Why do projects fail?

Projects do not fail because of poor planning, the wrong people, or a bad idea. All of these can be remedied over time with dedication, time, and resources. Projects fail when we give up, “run out of time”, or have no money left.

These items break down into two basic elements:

1. the will
2. the way

Projects fail when either the resources to achieve success run out (the way), or the motivation to continue falls away (the will).

Last week while attending the Marketing 2.0 conference in Paris, I had the pleasure of dinner and few beers with a fellow speaker, Scott Foe from Nokia’s game division. Over a pint of Guinness (tragically, from a can), Scott mentioned to me that his greatest business mentor was a graduate of West Point and had imparted to him that business really was war.

Attack the way and the enemy can’t fight back; attack the will, and the enemy won’t want to.

The military strategy of “shock and awe” is a perfect example of combining the two: simultaneously removing the capability and desire to fight, in a show of rapid dominance. Modern wars are fought not only with guns and tanks, but also with pamphlets, instructions on how to surrender, and subversive radio.

One missing element:

To the list of two ingredients above, we should add a third:

1. the will
2. the way
3. a definition of “success”

Without evil, we cannot define good; unless we define success, we are doomed to failure. America’s involvement in Vietnam ultimately failed because America’s leadership failed to define a compelling vision of success and ultimately lost the support of the people.

(On a side note, success was perhaps specifically not defined, as to do so would have been admitting that it was an anti-communist proxy-war. Also, our traditional methods of warfare were completely unsuited to destroying “the way” of a military infrastructure that had limited structure.)

Success and failure the business world.

In the business world, our projects fail and succeed for the same reasons. Either we run out of time or money, the business ultimately decides to shut it down, or there is no possibility of success because success has never been defined. When sitting down to a new project (and throughout the project’s progression), ask yourself and your superiors three questions:

1. “is there a desire within the company to continue this project?”
2. “do I have the time/resources” to achieve my goals?”
3. “what does success look like?”

If you start hesitating on any of the three questions (or the answer is no), your project is in serious jeopardy.

Rescuing “failing” projects:

Luckily, the three elements of success are interrelated. Fixing one often means tweaking another.

Resources (time, money, people) are ultimately the most concrete of all three elements. These are allocated on balance sheets by people who count numbers. If your resources are running out, this can often mean that your primary concern should actually be your support. Why isn’t the company willing to invest in this any longer? Why has the will failed? Hint: there is always more time and money, you just need people to help you look.

Motivation and Support (recognition, impetus, desire) controls the purse-strings on your project. If the company has no desire to continue your project, they won’t. Maybe you screwed up and blew your budget, or maybe the market has changed, and the will has focused on other priorities. Without securing support, securing resources is impossible. To secure support, you need to present the vision of why supporting you is a good idea.

Your Vision of Success (possibilities becoming realities) is the foundation upon which all support and resources for your project is built. If this compelling vision hasn’t been defined outside your team (from above), this is the most critical element to focus on. This vision will carry you through the hard times and serve as your yardstick to success in the good times. If you want management to believe in your project, tie it into their definitions of success, then give them something to believe in and deliver it. If they can’t commit the resources to attain your grand plan, let them know how they’re knocking down their own vision of success.

Any war stories to share about your encounters of success or failure?

former colleague fmbillwatt points us towards this very amusing segment attempting to explain the Twitterverse: “The Twouble with Twitters”

The confusion between the haves and have-nots is essentially one of savvyness: the old-guard incorrectly assumes the content has decreased while the initiation cost has stayed the same.

This is akin to yelling,

“stop Twittering, you’re WASTING all THAT PAPER with your mindless drivel!!”

It’s only been in our recent history of written and correspondence that we’ve felt the need to make communication it “worth it”. The Ten Commandments were only carved into stone tablets announced with a brushfire because they set the foundations of Western society.

Detractors of Twitter also think that just 140-character snippets of daily life are somehow going to “devalue” all communication. The main refrain is not a new one:

” doesn’t making something this short ultimately dilute all experience? ultimately leading to ruin, chaos, and alienation?”

If you think that 140 characters is too little space to say anything meaningful, we’ve forgotten that the beauty of the tribe is built on short grunts, cries, hoots, and hollers.

The noise of the tribe, is fundamental to who we are.

(and now we’re getting it back.)

Every battle worth fighting needs a good enemy. Who is your enemy?

MySpace has Facebook.
Chevy has Ford.
Luke Skywalker has Darth Vader.

If you’ve failed to define the enemy, whether it’s “Competitor X”, or “boring mediocrity”, you’re robbing yourself and your employees of vital motivational energy.

Enemies clarify goals and focus energies. Now, the extra hour in the office polishing your PowerPoint deck isn’t about pride, it’s about sticking it to the man.

We tend to forget that our companies are made of individuals, each needing some type of motivation. The notion of “us vs. them” is core to how we have evolved as humans, only slightly less important than “I’m hungry” and “I’m tired.”

Tribes instinctually need something to fight for, and something to fight against. It’s what defines the tribe and guides their decisions, and it has to be something more than “better next quarter” or “15% YoY growth”. Without a cohesive, visceral message about the battle you need won, what’s to keep them on the battlefield?

For bonus points: enemies don’t have to be people or competitors, they can be “ideals” or notions. Apple’s enemies are: mediocrity, confusion, and apparently, “buttons“

The new Pepsi logo has generated a stir among those people who pay attention to such things. Among the various opinions, most of the negative comments tend to converge around the idea that it is “too generic”, or looks downright “cheap”. Moogy.org has a nice overview and collection of links.

At this point, it may help to invoke the great Wayne Gretzky:

“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”

I believe that Pepsi has succeeded in skating to where the puck is going to be.

Maybe the new logo doesn’t match the current aesthetic of today’s world but that is because they are already marketing to tomorrow’s world. In two years, Pepsi’s new logo will simultaneously be both contemporary AND familiar. In twenty years, their logo will be cherished as an emblem of “simpler times”.

Maybe in the downturned economy, buying generic cola will be equivalent to creating a wartime victory garden or making mayonnaise cake?

On a side note: even if their logo proves to me a miserable failure, it shows that Pepsi has the balls to fight for their brand and make choices they believe to be best for their business.

While at eBay, I’ve had the opportunity to cut my teeth being a “designer” on various projects, initiatives, and explorations. Over time, I’ve learned that (like many other things), design looks like fun and is actually hard work.

Here are 5 tips that I wish someone had given me before I started designing anything:

1. know what you’re solving
   Design is the process of creating solutions to problems. More often than not, the problem is actually something different than what it at first appears. Probably, those asking you to do the design are phrasing the question incorrectly. As a designer, it’s up to you to figure out what they’re really asking for. Once you know what you’re solving for, then you can begin researching all the use-cases which you’ll incorporate into your successful design. (And there will be plenty of use-cases that weren’t initially mentioned.)
2. someone has already designed this
   The world seems like a blank slate. Never has a designer encountered these problems before, and you have the chance to create something truly new! Wrong. Your “entirely new” problem is likely one of the age-old problems many systems or products have approached before. The circumstances may be new, but looking to the past at how other designers have solved something like this will help you learn from someone else’s mistakes. If you can’t find something like this before, ask around, and read some books; the truth is out there.
3. this is not a meritocracy
   In the end, your design will not evaluated solely on its merits. Any design you deliver to a committee or team will have to pass their own special set of requirements. Their perception is your reality, and if it looks complicated to them, it is. There is no sense or joy attempting to convince them they are wrong, it’s your job to explain the rationale behind your design decisions and how they solve the problem. At times, you’ll need to educate about what the actual problem is. After you’ve done all this, you have to let it go and move on.
4. you are not designing for yourself
   You’re way deeper into this than you realize. By even thinking about this design problem in the first place, you have already become a power-user. There are plenty of edge-cases to explore, don’t get wrapped up in them, just because you know they exist. Focus on delivering the functionality in priority order by solving most users biggest problems first. Also, remember that the users of this product are not designers. Namely, your users probably don’t have a few of the luxuries you have: LAN connection, two 1600×1200 monitors, really good eyesight, an hour of undivided attention. I always think of this way: imagine this design as if I were trying to hold a baby in one hand and still accomplish my task. Does the design still work?
5. the better the design, the less people will talk about it
   Secretly in your heart you long for fame and fortune as a designer. A sad truth to design is that the better something works, the less publicity you’ll probably get. Inspired design is invisible, subtle, and elegant. To achieve any sort of notoriety, your design must be so invisible that its invisibility is noteworthy! Also, designers are like authors or actors: for every super-star, there are 1000 nearly-as-good who will never see their name in lights.

Any additional thoughts? I’d love to hear from any readers who are designers themselves!

It’s eerie sometimes, isn’t it, how a dog can look like its owner. Would it be outlandish to imagine that a company looks like its CEO?

Or, not looks like, exactly. But perhaps acts like?

Does the structure, strategy, and practices of Microsoft echo how Bill Gates presents himself? Do we see ripples of Steve Job’s subdued glasses and black turtleneck mirrored in the current lineup of Apple products? Does the iconoclastic multi-business Virgin conglomerate remind you of its multi-talented iconoclastic founder Richard Branson?

Does the company of eBay look a little like Pierre, overlaid with Meg Whitman, and a dash of John Donahoe?

The individual in a position of power uses the same mental model to make decisions both about their company and their personal actions on a daily basis.

The brain being used to negotiate multi-million dollar contracts is also being used to choose which pair of shoes to wear, and whether it matters if those shoes match their belt.

As an example, we all know CEOs who have a sense of style and believe in the importance that of experience and impression in their lives. They believe or understand style and presentation to be critical to success, so they will make sure their company can execute with the same level of “flair”. They will hire, fire, promote, and guide with these goals in mind, placing an importance on interaction and presentation that might not be seen in other companies.

But don’t get into the correlation == causation trap! There’s many reasons people might choose that tie or dress. Does the CEO wear sandals because they are actively rebelling against the “conformity” of shoes? Or because this is perfectly acceptable attire at university and they haven’t updated their wardrobe? Maybe they feel they have something to prove about succeeding without dressing like others in business.

The next time I interview for a job or invest in a company, when they get to the section where I can ask questions, I will have these two important queries:

• who’s really “in charge here”
• what are they like outside of work?

The little details about what car they drive, what shoes they wear, and where they choose to have their home may have critical foreshadowing as to how they run their business.

So how well does your boss dress?

Innovation is exploring the “new”; and by definition, the new is unoptimized and inefficient.

Optimization is the enemy of innovation. Or should I say, innovation and optimization usually inhabit opposite ends of the strategy spectrum.

Innovation is the process of identifying the possible, constantly changing and expanding upon what is currently achievable. Optimization, on the other hand, is the process of refining existing processes, cutting them down to the more and more essential pieces for greater efficiency.

Earlier this week I presented at and attended the Innovation Immersion conference in Phoenix. There, my eyes were really opened up to what other organizations call “innovation”. It seems there are as many implementations of innovations as there are different company structures.

While preparing for my presentation, I looked back on our Disruptive Innovation team, and how it fit within the grand scheme of eBay’s organizational structure. While we were far removed from John Donahoe’s statements about disruptive innovation of the organization, I believe we played a small but vital role in the end.

One conclusion I came to was that the desire to have an “innovation team” is a direct response to a perceived lack of internal innovation capability. Whether or not internal innovation is really lacking, perception is reality.

I then sat down and really asked myself whether I should be advocating for organizations to have an innovation team. If the team was really a placeholder for a perception of needing change, wouldn’t it just be better to change the culture?

I believe that all small, young companies are probably innovating “enough”, perhaps as much as they can possibly handle. In the beginning stages of a business, innovation is a way of being. There is never enough money, time, or resources to get things done “right”, so things are done however they can be done. The possible is recognized and embraced daily.

Over time, patterns of success are recognized and emphasized and the business slowly begins to tilt in those directions. Growth reinforces success. And processes that work, become mandatory.

The business will align itself with whatever it has “found” to “work”. Managers will begin to manage to these principles because their success relies on the success of their employees, and everybody will try to hire the prospective candidates which appear best suited for the environment.

As the business grows, these success patterns will become ingrained into the business. If growth is the primary objective, all decisions will be optimized towards efficiency. Whatever mix of employees you started with, they will be selected by evolution and “optimised” themselves.

You may end up with a corporate culture that has become some highly optimized that it’s unable to “innovate” any longer. Far past are the days of a small, lithe, company; this has become an efficient machine, and brilliant factory.

And yet here’s the kicker:

innovation is by definition the enemy of optimization, yet over-optimization is the enemy of long-term viability.

The balance is between achieving acceptable growth while maintaining long-flexibility. You never know what’s around that next corner.

UPDATE- The more general way of saying this is:

specialization is the antithesis of flexibility (unless, of course, you specialize in being flexible)

My inbox has a fundamental flaw: every email is treated with the same level of “respect” or priority. It contains both forwarded urban legends, and highly critical information related to my banking and financial condition

The problem of phishing happens expressly because there’s no easy way for me to separate legitimate emails in my inbox from illegitimate ones.

My solution comes from a game I regularly play with magazines or catalogs. When I sign up, instead of giving them my first name, I use their company name. For example, when I signed up for a subscription to Wired magazine, I gave my first name as “Wired”. Now, when any mail comes to “Wired Skyberg”, I know exactly who sold their subscriber database.

Here’s my proposal for a solution:

1. all email providers become OpenID or OAuth providers
2. whenever a 3rd party is asking me for my email address, they must authenticate via my provider
3. each sender receives a token which grants some type of access to my email account
4. I, as a user, can manage these tokens in any way I choose, via my email provider

This allows me to control who is able to place emails in my inbox, or various other folders of my choosing. It may seem like a lot of overhead, but it would be devilishly easy to manage if done right. The nice part is that the “overhead” can be handled either in-the-moment or entirely in the background.

Here’s a use-case showing one possible scenario:

• I’d like to sign up for a new service, and they ask me for my email
• I give them my email address, and a short temporary PIN I’ve already assigned with my provider
• they do their reg flow, and send me an email, including my temp PIN in the email header or subject
• while scanning my incoming email, my provider recognizes this PIN, and places it in a “Requesting Authorization” folder
• next time I login to my email, I can review their auth request in a special folder
• by clicking a button, I automatically send an email back with a PIN for their use only
• they will need to include this PIN in their email header whenever they wish to contact me in the future

Both the temp PIN and personalized PIN can be stored and accessed via OpenID or OAuth, for complete hands-off use. The personalized PIN could also be a public key if I wanted incoming email encrypted. The temp PIN could also be shared semi-publically on social networking sites or other trusted sites. Multiple active temp PINs could show you exactly where the referral came from, and if that temp PIN had been compromised or abused somehow.

An advantage of this system is that I can stop all incoming spam without resorting to changing my email address for all legitimate users. Too much spam “requesting authorization”? Change your temp PIN and they all silently disappear.

