Great Thoughts Time

You've likely heard or read about Google's famous of '20% time', their practice that allows and even encourages Google engineers to spend as much as 20% of their working hours pursuing projects of their own creation and choice. Google's history and some part of their culture is shaped by this unusual convention, most organizations would be hard pressed to define roles and manage teams and project commitments if a large part of their workforce was simply 'given' one day a week to do as they pleased.The Hamming Distance

Certainly Google has benefited from this practice as much if not more than the individual engineers. Many successful projects, (Gmail being the most well known), are said to have gotten their start as '20% time' projects. But despite how well known Google's program is, the clear successes it has helped to produce, and the seemingly obvious talent attraction and retention benefits that such freedom, (and trust), must accrue to Google; this program has not seen widespread adoption outside Google. 

So while the actual practice of formal '20% time' is more or less a Google-specific program, the idea of taking some time to step back from the day-to-day grind and think about new projects or tricky problems that may or may not be related to current initiatives is not at all unique. But the problem for most of us that have to try and find available time or seek opportunity for similar consistent stretches of exploration is that well, we just never find the time. Or we only find the time when we should be doing something else. Like actually having a life outside of work, taking a vacation, or participating in family or community activities.

I was thinking about this over the weekend when I came across the transcript of a talk titled 'You and Your Research' given by the late mathematician Dr. Richard Hamming on March 7, 1986 to an audience at the legendary Bell Laboratories facility in New Jersey. The hour or so long talk covered a fairly wide range of topics and bits of advice from the then 71 year-old Hamming, but none more interesting than his description of his personal version of '20% time', something he called 'Great Thoughts Time.'  What is 'Great Thoughts Time?' From the written transcript of Hamming's talk:

If you want to do great work, you clearly must work on important problems, and you should have an idea. Along those lines at some urging from John Tukey and others, I finally adopted what I called 'Great Thoughts Time.' When I went to lunch Friday noon, I would only discuss great thoughts after that. By great thoughts I mean ones like: `What will be the role of computers in all of AT&T?', `How will computers change science?''

Very cool. Hamming invented his own version of '20% Time' sometime in the 1950s, except it was really just '10% Time', (from 'Friday noon' onward), and rather than an open and free-flowing kind of exercise, he concentrated his thinking on what he called 'Great Thoughts', those critical and truly important ideas that if he focused on them, he could do great work. If you read the entire transcript of Hamming's talk you get the sense of the competitiveness inherent amongst these super intelligent scientists at Bell Labs.

Hamming clearly believed that having the smarts alone would not guarantee a scientist, or anyone for that matter a shot at real greatness. To do great work you had to work on only the truly important problems. And to identify what those truly important problems were, you had to set aside a block in your schedule for 'Great Thoughts Time'.

What do you think? Do you set aside time to think about the biggest issues facing you, your profession, or your organization today?

Why not?

2011 Rewind - Slaves to the Machine

Note: This week I am taking a look back on some of the 2011 posts that were either popular, interesting, (at least to me), or that might warrant a re-visit for some reason before the year is officially in the books. And also after about 200 or so posts this year, I am more or less tapped out of original ideas and want to recharge a bit. So that said, I hope you enjoy this little look back at 2011 here on my tiny corner of the internets.

I am not sure if the post from June titled 'Let's Pass on That, (The Hamster Wheel), was my best post of the year, (lack of comments and shares surely indicate that it was not), or even my favorite post of the year, (something about robots or sports would probably claim that spot), but in many ways I think the point of the piece is likely the most resonant, (at least to me), of all the big themes in the world of work in 2011.

Ridiculous amounts of content being created, shared,  and consumed every day. Social networks and connections on these social networks keep growing exponentially. Going to bed with the iPhone, waking up with the iPad is now not that unusual. Then later in the year Facebook launches 'frictionless sharing', making push notifications of the songs you listen to and the articles you scan out to the network an afterthought. All of it adds up to a dense, deep, and limitless sea of data that many of us try, (in vain), to stay on top of.  

