Category: Innovation

If you love Guy's smarts and irreverent charm, you've got to read this book.  If you have never read his blog or books — or seen him speak — this is the place to start if you want to understand why Guy has such a huge and loyal army of fans.   Guy has had a lot of different careers, including at Apple as an evangelist, a venture capitalist, the master of ceremonies at wildly popular entrepreneurship Boot Camps during the boom, and now on his blog "How to Change the World."  And now you can get the best of his experience and gentle wackiness all in one place.

Last week, I was lucky enough to get an advanced copy of his new book,  Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition. I started glancing through it, and instantly, I was hooked and — even though I was supposed to be doing other things — I read it from start to finish. This isn't a clean linear business book, although the chapters are organized around themes like starting, raising money, innovating, communicating, hiring and firing, working and so on.  It is a collection of the best stuff from Guy's blog and other places, with editing and tweaking.  And even if you are rabid reader of the blog, you will want to own a copy of this book. I could go on and on about why I enjoyed this book so much, but so I don't lose your attention, consider three things about it struck me:

1. If you read Guy's blog, you probably know that he provides the best blend of being entertaining, presenting lots of useful information, and not taking himself too seriously of any blogger around. Among those of use who blog regularly roughly in the business space, there is pretty widespread agreement that he is the best — his
popularity is earned. So Reality Check contains the best stuff from the best business blogger around (at least in my opinion).  Just read "The Ten Lies of Venture Capitalists" or "The Purest Form of Engineering," and you will be hooked.

2. Guy not only brings you his own wonderful and weird perspective, he pulls you into his social network.  You might wonder, why are the interviews on Guy's blog so much better than in most places?  It is because he takes the time to think of great questions.  He asks obnoxious, fun, and revealing questions that bringing out the best in people without coming across as mean-spirited or naive.  For example, I learned more from the chapter on "Speaking as Performing Art" that Guy gleaned from talking to Doug Lawrence (a professional singer and speaking coach) than from anything I have ever read before on the subject.

 You learn so much because Guy has an ability to get to the heart of the matter, whether he is giving us his ideas or helping us understand others. I think this is partly because Guy doesn't do a "gang" blog and doesn't have other people write his posts.  He is charming but also very picky about details, always thinking of what will be most fun and most interesting.  I was struck by how much time that he spent working on the acronym for the ARSE test that we published on his blog last year and also how skilled he was when he went through and changed the language on the questions that Guy claims that I prepared to determine if your boss is, in fact, an asshole.  I came up with the basic ideas, but in dull language. Guy went back through and changed the language so it was concise and fun — "Kisses up and kicks down," "short fuse," "army of one," and so on.  Everyone I know who has ever done an interview with Guy or any other kind of project will tell you that he edits things, pushes people to be the best, and as he has the magical marketing touch, it is a good idea to listen and learn.  So, in Reality Check, whether Guy is talking about his ideas or others, you get Guy's charm and that unmistakable voice.

3.  Reading this stuff in a book is more efficient and fun than reading it on a blog.  One of the weird side-effects of reading Reality Check was that it made me realize that books aren't obsolete yet — even through this is a book that draws heavily on a blog.  Things are organized by themes so it is easier to know the big picture, there is editing (always a good thing), and — as I have been told by a number of my Stanford colleagues who study his stuff — it turns out that people can read text on paper about 25% faster than online.  At the same time,  Guy's knowledge of the web also helps make the book a better experience, as he sometimes sends you to film or website and comments on it in his usual insightful way.  I especially loved the chapter "As Good as Steve Jobs," where he sends you to Majora Carter's 2005 TED talk and shows why it was such a great speaking performance and what you can learn from it  — breaking down what she did in the speech in one to two minute increments (especially the first 10 minutes).  In short, although Guy's book is a product of the web and it is sometimes designed so that you read it and use the web at the same time, it gives me good reason to believe that the experience of reading a book is something that still is a distinct and often superior experience.

Guy's book doesn't come out until October 30th, if you believe Amazon (usually they ship earlier than the announced date),  But I am going to order an extra copy right now, as this is a book that I will be loaning to a lot of people.

I have read a lot of stories about organizations over years, especially about the success or failure of innovative organizations, but The Pixar Touch is one of the very best. I've been quite interested in Pixar since Huggy Rao and I did an interview of Brad Bird for the McKinsey Quarterly, but I learned a lot from this book I didn't know.

