CHART OF THE DAY: Mount Stupid

Really quick shot for the end of a busy week, where despite it being nearly May, it is still snowing as I write this.

Today's CHART OF THE DAY does not cover one of the normal themes I usually like to hit with these posts - employment, the labor force, the aging population, how terrible the Knicks have been, etc.

No, today's chart, courtesy of SMBC Comics, is meant to elicit a chuckle and perhaps make you think, even just a little, before you feel the urge to chime in on a topic, issue, person, or event that you really don't have all that much information about.

Here's the chart, the one last comment from me after that:

Knowing just about nothing about a subject generally doesn't get you into trouble. Neither does being incredibly well-versed. In the former case, we usually have enough sense to keep out of the conversation and debate. And in the latter case, even if we run into a disagreement, we can usually have facts, data, or even just plain old experience to back up our opinions.

But when we know just about enough to simultaneously not seem like a complete fool but not enough to avoid becoming that fool?

That my friends is 'Mount Stupid.'

And you don't ever want to be up there. Besides being unpleasant, it's way, way too crowded.

Have a great weekend!

I'm comfortable not knowing

About a thousand years ago I was a newbie consultant working for a large, (actually quite large), implementation services arm of a equally large software company. As the software products that our consulting and implementation services group were responsible for implementing numbered in the dozens (if not more), and they were each one reasonably complex technologies, the company enrolled all newly hired implementation consultants in an extensive 8-week training program that was affectionately known as 'bootcamp'.

The bootcamp consisted of 8 hour days, for 8 weeks, taking all of the new consultants through the details and inner workings of the most commonly purchased of the company's applications, giving us a reasonable facsimile of 'real-world' problems that needed to be solved via case studies, and took us through what life as a traveling software consultant was actually all about. Aside - the job and lifestyle was equally better and worse than we all anticipated, but that is a topic for another time.

But even over an 8-week period, the amount of technical, functional, business, process, and project management material that was presented to us was immense and fast-paced, and truly, there was almost no way to actually remember I'd estimate more than about half of it. The rest, and certainly the more important parts of the knowledge needed to become a good consultant would take more time to acquire, and work in the field with real customers to reinforce.

All of this setup is to get to the point of this post. I don't really remember anything specifically from the content of the 8-week training bootcamp save for one sentence that was uttered not from one of the excellent instructors or experienced consultants that led our training, but rather from one of my fellow bootcampers.

At the end of a long week of intensive work on some complex application and technology concepts, our instructor was making a final point about some detail or another, and she noticed a look of confusion on the face of a student in the front of the class. She paused, explained the point once more, and then asked him point blank, "Do you understand what I mean by configuring setting ABC in order to allow the customer to do XYZ?" , (the specifics don't matter, and I don't remember what they were anyway).

The student thought about the question for a second then replied, "No, I really don't understand. But I'm comfortable not knowing."

The instructor was a little taken aback, tried to re-state the concept, and hammer it home so that it clicked with the student, but she missed the real point of his response. It was not that he didn't care about understanding the point she was making, or that he would never understand it, but rather in that setting, with that specific point competing with about 3,000 other ones we'd all been exposed to in the last few weeks, that is was ok to not understand. He was comfortable (his word), with his ability to access reference material, draw on his network of colleagues, do some of his own testing, etc. in order to understand the key point when confronted with the problem in the future.

He was comfortable not knowing because he was comfortable in his ability to think about the problem, access relevant resources, and apply what he'd learned more generally in order to solve this specific problem. He didn't need to know everything, Heck, no one needs to know everything.

I like people that don't claim to have all the answers. I especially like people that are willing to admit that they don't have all the answers, but know how to find them. 

And are comfortable with that.

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?

Experience Management

I had my first and only hands-on iPad experience yesterday, and it was unquestioningly crappy.

The scene - I was in the Delta departure area at JFK airport in New York City, with an hour or so to kill before my flight.  Near the gate was a small seating area with tables and benches, with mini-walls or partitions in which were embedded Apple iPads.  The idea being travelers could access information and services (check flight status, weather, news, order a club sandwich and a Toblerone, etc.) using the iPad screen.Better than an iPad?

Really a neat idea, right?  Information and services a mere touch screen away, and using the hottest tech device to come on the scene in years.  

So what happened when I tried my hand at this wondrous device (again, while I have seen and heard about the iPad ad nauseam, I had never actually tried one out).  

It was an altogether unsatisfying experience. The device was exceedingly slow. Many of the apps did not respond at all.  The ones that did, (news, weather) seemed to hang endlessly waiting for the information to refresh. And quite honestly, flight status was readily available on the ‘normal’ airport monitors, and I could look outside to check out the weather.

The one and only thing that I really wanted to do, check my email, lead me into a hard sell for some kind of recurring deal for Boingo internet access.  And one other thing, the sun was glaring in at such an angle that it made the iPad screens really tough to read, not that it really had much information anyway.

No big deal really, the airport is just trying to offer a new service, generate some additional revenue, and mounting iPads in the waiting area is probably a good idea.  And on another day, without the technical issues, the sun, and my general crabbiness I might have left there and marched straight to the Apple store to buy myself the iPad.  

But instead, I was left with a less than favorable experience. Who is at fault? Hard to know. But it feels like Apple, JFK, Delta, and Boingo all sort of conspired to deliver the suck. It is great for Apple to sell a bunch of iPads to Delta or whomever owns them, but I wonder if they care at all if their ‘coolest in the world device’ is being used to deliver such a lousy service message and experience.  

I guess the question is once you ship a product, design a service, or otherwise offer your concepts and ideas to the market, how much do you need to care about how your work gets presented by third parties to the eventual consumers of your efforts?  I imagine it depends on what you are really selling, just a product,  or an entire experience that your product enables, and the extent to which you can and desire to manage those end user experiences.

I am sure the iPad is a fantastically wonderful life-altering device, my mistake was expecting an airport to deliver the experience the way Apple designed it to be delivered.