In 2012 I think one of the major themes is going to be how, as individuals and organizations, we improve our ability to adapt, control, and make the technology, the deluge of information, and the power of connections and social networks serve our needs, and the needs of our organizations and communities, rather than the other way around.

So I will leave you in 2011 with a re-rerun of 'The Hamster Wheel', and say many, many thanks for spending a little of your time this year here on the site. 

Happy New Year!

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Really late to the story on this, (about nine months late to be more precise), but I recently found and read an incredible piece by Dean Starkman for the Columbia Journalism Review site titled 'The Hamster Wheel'.

In the article, Starkman compares the changes in journalistic approaches, and the increasing demands on journalists to create tons of consumable content for a myriad of platforms, (TV, radio, Web, Social Networks, blogs, live blogs,and on and on), to the proverbial caged hamster running on an exercise wheel. Lots of activity, lots of energy being expended, but no real progress, and of course the hamster ends up in exactly the same place when exhaustion sets in as it was before the running started, and theoretically it still had some options.

In the context of the news business, Starkman describes the Hamster Wheel psyche like this:

The Hamster Wheel isn’t speed; it’s motion for motion’s sake. The Hamster Wheel is volume without thought. It is news panic, a lack of discipline, an inability to say no. It is copy produced to meet arbitrary productivity metrics. But it’s more than just mindless volume. It’s a recalibration of the news calculus. Of the factors that affect the reporting of news, an underappreciated one is the risk/reward calculation that all professional reporters make when confronted with a story idea: How much time versus how much impact? This informal vetting system is surprisingly ruthless and ultimately efficient for one and all. The more time invested, the bigger the risk, but also the greater potential glory for the reporter, and the greater value to the public (can’t forget them!). Do you fly to Chicago to talk to that guy about that thing? Do you read that bankruptcy examiner’s report? Or do you do three things that are easier?

It is perhaps difficult to find another industry than news and information services that has been disrupted more massively in the last 15 years or so by the rapid development of the web, the birth of so-called 'citizen journalism', and the perfect storm of cheap data plans, incredibly powerful smartphones and other mobile devices, and hundred of millions of social network platform users ready and eager to report and comment on the news - all in real-time. In the CJR piece, Starkman paints a vivid picture of increasing activity with possibly dubious benefit, and that underscores more endemic tensions in workplaces today - we are all asked to do more, or at least the same, with far less people and resources.

The article contains an example of the Hamster Wheel in action using the illustrative chart on the right - over the last ten or so years, story production in the printed Wall Street Journal has increased substantially, with corresponding reductions in headcount leading Starkman to conclude the average WSJ reporter is now 69% more productive that in 2000. 

In the race for web traffic, more views of a networks' or news organizations' YouTube videos, 'likes' on Facebook, or Twitter followers; Starkman makes the argument that the traditional values and importance of deeply reported and in-depth investigative pieces (the ones that can't really be tweeted), are suffering. And not only are news organizations steering away from the investment of time and resources to produce these pieces, the long-term financial benefits of the current 'Hamster Wheel' strategy are dubious at best. Some estimated claim the popular and 'Web 3.0' model of journalism The Huffington Post only creates about one dollar of revenue per reader per year.

Is that a large, more applicable to the workplace take on all of this?  In other words, why did I just spend 45 minutes and 600 or so words writing about a nine-month old article on the news business?

Well here goes - I think many of us of running on our own personal or organizational Hamster Wheels. We too have to be everywhere. We have to connect and communicate with colleagues and staff on many more platforms than ever before. We have to engage potential job candidates all over the social web, and create compelling engagement strategies for the conversation, (that will work on all kinds of mobile devices including ones that have not been invented yet). We have to stay on top of news, information, coming and goings in our industry in a 24/7 global context.

