1. Find a subject you care about
2. Do not ramble, though
3. Keep it simple
4. Have guts to cut
5. Sound like yourself
6. Say what you mean
7. Pity the readers

I’ve been working on improving my writing, both in blogging and in the office, I see the value of it. Kurt’s list helps a lot.

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What’s been interesting for me is that I am lucky enough to work with people who are much smarter than me in many subjects – development, user experience, and more. I have a working knowledge on those topics, but am by no means an expert.

However, a funny thing has happened lately. I’ve found myself having to balance being a dictator and shutting everyone down to make a decision and just letting a discussion digress too far. I want to maintain a great relationship with the “creators,” since most of them are my friends. I want them to enjoy working with me as much as I do with them.

But what does that look like?

After wasting away 30 minutes on a 1 hour call on a minor UI tweak that wasn’t even crucial, I decided to ask one of my developer friends, Mark McSpadden how one should lead “creators” without insulting their craft. He gave me some of the best advice for anyone who has to work with people smarter than themselves:

It’s your job to define the goal, then turn to the people around you to give input on the best way to achieve that.

That’s it! It finally clicked for me!

That’s the culmination of everything that I’ve read for years now on leadership – how it’s a generalist leader’s job to surround themselves with the the smartest possible talent and tie them together to create greatness.

I have a plan to reduce the budget deficit.  The essence of the plan is the federal government writing me a check for $1 billion.  The plan will be financed by $3 billion of tax increases.  According to my back-of-the envelope calculations, giving me that $1 billion will reduce the budget deficit by $2 billion.

Now, you may be tempted to say that giving me that $1 billion will not really reduce the budget deficit.  Rather, you might say, it is the tax increases, which have nothing to do with my handout, that are reducing the budget deficit.  But if you are tempted by that kind of sloppy thinking, you have not been following the debate over healthcare reform.

Healthcare reform, its advocates tell is, is fiscal reform.  The healthcare reform bill passed last year increased government spending to cover the uninsured, but it also reduced the budget deficit by increasing various taxes as well.  Because of this bill, the advocates say, the federal government is on a sounder fiscal footing.  Repealing it, they say, would make the budget deficit worse.

I never dove into it, but I always wondered how increasing government spending would amount to a savings.

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I always hire for unity first.

Because there is something much more vital than productivity to the success of a work environment: unity. Will this person fit in, get along, and bring the unity of the team up a notch? It’s not until that question is answered that I then look for teachability and, lastly, talent. (But that’s a different blog post.)

Our culture is borderline obsessed with the focus on productivity and getting things done. And while I am certainly an advocate for those, at my office, and on my team, unity is far more valuable than productivity. Where there’s unity there’s people who love their job. And a lover will always out-work a worker.

Unity encourages discovery, too. Unity means I’ve got your back and you’ve got mine. When you feel safe around your team then you’ll go ahead and try out that crazy, out-of-the-box idea of yours. If you were afraid of your peers criticizing you, then you’d probably stick to what is safe and boring. Unity and trust amongst your team means you’re safe to fail. Which means there’s a far greater chance of something truly amazing happening.

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When someone regularly says “I don’t know”, you trust them more when they say they DO know.

The key though, is this:

He didn’t blow the questions off. He then discussed possibilities.

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1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I didn’t work so hard.
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

An excellent list that I need to remind myself about more often. It’s easy to fall into any of these traps. (via Justin Blanton)

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Teachers reported the printing of bank notes from millions to billions and then trillions skewed their pupils’ sense of numeracy, making them fail to grasp the realities of numbers.

On one geography field trip, students scoffed at being told granite rocks swept over Zimbabwe by ancient glaciers were 700 million years old. That time frame seemed insignificant.

Back then in 2008, 700 million Zimbabwe dollars bought a loaf of bread.

via Greg Mankiw

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If the point is getting your voice out there, being heard, being recognized, and creating a brand for yourself, you want to make it personal. You want to make it yours. So don’t hide behind a squiggle, swoosh, or a picture of your dog. You can be more real than that.

He’s right. I learned this one the first time I met someone at my company who said he recognized me from my Twitter avatar – it was a bit of a shock, but it was also the realization of the importance of a strong online personal brand.

If you’re out there building your platform, you want people to recognize you.

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Just a bit of background for those of you who may not follow the app – it is a task list application which launched a few years ago to rave reviews. It has an outstanding interface, and the iPhone app is wonderful. However, since it’s launch it has lacked an important feature, over the air sync. It’s not a cheap app either, with the desktop version running about $30 and the iPhone version about $10.

The developers, Cultured Code had been releasing relatively minor updates for a long time, bug fixes and minor new features, while everyone expected OTA Sync to come out.

Instead, they’re running these blog posts, alternatively titled “Excuses, Excuses, Excuses” – Part 1 and Part 2. In this latest post, he goes through a laundry list of every possible sync solution and why it didn’t work:

• Bonjour – already implemented, requires a Wifi connection
• MobileMe – not available on iOs
• Dropbox – “not complex enough” (I call them out on this – I have multiple apps that use Dropbox as a sync mechanism. The most obvious one 1Password has multiple updates every day)
• An entire custom database in the cloud – too complicated

They end their post by saying:

However, the complexities were huge; technical problems – such as the integration of JavaScript and Cocoa on iOS – piled up, due dates passed. We slowly began to realize that we wanted too much at once.

and…

Some people said we shouldn’t have pursued cloud sync with this level of ambition. But then, that wouldn’t be us. It is not how we developed Things. We know that people are coming to Cultured Code because we take this approach. They like companies that care, companies that try – and that is what we will keep doing.

It is unbelievable to think that a group of outstanding developers can’t build this. Sean Sperte put it wonderfully:

Here’s my advice for Cultured Code: you’re over-thinking it. It’s not that hard.

This is a lesson to anyone: if something is so incredibly hard that you have spent years of hard work on it and don’t have any results, you’re over-thinking it. Very few problems really are that complicated. Sometimes you have to take a step back and start from the basics.

Seth Godin on how to more effectively use your ad budget:

The problem is this: ads like this actually decrease user satisfaction. If the ad leads to expect one thing and we don’t get it, we’re more disappointed than if we had gone in with no real expectations at all. Why this matters: if word of mouth is the real advertising, then what you’ve done is use old-school ad techniques to actually undercut any chance you have to generate new-school results.

So much better to invest that same money in delighting and embracing the customers you already have.

At many companies, I wonder what would happen if they shifted so much of their ad spend into building new or better products. Advertising can only get you so far.

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