What if a user I’d previously granted access to now is sending me spam? Just revoke their personal PIN and they won’t be able to bother you any more. The personal PIN also has the benefit of making priority filtering easy. Want all financial stuff kept in its own folder? Just tag all PINs given to financial institutions as “money”, and they’re automatically sorted and categorized.

While this system does have a slightly higher bar to entry than existing email, isn’t that what we all really want?

Questions, comments, offers to develop this solution, all highly encouraged!

Last week I had the pleasure of attending O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 EXPO in New York City. In addition to meeting many interesting folks and letting them know about eBay’s developer platform, I also got to give a presentation on platform wars. In it I explore some notable platform wars, explain where the wars come from, pitfalls of being caught in one, and how to identify bad platforms overall.

Here’s the session notes and presentation:

Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD. VHS vs. Beta. PC vs. Mac. AC vs. DC. As long as platforms have been a valuable resource, wars have been fought to control them. Eventually, either through trickery, persistence, or legislation, all wars come to an end. By understanding these wars, old and new, we’ll be better prepared to survive the next.

Mark Earls over at Herd recently made a post which comes along the same lines of two of my recent posts. In his post “Preaching Against Survey Data” he speaks out against the traditional ways of collecting market data via surveys.

I recently posted about “sampling myopia” — the idea that it’s unlikely you’ll get a “good” answer from any type of survey or study you create, because you don’t know the full context — and also about why leadership based on bad data or too little data can be disastrous.

In his post he captures the essence of the two posts and my feeling towards the data in general:

…which I’ve always thought a bit harsh: I’m in no way a “touchie-feelie”, “it just kinda feels right”, “crystals will tell us” kind of marketing thinker. No, I think disciplined and evidence-based stuff is the only sensible way forward – we just need better (and perhaps less) research approaches which harness what we now know about human beings and not more and more of the same old stuff

So… are you seeing true, positive progress from your marketing and leadership, or more of the “same old stuff”?

Choosing projects based on projected ROI is a dangerously simplistic way of running your business.

If you take a look at the actual acronym: “ROI” return on investment, it seems like a perfectly logical way of directing your business activity. After all, who wouldn’t want to invest in the things that bring them the greatest returns?

The unfortunate simplification in action is that “return” is generally taken to mean revenue or cashflow, which is but one of the important aspects of running a business.

The problem here is that while revenue can be easily counted, recorded, multiplied and divided; other intangible dimensions cannot be. How do you quantify “trust”? How do you measure “excitement”?

What would an ROI of 20% on trust actually mean? Because the intangibles cannot easily be typed into Excel, they can’t be utilized on pivot charts, or factored into equations.

And because MBA’s live and die by Excel, anything you can’t count, doesn’t count.

ROI based on revenue or other “quantifiable” metrics prove to be an overly blunt way of looking at the world, missing the nuanced and very real ways that vectors like “image” and “brand” profoundly affect your bottom line. If you only have one “real” data point, you tend to optimize to increase that value.

This starts you off making very poor business decisions. Take, for example, 3rd party advertising on your site. Investment is minimal (just open a few content spaces on your pages), and return could be huge. BINGO, the ROI meter goes off, let’s do this!

Did anyone consider what it might look or feel like to have 3rd party advertising on the site? What type of message does this ROI-driven decision send to our customers and what do they think about it?

If you lined up a row of junior MBA’s and really forced them to “prove” it to you, their minds would ultimately jump to questionnaires, surveys, and satisfaction reports. Scratching at the walls to come up with NUMBERS they can give you, they’ll throw out all sort of tests and questions they can ask. Because they want to fit it into their Excel spreadsheet.

And this all takes time and money, and the results can only really be measured after you do something. Not to mention that more than likely, your “results” are indelibly tainted by asking the wrong questions.

so if you can’t measure it, what do you do?

Because so many of the truly important aspects of your business can’t be measured directly, you probably shouldn’t try. Measure the ones you can and then jump in to get a “feel” for the rest. No Excel magic to calculate ROI is going to help you here any more than it would help you learn to surf, or fly a helicopter. You’ve gone through ground school, now it’s your chance to really show what a good pilot you are.

Why can’t I SMS to a land-line?

This might seem like a silly question, but if I’m noticing it, then other people must be too. I think it’d be great to SMS my mom at her home, but of course there’s no way for her to “pick up this message” because her phone has no screen.

I can’t imagine that this would be particularly difficult to do, many phones already include an LCD display for showing the incoming call number.

Regardless of the technical limitations, this shows a hole in the communications infrastructure.

Along these lines is another list of questions I have:

Why can’t I call a street address on my phone?

Why can’t I send an email to a cell phone number?

Why can’t I send postal mail to a phone number?

Why can’t I chat via URL?

I could go on and create the 5×5 matrix of street address, email address, URL, cell phone number, and land-line number, but you get my point.

Isn’t it a little antiquated that an address in a specific format only allows communication only though that medium?

If I want to track-back to myself, I could ask, why isn’t my personal profile located at http://rolf.skyberg@myDomain.org?

Last week I started the first of a five-installment series of blog posts centered around trends I’m seeing in the world, marketplace and history. This is part of a larger project I’m working on, providing context to eBay executives around what the technology environment will be like in the next 3 to 5 years.

The “5 eternal human truths” from last week were trends and patterns that could be applied to any era of history; they are fundamental aspects of how humans interact in this world.

This week I’ll be focusing on some macro patterns that have been in effect for the past 100 to 1000 years. These macro-patterns have formed from our eternal truths bumping up against the physical world and each other.

If you create a technology that invalidates any one of these trends, you have a profoundly disruptive innovation.

macro patterns: ~1000 to 100 years

1) efficiencies of scale encourage consolidation of power

Hierarchical systems become a standard organizational structure because consistently interacting with a large group of people is difficult for many reasons. Beyond the pure logistical difficulties in maintaining working relationships, often personal and political reasons make communication difficult. In a world where control is power, hierarchical systems tend towards tighter control as internal communication is routed through defined and known channels.
Beyond communication, centralization has benefits for maintenance and construction which minimize ongoing resource expenditure. There’s a reason why large companies can often branch out into different industries well, the logistics of large project management are largely similar across wide domains.

2) smaller
The industrial age truly took off when we were able to produce machines which helped us build more precise machines. Before the standardization of nuts, bolts, screws, and gears, every machine was a one-off item of immense beauty and huge labor. Tools with tighter tolerances help you build products with tighter tolerances. Over time this pushes towards miniaturization because raw material cost always increases with volume.

3) faster / more
“Faster” relies on some of the same principles as “smaller”. Better-crafted machines and processes allow more accurate functioning which can run faster producing fewer errors. “Smaller” also leads to “faster” by virtue that you can pack in more “power” due to miniaturization. The new iPhone has approximately the processing power of a PowerPC from not to long ago. The PlayStation3 is a super-computer by many standards.

4) more connected, less wired
As communication technology increases in capability, face to face interaction is steadily decreasing while the total number of people we connect with is increasing. It would be tempting to assume that quality of communication is decreasing, but realize that all communication technologies are aimed at solving some deficiency with previous advancements.

5) rural –> urban –> suburban –> (urban?)
Everyone started “rural” because an immense percentage of human effort was expended in feeding our bellies, let alone these big brains we have on top of our shoulders. Advancements in farm productivity freed an enormous pool of labor which could only (efficiently) be utilized when clustered densely in urban areas. The availability of vehicle transportation in the United States encouraged dispersion away from the “difficulties” of city life to the vast tracts of unpopulated area available around urban regions. This trend is starting reverse as higher qualities of life are made possible by the efficiency of urban areas and those areas are no longer dominated by the industrial and factory work which originally created them.

