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Look, I Can't Help You If You Don't Have Tests
Testing is the documentation that shows you know what you're doing. With enough assertions and expectations, it is obvious to the person who you're looking to to help you what you thought the code should be doing. When it doesn't do what you think it should, and there's nothing for me to understand what you thought the outcome should be - I can't help you.
A cook who isn't working from a recipe asks the head chef why his dish turned out so wrong. The chef asks "what is the recipe?" If there are no inputs to the outputs, then all we are left with is the product: a bad meal. My best course of advice is to use a recipe next time. I can't save what you are about to deliver to the customer unless we throw it away and start with some verifiable approach.
If Your Corporation Wants To Innovate, Don't Be Corporate
As an innovation consultant, one of the initial questions of every project that bothers me is "what are we allowed to do?"
IT governance has its place. Particularly in some industry sectors, established software will need to have certain pragmatic controls. These are things we cannot get around.
But when the mandate is "innovate," teams must have the ability to take a "ask for forgiveness" approach. Leverage open source. Use Github. Try things corporate IT wouldn't consider for another 10 years.
Or get left behind. The choice is yours.
Google's Waze Acquisition Makes Roads an Elastic Resource
There are times when even the Smartest Guy is blown away. Google acquired Waze for a cool billion. Waze takes crowdsourced traffic reports and informs navigation as to the best route for you to get to your destination.
Sure - it's going to improve mapping. It allows Google to gain a channel to location-targeted advertising. But it also introduces public roadways to the concept of capacity management. In the same way that Seti@Home pioneered using the excess cycles of your CPU to find E.T. and FlightCar wants to rent your car to strangers when you're away and your car is at the airport parking garage, Waze has the opportunity to take data about the most traveled roadways in the country and find the excess capacity that other roadways have to deliver commutes that are as long or shorter by utilizing that excess capacity. Waze is in effect the Amazon Web Services of traffic, only they can give the excess capacity of secondary and tertiary roads away for free.
If we look really far out we can see how Google's self-driving car combined with the Waze idea basically creates an intelligent travel network leveraging existing infrastructure. This seems like science fiction today. But how brilliant is it that someone driving down a side street next to a traffic-packed highway thought "wow, this is an unused resource that I'm driving on." And how brilliant would it be to better utilize the infrastructure in this country in ways that are automated and convenient?
Knowing When to Innovate, Invest, Delegate, and Divest
I think a lot of people probably wrestle everyday with the big picture of what they do. I'm sure a lot of people are doing things they don't particularly like doing. I'm sure they would rather spend their time figuring out how to do something they've been looking to learn. They would like to take something they've mastered and create something completely new with their skills and passion. With my colleagues, I've started to coach and mentor them using a matrix to help them visualize their goals and objectives and see how they can grow and increase their excitement for what they do.
I don't have a name for it yet, but the idea is this:
Spend most of your time innovating. This is where you derive the most pleasure and generate the most value.
As a close second, spend lots of time investing in yourself. Go learn a new language. Pick the guitar back up again. Fix your finances. The goal is to make your investments worth innovating around. Items from the bottom right should migrate to the top right.
Now, that should take up 99% of your time. But there are still other things you own or are your responsibility. The goal is to begin marginalizing these things.
Delegate the things that you no longer enjoy doing. These things may be things that were once in the upper right and that you've innovated around, but now are less invested in. Whatever time you invest in these areas should be to teach and inspire others to carry the torch.
Divest yourself of things that really don't do anything for you. If you've honestly tried something, given it your all, and separated yourself from your lizard brain and the task at hand and can sleep well at night saying "I don't want to do it and I can't figure out how" then you should eliminate these things from your radar.
By taking this approach, you maximize the time you spend creating value either for yourself or others. You can flex your mind around the crafts and arts that matter to you, and spend less time on menial or non-important things that are ultimately diversions or distractions from what really matters.
Automation vs. the Mechanical Turk
I've been reading "Linchpin" and thinking a lot about Seth Godin's ideas and (something he's fairly sparing in his writings about) their general application. He talks about the mechanical turk (you know, the computer that plays chess, only it's a box with a human inside?) and how given a prescription, anyone can be a mechanical turk. In IT consulting, nothing could be more true.
Get task. Put task in box. Task gets done. Box has been "programmed" with the how to get it done, so it gets done the same way every time (except when it doesn't).
And Godin is right - this doesn't really grow people or create much value. It's commoditizing human capital.
In technology, Martin Fowler comes to mind. Fowler talks about how "Frequency Reduces Difficulty" which is an evolution of practice makes perfect. The more you do something, the more you understand it, and the more you understand it, the more able and likely you are to automate it. Sure, you could just do it over and over again, but then you are the mechanical turk. And then you're just a commodity.
Automation is a skill. Automation tools are a plenty (Puppet, Chef, etc.) but a culture and mindset that automation is the means to the end, an objective that increases quality and the value that the resource can deliver by removing focus from the commodity task and creating the bandwidth to create value - is scarce. How do you create an innovation culture that sees the investment in automation as an objective to a successful delivery?
