bettr fastr strongr

Sifting the sands of internet thinking since 2013.

[mdillr]

'Diffusion is essentially a social process through which people talking to people spread an innovation,' wrote Everett Rogers, the great scholar of how new ideas are communicated and spread. Mass media can introduce a new idea to people. But, Rogers showed, people follow the lead of other people they know and trust when they decide whether to take it up. Every change requires effort, and the decision to make that effort is a social process.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/07/29/130729fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=all

[mdillr]

don’t be tempted to withdraw into your own world. “When I see people in the office walking around with headphones on, I tell them ‘you’re not seeing what’s going on around you--you didn’t see when that woman put her bag down and the car horn went off; you could use that in a commercial’.

http://www.fastcocreate.com/1683427/7-ways-to-boost-your-creativity

It's a standard human response to privilege your own method of interacting with the world. Witness here an extrovert who sees someone with headphones and thinks, "You're missing out!" He doesn't know or care what that person is listening to, or what he or she has been reading or consuming via other media. You're either plugged into the world in the way that he does it, or you're disconnected from everything.

The key to everything: invite new ideas into your mental space, constantly, in whatever manner works for you. The means doesn't matter, only the ends.

[mdillr]

it isn’t just a big idea that creates a real solution and a real product. It’s also the development of that idea within a group and the support which makes it become a reality.

http://www.innovationexcellence.com/blog/2013/07/16/what-goldieblox-teaches-us-about-ideas/#sthash.8T0OIzwz.dpuf

This isn't a new idea. Steven Johnson makes the same point in Where Good Ideas Come From: it's rarely the solitary idea that changes the world, but rather the novel combination of ideas that have come before, and one of the best breeding grounds for these combined ideas is a social setting in which people from various backgrounds think out loud.

Many organizations that try to be innovative do it the wrong way, by funding the ideas of one or a few people who think they have an insight. You get innovative when you don't care where the ideas come from, and instead build out your organization's ability to take ideas and do something with them.

[mdillr]

No one took ownership of Google Reader internally because it wasn’t a top priority for Larry Page and his inner circle of lieutenants. And if you aren’t working on something that the boss cares about, then what’s the point?

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mattlynley/google-reader-died-because-no-one-would-run-it

"The point," of course, is that Google's long-term interests are best served by employees and executives who are passionately devoted to the product, over and above their own career trajectory. 

If this is the new culture of Google under Larry Page, the company is in for a long and slow decline.

[mdillr]

A number of traditional and well-respected Times journalists disliked his work.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/publiceditor/2013/07/22/nate-silver-went-against-the-grain-for-some-at-the-times/?pagewanted=all&

The fact that Nate Silver was unpopular among New York Times staff is not surprising. I've worked with a number of (former) journalists, and though some work in the digital sphere now, few have managed to embrace it. Silver represented a new approach to journalism, and journalism is an industry that -- to date -- has hated new approaches.

He's headed to ESPN now. The NYT intelligentsia will celebrate his passing, until the time that their ship sinks so deep that the water rises over their heads.

[mdillr]

Tim Cook has answered that question: the glue is Apple, and the ideology is design. It is a shared belief system that “No” is more important than “Yes,” that focus is essential to making great products, and that no one individual is essential. Not Steve Jobs, and certainly not Scott Forstall.

http://stratechery.com/2013/tim-cook-is-a-great-ceo

[vidantlesombre]

[libawr]

Because, seriously, who needs Snapchat?

Catherine Bracy at #PdF13 on how the demographic homogeneity & isolation of Silicon Valley means it’s not solving problems that need to be solved. Them’s fighting words! (via libawr)

Any community is likely to be better at solving problems that afflict the community than they are at solving someone else's problems. Silicon Valley has certain inherent limitations that are a byproduct of its strengths. As a relatively young, highly technical community they will create (and consume) products that provide technical solutions to young peoples' problems. As an urban population, they will solve urban problems. As a predominantly male, middle-class population, they will focus on the needs of middle-class men. And so on.

Nothing new here. We're all better at understanding our own problems than we are at understanding others. We're all far more highly motivated to solve our own problems than the problems of people who live halfway around the world. That's not an indictment of Silicon Valley, it's a description of lived experience. 

But it's also why the line quoted above -- "fighting words" or no -- carries some weight. SnapChat does not and will not solve third-world problems. There are lots of Silicon Valley products that make a hell of a lot of sense for Silicon Valley and very little sense elsewhere. Take from that two lessons: one on the inevitability of this outcome, and the second on the need not to assume that your own needs and interests are indicative or predictive of everyone else's.