6) knowledge is power
In a world where human resources are limited, control over the human resources (and the natural resources they use to create value) is the ultimate goal. Recent history (the 19th and early 20th centuries) drove tremendous efficiencies in the leverage of human resources through mechanization and automation. These efficiencies have created a surplus of the capital means of production, and now the emphasis lies in what you do with that ability. Knowing what can be built and designing it are key values in the 21st century. Knowledge is also power when a new business model is largely based on the ability to parse, digest, and reassemble the output of other knowledge-based companies.

What does this all lead to?

massive technological change in past 100 years
Perhaps I speak with a bias towards recent history, but the past 100 years have witnessed change on a massive scale. The reason behind this is the obliteration of many previous “limitations” to the human condition. We have “solved” key “flaws” in this corporeal life that we live.

physical shifting - the automobile, and airplane provide rapid transport of both people and things
mental shifting - all forms of telephony, video conferencing
“lossy” memory – digital reproduction in all forms
time shifting – video and audio recording, realtime transcription
language barriers – not quite perfect, but coming soon
financial limitations – modern electronic exchanges and markets

We are on the edge of something really really big which I don’t think will be fully realized until at least the end of the 21st century.

While walking home the other day, I made an observation which I thought I’d share in a very Seth Godin way. Here goes:

I walk to and from work, usually waving hello and exchanging a few words with a neighbor who seems to incessantly prune her shrubbery. For a few days now, her son has been home from university, and each time I’ve seen him out in front of the house, he’s been working on his mountain bike(s).

After seeing him work on his mountain bikes a few days in a row, I thought to myself:

“man, he must really like mountain biking! every time I see him he’s working on his bikes!”

For a brief second I considered saying something like that to him, but then thought about how he might respond. Because we’d only encountered each other as I pass by my neighbor’s house as I walk to and from my work, he could have easily said,

“man, you must really like walking! every time I see you, you’re walking to work!”

On the surface, this might seem like a silly interaction, but what it uncovers is a deeper problem when attempting to do any product research or marketing. Based on my experience with my neighbor’s son, I would have attempted to market the “extreme sports” angle of my product, but that might be completely mis-directed.

Perhaps he was working bicycles so much because he was planning on riding a “Race for the Cure”, and his real interests are in volunteer work. Or maybe he was repairing bikes for a friend. Or any number of alternate possibilities.

However, if we only construct our customer personas from questionaires we send them in the mail, we are likely missing broad swaths of their personality, goals, and aspirations.

Aggregated action-based data (search data, credit card receipts) can help alleviate this single-sampling problem, but then you run the risk of missing the context, like an Amazon customer who only buys products because she can have them gift-shipped to her nephew.

Carrying on my selection of “5 items” to put nicely in a list, here are 5 eternal truths of humans in the world. This is the first post in a series leading up to the final work I’m doing around presenting business trends for eBay’s future in the next 3 to 5 years.

These truths lay the foundation upon which my following posts will be built. I feel they have a deep influence on the way humans conceive, design, and utilize technology.

Knowing these truths helps you deconstruct projects, programs, and companies you see in the real world. Like a stack of balanced building blocks, it is easy to see how something would fail if these parts were removed or suddenly invalidated.

1) it’s all about conservation of energy
If you want to simplify this, you can say that people are lazy. However, it’s not so much that people are lazy, it’s just that most of them are optimizing their time to reduce their expenditure of energy. There are finite resources within the human body and maintaining them takes work. The physical replenishment of our energy sources takes time, so why waste it on something we perceive to be of little future value?

2) I don’t care how it works, if it works
Because we are lazy, when taken in aggregate, consumers (utilizers) of any product or technology generally don’t care how something works. There is a general acceptance gleaned from the social environment that if enough other people are using it, and it satisfies my needs, I have no desire or need to research it. If everybody else eats bananas, I can probably eat them too. The same applies to how/where your facebook data is shared/stored/archived, or where your AOL search history may be going.

3) the “known” is comforting
Again, because it takes resources to constantly re-verify the viability of everything around us, we seek the known and comfortable. If something looks like a banana we just ate, chances are it’s still something good to eat. New foods deem investigation, but that all takes time and energy. When resources are low, the “known” is an oasis.

4) we make the best of what we have
Humans can tolerate a wide range of experience, and will over time accept pretty much anything as “normal”. If you require the ultra-soft premium variety of toilet paper, is it barbaric that people clean themselves with various things such as: rags, wood shavings, leaves, grass, hay, stone, sand, moss, water, snow, maize husks, fruit skins, or seashells, and cob of the corn? Wikipedia tells all about toilet paper. Given that, is it barbaric that you aren’t connected to the Great Brain via telepathic signals? Not yet, but it will be some day.

5) control is power
As reliable and inevitable as the tides, control is power. That control may be over financial resources, physical labor resources, natural resources, the ideology of a people, knowledge, or simply time. As sure as there are resources to be had, controlling them is power. This may seem self-evident, but it becomes particularly important as the value of different resources change. 10 years ago, controlling which desktop web browser you used was important, now the modern war is perhaps around which mobile access device you use as your connection to the net.

This is part 1 of 5 which I will be publishing once a week in the coming month. Please contribute any eternal human truths you think I’ve missed, and I’ll be happy to incorporate them into my further work.

The next segment will be Major Trends that have been impacting our society and history for the past 100 to 1000 years.

After two years on eBay’s Disruptive Innovation team, I feel that I can safely draw parallels between “innovation teams” and unicorns. The comparison may be more apt than you expect.

1) they are supposed to magically cure ills
Both unicorns and innovation teams can supposedly bring you back from the brink of death and are generally a panacea for all that ails you. While innovation teams can help aspects of your public and internal image and process, nothing is a cure-all.

2) everybody wants one
Of course everyone wants one, who wouldn’t want a stable of shining unicorns and a team of innovators? As if to say, “we’re so good at what we normally do, we’ve got resources to spare on even MORE incredible stuff!”

3) you can waste a lot of time trying to catch one
Unicorns are elusive, as are truly innovative product managers, engineers and strategists. The best way you can attract unicorns and innovative employees is to find the very first one, then showcase how well that unicorn innovator is treated and what a big pasture with yummy grass you’ve given it. Those of like mind will come out of the woodwork, from many different lands. Don’t bang your head looking in all the “right” places, often those who have been successful in the past with your company are precisely not the people you want helping you build the future.

4) they are really just horses with an extra horn
When the day is done, unicorns are just horses with a horn, and an innovation team is still a team filled with employees who are still people. 90-95% of the “regular” work in managing a team, planning for its future, and staffing it will be the same. Yes, your innovators may be geniuses in their own right, but even geniuses need the right budget, equipment, resources, dedication to process, checkpoints, incentives, and objectives. Neglecting an innovation team filled with unicorns is perhaps more damaging than having no team at all. Because seriously, who punches unicorns?

5) they don’t do any real work plowing the (existing) fields
Even though unicorns may be just horses with horns, they are not trained to plow fields. Yes, if you train their initial enthusiasm into a workable energy, they can be tremendously productive, but probably in their own separate fields. You didn’t catch unicorns to saddle them next to your existing horses in your existing processes, but you also didn’t grab them simply to show them off. It will take time for you to find how the unicorns of your innovation team work with your existing business process. Do they first plow small fields your trusty Clydesdales will then later enlarge, or sow? Are they vehicles you can ride on, offering your executives a slightly farther view because of the new elevation?