Why Higher Ed is Ripe for Disruption
The average cost of a college education in the United States in 2012 was $22k per year at public institutions, and $46k per year at private ones. That's a fully loaded rate. For a four year university, that's means an education costs between $100k and $200k. 22 million Americans were expected to attend college last year. So roughly speaking, the size of the undergraduate education market is $500B-$1T annually.
Anyone want to find a way to get .001% of that market?
Can lean survive in the big enterprise?
We know it can. But I'm not sure that stories like Intuit aren't the exception rather than the rule. The old guard is till out there. They want targets. They want KPIs. Worst of all, they want marketing campaigns that build hype. There are few in the enterprise today that understand the early adopters curve, or failing fast. It is the way that business has tried and failed at small scale: give me promises; meet those promises; failure is an outcome, but not an option. Why is it such a hard pill to swallow to push aside all of the MBA bullshit and think practically? Who has ever succeeded repeatedly in doing anything without doing it a scale and without any particular clarity as to what the resutl will be, when it will be achieved, and what impact I will have? Vanity metrics are the things Eric Reiss says are the ultimate defense for myopic plans that lacks the foresight to understand that nothing is certain. You are what you are measured by. If delivering to a plan is what you are measured by - that is what you will do, to hell with the result. The illusion of certainty is what keeps innovation at bay and what allows entrepreneurialism to thrive. This illusion is just a market inefficiency, one that most founders look to exploit. Yet if CEOs and CTOs at large today were to look at their curren companies, they would realize how they are being manhandled by entrepreneurs not because of the soundness or disruption of their ideas (though that's not always false, either) but rather by their will to not engage in the tactics of their enemy. The United States won it's war of independence by engaging in ways deemed unconventional. Today, guerilla warfare is THE tactic that makes a difference on the battlefield. No modern general in their right mind would line up line after line of infantry dressed in red to shoot at the enemy. Yet so many enterprises can look at the world around them and see where their world is being turned upside down and by and large, would rather buy the enemy and change the rather tha learn from their tactics. The intrapreneurial movement is something that will ultimately revolultionize business, if today's guard only has the courage to admit how wrong they've been.
Health care's ivory tower of data
As I stood through VC's at the Health 2.0 Spring Fling talking about the opportunity they're trying to guide startups through in health care, a few things stood out:
They speak largely generically as if they were incubating a company in 2001.
They certainly aren't thinking much of the companies they're investing in.
First of all, it sounds like these guys are taking 6-7% equity in these startups in exchange for $20-50K (virtually nothing). So the guys taking this cash are either a) stupid or b) after something else.
Health care startups are hard. While other industries have been incredibly disrupted through entrepreneurial tidal waves of IT in the last couple of decades - health care has remained pretty stagnant. The industry for movie rentals didn't require government stimulus, not only because there was no social impetus to prop up a fledgling industry, but also because the market would find it's own way and wasn't actually dominated by large players. Playing in health care as a startup requires access to information - not capital. And the big players with the valuable information aren't playing ball.
But they are. They realize they don't have the will or political capital to say "I'm going to build a new suite of products to manage care delivery by performing big data analytics on claims data that I own." But they also realize that there are serious problems with their models that aren't going away. The big players are talking about ACO, they're building PCMH offerrings, they see the writing on the wall: government is going to kill the fee for service model if they are to continue to subsidize customers to use services in the health industry. Insurers have a different risk management game to play now. Whereas controlling consumer behavior and managing risk in that interaction with the system was the modus operendi, that model doesn't work with an individual mandate. Now risk management is about managing care delivery, and that's where steerage of care with delivery vis a vis providers becomes important.
But this means measuring care. It means measuring outcomes. And it means prescribed treatment plans that are shown to generate positive outcomes both medically and financially. None of this can be done without access to data at a speed that other industries that have already mastered, and that is where the political will falls apart. The glass ceilings of these enterprises are limiting their ability to do the things Netflix and Google were able to do. So the only choice they have is to go outside and acquire these companies or have consultants come in and drive innovation from the inside. But what is decidedly not happening is the opening up of this data in a way that would allow industry to grow around the large players.
And so the role of the health care VC is very different. They are, in effect, buying agents for Kaiser Permanente, United, BCBSA, etc. They have skin in the game, placing the right bets that a select few have ideas that once enabled by the 500-pound gorillas, can be disruptive and can enable them to adopt new models. But the low investment and relatively high stake in these companies is a sign that the VC's are not here to get these companies from startup to growing business. This is a small-cap, fast exit play that gets small ideas into the big companies quickly, and builds on the ivory tower. It's not in and of itself disruptive - it's farming disruption for larger companies.
The companies that come out of this age of health IT innovation will be focused on the consumer end. They are the ones that will find ways to work around the ivory tower and still have an impact that individuals and retail medical providers value. But HIT startups looking to make an impact on the equation of cost of care had better be ready to get cozy with the very companies that they are inherently trying to disrupt.