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The Screw-Me Scenario

It had all the signs of a good meeting. And I hate meetings. We were:

• Talking about a product we loved
• In great shape from a feature, quality, and schedule standpoint
• A group that historically did not kick ass
• A group that was kicking ass.

The slides looked great and the dry-run was flawless, so why hadn’t I slept in two nights?

I couldn’t sleep because I couldn’t see the Screw-Me.

You Might Be Lying

There’s an article to be written about the different kinds of meetings you’re going to be exposed to, but for now I want to talk about the executive cross-pollination communication clusterfuck. The point of this meeting is alignment. Big alignment. You’ve likely got several different groups who don’t normally spend a lot of time together being forced to sit in the same room so the execs can compare stories, measure reality, and figure out who is lying.

Before I explain how to get your head around this meeting, I want to talk about intent. Intent starts with a question: “Why does this meeting exist?” If you’re responsible for the presentation in this meeting, it exists because someone hates you.

It’s not personal hate. It’s professional hate and it’s exacerbated by a simple fact of organization: different groups speak different languages. Marketing speaks marketing, Legal speaks legal, and Engineering speaks engineering. There’s a fundamental communication breakdown somewhere in the building and someone is feeling wronged. They’re feeling bullied and since they don’t speak your dialect, they’re complaining up rather than across.

Normally, we deal with these Tower of Babel situations with the direct application of middle management, program managers, and other folks we pay big bucks to sit in meetings and translate between organizations. However, translation has not worked in this case. Someone high up on the org chart is hearing two very different stories and wondering which is true. Story reconciliation is certainly on the top of your list of items to resolve in this meeting, but job #1 is to figure out who hates you.

A Rubber Stamp Affair

For these critical meetings, your goal is to make them a rubber stamp affair. In the week before the meeting, you will have personally vetted your slides with each of the meeting invitees. You will have heard their concerns and made the appropriate adjustments to your deck. When the cross-pollination meeting arrives, your goal is an utter lack of drama and the finishing pronouncement of, “Yeah, we should do that and you know how.”

It never happens like this.

We’re “busy” and we have “things to do”, but mostly we’re “looking forward to blindsiding you with a Screw-Me at the least convenient moment in front of your executive team.”

It’s a disappointing trait of human nature that folks who feel wronged like to exact their revenge by flaunting their knowledge and dishing out the Screw-Me at the worst possible time, but, roll with it, you’re already a step ahead just expecting to be screwed. Besides, your enemy is working more with emotion than content and that will turn into their own personal Screw-Me Scenario at a later date.

Right now, your job is data.

No Guilt, No Doubts, No Fear

Ideas get better with eyeballs and before this meeting goes down, your job is to get as many eyeballs on your presentation as possible. You’re not going to get everyone in the meeting, but that’s not the point. The task is cross-pollination. Casting the information net as wide as possible and incessantly asking:

• Does this make sense?
• What is missing?
• How am I going to get screwed?

I’ve got the Russian Lit Major for vetting my strategy; who do you have? I’m not talking about your boss or your co-worker, I’m talking about the person who can objectively look at your presentation and start poking holes. These people are rare because it’s another disappointing trait of human nature that we often think we’re doing each other a favor by listening well, but then tell each other what we want to hear.

You lose yourself in any significant project. You’ve long forgotten your strategic initial assumptions, but, more importantly, you’ve forgotten what other people need because you’re furiously worrying about the daily tactical fire drills. A fresh perspective is a chance to test your entire idea and find the Screw-Me. You need someone to poke holes. You need to find and fill the gaps, and as each gap is filled, you’re going to build confidence around your pitch because, well, that’s one less potential Screw-Me entry point.

You’re not going to find them all. That’s ok, because in the process of constantly refining your pitch, you’re mentally refining yourself. You’re preparing yourself by seeing each of the different perspectives in your deck,. That improves the chances that you’ll know what to do when someone starts dishing out the hate.

Game On

The meeting’s on. You’re walking in with a head full of data and my hope is that through your constant cross-pollination you are legitimately the most informed person on this particular topic in the room. There’s still work to do.

Size the room. Who is here? What groups do they represent? What do they want? Any unexpected visitors? Really? Why would they randomly show up? Who brought them? What possible Screw-Mes could they represent? Ok, let’s get started.

Carry the room. Start your deck. You’ve got it memorized, right? They can tell this is the 32nd time you’ve done it, right? Good. It’s smooth. You’ve already diffused two Screw-Mes by slide 12. Really well done there. Amanda, you have a question?

Manage the room. Questions aren’t Screw-mes. You can clarify and stay on track. You know that Amanda is going to ask about hard data, right? Don’t let her take over the conversation. Say, “I’ve got your data in the appendix, but let me get through this first, ok?” Yeah, you just shut down a Senior VP. Nicely done. No way you can do that without serious confidence in your preparation. Yes, Tim?

Tim’s got the Screw-Me and you didn’t see it coming. Total left field. Completely valid strategic observation and you don’t have a clue how to answer. Shit.

You will recognize the Screw-Me by the complete silence that fills both the room and your head. That’s the realization everyone is having that you’re Screwed. First, let’s not make it worse…

The Unforgivable Spin

Tim: “Rands, what about THIS?”

I’m a poker player and an experienced meeting surfer, so the room will not immediately know from the look on my face that This has Screwed me, but what I choose to do next will define my ongoing relationship with the room.

There are two options when you are cornered by This. Your animal brain, when cornered, will try to find a way out. You can taste this approach even before you begin. I am going to spin. I am going to talk quickly and confidently about This and I am going to hope that in my furious verbal scurrying they are going to believe I’ve got This handled.

That’s not what they’re seeing or hearing.

This is not your staff meeting where a little verbal soft shoe is going to entertain and delight. These are the execs and no matter how many meetings you’ve surfed, they see straight through spin, they know this dance, and the longer you sit there spinning, the longer you give your boss an opportunity to step in, try to make the diving save, and make you look like a blithering fool.

It takes a little practice to make the correct move when you feel the spin coming. You are going to do three things:

1. Acknowledge the Screw-Me.
2. Admit “I don’t know.”
3. Concretely explain the steps you’re going to take to find out and give yourself a deadline.

You have completely defused Tim. See, Tim was pissed which is why he waited until precisely the wrong moment to throw down the Screw-Me. He wanted to see you spin and make a fool of yourself in front of your management team and what you did with the instant acknowledgement was crush emotion with structured sanity.

You can get lucky with spin sometimes. There are times when you spin so hard that you actually talk yourself into a Screw-Me solution that actually makes sense. But this is rare and unreliable and in my experience this frenetic verbal journey erodes confidence and wastes time.

The only question on everyone’s mind during the cross-pollination clusterfuck is, “Do you know what you’re talking about?” It’s lame that Tim doesn’t speak engineer and waited until precisely the wrong moment to Screw you, but my hope is that through your incessant vetting of your slides that you can deliver the “I don’t know” with confidence. Tim just knows what he’s pissed about and you, through your preparation, can see the entire picture.

A Screw-Me Detection Policy

An aggressive Screw-Me detection policy is, I believe, essential to navigating groups of people. It’s not just constantly knowing the potential worst case scenario in any situation, it’s that you are instinctively always looking for it. When I am looking at any situation, I’m always trying to figure out what sequence of events could occur that will screw me.