BONUS – everybody expects rainbows to shoot out their end

You want both your unicorns and your innovation team to crap gold coins and litter the ground with promissory notes. These are expectations, but they don’t come without hard work and dedication. The care and feeding of both these mythical creatures is not something to be ignored.

If treated properly, and given the opportunity to interact with Real Business Problems, innovation teams can shoot rainbows for your company. If relegated to the “shiny shiny”, sowing fields distant from any Real Work, you will be impressed by their flowing hair and sparkling teeth, but don’t expect any leprechauns to be vying for your pot ‘o gold.

Questions and comments, jeers and jest always appreciated.

If you can think up additional parallels, please post them as a comment!

Thought you’d all like a peek at my eBay Developer’s Conference ‘08 presentation.

Enjoy.

And Discuss.

When you’re done, click to view last year’s presentation.

In an earlier post (ten tech trends for tomorrow: I need your help), I proposed 10 things to keep an eye on for the next 3 to 5 years in the internet sphere. If you missed the previous list, go back and give it a look to get some context.

I also got a thread running between myself and other members of my team via email and I’d like to post the highlights of the results. These ideas were contributed by various thought and influence leaders inside eBay. Many thanks to “R”, “E”, “J” and “M”.

We’ll start with “R”, first person to respond to my thread:

So, to add… I agree with most of yours… some in different forms…

The MicroNiche – the smallest bits of information (your status, tweet, etc) will continue to gather momentum. Everything we do on the “network” will be more effective the more the level/barrier of engagement is broken down. Buying will be simple in 1 click, selling will be equally as empirical.

TVs are PCs – simply put, your next tv will be a pc and vice versa. Brains everywhere in every device.

Location-based content / activity – GPS, triangulation, etc. You will be seen where you go, you will be marketed to when you’re there. You will be more location-aware than ever before.

There’s more, but shooting out 3 for now…

Weighing in a few hours later, we have “E”:

From [ongoing research]:

“Old Media gets it”- in the last 9 months, we’ve seen the first signals from old-school media companies (newspaper companies, TV networks, and especially music labels) that they’re finally ready to embrace the internet the right way. It takes a while for big ships to turn around, but they’ve started the turn. Implication: significantly increased availability of premium (meaning “high-quality”, not necessarily “paid-for”) content online, such that entertainment continues to be the fastest-growing sector in terms of share of time online, which in turn induces business innovation in advertising for those media.

And “J” puts forth some intriguing ideas as well:

Hi all,

Agree with all of these. My thoughts are:

Browsers to become gateways for webservice integrations- Toolbars and extensions will become less popular, being replaced with lightweight webservices that securely add “mash-up” functionality into the browser. The first steps of this has already begun with all popular browsers supporting OpenSearch (one line of code on the HTML header tells the browser how to add site search) and IE8’s support of WebSlices and Activities which eBay was a showcase partner of. Furthermore, talking to Mozilla, they are very keen to push the cloud computing idea to sync’d bookmarks via lightweight webservices.

Home Entertainment being web enabled- While many smaller firms are researching this, Intel is the one to watch. It is planning to very aggressively push this in the coming two years, with OEMs on board who will build STB and TVs that are Internet enabled. I feel that it will take a while for a standard to come out, and for OEMs to really provide what users want. However, the move away from Windows and to custom Linux distributions that Intel are pushing sound like a step in the right direction in a bid to simplify the experience. If Internet enabled TV devices are to succeed, they will look and behave very differently to the Internet you get on your desktop.

Data Visualisation- This is tied into the above point about the internet experience in the living room being very different to the one in front of the desktop. Data visualisation of search results and general information will form an important part of a simple and fun browsing experience. Data visualisation will also be a big factor in the coming years as the volume and complexity of information being sent to users will get too much for a simple HTML interface to convey quickly.

“Application-isation” of the web- OK – terrible title, but I can’t think of anything better. We are seeing the move away from heavy desktop applications towards the internet. We have seen this for simple spreadsheets and word processors, but over the next few years I expect to see more and more enterprise level applications going onto the web interface.

And we wrapped up this round with “M”:

Convergence of desktop and web experiences- Computer users will no longer distinguish between web and desktop experiences. Their interaction with applications, sites and services will seamlessly integrate what has once been traditional desktop and web experiences. Ultimately, computer users won’t care where or how applications are served to them, but only that they can access them from their connected PC.

Convergence of interactive experiences- Consumers will expect that they can access the same, or close to the same, information and services regardless of the device they happen to use. Specifically, consumers will expect continuity between their desktop/web experience and their mobile experience. Different types of interactions, but ultimately the ability to manage information and commerce experiences. Digital living room will be still in its infancy, but mobile will accelerate, particularly in developing countries, where mobile is the only access point to the internet for many people.

Quite the gammut, eh?

Given all this thinking around the future and what’s to come, it’s really not so surprising we politely acquired VUVOX, is it? (BTW, if there are people wondering “how much it will cost?”, I for one say it should be free, just like gallery image.   )

Hello all and welcome to Chicago for eBay’s Developer Conference ‘08.

My presentation at 1:30pm today is entitled “Web 2.0: Lies, Mystery and Opportunity”, and I thought to get you started, I’d link to last year’s presentation. While my talk isn’t a direct follow-on to last year’s talk, it will give you a sense of my style and hopefully some of the context. Again, welcome, and I look forward to chatting with you all across the next 3 days.

Even if Facebook implodes in upon itself, the concept of an inbox limited to the “trusted few” may lay the groundwork to finally destroy spam.

Back in the days of old on the proto-internet, each major manufacturer had its own variant of “email” which were largely incompatible. Passing messages between two users of the same system was easy and not much of a problem if everyone was on the same system. But everyone wasn’t on the same system and eventually an “open” standard was declared so messages could be exchanged with users of different software.

To simplify things, just imagine for a moment that your email address wasn’t always “JoeUser@domain.com”, but could have also been:

• JoeUser@[10.11.12.13]
• @donald.mit.edu,@mail.mit.edu:JoeUser@domain.com
• servOne!mail!domain.com!JoeUser
• X400:c=US;a=domain.com;o=DOMAIN;s=User;g=Joe;

The standardization of email addressing allowed a wonderful thing: people using different systems could place emails in each others’ inboxes.

As I’ve mentioned before, each invention is an opportunity for someone to get ahead. Usually the first people to explore this are scam artists.

With the invention of email, scam artists realized that by addressing items to JoeUser@domain.com, it would eventually end up in Joe User’s inbox. This inbox is a place that Joe User expects to find relevant information and pays a lot of attention to.

Unfortunately, the only protection on this inbox was security-by-obscurity which is only slightly better than asking nicely. In essence, email’s greatest asset was also its greatest liability: Joe has no control over what gets put in his inbox!

With relatively simple “keys” (the short set of letters before the @ symbol), absolutely ANYONE in the world can put something directly in your field of vision.

GAME OVER. Protect your email address like you’d protect your PIN number because nothing can save you from the teeming masses who want to cram your inbox with crap.

Over time, slowly but surely, spam has decreased the effectiveness of email. What used to be a pristine environment composed of only content that mattered to you, is now a place where you can get “no relief”.

But then along came Facebook, and the net-generation decided that a spam-free, protected “Inbox” was better than a public “admit anyone” inbox.

