rodcorp: rodcorp: Projects and teams

Rodcorp is moving home

Mon, 18 Aug 2003 10:41:17 GMT

Ross Mayfield: interruption 'taxes' in IM, email, phonecalls

Wed, 13 Aug 2003 10:59:28 GMT

includes good stats for Peopleware fans. As you'd expect, generally an inverse relationship between how personal and 'intense' the type of interruption is (phonecall, email etc) and time-to-recover-from-interruption, except that IM (which has more presence than email) may extract a lower interruption tax. Another reason to use it in the office?

Businesses: managing real-time communications critical

Wed, 13 Aug 2003 10:55:05 GMT

Businesses: managing real-time communications is as important as managing real-time processes. Put another way: PR is increasingly an internal exercise because external PR just happens, leaks out of the company via your employees. So, Ross says, trust your employees, teach them and empower them. Trust being the key verb here. (cf Cluetrain of course, and Semler/Semco.)

Designers: selling down not up

Wed, 13 Aug 2003 10:49:04 GMT

Politics considered helpful in the selling-your-design game.

The title itself -- Make It Bigger-- refers to Paula's endless battle to help clients be able to see the design clearly, and accept it without the layers of hierarchy pissing on it (my words, not hers). By end running the hierarchy and then selling down rather than up, she is able to avoid watered-down design arriving for final approval.

Agile development = being ready to ship at any time?

Fri, 08 Aug 2003 15:54:56 GMT

Darren Hobbs sez that agile means being ready to ship (literally, shrinkwrap and shelve up) whatever work you've done at any point throughout the project. Guards against the risk of the project being cancelled, though arguably if something is ready to go at all times and that thing meets some of the project goals, the project probably won't get whacked. Also: possible risk of not making sufficient progress in fear of breaking the product?

Looking at "agile" as it relates to the team rather than the project itself, the other "thing" that is ready to ship when a project is whacked is the team, what it has learned (individually and collectively), and its willingness/interest in going on to the next project and doing good. Not that these are necessarily all positive values: disillusionment and fear of failure are big risks in teams that have had projects cancelled.

See also the Agile Alliance, and its manifesto:

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

Worth reading.

AIGA: Understanding The Future Of Mobile Devices

Thu, 07 Aug 2003 18:34:39 GMT

Notes taken at this event, ably led by Nico MacDonald.

WIP: Lament: music for printer and five voices

Wed, 30 Jul 2003 20:50:37 GMT

I walked into the open-plan office upstairs and heard the girls mournfully talking about how the new printer was no good. I asked whether it was slow, or had poor print quality. No: they didn’t like the newly upgraded printer’s song, which was mechanical and annoying. The old printer’s noise had been repetitive but musical, so they used to sing along with it when it did a large run of flow charts. I asked them what the old printer song had been like, and one of them started humming it to me. Gradually the others joined in until there were about five of them humming it, in remembrance.

Books read in 2002, 2003

Wed, 30 Jul 2003 20:45:23 GMT

Rodcorp's books read in 2003 (now you know what we've been doing instead of working) and 2002.

The Origins of Things: Sketches, Models, Prototypes

Mon, 21 Jul 2003 20:07:12 GMT

illuminates the process by which designers transform their often groundbreaking ideas into functional, manufacturable products. Drawings, cardboard models stuck together with tape and ultramodern computer animations are more significant here than the finished products, for they illuminate the designer's process in a way that the finished product--unless it is a deconstructive design object!--does not

Buy in UK. Incidentally, some interesting looking related books here too.
[via MachineLake]

Cabinets of Curiosity: desktops of designers

Mon, 21 Jul 2003 20:06:44 GMT

"For designers who collect, the cluttered workspace is a library of inspiration". The desks of designers Rob Cristofaro, Maira Kalman, Scott Stowell and Milton Glaser.
[via MachineLake, itself via manAmplified]