The story itself is stunning; I had not realized that the start of the dream went way back to Ed Catmull's dreams as a teenager and his goals as a doctoral student and young man to start making computer animated movies.  The twists and turns in the story are remarkable.  There are plenty of stories about Steve Jobs and his often difficult personality, but there are other things that emerge that I found even more interesting.  One has to do with the wild swings in Pixar's strategy. Apparently, when Jobs bought it from George Lucas for 5 million bucks, he got a pretty good deal because Lucas was going through an expensive divorce and needed the money. 

The other twists and turns that I found interesting where all the different kinds of companies that Pixar tried to be during the years before it became a successful film company. For some years, they tried to be a computer hardware company, selling high-end graphics machines.  They also tried to be a computer software firm at times. They made TV commercials to pay the bills.   At one point, they almost had a deal to sell a whole bunch of machines to Phillips to use for medical imaging, but Jobs pissed-off the Phillips people so much that they walked.  Jobs also came fairly close to selling the company several times, especially to Microsoft, as he would occasionally give-up on it (Who could blame him? He pumped millions and millions of dollars into it, and it never made any money until Toy Story came along).

Jobs approach to organizational strategy, if that it what you want to call it, reminds me of strategy in high-velocity environments as described by my Stanford colleague Kathy Eisenhardt.  One strategic direction after another — many of which seemed unlikely at the time — was embraced with vigor and intensity by Jobs, and his ability to at least briefly convince others that it was right and certain to work (using his famous reality distortion field) is interesting and impressive.  But in many ways, I am more impressed with Jobs' ability to quickly drop an old strategy when there was good evidence it was failing, and then turn to the next one with equal enthusiasm. 

This may sound sort of crazy, but I also think it is how skilled strategists act when what they are doing carries a huge risk.  You need to build enthusiasm about what you are hoping to accomplish, as energy and the self-fulfilling prophecy increase the chances that a risky idea will succeed.  But you also need to be equally skilled at pulling the plug when your current tactic is failing (See this post about Andy Grove's comments on leadership, he is proposing a similar mindset).  One of the ideas that was viewed as "most dumb" by the people around Jobs was — before Toy Story  was released ,and the company was still deep in the red — started pushing very hard for an IPO.  The lawyers and investment bankers thought he was nuts. Well, after Toy Story became a huge hit — even though they had no other track record  of success –Jobs quickly took them out for an IPO… setting off a stream of events that made him a billionaire for the first time.  There is also an argument made in the book that, by an rational standard, Jobs should have closed Pixar years before Toy Story, but he persisted because he couldn't handle another failure after getting fired by Apple and failing at NEXT.  Desperation is sometimes the mother of innovation!

One other fascinating thing.  Now, Pixar is part of Disney and executives from Pixar like the amazing John Lasseter (fired by Disney animation years ago) are now in charge of Disney's film animation efforts. But during the production of the first Toy Story, people at Disney — including CEO Michael Eisner — demanded specific changes in the plot that made it a better movie, and the expertise of diverse people at Disney made it a better movie in many other ways. The blood between Disney and Pixar started getting bad as Pixar became more successful (especially between Eisner and Jobs), and Disney animated films started getting worse and worse. But I had not realized how much Disney had helped in the early days of Toy Story.

Finally, during several visits to Pixar over the past several months, I have been struck by how virtually everyone from two-time Academy Award winner Brad Bird to a guy I met who started out working at Pixar as a janitor years ago absolutely refuse to take their success for granted.  They are proud of what they have accomplished, but downright paranoid about the risks of taking a turn toward mediocrity.  This blend of pride and paranoia stems, in part from the fact that they were weirdos, outcasts, and — in case of Pixar and its forerunners– on the edge of being shutdown so many times over a 20 year or so period (the number of different places and ways that the founders Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith worked to ultimately create this success were astounding, from early work at the the University of Utah, to Alvy Ray Smith's work at Xerox PARC where he got fired because management believed that color graphics had no future in the modern office, to several years spent working in New York for a generous and bold multi-millionaire, to the years working for Lucas, and then the sale to Jobs… and all along, although Alvy Ray Smith left because he his relationship with Jobs soured, and John Lasseter joined-up, the vision of making top quality computer animated films drove these founders throughout.) 