The older generation HOWLs that these kids don’t know what they’re doing! We gape at astonishment that they would rather use a PRIVATE system available only on the web! Don’t they know better?

But the more you think about it… isn’t it kind of silly to have an inbox that just ANYbody can post to? No wonder why we get so much spam, we’re just sitting there collecting dirt.

Of course, this will all get built into the system just as JoeUser@domain.com was a simplification of“@donald.mit.edu,@mail.mit.edu:JoeUser@domain.com”.

As the concept of creating a maintaining a “friends list” becomes more mainstream, we have already pre-populated our whitelist of email addresses. Before, maintaining a whitelist of accepted senders was a tedious process few people had the time and energy to pursue. Now, we’ll simply suck that whitelist from a small collection of network utilities like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and maybe even eBay.

The greatest aid to adoption is to recognize and reuse effort that people are investing anyway. Don’t push to change behavior, deliver value from what people are already doing.

Want to influence eBay’s 3 to 5 year investments and strategy? Let ‘er rip and leave a comment.

At eBay I’ve been asked to lead a team focusing on what the tech trends of the next 3 to 5 years will mean to our customers, and what competitive environment we will find ourselves in. This information will be presented to our executives and board.

To start off our work I quickly threw together 10 ideas about what’s “going on” in the tech world and mailed it along to the team.

Normally I wouldn’t share verbatim, but I think this problem might best be solved collectively. So I’m opening this up to any and all readers of my blog.

So if you’ve got an opinion about what’s happening in the web/tech/society/world and how it will change the market environment in the next 3 to 5 years, I want to hear it!

As we trudge on into the future, we need to question whether the old way of doing things is necessarily the best. Will your future mobile phone, even support voice calling?

Let’s take a look at lessons learned from Skype. eBay purchased Skype a few years ago for an admitted outrageous sum of money, betting on the fact that voice is, in fact, the killer app. Skype was so inviting because the peer-to-peer technology behind it (implemented by the same guy who invented Kazaa), essentially made peer-to-peer voice, free. Exploiting the un-used bandwidth of the participating members, Skype is essentially the give-a-penny-take-a-penny of telecom. You can deliver voice chatting at little or no cost to the network operator.

Somewhere along the way of developing Skype, text chat sprung up alongside the voice chat. Undoubtedly it was seen as “essentially free” and probably helped the early testers tap out messages of “halp!” when their voice connection went down. So why not implement chat indeed?

If you were to re-create Skype from the ground up (and many are trying), you’d make the same choice again to include text chat. What developer in their right mind could leave out text chat? Regardless of how well the voice connection worked, reviewers would most definitely grumble if they couldn’t send back and forth their smilies or short notes.

What this really points to is the fact that voice is not the killer app.*

If you look at my desk, and the amount of time I interact with all the items on it, my PC wins without contest. A far distant second to my PC is the ancient sound wave reproduction device sitting to the left, my telephone. My most-used applications are my email client, my web browser, and then a host of office productivity applications. I only use the phone begrudgingly to attend meetings and receive calls from the lobby about guests that have arrived. If my phone died, I wouldn’t rush facilities to replace it.

You could point out that my job is more oriented towards computer work, if I were a salesman my priorities would be a little different. The telephone would likely be my primary tool because my job would be to communicate and persuade via a synchronous, nuanced, high-context communication channel.

Another objection might point to a multitude of other professions where computer use is negligible or non-existent. Bricklayers, glass-cutters, day-care operators, waitresses, bus drivers and dry cleaners probably could survive quite happily with no computer at all. I on the other hand never need to use a shovel, flashlight, cash register or hockey stick in in the normal course of my work.

And in these exceptions, we see the pattern emerging:

* depending on the needs of the situation, each application has a collection of “best” tools.

As we teeter on the edge of complete cellular saturation, and gaze in astonishment when mobile searches skyrocket for iPhone users, now is the time to ask ourselves,

“is voice really what I want from my phone? don’t I really just want everything in my pocket?”

Just because voice was the initial application of cellular technology does not mean we necessarily should perpetuate the practice of transmitting the sonic vibrations of air passing between two vibrating pieces of meat. Voice is an archaic technology sprung from the biological constraints of our evolution.

I mentioned in a presentation that the current mobile experience “was crap”, and someone challenged me, asking if I thought the iPhone was crap. They asserted it was not crap, because it had displaced 15 to 20 minutes of browsing in the morning they would have normally needed to boot their computer for.

Initially I wanted to persist with my statement that mobile was indeed crap, but the decision was no longer mine to make. He had already decided that for those 15 to twenty minutes, his iPhone was the best tool for the job.

From a product and strategy management perspective, this reinforces the notion that we must always ask why and drive further to the roots. If you’re in the cellular business and you focus narrowly on voice, you’ll get smacked in the head when your competitor blows you away because they have been thinking about communication in all its many forms.

BTW, if you want to see this strategy playing out perfectly, check out the DASH GPS/Mobile search/Traffic Device. Global positioning of YOU is not the killer app, it’s really more about whats NEAR you. They figured out if you Google stuff at home and at work, why wouldn’t you Google it in your car?

When we create design layouts in tools like Photoshop or Illustrator, does the ease of copy-paste ultimately create artificially dense, human-unfriendly spaces?

Are these interfaces not unlike a cancer, grown without natural physical boundaries of human creation and cognition? Could we make it better, if we forced ourselves to sketch, everything?

A few weeks ago Eric Burke made a great graphic on his StuffThatHappens.com. Showing the typical Apple product and Google product, it was obvious to see that simplicity was paramount with one giant button or one simple search box. Contrasting it to “your product”, it was apparent that no user wants to deal with an interface littered with buttons, dialogs, mandatory and optional fields. (see the awesome comic)

But how did we get this way? I think the productivity tools we use every day might be part of the problem.

Dan Roam came and talked at eBay, discussing his new book “The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures”. In his presentation he told a story of developing a piece of dashboard software for a major organization, and he said with a certain amount of pride that all the design was “done in a notebook”. The rough hand-drawn style of the mockups for the dashbord apparently kept execs and designers from quibbling over the little details and everything progressed smoothly.

While sitting there, I imagined trying to capture our eBay homepage with pen and paper, and it made my head hurt. We have so many links and such a dense interface, you would wear out our nib trying to document them. Let alone creating multiple copies to share and discuss.

So therein lies the question? Because it has become so easy to design high-resolution, high-fidelity interfaces; endlessly duplicating elements and text blocks, are we creating structures humans can’t visually and mentally digest?

Is the ease with which we copy-paste both elements and information, forgetting the necessary influences of natural growth, decay, and selection?

If we forced ourselves to design only with pen and paper, would it necessarily create a more understandable interface? Pushing complexity away from the user, exactly where it should be?

Try this experiment for yourself, either in your next design, or your next powerpoint.

If you aren’t willing to take the time to draw each one of those fields and links, I can guarantee that your users don’t want to fill them in.

Are you controlling your brand, or is it controlling you? If you haven’t examined your mission statement recently, you are probably missing out on opportunity.

Many moons ago, each in their separate time, two mega-brands were born: McDonalds and the Virgin group.

One stood for cheap burgers and fries, and one stood for an irreverent take on the music industry. Without digging into financials, it is pretty easy to say that while both generate tremendous annual revenue, only one of the two is widely viewed as innovative, friendly, vibrant and positive.

