe the past was bad
And so, for the sake of momentum
I’m condemning the future to death
So it can match the past.
[ Momentum Lyrics on http://www.lyricsmania.com/ ]

“There’s a common attribute that makes for good designers, good engineers, good employees, and good companies. For a long time, I couldn’t figure out what it was. Was it practice? Was it skill? Was it innate ability? Turns out, it’s none of those. It’s taste.“

“[Ira Glass] points out how that gap between ability and taste drives creative people to achieve great things.”

[via Dustin's post on a AA.com UX designer]

He says the first step, is to stop using the word, and instead use a phrase that better represents what you mean. He typically finds that people mean one of these three when talking about “innovation”:

• Having new ideas
• Taking more risks
• Making things radically better

Other advise: “[Scott] tells us you have to be opportunistic and start small. High-priority challenges may be a temping place to start, but he suggested looking first at low-hanging fruit. You can build momentum for positive change by racking up a number of small wins that together move the project in the right direction. Having these small successes under your belt gives you more influence when attempting larger changes later on.”

“The correct tool is exponentially more productive.”

Whether you are talking about Netflix upending the rental business, cell phones killing the pay-phone business, new ways to  detect flu outbreaks, digitization of film, or more efficient ways to build web applications, the new isn’t just better. It’s radically better.

The radically better, or “exponentially” as Rands put it is really the important bit. We are not talking about small efficiencies that bring about incremental 20-30% gains, these are the big changes that happen over night and catch many people entirely off guard.

Take YouTube for example. There was more original content uploaded in the last 2 months to YouTube than ABC, CBS, and NBC created in the last 50 years… combined! Read that last sentence again, because even I was shocked the first time I ran across the statistic. That’s a lot of video, and makes these mammoth broadcasting networks look like peanuts. Say what you will about the quality of the content getting to YouTube, but YouTube didn’t exist 4 years ago, and with that kind of volume it isn’t hard to outpace the legacy broadcast networks with just a modicum of tweaking.

The same is happening in many other industries: Phone book companies have become irrelevant due to Google. The Apple’s iTunes Music Store is now the #1 music retailer making compact discs obsolete. Amazon is rapidly making many brick-and-mortar stores irrelevant (especially with their for foray into same-day-shipping). And with the Amazon’s Kindle and B&N’s Nook eBook readers coming of age, one doesn’t need a sharp imagination to see what is going to happen to the book industry. The thing about eBooks, is that for the last half-millennia, books have been largely unchanged. Until our generation.

I know people have a hard time wrapping their head around small changes, much less big ones, but these big changes are happening everywhere. Every. Single. Day. We need to adapt, or become as irrelevant as the pay phone has become.

My takeaway? What separates you and your business from your competition is your ability to rapidly change and adapt to these new realities. And then radically do it again in 18 months. And then again, and again, and again.