Bike courier culture, alley cat racing

Mon, 21 Jul 2003 19:35:01 GMT

This weekend we met a bunch of bike couriers at a barbecue. Interesting people, with a strong sub-culture - sub in the sense that non-couriers know very little about what they are like, how couriering works etc. Unsurprisingly, most of them are mad about bikes, and it's a way to earn a crust. So there was much talk of the Tour de France. They knew only one person who'd gone on from couriering to 'proper' road racing. There are 600-1000 couriers working London at any one time, and they do about 70-80 miles a day in town, mostly within the Circle line area, though they may travel further west to Notting Hill, and further east to the Docklands. This bunch had a strong sense of identity and shared culture/community. Some have expensively tricked-out rides, some something seemingly more standard (the playoffs between lightness/efficiency, reliability and cost being the key equations couriers run in choosing the tools of their trade), with single/no brakes and single gears common.

About 50+ of the London couriers are into "alley cat racing": illegal checkpoint-to-checkpoint race where the racers only know the next checkpoint. Ie: orienteering on a bike, in (and often against) the traffic. AC Racing was imported from US couriers in the mid-90s. Last night they showed a video made by film students by mounting a camera on one of the alley cat racers. 8 minutes of crazy, often-dangerous riding through traffic and people; ends with the cyclist getting hit by a truck when he attempted to zoom across a red-light and straight across the traffic going both ways (he'd successfully done this a few times already in the film). He wasn't hurt too badly, but the bike probably was. "Oh well, that's racing", he concludes.

Even though you don't quite get a sense of the true speed on film, it was fantastic, and reminiscent of several other illegal car or motorbike films (Claude Lelouch's infamous C'etait un Rendezvous, the Getaway in Stockholm films, Black Prince Peripherique).

Couriers, alley cat racing, etc:

some somewhat dark alley cat video at DC Courier
Google for 'alley cat race'
Travis Culley's The Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power
London Bicycle Messenger Association (who also have a print(?) newsletter called Moving Target)
bikereader.com: a rider's digest of essays, humour etc
various bike movies (list), BicycleCam (races filmed from the bike)

Other films:

Claude Lelouch's infamous C'etait un Rendezvous, a 9-minute 1973 short film in which he races his Ferrari through an empty night-time Paris. Buy Rendezvous here. (Lelouch also did a Tour de France film, Pour Un Maillot Jaune)
Black Prince Peripherique, in which a Kawasaki is raced round the 35km Paris peripherique in morning traffic. You can also buy Periperique here.
the Getaway in Stockholm films

(Update: Struan correctly reminds us that alley cat racing perpetuates the image of 'cyclists as arrogant, self-righteous grumps with only limited respect for the law'. Which, together with the rest of us non-courier cyclists going through red lights, really doesn't help. Perhaps the racing is symptomatic of a bike culture that sees itself as *against* motor traffic. Alley cat racing isn't safe or particularly clever, but we have to admit it was quite exciting to watch.)

IDEO: Give email a timeline

Mon, 21 Jul 2003 19:33:06 GMT

Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, interviews with Master of Design MIT Tech Review (free reg reqd). Two interesting nuggets: first a slightly confusing vision of email + blog-like timeline = good way to organise (confusing to us anyway: we're not sure how this is significantly different from sorting emails by Received):

There's something about e-mail that demands a reply, demands a response. But when you're getting thousands of these things, it becomes an impossibility to respond to everything. So we've got to shift the etiquette, and maybe make e-mail more like publishing: that is, you send something out and you might get one percent response. I think that the paradigm of e-mail as letters, as objects, is inappropriate. I'm waiting for a shift to the timeline, rather than the object, as the organizing principle. If you think about a blog for instance, that's a timeline. And it's a really good way of organizing huge amounts of information, because we're quite good at sequencing. We're quite good at remembering when things happen. That has meaning for us. But imagine creating an individual document around every one of those individual blog entries and just having them there on your desktop or in a folder. It would be completely meaningless to you. And that's how we treat e-mail now. But imagine keeping e-mail a bit more like a blog. Then suddenly, you've got instant messaging qualities and e-mail qualities happening at the same time. So I'm guessing that we'll start to see that sort of timeline become more and more important. Because I think it's the way that we as human beings tend to organize massive amounts of data.