In short, we kind of have convinced ourselves, just like the execs at many of the news organizations that Starkman discusses in the CJR piece, that we can't take a breath, miss a tweet, an update, follow the hashtag from a conference we could not get to, or let someone else beat us to the punch.  It is a hard way to live without any kinds of filters to know what is truly important and meaningful and what isn't.

I'll leave you with a final nugget of insight from the the piece:

The most underused words in the news business today: let’s pass on that.

They might be the most underused words in your business too.

Repetition, Creativity, and Short Memories

A series of pretty long flights and flight delays the last few months not only provided some decent blog material for my 'Notes From the Road' series, but also furnished the opportunity to finally read the almost 800-page unofficial oral history of ESPN called 'Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN', by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales.

The book's format, and it is definitely not for everyone, has almost no author penned narrative or exposition. Rather the story of ESPN unfolds in a long series of snippets from interviews that the authors conducted with more than 500 people that built, led, worked at, or observed ESPN since its humble beginnings in 1979 to its self-proclaimed position today as the 'Worldwide Leader in Sports.' The tale of ESPN, with plenty of drama, corporate infighting, scandal, really questionable to downright bad behavior, innovative and groundbreaking ideas, and finally to its position today as probably the most powerful single entity in sports, (and the main reason your cable TV bill is so high), is really targeted at the sports junkies among us.  So while I enjoyed the book, I can't really recommend it to anyone other than the sports-obsessed.

But in the 800 pages worth of observations and comments from (mostly), really successful and accomplished executives, broadcasters, and marketers there are quite a number of interesting and kind of instructive pieces of advice that have application in areas beyond sports the presentation of sports on TV. Again, while there are several of these in the book - I will just highlight one, an examination and recommendation on staying fresh, even when the work seems repetitive, and how to continue to bring new ideas to the table when it can be easy to keep trotting out the 'this is the way we've always done it' card.

Here it is, some advice from ESPN Executive Producer Bill Fitts to the line Producers as to what they should do with their written post-mortem show reports after an event had been broadcasted:

"When you guys finish your shows, take that file and throw it out. Do not keep one piece of paper, because next year when we have to come back and do this again, it will force you to rethink everything you did, not just pick up from where you left off and implement the same procedures and production elements that you did last year."

Money. The challenge in a creative field like broadcasting is to continue to push, to keep new ideas flowing, to devise and deliver new ways for the audience to experience the events so that with each viewing, even if if was the 3,459rd basketball game they had seen, maybe something about the show would be new, fresh, innovative. And you can really only make that happen, at least consistently, by letting go of the past, your assumptions, your pre-conceived constraints, and look at the challenge like it was brand new, and anything is possible.

And its good advice for us in the workplace as well. Whether it is annual benefits open enrollment, a new training and development program we are pushing, or a new system we are building - how might the way we deliver be different, (and hopefully better), if we could really let go of the past and start brand new.

Relative Creativity

Take a look at the promotional posted for the 2009 movie 'The Men Who Stare at Goats' :

I didn't see it eitherNot a bad looking promotional effort most would say - edgy, creative kind of typeface, clever use of the actual goat in the series of profile images, stars of the film staring out wisfully into the middle distance.

Some big time names in the form of George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Ewan McGregor, and Kevin Spacey also help the piece achieve a little bit more wow factor.

I am pretty sure the movie was not what you'd call a smash hit, or even a 'hit', (the IMDB page for the movie indicates about a $32M gross on an estimated $25M budget). But surely any disappointment in the eventual box office receipts for the movie would not be attributed to the poster that you see on the left, after all, while perhaps not being incredibly artistic and memorable, it certainly is a solid, 'B' kind of effort.

But take another look at the 'Men Who Stare at Goats' poster, this time in a larger context of very similar looking pieces, (courtesy of the Daily Inspiration site):

Look closely at the 'collage' image on the right - the 'Goats' poster is in there, (second row, third from the left). Keep looking

Weird how alike so many movie posters seem to be in terms of design, layout, color schemes, etc. If you take a longer look at the Daily Inspiration piece you'll see more examples of how similar movie genres, (Action, Romance, etc.), have consistently spawned similar looking promotional posters.

