Archives for 2008

The Next Level of the Game

August 5, 2008 By

The coach tells the high-school star athlete, you’ve got to take your game to the next level to compete in college. The executive coach tells the young hotshot, at the next level, EQ matters more than IQ. What does this mean? The metaphor of levels is pervasive but obscure. It illuminates many things — sports, education, careers, personal-life stages — but very few things illuminate the metaphor itself. In fact I can think of only one: a certain class of video/computer games. Games that are somewhere between the elemental, abstract ones like Tetris and over-engineered MMPORGs. A great example, that I’ll use, is the neoclassical vertical shooter, LaserAge (think ‘modernized Space Invaders). Here is a screen shot of Wave 1, Level 1.

Ingava LaserAge, Level 1

Ingava LaserAge, Level 1

What makes this game just right to illuminate the “levels” metaphor is that it is in a Golidlocks sweet spot. Unlike, say, Tetris, you don’t get sucked into a realm of mathematical abstraction. But neither do you get sucked into complicated mythologies and narratives that obscure the mappings to real life. Playing a lot of Tetris or World of Warcraft makes you better at Tetris or World of Warcraft. Playing LaserAge makes you better at life.

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Acceleration as Strategy, Urgency as Doctrine

July 23, 2008 By

Three things happened today that created a sort of nuclear reaction in my head. The result was a rather blinding flash of insight concerning a set of knotty problems I am wrangling with. The first thing was a reaction, from a colleague, to a whirlwind burst of activity I put in last night to react to an opportunity. The second was an unusual compliment from another colleague. The third was a pre-release review copy of John Kotter’s upcoming A Sense of Urgency arriving in the mail today (check out the HBP site for Kotter, which includes a video)

Somehow the raw material brought me one of my increasingly rare moments of clarity (my last Aha! of comparable magnitude was 2 years ago). Condensed to a sound-bite, my insight can be summed up as follows: for your business to win today, you must adopt acceleration as your strategy, and urgency as your doctrine. Let me explain, via some bigger bite-sized thoughts.

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Towards a Philosophy of Destruction

July 21, 2008 By

Somewhere in the back of our minds, we know that creation and growth must be accompanied by destruction and decline. We pay lip service to this essential dichotomy, or attempt to avoid it altogether, by using false-synthesis weasel words like renewal. I too have been guilty of this, as in this romanticized treatment of creative destruction (though I think that was a fine piece overall). Though I define innovation as “creative destruction” in the sense of Schumpeter, most of the time I spend thinking about this subject is devoted to creativity and growth. The reasons for this asymmetry are not hard to find. Destruction is often associated (and conflated) with evil. More troubling — it is often associated with pain, even if there is no evil intent involved. Finally, destruction — let’s loosely define it as any entropy-increasing process — is also more likely to happen naturally. It therefore requires less deliberate attention, and is easier to deny and ignore. Still, the subject of destruction does deserve, say, at least 1/5 the attention that creation commands. A thoughtful philosophy of destruction is essential to a rich life, at the very least because each of us must grapple with his/her own mortality. So here is a quick introduction to non-evil destruction, within the context of business and innovation. Before we begin, lodge this prototypical example of creative destruction, the game of Jenga, in your mind:

Jenga (Wikimedia Commons)

Jenga (Wikimedia Commons)

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Peter Cappelli’s “Talent On Demand”

July 17, 2008 By

There is a compelling scene in HBO’s quasi-fictional Western, Deadwood, which qualifies as an instant lesson in the essentials of talent management. The 1870s mining boom town of Deadwood, which is just emerging from Wild West state-of-nature conditions, has attracted the attention of the robber baron George Hearst. Al Swearengen, the town’s incumbent strongman, adapts nimbly and switches from a governance-by-murder strategy to a more artful one, and in the process very effectively shifts power between his two key reports to reflect the priorities of the new situation. Dan Doherty, his dim and violent second from the lawless past, is gracefully shunted aside, while the more suave, but restless and underutilized Silas Adams is handed the tricky and critical “stretch” task of managing the relationship with George Hearst. Somehow, Al keeps both men motivated and loyal. Modern executives will recognize all sorts of very current themes in this little vignette. So how do you master these timeless elements of talent management, while operating in modern business conditions? You read Talent On Demand by Wharton’s Peter Cappelli, a book that completely validates my belief that talent management is the issue of the next decade (the purchasing function ranks a close second).