And here's the well-known IDEO formulation of design as an often-*subtractive* process:

The naive view of designing is that it's purely an additive process, about adding more and more and more. Actually, design is a funnel-shaped thing. It becomes an editing process: What is appropriate? What can be stripped away? So design is a holistic way of thinking. It's about being able to create the whole of something, and in such a way that somebody who’s using that product, whether for the first time or the tenth time, understands it can interact with it as seamlessly as possible

Three sets of cards to help your head make connections faster

Fri, 18 Jul 2003 08:32:53 GMT

Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies: One hundred worthwhile dilemmas, "each of which is a suggestion of a course of action or thinking to assist in creative situations"
Charles and Ray Eames' House of Cards: Comes in five flavours. "The images are of what Eameses called 'good stuff', chosen to celebrate 'familiar and nostalgic objects from the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms'. The six slots on each card enable the player to interlock the cards so as to build structures of myriad shapes and sizes"
IDEO's new Method Cards: "Each card describes one method and includes a brief story about how and when to use it. This is not a 'how to' guide. It's a design tool meant to help you explore new approaches and develop your own. Use the deck to take a new view, to inspire creativity, to communicate with your team, or to turn a corner"

Ricardo Semler: a company should trust its destiny to its employees

Thu, 17 Jul 2003 13:05:46 GMT

From Ricardo Semler's Maverick!, the story of his anti-Taylorist experiment at Semco.

To survive in modern times, a company must have an organizational structure that accepts changes as its basic premise, lets tribal customs thrive, and fosters a power that is derived from respect, not rules. In other words, the successful companies will be the ones that put quality of life first. Do this and the rest - quality of product, productivity of workers, profits for all - will follow.
At Semco we did away with strictures that dictate the 'hows' and created fertile soil for differences. We gave people an opportunity to test, question and disagree. We let them determine their own training and their own futures. We let them come or go as they wanted, work at home if they wanted, set their own salaries, choose their own bosses.
[...]

At the heart of our bold experiment is a truth so simple it would be silly if wasn't so rarely recognized: A company should trust its destiny to its employees.
[...]

Semco is an invitation [to] forget socialism, capitalism, just-in-time deliveries, salary surveys, and the rest of it, and to concentrate on building organizations that accomplish that most difficult of challenges: to make people look forward to coming to work in the morning.

It's an invitation many companies could usefully consider.

Semler books:

Maverick: google, Allconsuming, Amazon.co.uk
The Seven-Day Weekend: google, Amazon.co.uk

Kevin Kelly Recomendo has good mapping tools etc

Wed, 16 Jul 2003 13:31:48 GMT

Diagrammatic chart of world history: Displays with utmost intelligence 50 centuries of civilization, as revealed in the complex rise and fall of ancient powers. Not as linear as the (out of print) histomap (some interesting writing/maths histomaps here)
Offroute: custom topographic maps
world map wallpaper
The Tiny Book of Tiny Houses: "Each very tiny house -- or should we say each shack and shed -- is photographed and sufficiently rendered in orthogonal view that one could construct it, or at least borrow designs from it [...] George Berhard Shaw designed [his] hut himself as a tiny office built on a central steel-pole frame so that it could be manually rotated to follow the arc of the sun" (something similar at Amazon.co.uk, Allconsuming)
Ancient Civilisations: the best one-volume survey of earlier civilizations he's found (Amazon.co.uk, Allconsuming)
and... Tools are the revolution: pdfs of pages from the Recomendo-inspired Whole Earth issue

Redundancy in software and structural engineering

Wed, 02 Jul 2003 16:38:46 GMT

Kurt Starsinic: "Redundancy" as it's usually practiced in software design is compared to the same in structural engineering, and found wanting.
[via Searls]

Unintrusive, delay-friendly: How IM augments conversations

Wed, 18 Jun 2003 10:11:04 GMT

Instant messaging's mostly-synchronous nature mean that "it is OK to not answer an IM until you are ready—a pause of 30 seconds is perfectly acceptable where it wouldn’t be in voice (and the answerer doesn’t even have to hold the question in their mind while doing something else, but can refer back to it later)". Stewart Butterfield's office uses it to communicate across geographically distant teams (where presence is a useful feature), but "even in the office here, we often use them when we are only few feet away: to ask quick questions without breaking other peoples’ concentration".