What might be interpreted as interesting, attractive, and well-executed when approached individually, (like the 'Goats' poster), takes on a slightly different tone and feeling when viewed through this lens. When thrown together dozens of other pieces informed with the same mindset and sensibility, the 'Goats' poster simply vanishes into the sea of sameness, (and safety, I suppose).

The point to all this? Not much of one admittedly, I saw the Daily Inspiration piece and it simply seemed interesting to me. I guess if there MUST be a point, (I think the Blogging for Dummies Book I read five years ago mentioned something about each post having some kind of point), it's that understanding context, and the ability of your audiences to compare the work we produce, the systems we design, and the strategies we devise and deploy with what else is being created, designed, and deployed is an important, and sometimes overlooked component of our success.  

It can be really easy to spring something out to our internal customers with the mindset that they are a kind of captive audience, without the ability to make free choices from competing alternatives. Kind of like a movie-goer whose multiplex has the same film running on all 12 screens. And for many workplace systems or policies that is indeed true. Employees can't choose their own HRIS if they don't like the one the company has deployed, and they can't create and elect their own medical or dental plan coverage if yours are not to their liking. 

But what they can do, and what has become increasingly easier in the age of social networking and open communication is have a much, much better understanding of competing alternatives and what is possible outside of your own organization. It has never been easier to compare almost everything about one organization's operations with others that are potential competitor's for a good employee's services. 

The 'Goats' poster is fine. There is nothing wrong with it. It just looks like every other one you've ever seen. Whether or not that is good enough is really the question.

Transferable Excellence

I read a really neat piece on the Fast Company CoDesign site last week about Pixar, describing some of the secrets, or really philosophies that form much of the foundation for their success. The piece, titled 'The Inside Story: 5 Secrets To Pixar's Success', details the some of the recollections of Pixar's former Chief Technical Officer, Owen Jacob.  These kinds of articles are usually have only limited value and application to the broader business world, as often the 'secret sauce' of a Pixar or a Zappos or an Apple are nearly impossible to duplicate outside of those unique and distinct environments and cultures. Or some of the secrets really aren't secrets at all, just common and common sense approaches to customer service or design or communication that for one reason or another these companies manage to execute more effectively than most.

In the CoDesign piece about Pixar, most of the ideas weren't those not-really-secrets and rather were kind of interesting and a little unexpected. Among them were advice on letting your work rather than your words speak for themselves, admitting when an idea or project needs to be scrapped and re-started, and understanding the importance of the medium when transmitting your messages. 

But it is the last 'secret' was the one most intriguing, and the one most traditionally associated with human resources and recruiting - Hire For Excellence. Of course many if not most organizations, at least on the surface, attempt to hire for excellence, but only as it is normally defined and interpreted. That is by carefully matching resumes and experiences with job requirements, interviewing to get a sense of the candidate's process and approaches to solving problems, and perhaps assessing more ambiguous interpretations of cultural fit. But no matter the specifics of the process, all organizations try to make the best matches when filling their open positions.

What is different, and secret, about Pixar's definition of hiring for excellence it their broader, more expansive view of excellence. According to the CoDesign piece, the 'excellence' they are looking for is not limited to the job spec, or in some kind of pre-defined assessment, but rather this:

It doesn’t matter what you are excellent at, just that you have reached a level of excellence. It’s important that you know what excellence feels like and what it takes to achieve it. It could be gardening, jujitsu, or cooking. The main thing is you’ve had a taste of excellence and will know how to get there again.

Definitely a different take than most of the standard processes we have in place for identifying and assessing candidates. While in the interview or screening processes, we might (briefly) look at or consider someone's 'non-essential' interests or skills as a data point in the process, we almost never think of these activities as a kind of predictor of on the job success, and rarely consider what achieving excellence in the real world could mean inside our own organizations.

So what do you think? Is demonstrated excellence at something, anything as good or better than the 'right' experiences, skills, and education?