This strategy sounds a lot like paranoia and yes, an unchecked Screw-Me detection policy can result in a conspiracy theory lifestyle where THEY are out to GET YOU.

Yes, only the paranoid survive, but paranoia is a lot of work. You can burn a lot of calories worrying about all possibilities, but this is not an approach I recommend. What I’m asking is that you look at specific key events strategically. Step back and look at the whole board. Ask “What sequence of moves is going to benefit me? Can I see what is coming? And how could I get screwed?” because teams which kick ass aren’t just ones that deliver, it’s that they deliver when they’re screwed.

An Aspirational Twitter

Big couple of weeks for Twitter. Biz was on Colbert. Ashton got a million followers and bought a bunch of mosquito nets. Oprah showed up sans shift key. Twitter seems to be on the front page of everything but, curiously, has done nothing functionally interesting. They’re just sitting there keeping the lights on.

Not everyone is just sitting there. Some are wondering, “What’s next?”

Birdhouse (Adam Lisagor and Cameron Hunt)

The best explanation (and compliment) I can give Birdhouse is that it’s just like Twitter — the more I attempt to explain what it is, the less you’ll understand. You’re not really going to get it until you use it, but here goes…

Before I begin, a quick reminder. My opinion regarding tweets can be summarized thusly: “I don’t give a fuck what you had for lunch unless you give me reason.” This colorful opinion has already been well documented in The Art of the Tweet.

Described by its creators as “A Notepad for Twitter”, Birdhouse is precisely the application you should be using if you want to bring some art to your tweets.

Let’s say that art is one part consideration and one part timing. Birdhouse supports both parts by providing a temporary safe haven for your partially formed thoughts.

I’ve got an approximate tweet rate of six tweets per day. That’s my thing. The rate at which I discover tweets varies as a function of time and caffeination, but almost always exceeds the publishing rate, which means I’ve often got a tweet pile-up somewhere. Birdhouse is a perfect place to park a thought or link.

While Birdhouse has a clean, usable interface, it’s the act of parking an idea that’s where the innovation lies. Birdhouse separates the act of creation from the act of publication. It replaces the unnecessary rush between “I just thought of this” and “I need to publish this” with calm consideration. This replacement, in my opinion, is essential to developing tweet content of value.

Try it. I know your quip tastes mentally delicious when it shows up, but is now the precise time to share it? Maybe it needs the larger Monday morning audience? Maybe you’ve already unleashed enough of the funny for that day? Your Twitter-schtick is your deal, but my belief is an idea gets better both by letting it ferment as well choosing the right time to open it.

Tweetie (Atebits)

When I first heard of Tweetie for iPhone, I sighed. The problem with explaining Twitter to the uninitiated is, well, you have to say Twitter. A lot. Then you end up saying “tweet” or “twittersphere” or “twoot” and then you flash back to the embarrassing conversation with your Mom when you tried to explain what a blog was.

“No no no Mom… it’s an important thing.”

“What is?”

Sigh. “A blog.”

Tweetie takes dorky, uncomfortable names to the next level. And it does so with stunning visuals and clean interaction design that will change how you use Twitter on your desktop. I mean it.

My measure for compelling visual design is, after installation, whether or not, in the first five minutes, I fire up xScope to see the pixel-by-pixel construction of a particular piece of UI. Exactly 12 seconds after I fired up Tweetie, I was applying the microscope to the breadcrumb bar in Tweetie because I wanted to know “How’d he build that?”

Build products that speak for themselves. It’s simple. The teaser video for Tweetie had no feature lists, it had no spin; it was a simple, kickin’ video with nouns and verbs where using the product was the best pitch. Take a look at the application window below and tell me how many words you can find that describe the functionality. I count one. How many do you count here?

The rest of the real estate is an elegant distillation of the four most important Twitter features:

• Updates — who said what?
• Mention — did they say it about me? to me?
• Direct Messages — only me?
• Search — if they’re not talking about me, what they hell are they talking about?

Twitter has been tidying up the layout of the site to focus on these features, but I don’t want to visit the website — that’s why I installed a rich client. After two weeks of regular usage, Tweetie has eliminated my daily visits to the website by providing simple access to all of the features I need and it does so by borrowing from the future.

Tweetie is a desktop version of an application of the same name for the iPhone which, in my limited experience, is the first time an application has migrated from the phone to the desktop. As a friend mentioned, “Platform merge in progress!” and he’s right.

The navigation in the desktop version of Tweetie feels… like the iPhone. Jumping from Updates to Mentions (via the essential and deliciously obvious keyboard shortcuts) feels like a flick of your index finger. Drilling down on an avatar accesses the user information with a clean horizontal scroll, again, inspired by iPhone navigation.

It’s delightful to navigate Tweetie. The application seamlessly integrates Twitter users, their information, and their conversations into a mesh of information that feels like more than the sum of their parts. And I believe Tweetie, like Twitter, is just getting started. Quick, look at the Tweetie interface and tell me exactly where a future Groups feature lands.

When I use Tweetie, I’m reminded that a maniacal attention to detail not only makes you want to reach out and touch the digitally untouchable, it describes the familiar as the new, and, most importantly, it speaks of an aspirational future.

Keynote Kung-fu Two

You’ve taken some hits. Being taken apart by the execs because they could smell you weren’t prepared. The slide deck you loved that the audience ignored. That guy… snoring. In the front row.

However, you’ve also hit it out of the park. The unexpected standing ovation. That seven-slide deck that turned into an hour of ad-libbed brilliance. The moment you know you’ve deeply connected with your audience.

Admit it, you’ve got some presentation-fu.

The original Keynote Kung-fu article describes how to set up and use Keynote for the first time, but once you’ve done a couple of presentations, you’re going to want more. How To Not Throw Up and Out Loud walk you through the basics of constructing and practicing your presentation, but there’s more to say about Keynote because, as with any well-designed tool, the more you use it, the better you get and the more layers of awesomeness you will find.

Pre-Game

Advanced Keynote Kung-fu starts in pre-game. Before you’ve written a single slide, you need to pick a theme. This process has been simplified in the latest Keynote with the new, ginormous theme picker chock full of interesting templates, but I almost always start with standard black.

I don’t want to worry about anything except the ideas and basic flow. Black is pleasantly generic. The rule is: if you’re starting a presentation by endlessly fussing with your presentation design, you probably don’t have anything to say.

With theme in hand, I follow all of the workspace setup advice I gave in the prior article, including the addition that turns on Master Slides via View | Master Slides. This puts the different types of base slides available in the black template at the top of the slide navigator. Rather than building a custom layout for each new slide, I stick to using this default layout as much as possible for early drafts. There’s a great reason why which I’ll explain shortly.

And then I create slides. Lots of them. More than I’ll ever need. It’s a slide explosion.

I’m an outlining zealot, so I’m going to repeat another piece of advice from the original Fu article. In Keynote’s slide navigator, hitting tab will indent the current slide and create a collapsible group under the prior slide. This simple, convenient feature breaks the linearity of my endless list of slides and is the first indication that I’m headed down an organized path to a well-constructed presentation.

A prior version of Keynote introduced a Light Table view to allow you see just thumbnails of your slides, but this view confuses me. In my head, my deck is linear, with a beginning, middle, and end. While looking at your complete deck is visually stimulating, the wrapping of slides destroys the shape of my deck that I have I my head. The Light Table view is useful only after my deck is done when I’m looking to poach bright ideas for other decks. See?