It would be easy to say that Virgin Group Ltd. is merely the outgrowth of the gregarious and spirited Richard Branson, but in doing so you would miss an interesting choice:

at some point, buried in their histories, McDonalds and Virgin chose separate paths. If leaders of McDonalds had chosen differently, why shouldn’t we expect McHotels, McLube, and McCinema?

We bristle at the idea of McHotels because who would want to sleep in a hotel staffed by burger flippers? But does it make any more sense to fly trans-atlantic with record salesmen?

A McHotel strikes us as so funny because McDonalds chose to build their brand around one business, one industry. In doing so, they necessarily locked themselves into one market, and dependent on one source of revenue.

McDonalds brand promise is painfully apparent when we attempt to imagine this McHotel in our head. Their brand simply isn’t broad enough for us to imagine paying them for anything other than thoroughly standard food.

Virgin on the other hand, chose to diversify, attacking any business where Branson thought there might be a challenge. It seemed, the bigger the challenge, the more he was driven to advance.

In doing so, Branson necessarily built a brand image which stretched to deliver on any business he might imagine. Regardless of the industry, the Virgin brand stands for something a bit more cheeky, stylish, and modern. In other words, Virgin is the brand of youth and the young at heart.

Now, if you take a look at your business, does your brand stretch across multiple industries? If you put your name in front of a hotel, would you laugh out loud, cry, smile?

If you can’t see your company in any other industry, or if the results of your mental business Frankenstein are terrifying, it’s probably time for you to re-imagine your value proposition.

If you can’t see your company standing for anything more than just cheap burgers and fries, then I can guarantee your customer can’t either.

As business moves on from the manufacturing of physical goods, our products are now represented as collections of information and a user interface we design. This is our “one” output, and it must suit all our users and evolve over time. Or does it?

How can we balance the “need” for change against the needs of our customers?

The automotive industry has been a major technology driver throughout the 20th and into the 21st century. Progressing from powered carriages (and even racing sleighs) to modern technology showcases on wheels such as the Toyota Prius and Chevy Volt, each model year brought something new, something different.

Unfortunately, technological innovation doesn’t run on a neat yearly or quarterly schedule of change. Pressed by marketing departments for a new model to showcase, often the only difference between model years was a tweak of the trim or subtle change in design.

Detroit automakers are particularly prone to this behavior, as the only real difference between a Chevy Silverado and GMC Sierra is the name stuck on the outside. The staff employed to differentiate the two cousin vehicles has plenty of spare time to create new “improvements” for each model year.

The other option of course is to only change what is necessary and eschew yearly updates. Two of the most famous vehicles ever produced followed this pattern with great success. Both the Model T Ford and the Volkswagen Beetle remained essentially unchanged for their production lives. The Model T was produced for 19 years while the Beetle was survived for an astounding 65 years of production in various countries.

Each car was designed to be “transportation for the masses” and functioned quite adequately, even as competitors eclipsed the models in all measurable ways.

Yet these cars still held something special, something upon which strong followings are built. Ford continued producing the Model T’s engine up until 1941 because people simply wouldn’t let go; maintaining and upgrading Volkswagen Beetles is still a major industry world wide.

But this story isn’t about cars, it’s about the internet. If you do business on the internet, your webpage is your one face. At eBay, our site and the guts behind it is our one “product”, the one product all our users see and use. So how do we balance our urge to upgrade against disrupting the natural flow of business with a new interface?

In the automotive world, you can produce a new car while continuing to support the older model, because you are shipping thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of new vehicles. Those who want to upgrade will grab the new shiny and reap the marginal increase in rewards; those who are content with their transportation will stay put and change the oil as they always have.

Not so in the internet world, when you upgrade the site, it’s upgraded for all your users, whether they like it or not. We push everyone into a brand-new Pontiac regardless if they were happy in their Beetle.

Craigslist has followed the “change the oil” pattern very well. While it isn’t pretty, or as “full featured” as modern competitors, Craigslist holds its own just as the Beetle defied the market. It’s simple and effective, enough said.

And if we still feel the need to change? We should take a page from the auto industry: standardize and differentiate.

At eBay, we’ve build a robust set of standard APIs so developer can write an application on version “440″ of our API, and it will continue to work as long as eBay acknowledges that 440 is an acceptable interaction model. At any given time we may support 20 or 30 versions of our API. We can “afford” to keep these models active because we have modularized our data away from the interface. The pieces “just work”.

This is where our 3rd-party developers come in, creating different versions for different people. Some individuals want to see eBay Like It’s 1999, and some are looking for the screaming edge of cool. As long as these applications respect the modular APIs, each user can have their own version that suits them best.

Now, we’re still a long way from total success, our primary interface is still intimately tied to our databases and this is the version that all our customers must use, for better or for worse.

As the web evolves, I see the ability to add, remix, and recreate our experience of it to be a fundamental right, as essential as being able to read the last chapter first, if we want to. Opening up the doors to your data embraces our profound desire to make an experience ours, directing our future as we see fit.

Having the job title “Disruptive Innovator”, I am sometimes asked to “tell people the future”. This is a non-trivial request, especially, because they are expecting an answer.

The question may not be phrased in this exact way, it may take the form of: “so what will Web 3.0 be like?” or “what technologies excite you?“

Here are 5 tips for how to respond when someone asks you to “explain the future”:

1. give it your best shot
   There is no “right answer”, they are looking for your viewpoint as a respected individual. They are asking you because they value your opinion so sum up all the thoughts swirling in your head and let fly.
2. use details to color-in your predictions
   Because you are an expert in your field, you follow the news and know more little details than anyone really should. These little details are what lead you to your conclusions, so they the more details you can give your audience, the more reasonable and expected your predictions will seem.
3. or, just tell them the raw facts and let them decide
   Screw predictions, forget about attempting to explain the future. The data that you’ve collected is valuable to your audience so they can make their own predictions. An added bonus of this strategy is that you encourage them to hypothesize which brings you new ways of looking at the situation.
4. be careful, the analogy you choose will be taken literally
   Be careful when choosing your analogy, because it’s going to stick. If you say the future is “mobile computing”, realize that what people will hear is, “the future is the expensive and sub-standard device and service I have in my pocket right now”. To avoid this, present the trend, not the current implementation. “much as telephones lost their copper wires, computers will migrate out from under your desk and into your pocket, internet intact”
5. this is your opportunity to craft their worldview
   If you have a cause, some way to change the world, provide the tools for them to take action with you in crafting the future that is to come. They asked you, so they’re definitely paying attention. Seize this opportunity to lay out the details of your story, extrapolate them into a reasonable whole and deliver with passion.

Hopefully this list is helpful for responding to the question, “what’s next?” and if you have success (or failure) in explaining your personal view of the future, let me know!

Curving lines, a sculpted body, more of an embodiment of passion rather than the shell of an automobile. To view the car above, there is no doubt that it is a thing of beauty. In fact, this car design is so pretty, it made its way to the MoMa in New York.

It comes as no surprise to me that this is an Italian design, crafted by the great Italian designer Battista “Pinin” Farina of later Pininfarina fame. The wholeness of it expresses a singularity of purpose, untainted by design committees or group decisions. This design is essentially the work of one man.

It is the work of one focus, one idea. While many designers likely put pen to paper, all their effort was channeled through one person who had the final say. This master designer controls the ultimate outcome, for better or worse.

In more recent history, we see this same singularity of control and purpose in another iconic product, the iPod and now the Airbook. Both master and commander, Steve Jobs imprints his values and visions on each Apple product with fierce consistency and clarity.