In addition to the fact that success has not come to easy to these persistent people, the other force that fuels the pride and paranoia of these people is the history of Disney's animation studio (where both Lasseter and Brad worked, and both were fired too), where a once great studio begin turning out mediocre work because they became self-satisfied and started resting on their laurels.  They started doing work that of such poor quality that it depressed and angered the old animators who had made it such a great place.  The belief in the importance of a great story and the power of creating characters that express authentic emotion goes back to the earliest days of Disney and are beliefs that guide what happens at Pixar to this day. 

So, in addition to being a fascinating and well-told story, I would nominate this book for my personal top 100 business books — and I think it belongs in Jack and Todd's book.  The lessons about leadership, strategy, culture, innovation, persistence — and the degree to which random events rather than planning shape human and organizational history — are all on display.

P.S. If you are interested in books about creative organizations, I also recommend Dealers of Lightning, a well-crafted history of the glory years at Xerox PARC.

I was reminded of the above cartoon by a recent email from someone who had remembered seeing it in Weird Ideas That Work. I thought I'd post it because I bought the rights to use it.  I think it does a lovely job of showing how much of what people in organizations do happens because they have always done it.  So they don't have to think about it very much — which is good for efficiency but bad if they are doing the wrong thing. Worse yet, in many places, if they try to do something differently, they will be teased, punished, and often expelled.

I recall, for example, what happened when one of my students who worked as an IBM summer intern many years ago came to the office wearing a yellow tie.  Because the "uniform" in those days was a white shirt and red tie, he was teased like crazy by his co-workers.  But he didn't realize they were serious until he showed up a second time with the deviant yellow tie, and his boss pulled him aside and give him a stern lecture about evils of wearing the wrong tie.  This student concluded that IBM in those days was focused on conformity, not performance, so he went into another line of business and is now CEO of a big company. Note this was before Lou Gerstner took over — he understood that the IBM unifrom was a symbol of mindless action and being stuck in the past too, which is why he came to work the first day wearing a blue shirt.

Along these lines, the hats cartoon and the old tie story remind me of a conversation I had with management guru Warren Bennis when I was on the academic job market for the first time (this was about 1983). He warned me that some of the most prestigious Ivy League schools (where I was interviewing)could be very stifling places, and as the title to this post says, that the "The best you can be is a perfect imitation of those who came before you."  I thought that was brilliant line, and also a lovely diagnostic test for an organizational culture.

I was lucky to end-up having a rather strange career at the Stanford Engineering School, where my colleagues and I have been encouraged to do many different and wonderful things — for example, helping David Kelley to start the Stanford d.school, something that I don't believe would be possible in most other universities.

As I have written here before, my favorite book on corporate creativity is Orbiting the Giant Hairball by the late Gordon MacKenzie. For me, nothing nearly as good has been written since.  I was searching for insights on creativity and came across this old — but still very fresh — Fast Company interview with him. Check out the whole thing (and read the book).  But here are a few gems:

‘In the mid-1980s, MacKenzie founded an oasis for creativity —
called the Humor Workshop — just outside the walls of Hallmark
headquarters. “I wrote a one-page, handwritten description of the
department,” MacKenzie recalls. “Without telling my boss, I called his
boss, the vice president of the creative division, and we had lunch. By
the end of the meal, the VP was telling me, ‘We’ve got to do this!’”

Eventually MacKenzie shifted his orbit and returned to company
headquarters, this time with a title of his own invention: Creative
Paradox. “My job was to be loyally subversive,” he explains.’

That phrase “loyally subversive” is so delightful, so much cognitive complexity in this those two little words. Like this old story about Chuck House at HP.  Or how about this one:

I became a liaison between the chaos of creativity and the discipline
of business. I had no job description and a title that made no sense,
but people started coming to me with their ideas, and I would listen to
those ideas and validate them. When you validate a person, what you’re
really doing is giving them power — like a battery charger.

A battery charger!  Another great phrase, and consistent with Rob Cross’s research on energizers.

Finally check-out his answer to the interviewer’s question:

‘What is the biggest obstacle to creativity?

Attachment to outcome. As soon as you become attached to a specific
outcome, you feel compelled to control and manipulate what you’re
doing. And in the process you shut yourself off to other possibilities.