Organize and Design

The point when organization rather than creation becomes the primary activity is when I start to worry about design and layout. This presentation is far from done, but a design exercise is a great mental break from working on the message. If you haven’t already, take a look at the original Keynote article regarding preparing your workspace. In addition to the preferences tweaks and enabling the color and font inspectors, I enable the following:

• Rulers: you’re going to start worrying about spacing at some point.
• Presenter Notes: as you go through this first part of organization, you won’t be able to ignore the content, and rather than getting stuck endlessly rewriting your deck, use the presenter notes to capture your random inspiration so that you can focus on the organizational task at hand.
• Multiple inspectors: Keynote added an additional mini-toolbar, which includes many of the common inspector options, and I use it a ton, but I still need the inspector window. Actually, I need a couple. Option-Clicking on any of the inspector tabs creates additional windows and I usually have the Slide, Build, and Graphic inspectors open.

With your workspace prepared, let’s begin the deck design transformation. If you’ve stuck with the basic black or any of the base slides for any template, you’re about to discover that you’ve already saved yourself a tremendous amount of time.

Which Master slide did you use the most? I tend to riff on Title & Bullets quite a bit, but the Gill Sans has just gotta go. I also despise the spacing on the bullets, so how do I go back and change the 19 slides that use Title & Bullets? Just change the Master. Typography, artwork, animations, transitions — it can be all be changed at the Master Slide level.

If you ignored my Master Slide advice, you can slap the palm of your hand firmly against your forehead. Like CSS, Keynote slides inherit styles from the Master Slides, and while this is hardly revolutionary, it’s a presentation development must-do to avoid repetitive design tasks. By working with a base set of slides, you give yourself the flexibility to change your mind as much as you want.

Even better, once you’ve developed your personal base set of slides, you can save those slides as a Theme which then shows as up as one of the options in the Theme chooser.

Designing for Failure

At the end of this process, the slides should have a shape and a cadence. Go glance through all your slides. How does it sound in your head? Is it tap tap tap or taptaptappitylet’smovetap? What should it sound like? I don’t know; it’s your deck.

In order to effectively present you need to have a love affair with your clicks. You need to know them intimately not only so you can cleanly step through the slides, but for when something goes wrong. And something will go wrong.

Try walking through your deck backwards and forwards. In your practicing, you’re going to know the regular flow of your deck, but what about when you screw up? I love that multi-stage build-out you’ve got on slide 12 — it’s 32 seconds of transition goodness — but what happens when you accidentally hit Back after it’s done? That’s another painful 32 seconds that you’re going to need to improvise.

Your presentation is not a movie. Each presentation, while structured, is you standing up there waiting for disaster to strike, and when it does, where I want your head at is: “Disaster… failure… is only going to make this presentation better.”

Practicing for the unpredictable, improvising, is covered in How to Not Throw Up, but Keynote also provides a variety of disaster recovery tools.

URL Jump. Available via the inspectors, this feature allows you link any object on a slide to jump forwards, backwards, or to any other slide. My move is to hide these jumps in the navigation of the deck for unexpected moment when I need them.

Presentation Mode. Once you’ve fired up presentation mode, you have a slew of features to help you navigate disaster. All of these features are available by hitting the ? in this mode and here are are few of my favorites:

• Slide Switcher Overlay. You’ve probably already triggered this without knowing because clicking on a number will fire up this handy feature. Just type any number and the overlay will appear.
• Jump to Slide. When you accidentally back up over an animation-rich slide, you can simply jump over the slide rather than stepping through each build using the bracket keys.
• White Out / Black Out. There are moments when you want them to pay attention to you. Keynote provides two features which achieve this effect: white-out (via W) and black-out (via B) do exactly what they describe. Blank the screen with your favorite color so that the spotlight moves completely to you.
• Swap Displays. In presentation mode, X toggles the display and presenter screens while in presentation mode. Handy for those tense first few seconds where it’s not clear which display is showing up where.

Even with adept usage of these tools you’re going to screw-up. I like when a presenter stumbles. I like to see how they react to the unpredictable because non-catastrophic failure humanizes a presentation. I’m there to hear what you think, but when you stumble over that slide and attempt to recover, I get a glimpse of how you think.

A Slice of You

In the past year, I’ve seen two amazing presentations where there was a total absence of slides. One was, essentially, an author reading his essay. Another was two of my favorite people talking about finding your obsession and following it. Both parties, I’m sure, spent a tremendous amount of time constructing their talks, and the results of that work were a scathing critique of Web 2.0 and an intelligent, clever romp into why you should simply focus on building things you love.

You don’t need slides to say something big.

I’m not there yet. Yes, over the past few years I’m finding fewer and fewer actual words on my deck, and I can see a day where I can riff on a single slide for an hour, but I’m not there yet. Not sure if I want to be.

It’s you up there on stage. They paid to see you. If they simply wanted to know what you think, they could have read your weblog or bought your book, but they paid to see you. A presentation is not just the careful construction of your thoughts; it’s a means by which your audience has access to you — pacing, waving your arms, and cleverly recovering from that disaster on slide #32.

Mastery of Keynote can give your deck significant fu, but the slides are a prop. You’re the presentation.

The Pond

“Can I work remote?”

I cringe. It’s Ian and Ian is a senior engineer. He’s a rock. He gets it done. I never have to ask him twice and, after six years, Ian has every right to ask to work remote. But I’m still freaked because my first thought when anyone asks to work remote is, “This fine person is a year away from either quitting or being fired.” Why? Because they’re asking to leave the Pond.

The Pond

When I think of communication in a large group of people, I imagine a pond. Small, round, slightly green water. You can see the edges of this pond and there’s a willow tree over there looking both informed and sad. Metaphorically, all the people in the organization are standing somewhere on this pond. Our positions are based on whom we know and where we are in the organization chart. When something happens in the company, when something noteworthy is said, a drop falls in the pond and creates a ripple.

The ripple is the piece of information traveling from one person to the others. Big drop, big ripple… travels further.

With me so far?

There is a constant flow of information in your company. That means there are constant drips in the Pond, creating various-sized ripples traveling every which way, bumping into each other, and transforming each other into slightly mutated ripples. These mutated ripples are the rumor mill, gossip, and all those small pieces of slightly bizarre information that cross your path during the course of the day.

If you’re in the Pond, you’re gathering data, whether it’s intended for you or not. It’s inevitable. It’s what we do as curious humans; we receive information, digest it, alter it, and then send it on its way tweaked to our own personal wavelengths.

A remote employee is not in the Pond. Yes, he’s on the mailing lists and he aggressively updates the wiki, but the subtle, unintentional, tweaked, quiet information that is transferred throughout the Pond doesn’t leave the Pond. There are those whose jobs it is to look at the Pond and attempt to relay the interesting ripples, but while these program and project managers are well intentioned, they relay poorly because they’re just single observers of ripples. Real information is never conveyed by the individual; we understand by listening as a group.

The group forms a collective picture of the state of the Pond – it’s a distributed picture understood by everyone, but never completely known by one. It is the unspoken royal “we” and this intricate, immeasurable thing is absolutely essential to how a group gets things done well.

Do you mean it?

