(really) entrepreneureal

I ran a great visioning session the other day for some friends in the user interaction space.  They have a great business: solid contracts, good client relationships, and a new product in testing – but they also know that they have a lot of work to do to become the company they envision, with the growth they aspire to.

I started the session in a standard Current Reality-Vision format, until I realized that my job, at least at this early stage, was to do something much simpler: just let them talk.

We take for granted the honesty and candor that come with our friendships and family relationships, and assume that this applies to the business world, too.  Sure, we’re all more professional at work, but we’re open and forthcoming, right?

Wrong.  By merely being in the room I gave this team the freedom to talk and explore issues that rarely come up – but that are fundamental to the strength of their business.

So next time, remember to let them talk.  It does everyone good.

I was trolling through my feed reader, and came across this article.

I would love to give you a run down of the piece, and provide an in depth analysis of the writer’s finer points, but I can’t.  Globe and Mail wants to charge me CAD$4.95 plus tax for the privelege of downloading the article – and only then for 30 days.

Excuse me?  Has the staff at Globe and Mail been living in a cave? Or gone off the deep end?

Nobody charges for online content, and certainly not $5.  Every heard of iTunes?  The magical $0.99 number is not ideal for a news article, but still better than nothing.

This is the perfect example of how an anachronistic business model is struggling to change with times and will, ultimately, likely be snuffed out.  Building an empire on a foundation of paper just isn’t viable anymore. This is especially true if you have the audacity to charge over $1000 for a yearly subscription.  What do I get with this – the cell phone numbers of the writers, so I can call them up with clarifying questions? Or maybe access to a members-only G&M club with local events?

No, all I get is a big pile of paper (bull).  So sad.

I just spent two days helping facilitate a design charrette for a client.  The idea was to put a range of interesting people and potential partners in the room and get them to weigh in on the client’s new business concept.  We purposefully chose a diverse group for the meetings in order to get a good spread of opinions and ideas, and to create a unique networking opportunity for everyone. I think we succeeded on every front.

Halfway through the second day, though, it occurred to me that I was in a room chock-full of “weak ties”; which, if you read my last post, you’ll know should make for interesting results.  It also struck me as having an awfully powerful effect given that every single participant was being exposed to something new: a unique business model, a novel technology, a different growth trajectory.  There was nothing linking people in the room other than that they were all in a thoroughly unique context – and loving it.

In discussing the phenomenon with one of the participants, we came to the conclusion that people don’t change their contexts often enough, or even realize that there are other options out there!  An organization hires consultants to identify weak spots (because it can’t get out of its context), or someone goes to a therapist for guidance and support.  There are examples of how contextual shifts can be beneficial, but overall it seems we are poorly conditioned into acknowledging that all we often need is a change of context, pace, or perspective to come up with new ideas and solutions to life’s challenges.

So this might work fine for the savvy businessperson, or the 20-something who is able to soak up change like a sponge – but how can we begin to think about teaching context-changing to everyone, from 2 to 92?  How do we design concerted contextual change on a large scale?

Thoughts, ideas?

I spent last night watching a live gig by The Sweet Remains, at San Francisco bastion of good music, the Hotel Utah Saloon.  The evening was an aural delight, but also brought a couple of things to mind:

1. It really is the weak ties that matter.

Mark Granovetter is famous for focusing on the “strength of weak ties”, or basically, how it’s the people you don’t know well who run the highest chance of introducing you to other new people.  Sounds obvious, but when I arrived at the gig and realized that my friend Dave was best friends with one of the band mates, it all struck home at once.  Lesson learned?  Never discount your acquaintances, because they could lead to great things; and in this economy, we should all take every chance we can get.

2. Talent finds talent (through work and perseverance).

While my link to the band was pure happenstance, their success is no such thing.  Together for over a decade and friends for much longer, the bandmates put in many hours to get to where they are today (probably over 10,000).  It goes to show that success does tend to breed success – usually built on a solid foundation of hard work and dedication.  As fear for our livelihoods grows by the day (or at least, that’s what the news would have you think), we should all remember one thing:

Yes we can.

The term “cloud computing” is, in my view, an anachronism.

This doesn’t mean that it isn’t timely or relevant, or a reflection of what’s happening in the world, because in many ways it is. However, it is a term that’s definitely based on dated views of the way that technology works – and should work – and frankly, it’s totally handicapping the conversation about what cloud computing actually means.

Picture this: a large system of “nodes”, where content flows freely between them.  If one node moves, or disappears, the system reorganizes itself to maintain content flow. The overriding organizing principle? No concrete boundaries, shifting hierarchies, and a focus on organic growth and adaptation.