I got a call from someone who wanted me to lead a workshop on
creativity. He needed to tell his management exactly what tools people
would come away with. I told him I didn’t know. I couldn’t give him a
promise, because then I’d become attached to an outcome — which would
defeat the purpose of any creative workshop.’

This last point is remarkably similar to a point that I heard from Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO, make just a few months back.

Finally,note that these are arguments about how to spark creativity.  I would be the last person to argue that organizations need to be all about creativity all the time.   Doing routine things well requires an entirely different mindset.

Robert
Sternberg is a psychologist who has studied an astounding range of topics,
from wisdom, to intelligence, to creativity, to love, to leadership.  I’ve been doing some reading on creativity
this morning, and I ran into this quote from Sternberg in a comment that he
wrote in the American Psychologist in
2002,  which he titled “Creativity as a Decision”
(This was published in the May issue on page 376):

“If psychologists
wish to teach creativity, they likely will do better to encourage people to
decide for creativity, to impress on them the joys of making this decision, and
also to inoculate them for some of the challenges attendant on this decision.
Deciding for creativity does not guarantee that creativity will emerge, but
without the decision, it certainly will not. As a mentor, nothing makes me
happier than watching at least a substantial proportion of the students I have
mentored make this decision. They decide that they may pay a price but that it
is a price worth paying. By making this decision, they transform both their own
lives and the lives of others. What greater reward can life hold?”

I like this both because it doesn’t sugar coat or over
glorify creativity.  And its simplicity
reminds me of Karl Weick’s
lovely insight that people move through three stages as they gain knowledge
about a subject: From overly simplistic, too overly complex, to – in rare cases
– elegantly simple.  Sternberg seems to
be getting to the third stage!   Sternberg argues that there are many studies
and complex findings about creativity (e.g., does it require high or low
self-esteem?), but the common theme he sees is that creative people have made
the decision to be creative, regardless of setbacks and frustrations.  And his simple insight that deciding to be
creative does not assure creativity, but without that decision, it is sure not
to happen is intriguing.

As I
wrote a few months back, Huggy Rao from Stanford, Allen Webb from McKinsey
and I interviewed Pixar’s  Academy Award
winning director Brad Bird for the McKinsey
Quarterly.  Brad was one of the most lively and insightful people
I’ve ever had the privilege
of interviewing.  You can read it here  (there is also multi-media
with it).  It seems that the Quarterly readers love Brad Bird too,
as this article was the most
popular among readers last quarter.

The two main things about
innovation that Brad reinforced for me are the value of tolerating and
celebrating constructive friction and of never being satisfied with good enough
— he made very clear about how the mediocrity of the once great Disney
animation studio could be traced directly to the attitude that “we are satisfied
with our work, it is good enough.”  In contrast, my daughter and I
were lucky enough to see a preview of WALL-E earlier
in the week at Pixar (an astounding movie, especially the first 30 minutes are
pure magic), and although the Pixar people we talked to were clearly very proud
of this film, the main thing they seemed worried about was that all their
success would make them complacent and less creative.  That kind of
paranoia and hungriness is, I think, a hallmark of people and organizations
that are creative over the long haul.

I just downloaded the new update of Firefox, version 3.  It took under a minute for the whole process. The Wall Street Journal says it is the best browser you can get. Get it here.  Do it today and help set a world record for the most downloaded software program in a single day.

P.S. Mozilla CEO John Lilly tells me that, after an initial glitch (the server appears to have crashed from all the demand), things are under control now and they have shot past 2 million downloads in the past few hours (about 2.5 million right now). Go here check the current numbers. Also check out this rave review at Infoworld. I agree, it is a lot faster than the 2.0 after using it for a few hours.

Update on Weds. AM : The downloads are at about 6.5 million, with about four hours to go, so the Mozzila folks are already well past the 5 million goals. Congrats to all.

Update Weds. PM: The final total was over 8 million in 24 hours and they currently are quite close to 9 million.

  Now, my question is, what is about this idea of setting a world's record that led to such infectious action?

I have been plagued for years with the problem of sending and receiving big files to people, and have often been left to struggle with the very user unfriendly FTP system — something which I still don't quite understand how to use.  Just a few weeks ago, I found out about a service called YouSendIt, which enables you to send quite large files (up to 100MB) for free. I think they charge you for bigger files and some premium services, but the free service isn't buried, it is the most prominent thing on their landing page and it is absurdly easy to use.  Note that I have no financial interest in YouSendIt and have no idea who works there or who owns it. I just think it works great, and if you are ever in that frustrating situation where you can't send or get a big file, this is the answer.