Remote has to work. It’s not just Ian. There are bright people in your building right now who are going to want to return home to Colorado, and you’re going to let them because losing them is not an option. Also, there’s a planet full of talented people who will always be at a distance, but who represent huge, untapped productivity for your team. Your challenge is how to augment the remote employee’s absence from the Pond.

This article is about how to decrease the risk that you will have to fire your favorite employee who decides to become remote. I’d like to give advice from the other side, on how to work remotely, but I’ve never done it. I don’t have the personality. My professional satisfaction comes from being able to look those I depend on in the eye and ask, “Do you mean it?” There is essential content to be discovered in that stare that will never be fully conveyed in an email, IM, or tweet.

My belief is that without deliberate attention, the remote employee slowly becomes irrelevant to the organization. Through no fault of their own, they can be gradually pushed to the edge of what’s important. And when you’re at the edge, you’re an organizational shudder from falling over it. Failure happens at the edges.

Avoiding failure involves asking four questions before they leave:

1. Do they have the personality?
2. Do they have the right job?
3. Does the culture support it?
4. Do you have a remote friction detection and resolution policy?

The Personality

Whether the employee has the right personality to be a productive remote worker is a tricky call because most of your data about this person is based on working with them. What’s going to happen when you can’t see them? How are they going to react when you forget to include them in the staff call? How are they going to feel when the product launches and they aren’t there to celebrate?

This is what I consider.

Are they eloquent in email? Every bit of communication is more expensive with remote folks, so they’d better be good at it – no matter the medium. Can this person construct and convey a complex argument in a single email? Can this person make an important point… via iChat? Written communication is bereft of much of the intangible value of the Pond. It lacks the nuance of face-to-face communication, which means the author needs to be painfully explicit about the details. Can this person do that?

Are they self-directed? How do they deal with ambiguity? If you’ve given them crap direction, do they bump around for a bit before admitting defeat, or do they immediately ask for clarification? Many of the subtle ways you check in and error correct co-workers leave when they leave. If they’re in the weeds, are they going to ask for help? How long until they ask for help?

How detail-oriented are they? If self-direction indicates how they start a thing, their detail orientation is how well they finish. Is this a person who needs help across the finish line? Do they get lost in nonessential details? When you ask for a thing, are you getting the end result you expect?

How well do they know the Pond? We’ll talk about their job in a moment, but whatever that job is, it will have dependencies on people they are leaving behind. Does this person know how the organization communicates? Do they know both the organizational structure as well as the social structure? Are they asking you who to follow up with or are you asking them? Are they instinctively aware of whom they might piss off and proactively account for this in the first mail rather than after the flame-o-gram?

Do they need the Pond? Knowledge of the Pond is great, but does this person thrive because of the Pond? How much of their day are they spending talking with co-workers? Is this conversation essential to what they do or purely social? Which part of them are you going to socially amputate when they’re no longer in the building?

Are they reliable? I imply at the beginning of this article that it’s a senior employee who has a better chance at being successful remotely, but that’s not true. The ability to work remotely is not entirely a function of seniority; it’s also genetic. There are those who do it better solo. Their standard operating procedure is to simply get it done. Seniority can improve personal efficiency and the quality of the finished product, but I’ve discovered innate reliability at all levels of experience. There are people who simply do what they say they’re going to do.

The Right Job

Typical corporate logic dictates that a remote employee should work on a project that is separable from the rest of the team’s. The reasoning here is flawed. The belief is that the inconvenience of communication and decision-making latency around their distance means they should be separated and placed on non-dependent work.

Every part of that reasoning is wrong. Every part is another reason that remote fails.

My most successful remote employee was a perfect anomaly. He wrote standards — protocols. The heart of his job was to define a structured means of communication where the primary goal was the removal of ambiguity. He was a phenomenal communicator. He went out of his way to completely and promptly answer every email. 24 hours a day. When he visited, he took the time to do a complete circumnavigation of the Pond, vetting all the ripples he could find. He instinctively knew that the skill in defining a protocol is creating a structure that is going to meet the needs of right now, but also the unimagined needs of five years from now. And he applied that not only to what he wrote, but also to how he worked. He was a wonderful anomaly and he taught me that a remote job must be perceived, in all ways, as equal to a local one.

There should be absolutely no consideration of a person’s location on the planet Earth when considering the work you need of them. Each time the concern “Well, they’re remote” comes up, you need to turn the concern around and ask, “What about my company, my people, or the work makes remote an issue?” because that is what needs to be considered locally.

The Culture

How are those back in the Pond viewing the remote employee? The means by which Pond-based employees discriminate varies from the discreet to the direct, from the passive to the aggressive. The reason for this discrimination always boils down a single, fundamental tension: remote creates productivity friction.

The friction sounds something like this:

• “I don’t know what the hell this remote person is doing, so I’m going to assume he’s stumbling around the house in his underwear.”
• “This remote person is messing with my deadline or deliverable.”
• “He doesn’t answer his email.”

How long does it take to build a thing of quality? There’s a cost and the question is how is the remote worker affects this cost. Anything higher than the cost of a local employee creates friction. What was a 27-second walk down the hallway to yell at Bob about his crap code is a now 30-minutes constructing an email. Staff meetings start with a wasted 10 minutes trying to get the videoconferencing to connect. Every single communication with a remote worker costs more and generates more ripples in the Pond, and both their job and yours is to either make this cost go away or justify it.

Respect comes from knowledge and the question is: does your culture support a constant and consistent flow of knowledge to and from the remote worker?

Let’s find out:

• Have you created or implemented specific communication media for the team? Wikis? IRC? Are they used? Do different teams need different media? Are there too many and, if so, how are you going to anoint the one true medium?
• Other than the job, how are you encouraging other random interactions between local and remote folks?
• How often are you seeing these remote folks face-to-face? My vote is at least monthly.

Friction Detection

Remote friction is going to crop up. Just like interpersonal tensions randomly appear in the building, so does friction around remote employees. What are you doing not only to detect these, but also fix them? An example.

I hate meetings, but the brilliant thing about a meeting is that it’s full of people, and in a room full of people you never quite know what the hell is going to happen. The knee jerk reaction to bridging this meeting gap when there are remote workers is always, “We need good video conferencing software.”

After 10 years of hearing this argument, I’m calling fail. Video conferencing works when you need to talk to your kids during that trip to Chicago. It fills that visual gap, but all of the video conferencing solutions I’ve been a part of relative to a meeting create friction rather than remove it.

Yes, I can see Anne on the screen, but she’s flat. She’s also got this 1/10th of a second lag on the conversation, which doesn’t sound like a lot until you’re in the middle of that strategic rant about design and Anne chimes in, mid-sentence, with a bright thought that completely disturbs the creative cadence of your rant. That 1/10th of a second. Her inability to inject her essential thought at precisely the right moment. These micro-disturbances of the Force are a constant reminder that Anne’s not there. She’s being projected on the conference room wall like a well-intentioned screen saver. This isn’t just hurting the tempo of the meeting, it’s eroding her credibility.

In this case, surprisingly, less technology, rather than more, is better. Skype’s proximity to my computer and the usual lack of lag is far superior to video conferencing for 1:1s, and spending a little money on a quality Polycom is a fine solution for the staff meeting, but technology is a tool and never the answer.

Friction detection is paying attention to all the ways a remote employee interacts with the group and constantly asking, “Is this working?”