Terry Bell: The right hand of Frank Gehry

Wed, 18 Jun 2003 01:34:06 GMT

LA Times feature on the managing architect/project manager who makes Gehry's buildings happen. Architect as project manager rather than visionary.

Apart from "knowing how to build stuff," says Gehry, the key to Bell's role is "knowing how to keep a crew of workmen together, and earning a certain amount of respect for his position, because the construction guys always try to diss the architect." In another sense, Gehry continues, Bell's job is "like being the conductor: You've got the score. Now, how do you do it?"

[via ?]

Program management: responsibility without authority key to MS success

Tue, 10 Jun 2003 10:16:35 GMT

Chris Sells explains that program managers have to persuade, cajole, sell "doing the right thing" to others at Microsoft. Management by buy-in (as opposed to management buy-in). Responsibility without authority is is designed into the role, and is seen as a key differentiator for MS.

The PM's job is wake up in the morning and think to him/herself, "What's the right thing to do today?" The range of things that fall into this category is far too wide to even give you the bounds, but essentially it's whatever someone else isn't already doing (or isn't doing to their satisfaction : ). Once they identify the right thing to do, they can attempt to take "ownership" of making it happen (your boss gets a say in how you spend your time).

Once ownership is acquired, that's when things get interesting. PMs have all kinds of responsibility, but no authority. While this kind of position is generally one to avoid in the world of corporate politics, the internal product cycle training video I watched a couple of weeks ago points out that "responsibly without authority" is by design. Instead of ruling by fiat, PMs have to wander around the company finding folks that are involved with what they're doing to get their "buy in" and their help. The way to do that is through old-fashion politics, i.e. gathering consensus, persuasion, trading favors, brow-beating, table thumping, complaining up your own management chain, complaining up your opponent's management chain, etc. It's not just a popularity contest, although being liked certainly helps. It's also about your reputation, as established by your technical chops and your ability to produce, among other things.

Blogging as inhibitor (Gibson) or catalyst (Doctorow) for writing

Sun, 27 Apr 2003 23:59:30 GMT

William Gibson says he's stopping blogging so that he can write. In an interview with Karlin Lillington for the Irish Times WG said: "If I expose things that interest or obsess me as I go along, there'd be no need to write the book. The sinews of narrative would never grow.". And on his own blog he warned readers he'd stop once it was time to start the next book:

One thing that was immediately clear to me, from the first blog, is that this is not an activity, for me, that can coexist with the writing of a novel. In some way I only dimly apprehend, it requires too much of the same bandwidth (yet never engages anything like the total *available* bandwidth). But, definitely, the ecology of novelization and the ecology of blogging couldn't coexist, for me.

On the other hand, Cory Doctorow says he blogs so that he can write: "I've been using this blog to keep track of stuff that needs to work its way into my novels for years now", and notes that the same seems true for Rucker, Sterling, Warren Ellis and others too.

What is it (the author? the subject matter? the writing method?) that makes blogging a writing-inhibitor for one author and a writing-catalyst for another?

Chris Sells: My first week at Microsoft

Sun, 27 Apr 2003 22:50:20 GMT

"I learned that the internal resources for MS employees are unbelievable. I could work their my whole life and never take advantage of all of them"
[via Scoble]
Kind of related: review of an Interviewing-at-Microsoft book, How Would You Move Mount Fuji?, and onwards from there, Malcolm Gladwell asks What do job interviews really tell us?.

Vodafone sees user experience as the battlefield, Microsoft as the competition

Sun, 27 Apr 2003 12:39:03 GMT

Microsoft is our main competitor as much of the strategic position will be in controlling the user experience more than the network. Under this point of view we see a serious danger as we could be marginalised as ISPs have been.

Judging from the experience of using Vodafone Live! over GPRS, there is much work to be done.