I have complained here about bad customer service now and then, at HP for example, when they were so hard to deal with on my online order.  But in one of my very early posts, I argued that the test of an organization isn't just found in how often they mess-up, but also in how quickly and gracefully they respond when they mess-up.  This is really just a subset of one of my favorite single diagnostic question for any organization: "What happens when someone makes a mistake — or, I would add,  is linked to an error, failure, or set back?"  I had a very good experience that I talk about with Amazon in this regard.

In this vein, my friends at Timbuk2 just sent me this little story from goodonpaper.org, which looks like it was just posted yesterday. It is written by Andy, freelance web producer and music promoter. Andy bought a Timbukt2 bag, and after a couple days, the velcro patch starting falling-off.  Andy (who apparently lives in the United Kingdom) wrote the people at Timbuk2 to ask for a repair. I love the answer:

Since the international circumstances are what they are,
and since I’m not all about weighing down a plane with broken product
that we will simply look at and say “Yep, it’s broken”, and since I’m
all about people passing on good intentions, this is what has happened,
and what you need to do:

I sent you a credit to replace the bag. No need to send it to us,
your dodgy picture is proof enough (for me; this isn’t exactly “by the
book”, so don’t expect all the customer service people to do this, k?).
Order yourself a new bag.

But!

Bring your Velcro-impaired bag to a place that takes donations,
whether that place be your broke best friend or a Goodwill or homeless
dude down the street. Don’t throw the bag away! Give it away to someone
who needs a bag, regardless of that bag’s Velcro status.

No funny business, ya’ hear?

Andy responded by putting the story on his blog offering to give the bag to a deserving owner, adding "You need to post in the comments with how you’ll continue the good
karma passed on from Timbuk2 to me to the wider world through a random
act of generosity."

He already has some great responses.  To me, this is a great example of how, by erring on the side of trusting people and believing that good things will happen, everyone is elevated. 

P.S I love the "No Funny business, ya' hear?" 

I have written here several times about the Firefox browser.  Students in our Creating Infectious Action class have done great projects where they came-up with all sorts of great ways to spread the browser in 2006 and in 2007 (see The Sacred and the Profane, for example).  So I was delighted to see a big story in The New York Times today about Firefox, called An Upstart Challenges The Big Web Browsers. It now has over 170 million users, and most of this 170 million number reflects an active decisions by an individual users or tech person to not use Explorer (bundled with PCs and set as the default) or not use Safari (bundled with Apple and set as the default), and instead to download Firefox and set it as the default.

Certainly, one reason that Firefox spreads is that has a large group of loyal and hardworking zealots who develop and do quality control for the product — and most aren't even employees of Mozilla (some are employees of other software firms and others work for free because doing so is an important part of their identity). For example, CEO John Lilly tells me that some 10,000 people each night check for bugs in the code.   But the other reason that Firefox spreads is — since everyone at Mozilla and the huge open source community that develops it are committed to excellence above all else — it is simply a better browser than the rest.  In addition to being absurdly easy to install and use,  one area where Firefox has consistently walloped Explorer is security.  I recall talking to an executive from a large financial services firm a couple years ago, and he told me that the security problems with Explorer were responsible for millions of dollars worth of fraud every year, but there had never been a single instance of fraud when customers used Firefox, and that it would save his company a lot of money if everyone just used Firefox. Interestingly, The New York Times story has a Microsoft executive seeming to admit that such security problems existed, at least until 2006:

"Microsoft waited five years before releasing the sixth version of
Internet Explorer in 2006. Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer group, says the company was focused on
plugging security holes during that time."

I admit I am biased, as I've known CEO John Lilly for a long time and think he is both wise and smart, and have been most impressed with founding CEO and now Chair Mitchell Baker every time that I have met her (See this McKinsey interview). But I am fond of lots of other people in Silicon Vally too, like the folks at Yahoo!, and I don't argue that their software is better than the rest.

Firefox is about to release version 3.0. The Times claims it runs twice as fast as 2.0 and uses less memory. I look forward to downloading it.