Another Pond

You, as the manager of people, are responsible for making the remote call regarding a person, putting them in the right job, and making sure the culture supports remote people. But the responsibility of delivering while remote is squarely on the remote employee. Yes, a remote employee answers to himself. At four in the afternoon when they run into an impossible problem, it’s almost entirely up to them to develop their plan of attack.

Working remotely isn’t a privilege; it’s work. And it’s the same work we’re all doing back at the mothership… fully clothed… in the Pond.

The Makers of Things

In the late 1800s, the Brooklyn Bridge was built with no power tools, no heavy machinery, and only a basic, evolving understanding of how to make steel. It’s not these facts, but the stories surrounding the facts that inspire me when I take a good, long stare at a suspension bridge. But first…

Stunning.

In a good bridge, I see the defiant end result of how some of my favorite engineering stories begin:

• “I’m sure you can arrange an impressive line of people who say it’s impossible. I take personal joy in ignoring those who say no.”
• “Yes, halfway through this project we’ll discover the impossible, but we know how to build through the impossible. Impossible is when we do our best work.”
• “Trust me when I say that I can close my eyes and see the end result, and when you can see it, too, you will be amazed.”

Ignore the No. When Brooklyn and New York’s population was booming at the end of the 19th century, the best way to get to and from Brooklyn was via ferries. As solutions were considered, I’m sure there were those who simply thought, “More boats!” These ardent defenders of the status quo were not engineers — they were the business. Their goal was not to build something great, but to make a profit.

It was an engineer named John Roebling who proposed a suspension bridge. We take bridges for granted now, but back in the 1800s, bridges were in beta. They fell. One out of every four bridges… fell. He convinced them by designing a bridge half again as big as any before it that was six times stronger than he estimated it need to be. Roebling designed the complete specification for the bridge in a mere three months and then died of tetanus from an injury he received surveying the bridge site.

Discover the impossible. Both of the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge are in the water of the East River. Ever wonder how you dig a big hole in the bottom of a river bed? In the late 1800s? It’s called a caisson, which is a huge, watertight wooden box half the size of a city block. This monstrosity was constructed on the river, sealed with pine tar, and carefully floated to a specific location on the river. It was then slowly sunk to the riverbed by placing stone on top that would eventually become the foundation.

Done, right?

Wrong. With the caisson on the riverbed, it’s time to push it another 45 feet into the riverbed in search of bedrock. Workers did this through the continued application of stone to the top while workers in the caisson dug out the riverbed with shovels, buckets, and, when necessary, dynamite. There was nothing resembling an electrical grid, so there was nothing resembling modern lighting in this watertight pine-tarred box, which was slowly descending through the floor of the East River. There were no jack hammers, so when they hit rock, they used small amounts of dynamite to crack these rocks. In a pine-tarred box, at the bottom of a river, mostly in a very wet dark.

And when the caisson finally hit bedrock 45 feet underground, they had to do it all over again for the New York tower. 30 feet deeper.

You will be amazed. With his father killed via an accident early in the surveying process, it was Washington Roebling, John’s son, who was chief engineer. He did the balance of this work bedridden in Brooklyn Heights, suffering from caisson disease, which he acquired working in the caisson as it descended into the New York-side of the East River. It’s not technically a disease; it’s decompression sickness or the bends, and it forced him to monitor all of the work from a window in his bedroom. He relayed detailed instructions via his wife, Emily, who effectively managed a cadre of politicians, competing engineers, and anyone else working on the bridge for over a decade.

As the New York caisson descended further than its Brooklyn counterpart, the incidents of the bends increased, killing two men. With no bedrock in sight, Roebling used his knowledge of geology and mineralogy to make an amazing decision: stop digging. It wasn’t bedrock, but it was compacted sand.

The New York tower. 78 feet deep into the riverbed. Resting on sand. It hasn’t moved.

We Are Defined By What We Build

The Brooklyn Bridge was built from 1870 until 1883. A quick history refresher: five years after we finished shooting each other in the American Civil War, we started building this:

Three years after that, work started on another:

And before the Williamsburg Bridge was even done, work started on the Manhattan Bridge:

These are the words and the stories I hear in the Brooklyn Bridge: enthusiasm, audacity, impossibility, and amazement. More importantly, I see a work of bare utility with a palpable sense of confidence, an equilibrium with nature, and a beauty that only grows with time.

We are defined by what we build. It’s not just the engineering ambition that designed these structures, nor the 20 people who died building the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s that we believe we can and decide to act. I’m happy to report our new President agrees when he says,

“In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted — for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.”

Someone, sometime soon is going to start describing the climb out of this impressive hole we’ve dug for ourselves, and they’re going to call it “America 2.0”. Clever, yes. We need a new version of ourselves and that’s going to involve bright, unexpected ideas from those we least expect them from, and they’re going to strike you as impossible. All you need to do to understand these terrifyingly ambitious ideas is to look back at what we’ve already done to understand what we can do.

The Art of the Tweet

In writing an article, I know I’m done when I delete. The process leading to done is chaotic; it’s days, weeks, or months of aggregating writing where I collect and organize paragraphs and sentences. Over time, content creation becomes content shaping as I organize the thoughts into a pleasing coherence.

And then, in a moment, it’s done. It looks nothing like the final product, I still have hours of writing and editing to do, but I know that I’m done because I can see the arc and the shape of the piece. I have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but, most importantly, I have the new ability to remove. I can delete. A line here, a paragraph there — I can let go of things of former importance.

It’s one of the biggest writing lessons I’ve learned in the past few years — the art of less — and the appearance of Twitter has only reinforced this lesson’s importance.

Two Tweets, Three Guidelines

There are two kinds of tweets:

Original material. This is you talking to everyone.

Retweets, quotes, and links. This is you forwarding a thing that you find interesting to everyone. For simplicity’s sake, let’s just call these retweets.

There’s another type of tweet that I want to talk about briefly and that’s the conversational tweet. What does this tweet tell you?

@commanda No clue

Not a thing. As you’ll see with the three following guidelines, my Twitter expectation is that each time I glance at my Twitterstream that I can something of value in any tweet. While conversational tweets are interesting for you and the recipient, they leave the rest of us in the dark.

Say More with Less

Tweet material just shows up. I’m sitting there in someone’s office when they say something which is, well, twitterable. This identification process has become annoyingly front-of-mind over the past year to the point that I interrupt important meetings with the simple declaration, “That’s twitterable”.

With solid twitterable material on my hands, I ask, “Does it need an edit?” The editing of tweets started out as a practicality for me. I needed to know whether or not my rough tweets were more than 140 characters, so I’d fire up WriteRoom, which conveniently counts characters, words, and paragraphs. Yes, I know Twitteriffic counts characters and so does the Twitter web application, but writing happens in big, open places. I don’t like typing in boxes; I want a canvas.

With the rough tweet dumped into WriteRoom, I start cutting. First to get it under the 140-character limit, but, more importantly, to reduce the idea to the basics. The Elements of Style has advice here. They suggest: “Avoid fancy words”. Why utilize when you can use? My advice is similarly confusing: “Drop words to give them room to think”.

In my head, I’m cutting words from my tweet to give you room to mentally add your own:

BEFORE: If it’s 4am, I know how stressed I am.
AFTER: Stress is how well I know 4am.

Nine to seven words. Slight reorganization, but which says more to you?