Steve Jobs hates buttons, so the iPhone only has one. He also feels that you should never need to right-click, so all Apple applications have clearly-defined shortcut keys. He designs for integration and simplicity, so the iPod is not only pretty chunk of metal and plastic, but also the entire music-delivery chain including iTunes.

From an organizational standpoint, this is definitely Conway’s Law in action. One king designer equals one ethos alone.

Conway’s Law roughly states that the organizational structure of a group directly correlates to the structure of its output. Five teams that report to one leader will likely create five distinct parts that roughly work as a whole. How well each part interacts with the other parts correlates to how well each team communicates with the others.

And is this so surprising? If part A and B need to function together, teams A and B need to agree upon how that integration happens. Poor communication about the standards between the teams will lead to poor integration between the parts.

In Apple and Pininfarina’s case, one indivdual controls and specifies the output, so it all looks and feels similar.

Compare and contrast this to the design-by-committee world of companies like Pontiac who can’t produce a good-looking car to save their lives. Or the Microsoft Windows world that won-over the personal PC market by opening the platform and increasing accessibility to developers, yet now enforces digital driver signing so that one poorly written (and un-reviewed) device driver doesn’t take down the entire machine.

And perhaps this all relates back to the toy duck syndrome... if you’re managing to a stock price on a quarterly basis, or worrying about wall-street, you’ve bound yourself to lead by committee. By allowing your choices to be guided by the goals and thoughts of an anonymous and unrelenting mass, haven’t you tied your hands against any meaningful decision?

In any decision, there is always someone who will lose out. Leadership is understanding these dangers and making the best decision anyway, always driving to a clear vision of the future.

A few months back, I appended the phrase “pattern hound” to my blog title which was previously just “Rolf Skyberg”.

This morning, I wrote up a page about what a pattern hound is and why I am one. Because I wanted to keep this at the top of my blog, I created it as a “page” rather than a “post”.

So for those of you who only read my blog via RSS, here is the text in full:

We are driven as humans to understand. From our first waking moments, we look at this world with keen eyes and follow how the parts and pieces curve and interact, how this causes that, and in turn rolls towards us. We delight in waving our pudgy arms through the air knowing that, “hey, I’m doing that! now I get it!”

We are natural problem solvers and tool makers because it has been driven into our blood, our very genes. The big ‘ol brain on our shoulders is our advantage, and whoever can figure out this world first, wins. We are formed analyzers. Understanding gets you ahead.

As we experience this world, useful bits are passed on to us by other helpful humans, thing that help us cope. Language becomes our universal communicator to express our needs, wants and desires of the moment. Our mental models help us predict what will happen next.

Sometimes these models are taught to us (theft is wrong!), some we learn on our own (fire is HOT!), some we pay thousands of dollars for (SWOT is one method of looking at business). And usually, the models we base our thinking on are delivered by those most involved with the topic at hand. We learn business models from business people, because they should know, right?

But unfortunately, often these experts are too far into their world to deliver new solutions. It has often been said that you can’t solve a problem with the same thinking that created it.

And this is where Pattern Hounds come in.

Hounds are a special type of dog, bred to help its master while hunting. Some sniff out the quarry, some lock on with steady vision. Regardless of their methods, hounds lead their masters to “the good stuff” by seeking it out and pointing the way.

I am a pattern hound. I sniff out new ways of looking at the world and deliver it to those who seek it. Maybe your models are stale and leading to dead-ends, maybe your are just starting off and looking for fresh models to form your mind.

I pry out the curious, the patterns, the connections. I deliver them as analogies, parables and observations. Occasionally I stretch them into the future.

With each of these new frames on the world, I hope I bring you a new piece to fit into your understanding of your world.

I hope to help you get closer to the good stuff.

Here are five patterns I’ve hounded in the past two months:

• Avoiding Toy Duck Syndrome – the importance of long-term vision
• Delivering a Useful Luxury – if luxuries are really useful inventions, they eventually become cheap!
• Why Should I Care? – if you are being ignored, you are saying it the wrong way
• When Ugly Is Better – environment shapes attitude, make sure yours matches your capabilities
• Social Networking: Because We Miss Our Friends? – social creatures, seek people through any mean possible
• Zombie Grooming and Social Favors – our “online” activities prove we are still humans

We still have yet to understand what having a globally-available always-connected networked communication device in our pocket means. Our lives, relationships and business models will all morph over time as we explore how being universally connected profoundly affects our humanity.

The current “mobile” experience as it is delivered has some serious flaws. Alexander van Elsas points out there are some pretty obvious problems with our cell and smart-phones:

1. expensive data connection
2. slow data connection
3. data input difficult
4. screen is too small
5. complicated hardware
6. mobile phone isn’t (and shouldn’t be a computer)

And while all of these things are true, for me the future is still undoubtedly mobile.

Not because what we have today is so wonderful, but because mobile is the opposite of some arbitrary decision that our computing and communication devices must be stationary.

The ability to communicate with other humans across vast distances and time is indeed a useful luxury, something which will only become more refined with time.

Barking, grunting and wailing helped our ancestors survive in this world because they were useful. Over time, this luxury of communication became further refined into vowels, consonants and stops. Eventually we developed grammar, poetry, yodeling, and opera as even more nuanced forms of communication.

So for me, the question of “mobile” is not an “if?”, or even a “when?”, but more of a “how?“

This “sixth sense” of mobile, allowing us super-human abilities to communicate is certainly coming, now how do we make it cheap, fast and intuitive?

BTW:

cheap and fast will come with time as mobile providers fight over the opportunity to connect us by delivering this useful luxury, and the right user-interface and delivery will come as we begin to recognize our children intuitively understand that our mobile devices are extensions to our human desire to communicate.

Photo courtesy of Kessiye on flickr.

If you want to make a million (or a billion) dollars in this world, there’s one sure-fire way: deliver a useful luxury.

A useful luxury is a product or service which substantively improves the quality of life for the purchaser.

Examples of obvious useful luxuries would be:

• a personal butler
• TiVo
• a Toyota Prius
• a good cell phone plan
• indoor plumbing
• the polio vaccine

Indoor plumbing? The polio vaccine? You might think these are hardly luxuries, but necessities.

Yet, people lived just fine without them, for thousands of years. The last two are a little different, because we don’t see them as luxuries any more. Now, they are just part of our expected life.

Useful luxuries become multi-million dollar industries.

This transition from luxury into necessity happened because they are indeed profoundly useful. Seeing the universal demand for these “luxuries”, industry swung into action, lowering prices and increasing accessibility through technological, infrastructure and organizational innovations.

Using the lens of “luxury” is still a useful way of determining the future success of products. It foretells the success of Tivo, Netflix, Amazon, eBay, broadband internet, alternative fuel vehicles, supersonic travel, fusion power, and telepresence.

Each of the products, services, or innovations listed above are something that can be had “for a price”. Each is a luxury because it somehow “cheats” the existing way of doing things. Tivo obliterates the arbitrary restrictions on when you watch television; Netflix destroys the stupid “I need to go somewhere to have temporary entertainment” paradigm.

eBay provides a marketplace of buyers and sellers so rich and varied that it might be considered “cheating” to advertise and deliver to millions; supersonic travel knocks down the silly barrier of many hours between where you are, and where you’d like to be.

This “luxury lens” also puts close scrutiny on some topics like “social networking”. Is the value you get out of social networking in any way a luxury?

If you had unlimited resources (money), could you deliver a better and more profoundly useful experience than we’re seeing with FaceBook and MySpace?

If the answer is yes, then you should get on building it, because obviously somebody is not delivering on an opportunity.