Replace the word “content” with “information”, or “data packets”, and you are basically describing our current technologically connected world.  Sure, concrete boundaries certainly exist in the form of physical computing platforms, operating systems, mobile handsets; hierarchies don’t shift so much as dictate how content flows, and technology is hardly “organic” in the purely abstract sense.  As long as the world is based on a binary string of 1’s and 0’s, at least in their current configuration, we’re far from the interconnected system described above.

But that’s exactly the point.  Cloud computing isn’t just another fad, or a better way of organizing data, engaging in “utility computing” or service delivery.  Sure, these are individual outputs of a more interconnected world, but they definitely aren’t the end game.

While cloud computing theory suffers from an unfortunate level of myopia, there really isn’t a better alternative.  Should we look to Emergence, which offers an intriguing look how systems reorganize, but is highly impractical? Or maybe traditional social networking theory from the likes of Granovetter?

Or do we need a more futurist, contextual, and ultimately radical approach to viewing our world?

As the global economy tanks, I’m struck by the number of clients and partners who express frustration with their inability to alter the status quo of their business environment, due either to bureaucratic inertia, lack of motivation, or perceived general helplessness.  This is an issue that is particularly poignant for small companies, because they often intersect with much larger organizations on a regular basis and are forced to deal with the momentum and weight of the “status quo” each and every time.

This sense of frustration isn’t new.  Business tales abound of the small contractor/company/consultant fighting to get things done for a large(r) client, and the endless frustration that usually follows.  Indeed, there are thousands of companies that make a great living by challenging the internal status quo of larger institutions (these folks are generally called “consultants”, which elicits much the same sentiment as that other term, “lawyers”) because these larger organizations grew at the expense of what (I assume) made them great to start with.

My advice is usually this: give yourself the freedom to make choices that stay true to your identity as an individual or company.  Because at the end of the day, if we don’t own the freedom to make the right/best/most creative/most effective/game changing choices, then we’ll never be able to say that we’ve done enough and truly tried our best.  This could mean something as simple as choosing a different tack with a client, or on the extreme end, even turning a client down.  Whatever the case, it simply isn’t helpful to point to the bureaucracy, or the “higher ups”, or the “status quo”, as reasons for not trying something new, or making sure that you get the job done to the ultimate satisfaction of the number one client – you.

On the positive side, that people are expressing frustration at all means that they are re-evaluating things, and perspective can never hurt.  It is funny to see, though, how many people are quick to shrug off the advice of “owning freedom” as trivial.  Sure, it certainly isn’t easy and will take a load of practice, but the end result in more than worth the effort.  It’s almost as if feeling free to live the business and life that we want has been drilled out of us.

Time to get it back.

This post is a little behind schedule, but I do figure that late is better than never.

I saw Eric Rodenbeck from Stamen Design speak at the Commonwealth Club a little while back.  Stamen is a boutique design and visualization firm that finds unique and interactive ways to represent data.  These could be anything from crime stats in Oakland, housing data from the last 100 years, or even the latest activity on Digg.  Here’s the trick, though: the Stamen crew doesn’t come up with your typical charts, scatter plots and boring data representations, no – they try, as Eric said (and I’m paraphrasing), to “let the data speak for itself”. This results in some pretty amazing stuff, and Eric’s talk was definitely interesting.

I’ve met Eric before, and was impressed by how he brings a great knack for explaining the stories behind whatever information it is that he’s playing with; this, combined with an amazing intuition for how data can be manipulated for best effect, make him a rather compelling speaker.  His speaking aside, Stamen’s broader ambition, to unveil the story, the human face, the intriguing tidbit behind every bit and byte, made me think long and hard about how we seem to do our best to obscure the beauty inherent to the world around us.

Bar charts? Scatter plots?  You’ve got to be kidding.  This all hints that maybe there is a need for a paradigm shift in how we think about data visualization.  Maybe everything we’ve been doing thus far has been, for lack of a better word, wrong.

I think part of our ineptitude for data visualization can be traced to our obsession with data tools.  Excel, Gantt charts, linear algebra – these are all tools for manipulating numbers, which is fine for accountants and business plans, but is far removed from the real world we live in.  Wait, scratch that – just because accountants and business plans use numbers doesn’t mean they have to be represented so poorly, so linearly. Can you imagine if your accountant showed your spending habits in a crazy schema like that used by Jonathan Harris?

Stamen, on the other hand, is all about the process. It’s not what we use to manhandle data (if we manhandle it at all), rather it’s how (and to some extent, why).  Use design processes that challenge existing data visualization practices instead of relying on the simple set of tools offered by Powerpoint, or Excel. Find inspiration for the *best* (or better, anyway) way to show information by exploring the world around you, asking the people who the data is for what they would like to see.

Of course, I have no doubt that if everyone gave themselves the freedom to explore new ways of data visualization, to flex their creative muscles, that the world would be a much prettier and more intuitive place.  But as luck would have it, most of us have neither the time nor the inclination to even try.

Shame.