The act of editing a tweet seems contradictory to the impulsive nature of tweets, which means this is a good time to remind you that I’m a repeatedly stated firm believer that Twitter is what you make of it. I want my tweets with a bit of art. I want each word considered. You want to share the intimate details of your Battlestar Galactica watching habits. Whatever works for you, but how about…

Don’t Say What You’re Doing, Say Why You’re Doing It

The question Twitter asks is, “What are you doing?” I can’t think of the last time that I followed that direction. Fact is 95% of my day would bore the shit out of you. Really. There’s a chance you might derive some meager inspiration from the fact that, right now, I’m sitting in a coffee shop writing — talking to no one — but what is more interesting is why I’m here. Why I choose to do what I do. The tweet is, “Avoiding a meeting I hate”.

It’s just a mental step further from “What are you doing?” It’s a moment of introspection to transform the boring details of your day into delicious group therapy. This is why I think you should…

Add a Bit of Yourself

Twitter is you. I’m a big fan of the retweet, but I have the same fundamental problem with it that I have with literal answers to “What are you doing?” My question about the zero-add retweet is, “So what?”

Yes, the point of the tweet is the link and, yes, I follow some people because they are experts at finding compelling content on the Web that I probably care about. I don’t want just the content; I want to know what you think about it. Retweeting an article? Great, what’s the one line you love? Think that lolcat is funny? Me too, but why?

BEFORE: NYTimes Graphic: Home Prices in Selected Cities: http://bit.ly/4CjL (@khoi)
AFTER: Ouch. Phoenix: http://bit.ly/4CjL (@khoi)

I’ve already got a bevy of sites that are scrubbing and prioritizing the web for me. I check them four times a day and they serve their purpose well. But these sites lack authenticity. I don’t need another list of interesting links.

In Twitter, you follow people, not content.

140

My brief research into the English language revealed the average character count of a word is eight. Throw together a bunch of a smaller and bigger words, some single spaces and punctuation and you roughly end up with the average 140-character tweet being somewhere between 14 and 20 words. Let’s call it 15.

15 words.

In my opinion, the art of a good tweet is not just how much you can convey using extreme brevity, it’s also how you can take an idea, shape it with a bit of yourself, and give it to someone else who, if you’ve given them reason, will do the same.

A Twitter Decision

In starting a significant project, an engineer knows the first three big design decisions you make are vastly more important than the second three.

The nature of these decisions varies from project to project. They may be choices about look and feel, rules about architecture, or trade offs regarding feature set. Whatever these decisions are, they set a tone that defines the success of the project.

When I look at Twitter, I see three early essential decisions about how Twitter allows you to craft a community. I believe much of Twitter’s continued success is due to definition and execution of these decisions.

Interestingly, some obvious candidates for the Top 3, like “Scales like crazy”, “Will generate money”, and “Needs to be searchable” weren’t initially there.

The decisions were:

• Decision #1: A user chooses whom they follow.
• Decision #2: A user chooses whom they no longer follow.
• Decision #3: A user should be judged only by what they say.

These are simple decisions of empowerment. As Twitter’s popularity grows exponentially, both veteran users and recent arrivals need to remember that these basic decisions mean Twitter is yours to build with however you choose.

Yeah, Britney’s here now. Barack was here for a bit. I hear Shaq is figuring out Twitter as well. Yeah, these folks have an inordinate number of followers and are saying nothing particularly interesting, but they do not embody what makes Twitter great. Twitter is great because of choices made to allow you build whatever you want.

Decision #1: A user chooses whom they follow.

This might have been your first Twitter crisis: why am I here?

“Well, I hear so’n’so was on Twitter and I like them, so I followed them so I could figure out what the hell this Twitter thing was all about.”

You added folks. You looked at whom others you respected were following and you added more. Then, someone pissed you off. Someone said something that was not aligned with the vibe of your Twitterstream and you got cranky.

Every couple of weeks, a meme stressing about “an increase in Twitter spam” wanders the Internet. Each time I see this meme appear, I turn away from my keyboard and bang my head against my desk three times.

Twitter spam. Really? Are you even paying attention? I’ll say it again, you choose who you follow. If you’re following a newsbot, you’re going to get news spam. If you follow a good friend who can’t stop RTing, you’re going to to get retweet spam, but complaining about it is like standing the middle of a freeway asking, “Why do these cars keep hitting me?”

“But Rands, I need to follow this person, but they won’t shut up.”

There’s a legitimate complaint here. I’m certain there’s a sensible feature request based on this complaint, like “Please don’t show me tweets contain RT or @” or maybe a feature to put someone you follow on Twitter time-out during that weekend drinking binge where they won’t shut up about their ex-girlfriend. Yes, these features could be added to the base platform, but why complicate a feature you already have? You unfollow. It’s brutally simple and it solves the problem.

Decision #2: A user chooses whom they will no longer follow.

My theory regarding folks who complain about Twitter spam is that they, like me, have been traumatized by decades of email spam. You believe that Twitter spam is inevitable because, well, we lost the war against email spam, so we’re going to loser the Twitter spam war, as well.

You can win this war.

Think if you had the following power over your email inbox. When a piece of spam showed up, you could press a single button and guarantee that you would never receive that type of mail again. Poof. We just eliminated the billion-dollar spam detection and prevention industry with this dream. That’s exactly what Twitter made possible with Decision #2 and they did it with class.

If you choose, you receive a notification when someone starts following you, but have you noticed there is no similar notification when they leave? I find this omission telling. While I can’t confirm the feature omission was deliberate, I hope it was. The simple choice to not broadcast a departing follower strikes me as saying, “We are choosing to focus Twitter’s community conversations on what’s being built, not what’s being taken apart.”

A service like Qwitter quickly appeared to fill the gap, but unless you’re getting paid by your number of followers, getting lost in figuring out why someone is no longer following you is a waste of time. Their departure has nothing to do with you; it has to do with them and the experience they want out of Twitter.

Decision #3: A user should be judged only by what they say.

Take a look at the decisions Twitter made regarding your profile. It’s a spartan, 160-character bio, your location, and a URL. None of which you actually need to fill out. This is decidedly not Facebook. There is no feature in Twitter which tells who in your graduating class has a Twitter account. If you don’t know the person whose account you’re checking out, you’re forced to think. You make a choice to follow not based on where they live, where they went to school, what they do, or whom they know. What matters is what they say.

Yes, this rule says should because there’s no way my hippie utopian vision of a world where bright ideas connect bright people is going to last. Barack hasn’t said much since the election, but still garners thousands of followers a week. Mr. Tweet robotically scrubs your follower list and offers automated helpful advice regarding followers of followers that you might be interested in, and I’ve found some “Well, duh, I should be following them” folks.

Twitter is mainstream and lots of time and energy is being spent analyzing and judging Twitter habits. “He’s got 17,123 followers and only follows THREE PEOPLE. Jerk.” Who cares? Yes, some folks have huge numbers of followers, whereas others have 12. This gives these massively followed people a larger stage for their 140 characters, but because someone has a pile of followers doesn’t mean I ever want my search altered by someone else’s subjective calculation regarding “authority”. I define my own authority. I prioritize.