[cmogle]

Top executives who value innovation need to point their fingers not at others but themselves. They must lead the innovation charge by understanding how innovation works, improving their own discovery skills, and sharpening their ability to foster the innovation of others. Moreover, they must actively populate their organizations with enough discovery-driven innovators to make innovation a team game that translates into tangible and sustainable innovation premiums.

http://www.innovationmanagement.se/2013/04/18/the-secret-of-innovative-companies-it-isnt-rd/ (via cmogle)

For an organization to be innovative it needs two key ingredients: a workforce composed of a broad range of people committed to finding new solutions to old problems, and leadership who are only interested in finding and promoting the best ideas without regard to where they came from.

Innovation can fail at either the top or the bottom of the hierarchy. In orgs where it fails at the top, sooner or later the bottom will stop trying.

[tombradicichphd]

When promoting innovative ideas, they often don’t stick early on, so don’t make the mistake of not constantly repeating yourself. Don’t make the mistake of not constantly repeating yourself.

Dr. Tom Bradicich, personal communication

[mdillr]

(via tombradicichphd)

There's a word in ancient Greek, kairos, which is perfect in this context: it meant "the right time."

Powerful ideas + the wrong time = failure, but only for now.

The same ideas + kairos = innovation.

[dustinfarivar]

Novice > Novel

It is more important to do simple things well than create “ground breaking” innovation.

My new Medium Post

[deegeplay]

Israeli mechanical engineer, Izhar Gafni, developed the Alfa – a recycled cardboard bicycle that is both waterproof and fireproof.

The journey started when Izhar heard someone built a canoe out of cardboard. Being an engineer, that idea “disturbed” him – he couldn’t stop thinking about it. It eventually drove him to apply the cardboard concept to something he’s passionate about: the bicycle.

Izhar is now partnering with ERB, who will manage the business and financial aspects, to make Alfa a 100% recycled product that can be manufactured for $9 (adult version) and $5 (kids verison).

[mdillr]

Cool on many levels.

[mdillr]

Technology pundit pro tip.

Before you start writing about "the classic innovator's dilemma," read the book first. It will help if you know what the term means.

[lostinbetweenrealandfake]

[mdillr]

“The skills of reasoning rely on habit, governed by well-established rules of the game; the ‘reasonable person’ – used as a standard norm in English common law – is level-headed instead of multi-level-headed; adaptive and not destructive; an enlightened conservative, not a revolutionary;...

I suspect that an org that is 100% composed of innovators would fail. You need a mix, a critical mass of change agents to keep the group moving forward, but enough "sensible people" to keep the lights on.

[springwiseintelligence]

Peer-to-peer bonus system made easy for employers

There are a number of web apps that help employers track individual and team achievements enabling them to allocate rewards fairly – take PropsToYou as an example. However, for larger companies it may be easier – and more effective – to let the employees themselves decide who deserves recognition from above. Bonus.ly is a platform that enables businesses to employ a peer-to-peer bonus allocation system across their organization. READ MORE…

[mdillr]

Interesting concept, potentially very powerful if it becomes ingrained within an org. Internal P2P systems can come into direct conflict with institutional hierarchies; over the long term, which forces win?

[courtenaybird]

Teens on Social Media:

The Pew Research Center has released some interesting research into teens on social media. The major story that the press has taken from the research is that teens are supposedly tiring of Facebook, with many citing boredom due to “drama” and an ever-increasing adult presence.

(via We Are Social)

[mdillr]

Facebook will die when high school kids find a cooler place to hang out. It's inevitable, but it doesn't look like it's happening yet.

[mdillr]

The problem with post-mortems

If you've worked in a large-ish operation for any amount of time, you've almost certainly found yourself in a project post-mortem: a meeting in which the highs and lows of the project are dissected and examined, toward the goal of extracting lessons learned and doing things better the next time around. If you've worked long enough to get a little cynical about the process, you've probably noticed that the lessons learned in post-mortem meetings almost never result in better process going forward. Generally speaking, no one in the meeting is responsible for taking the lessons and enacting them, and in most cases no one will have the authority to change organizational procedure even if they want to. As a result, the post-mortem meeting is almost always a well-intentioned failure. You may talk about good things, but you won't change much if at all. The problem, ultimately, is one of memory. If you've ever studied a foreign language, you know that there are two types of memory: short-term and long-term. You can study vocabulary or verb conjugation and have pretty good recall 10 or 20 minutes later. Remembering the same material the next day is quite a bit harder, though, and remembering it a week, month, or year later is harder still. Knowing something now doesn't mean you'll know it later, when you need it. Language students spend a lot of time struggling with this problem and slowly, methodically moving items from their short-term to their long-term memory. In grad school I had a flash card system that was my evolved solution to this problem: I would test, and re-test, and re-test myself again on vocabulary words at specific and carefully-chosen intervals until I could be confident that I had memorized them. It was sometimes time-consuming, but that was a lot better than not learning the material. The post-mortem meeting is akin to taking the vocabulary card out of the box and looking at it once. That's a  start, but no one learns from that. Learning comes through repetition and review. Has any business collected and reviewed project insights in this way?