Most significant technological revolution in TV has by far been the remote TV control

Sun, 27 Apr 2003 12:37:45 GMT

Ever notice, for example, that network series rarely have theme songs like in the old days? Thank the remote. Notice that there are no commercials between the end of one network show and the beginning of the next one? Thank the remote. Notice (if you're old enough) that the commercials themselves are more sophisticated and less annoying than the ones the TV blared in the '70s? Thank the remote. Notice those endless headlines crawling across the bottom of your screen? Thank the remote. Notice (ladies) that you can tell a lot about a guy's control issues by watching an evening of TV with him? Thank the remote.
[...]
"For all the whiz-bang predictions of what interactive TV is going to bring ... the most significant technological revolution in TV has by far been the remote TV control," said Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University's Center for the Study of Popular Television. "It made passivity even better."
[...]
The technology that's let you surf through this war was rooted in another one, World War I, when Germany used radio signals to guide a motorboat packed with explosives.

[via gizmodo]

Doctorow on Shirky at ETCON2003: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

Sun, 27 Apr 2003 12:37:10 GMT

Notes from Clay Shirky's talk at ETCON 2003.

If you're going to design a piece of social software, design for:
* All groups have a Constitution: formally instantiated in code, informally instantiated in social norms
* Handles for the user that matters. Anonymity doesn't work well for large groups, neither does weak pseudonymity. The world's best reputation system is in the emotional center of the brain. Almost all reputation systems are trivial or bad or both. Some people cheat on their wives but not at cards. eBay has done us all a disservice: non-iterated atomic transactions are the opposite of social situations. A good repuatation system just needs to let me know who you are. There has to be a penalty for switching handles.
* A way for good works to be identified -- member since, Karma, etc. A music sharing group that FedExes 180 GB HDDs back and forth gives new members the username, $SPONSOR'S_UID_MEMBERNAME
* There needs to be a cost to participate: moderators have to be around for a while. It needs to be hard to do somethings on the system: otherwise the core group won't be able to defend itself. This is anti-ease-of-use, but only for individuals, but the user of social software is the GROUP, not the USER.
* Spare the group from scale: conversations require dense, two-way conversations. Metcalfe's law is a drag. The value of a group is inverse to its size: you'll give a kidney to a smaller group than you'd give a kiss to. MeFi shuts off new users when it gets too big.
People who use your software have rights, even if you own the software.

Ricardo Semler on peopleware: Idleness is good

Fri, 18 Apr 2003 00:19:52 GMT

Ricardo Semler's methods at Semco may seem nutty (you can choose you own salary and manager, everyone can see the company financial accounts), but apparently they work.

Semco's staff work in small, autonomous units of about a dozen (the size, says Semler, of a close family group). They make the decisions, choose their leaders, set objectives and decide who they need and what they should be paid: someone who wants too much pay for what they are doing might be frozen out by the group. "From a distance it can sound like a workers' paradise," says Semler, "but the system is pretty unforgiving, because if you put your salary too high, and people don't put you on the list as someone they need for the next six months, you're in more trouble than you would be at General Motors.

There is little bureaucratic control beyond financial accountability; almost everything depends on peer pressure. "We have a higher trust in human nature," says Semler, "but we're also convinced that peer control is fabulous as long as there is a common interest. If someone's interested, the sort of corporate corruption you see elsewhere can never happen. It can only happen in places where people really don't care, where they're doing their nine-to-five thing, and the chief executive knows he's under the sword of Damocles so might as well make as much as he can. If he has that attitude, a lot of other people think the same way, so that system is doomed."

As XP is to coding, Semler's methods are to peopleware: they seem arse-about-face. And we suspect that without embracing the culture 100%, it's hard to get the benefits.

The Guardian's article pulls a quote out as its headline (Idleness is good), but the core idea is that Trusting People Is Good, and trust is something sorely lacking in many workplaces these days. The next step is probably to ask customers to name a fair price they want to pay for services, and accept it (or for customers to ask their suppliers to do a fair amount of work for a budget of X). Perhaps Semco do this already.

Awesome stuff.

Related:

Thunderbird's case study on Semler and Semco has a more in-depth overview of how Semco's participative management culture works (Thunderbird: "The American Graduate School of International Management")
At Ideo, team-leaders make a pitch to fellow employees about the kind of work direction they want to take their team in, and the employees get to choose which team to join.