This is My House

Think of your Twitter account as your house. This is my house. Your house is different. You’re trying to figure out how to use Twitter to monetize eyeballs. Good luck with all that. For me, Twitter remains a place for casual information. For me, a tweet is still a note I tie to a balloon, which I let go and think, “Who is going to read that one?” Sometimes I look and see where it ended up, sometimes I don’t.

In my house, I want to create an illusion of a two-way conversation, which means I continue to prune followers so that content flows at a consumable rate. If I get the sense that I’ve lost control over my Twitterspace, I’ll stop going — the same way my fancy new mail rule files once important messages straight into the well-intentioned To Forget folder.

This is my house and I’m still deciding how I want it built and, thankfully, Twitter decided to be spartan and to stay out of the way. I think they knew the construction of your community is your deal. Bitching about it means you haven’t figured it out for yourself.

Rands in Review 2008

I live in the mountains and in the mountains you need a chainsaw.

Strangely, the time of year it’s the least fun to be outside is when I use the chainsaw the most. This is a result of holiday vacation, trees conveniently falling during winter storms, and short windows of time the county of Santa Cruz allows you to burn in your yard.

The job of the chainsaw is rarely one of actual building. It’s destructive, constructive work where you’re removing dead or live trees in order to make room for others to grow. After an afternoon in the forest, I’m covered in sawdust and sap. I’m bruised, I’m exhausted, and I can barely walk. It’s great.

I’ve been doing the same type of work with the weblog. In preparation for a new design, I’ve been slowly tidying and pruning the site. I’ve also been reflecting on the past year’s writing. Let’s look back at some of my favorite articles from 2008:

Appropriately, 2008 was led off with a Twitter article. Twitter was a recurring theme for the year and it showed up again in May as I talked about what, in my opinion, made a good follower in We Travel in Tribes. The first tweet inspired article was The Quirkbook, which listed a plethora of quirks I gathered via Twitter after admitting a few of my own.

Out Loud was the second half of my reposings on presentations. This article tackled the art of giving a presentation versus writing one. Articles like this appear because of immediate practicality. I was in presentation hell last spring and needed to articulate through my fingers how to prepare for a presentation.

Pixel Rigs documented another visual fascination of mine, namely desktop arrangements. I’m happy to report the Flickr group I created continues to receive a trickle of new desktop set-ups. I’ve recently updated mine, as well.

The FriendDA was an idea that had been kicking around my head that I finally got around to writing and posting. I deliberately disassociated the FriendDA from Rands to see what it could do on its own. Checks of the Twitterstream demonstrate folks seem to find value.

The Coffee Mug Affair was my third obsessive analysis of tools I can’t live without. The “This is seriously fucking black coffee” sits in front of me and is happily serving its purpose as I browse the archives and write this article. The cup also made an appearance on the first piece of Rands schwag, the t-shirt.

The year finished up with this Rands shirt with 100% of the profits go to First Book literacy charity. I’m done printing shirts, but I’ll be leaving what has been printed up in the Buy Olympia store until we’ve sold out.

That’s 23 articles on the year — five less than the year before. Other than some small tweaks, I’m moving into year #4 of the current design — which is unacceptable and currently being rectified.

The fact real work kicks in this week is tempered by the presence of MacWorld, which brings some of my favorite people to San Francisco. This collection of bright minds shows up at a perfect time of year. With the holidays behind us, with the celebration and the cleansing complete, it’s time to ask, “What are we going to build next?”

A Signature Cadence

Early on in the movie Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe constructs one of my favorite getting-to-know-you and let’s-fall-in-love scenes. The lead, William Miller, and the love interest, Penny Lane, stare at each other while lying to each other about their ages:

Penny: “How old are you?”

William: “18.”

Penny: “Me, too. How old are we really?”

William: “17.”

Penny: “Me, too.”

William: “Actually, I’m 16.”

Penny: “Me, too. Isn’t it funny? The truth just sounds different.”

What does a lie sound like? How do we decide to trust? There’s a reason why you can figure out in an instant whether a mail is spam or not. It’s not a single, measurable thing, but a whole set of small, invisible variables with which you can instantly make a judgment — I do not trust this mail.

You have a complex set of analytical mental muscles that help you make critical snap emotional judgments. Whether it’s a mail, a website, or a person, your brain can instantly look at 12 imperceptible aspects of a thing to determine how you should feel.

Truth, love, or lies, human has a signature cadence.

I love Flickr

Really, I love it. My favorite part of designing a presentation is the three hours I get lost slice and dicing the deck and cruising Flickr looking for the perfect image. I always find a photo that changes the way I see my deck.

Flickr pulled my SLR out of my closet and onto my desk. Flickr gives me regular visual insights into friends that I’d never find in Twitter, instant messaging, or even over lunch. I feel as I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what Flickr can offer and you know what? Until recently, I thought Flickr loved me back. Up until a few months ago, this was the Flickr logo:

As far as I could tell, just about every single Flickr page contained this highlighted message, and what I saw in this simple message was that I wasn’t on a web site; I wasn’t using software. I was somewhere else.

Flickr is not a web site. Flickr is a tremendously large group of people constantly throwing their photos at each other and when Flickr said it loved you, it was reminding you that you weren’t at a website, you were part of a community.

You’re Not a Clock

Some time shortly after Web 1.0 was over, an engineer was programming and making a choice regarding wording. He needed to tell the user how long it had been since something had happened — elapsed time. There are well-formatted, structured ways to display this information, but most assume you’re a clock:

3 days, 2 hours, 12 minutes, 3 seconds.

There are a bunch of problems with this format. First, you waste a lot of space saying very little, but the larger issue is that it doesn’t effectively describe the passage of time. You don’t measure time — you feel it. This engineer understood that you’re a human being. He decided that communicating elapsed time should sound like telling you the time over coffee, “When did Michael update his status?”

It’s small. You probably didn’t even see it. It’s not precise, but tells you exactly what you need to know. Moreover, it sounds like someone rather than something is saying it.

It sounds authentic.

Stop for a second and reread any paragraph in this article, but this time, I want you to listen to the voice you’ve constructed in your head. It sounds like you. This is why, when we meet, you’re going to be confused because I don’t sound like you. You do.

You trust this voice and the more a website or an application is designed to imitate that voice, the sooner a user will engage because they’ll make an emotional connection faster.

It’s a Little Thing

Do this. Take a moment to look on one of your favorite websites or weblogs and look for where they choose to sound like a friend you bumped into at the coffee shop. Once you start looking for it, it stands out. My favorite place to look is at the bottom of the page around the copyright:

It’s a little thing. In the huge pile of work building a website, the words chosen to deliver small messages might seem important, but these small words define a personality and both personality and reputation are built on decisions that feel too small to matter.

Here are three ways JetBlue starts the conversation at their kiosks:

Here’s how Twitter used to tell you they saved your information:

And this is how Khoi reminds you to have a conversation, not a flame war:

This conversational tone has a purpose. By sounding like a human, these small wording decisions push the technology out of the way to reveal what we really care about: the people.

Yeah, they’re faking us out. Yeah, it’s a script that is randomly saying “Hi” in every language possible, but look at the design intent. You are being benignly deceived into believe that you aren’t interacting with a computer, you’re staring through a window at other people.

And that’s where your head should be. Not worrying about how it might work, but who you might find on the other side.

I Think Flickr Still Loves Me

I see a lot of guilt inside the term “Web 2.0”. It’s an overused catchall term used to describe a bevy of new technologies and trends, but what I hear is guilt. When someone uses the term, I hear, “Yeah, so we’re not going to fuck-up and flame-out like those Web 1.0 dweebs. We’re Web 2.0.”