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Work-Life Chemistry and How to Measure It

July 13, 2008 By

Let’s say you go on a business trip to the city where your favorite cousin lives, who you haven’t seen for a decade. You enjoy a nice dinner together one evening. In utility terms, this is positive work-life chemistry – your company doesn’t pay anything extra, and you essentially got a freebie family visit. Or maybe you’ve been meaning to read a book, but haven’t been able to find the time. Then the book suddenly becomes critically relevant to your work, and your boss demands that you read and present a summary at the next team meeting. So you spend a few afternoons at your desk, at work, reading it. Work-life chemistry happens when episodes of work-life blending lead to a non-zero sum outcomes. I made up a way to measure and visualize your work-life chemistry. Here is what it looks like. If the arrow in the diagram below is in the reddish zone, as in this example, you are blending work and life positively. In the blue zone, work-life chemistry is draining you (thinking “dampening” if you like). Let me explain how this works, and show you how to sketch out your diagram and arrow.

chem1.png

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Dipity, Or, How to View Time, 2.0

July 7, 2008 By

For history buffs like me, a rich understanding of the temporal structure of the world is very important, almost more so than its spatial structure. Timelines to me are in some ways vastly more interesting than atlases and maps. More generally, I (like I suspect, many others), have been watching jealously while creative programmers have been making up great “2.0” style visualizations, and wishing I could use their tools. Today, a startup named Dipity made my day by creating a fantastic time-line visualization tool, which I used to create this visualization of the history of my employer, Xerox. I absolutely love it when a company does just one thing, but does it really well. Wikinomics.com has a great interview with the co-founder, Derek Dukes. I hope this is the start of a whole new ecosystem of startups that creates a riot of visualization tools for everybody to use. Next request: somebody create a tool for user-generated cartograms please.

[Visualization here; temporarily un-embedded]

Happy First Birthday, Ribbonfarm

July 6, 2008 By

Recently I took my usual mile-long walk to my neighborhood Starbucks, in suburban Rochester, something I often do when I need a physical rhythm to help tame runaway thoughts. I sat on the patio, sipping my drink, watching the sun set behind Bill Gray’s restaurant. Cars and Harley Davidsons (upstate New York is biker country) occasionally rumbled by. At some point, the scene quietly turned magical and surreal. The buzz of the other coffee drinkers’ conversations faded. The sunset acquired a sudden stillness. I took a picture with my cellphone.

Hard Road

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From Bubbles to Cloud: The Evolution of Enterprise 2.0

June 27, 2008 By

Since New York Times columnist/blogger Marci Alboher just praised my ‘whimsical and thoughtful’ drawings and my previous article was all text, I thought I’d better hurry up and invite NYT readers onboard with a whimsical-and-thoughtful. Here’s my attempt at a right-brained model of Enterprise 2.0 capability maturity:

Bubbles to cloud

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Theory W, Theory X and Theory Y

June 22, 2008 By

For real estate agents, it is location, location, location. For businesses, it is talent, talent, talent. Neither of Douglas McGregor’s classic pair, Theory X and Theory Y, works anymore, and neither does any clever combination thereof. Whether you are a free agent, or a manager in a larger company, your ability to understand and orchestrate your corner of the talent economy will make or break you and your company. Kicking and screaming, anybody with half a brain has accepted that the “fungible headcount” mental model must necessarily be replaced with a “people are unique” mental model. But this uplifting let’s-all-self-actualize strengths message has brought with it the demanding task of mass-customized management, all in the face of revolving-door dynamics. In this series, I offer up the outlines of a new beta theory, Theory W, that I hope will help, and which you’ll have to help me finish.

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The Three-Leaps-of-Faith Rule

June 20, 2008 By

ABDs agonize far too much about finishing, and not enough about finishing right. A successful Ph.D. experience, as opposed to a merely completed one, is one that leaves you with self-assurance, confidence in your own abilities, and full of the creativity and energy required to go after more ambitious pursuits. A completed but unsuccessful Ph.D. experience, on the other hand, can leave you cynical, broken, and effectively ruined for further research work. Many, of course, acquire “successful” mindsets via postdoctoral experiences, but you should aim to get it right the first time.
I have a magic formula for a successful Ph.D. Through the course of your doctoral work, you must make at least 3 significant leap-of-faith decisions, that turn out to be right. Here is a picture of what a leap of faith looks like:

Leap of faith

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