My negative reaction is unfortunate because inside of this guilty morass are some brilliant developments. I enjoy watching the ever-blurring line between a web page and an application. I like seeing the web becoming a cloudy platform.

Mostly, I like the authentic tone that came with Web 2.0.

Who knows who removed the authenticity from the Flickr logo. It’s sad, but it served its purpose. Flickr’s old logo was a quiet efficient invitation to join a community and sound like yourself.

A Pleasant Elsewhere

Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume is certainly not the first book I read, but when the question of the first book comes up, it’s the first answer because in my fuzzy thirty-something brain, Tales was the first book I was proud of reading.

I picked it out, I lay on the top bunk of the bed, and I read the book for myself. There was no school assignment motivating my endeavor, just the simple joy of enjoying a book I had discovered by myself.

Summers in the Rands house were full of reading. The Mom signed the sister and I up for a reading program at the local library. The game was “Read as much as you possibly can”. 20 books and you got a patch. 100 and there was some type of pizza parlor incentive. At the start of the summer, I’d walk out of the library with my four new books and think 100 books. That’s impossible.

I’d get home, read the four books before lunch, and start to bug the Mom, “Can we go back to the library? When are we going to the library? I need more books.”

“We were just there.”

“Yeah, but I want more to read.”

It’s these intense summer reading periods that I blame for the four unread books sitting on my desk right now. It’s also the reason for the two packed shelves in my closet of to-be-read books, as well as the stack of seven books next to the bed. My belief is: there can never be enough books.

When I have headache, I read and the headache goes away. When I’m pissed at the world, I find a book and a dark cave and chill in a pleasant elsewhere. Forget about the knowledge and ideas passed along via the written word, reading a book brings a calm to my crazy NADD-driven world.

I see the world in terms of words because whenever I have a quiet moment, I fill it with reading.

My Disaster

Roughly a third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives, and while there are piles of research that indicates literacy leads to a better quality of life, I simply want to promote a pleasant elsewhere. Certainly, there are more urgent disasters in progress than literacy, but this is my disaster and you can support it.

I offer the first Rands in Repose t-shirt.

This shirt is available in limited quantities until the end of the year.

The simple, yet elegant logo for the shirt was designed by the terribly talented Kevin Cornell. The shirt itself is a product of the Continental Clothing Company and is constructed of 70% bamboo, which sounds freaky until you put it on. Bamboo has a high quality, unique, silky feeling, but is durable and machine washable.

Both men’s and women’s sizes are available in a complex brown color named “bitter chocolate”.

100% of the proceeds for each shirt goes to First Book, a nonprofit organization with a single mission: to give children from low-income families the opportunity to read and own their first new books.

I’d like to thank the folks at buyolympia.com for make the process of finding, printing, and selling shirts easy.

I’d also like to thank the folks who take the time to read and comment on my reposing. It’s my honor to play a small part in your pleasant elsewhere.

Happy Holidays.

Dumbing Down the Cloud

Cloud computing is yet another name for services that have existed for a really long time. Here’s the 2008 IEEE Internet Computing quote regarding Cloud Computing:

“Cloud Computing is a paradigm in which information is permanently stored in servers on the Internet and cached temporarily on clients that include desktops, entertainment centers, table computers, notebooks, and wall computers, handhelds, sensors, monitors.”

Information stored on servers? Temporary caching? Holy fuck. You mean like those email servers and clients I’ve been running for 15 YEARS?

The innovation in cloud computing happened years ago. It happened when some bright engineer was trying, for the 185th time, to draw the Internet on a slide, and thought, It’s this big, huge, amorphous thing that lacks definition. It’s a… cloud.

That’s when the magic happened. That’s when the name mattered. When it was first used to eloquently and visually describe an idea that lacked mental definition.

Everything that has been happening since then is marketing and wishful thinking. It’s those marketing nerds getting paid too much money to rename ideas we’ve already had. Innovation doesn’t come when we give our ideas new names; it comes when the fundamental idea quietly evolves. Innovation often happens silently — not by what you say, but what you do.

Anywhere. Transparently.

My use case for the cloud hasn’t changed in years. I want a single folder sitting somewhere in the cloud that I can transparently access from any computer… anywhere. I’m not greedy; I’ll make it even simpler: I’ll only put documents in that folder. No applications, no preferences, just my well-defined documents.

I’ve been trying creatively-named solutions to this use case for a decade. This is how my technology investigations play out:

• Discover
• Install
• Configure the bits
• Give the solution a whirl three times
• Never use it again.

Fact is, getting me to change my information workflow is pretty hard. I’m a creature of habit and efficiency. While I will compulsively give any new idea or tool a try, an application or service needs to fulfill strict requirements.

Just to grab me, you have to:

1. Make it look and feel like magic.
2. Work flawlessly in the first 10 minutes. If you can’t survive 10 minutes of critical analysis, I’m gone.
3. Provide additional, unexpected awesomeness.

Like I said, it’s tough, and chances are that even if an application meets all of these requirements, I’m going to throw it out because I don’t trust it.

I trust Dropbox. Here’s why.

Dumb versus Smart

There are two approaches to cloud storage: dumb and smart.

A dumb cloud does just what you’d expect. You attach an external drive or you mount a network directory. It’s there. It does nothing unless you remember to manually copy stuff yourself.

A smart cloud combines the external storage with a scheme to do your copying or back-up for you. The idea is that as you change files locally, these changes are detected and sent off to the cloud. Sounds simple enough, right? Brace yourself.

Remember my use case: a single folder sitting somewhere in the cloud that I can transparently access from any computer… anywhere. The key word in that sentence is transparent, and a tool’s inability to be transparent is why applications in this space have been a study in failure. I’ll explain.

The fail begins with you and your two computers: a portable and a desktop machine. You edit one file on your desktop machine. Fine, the bits get sent to the cloud. Then, you make a different change on the SAME file on your portable, which is NOT on the network. Two hours later, you bring that portable onto the network and what happens? You’ve got two different versions of that file which both contain original work. Whatever cloud sync tool you are using will likely ask you: “Hey, both of these files have changed. This one was edited this morning and this one was edited two hours later. Which one do you want to keep?”

It’s a fair question. Sync is trying to be useful, sync is trying to be helpful, but sync is giving you a choice, and while you are generally good at choices, you will screw up. And when you do you will never, ever blame yourself, you will blame sync.

You will twitter: SYNC FUCKING OVERWROTE MY CHANGES, when all sync was doing was what it was told. See, sync will happily screw you if instructed to do so. By you.

Even though it’s my fault, data loss is a colossal disaster in my universe and that means once I figure out data was overwritten, I will not cease my irrational swearing until whatever tool responsible is completely eradicated from my system.

Yet, it is my fault. I chose a solution that was too smart. What I need is for my smart clouds to be dumb.

Dumbing it down with Dropbox

There is nothing new about the idea behind Dropbox. Even the name shows little in terms of innovation. Before I explain how Dropbox gained my trust by solving the sync problem, let’s talk about how it grabbed me.

Is it magic? After a simple install and easy account sign-up on the Mac, you end up with a new menu extra. Choosing ‘Open your Dropbox’ reveals the directory structure of your Dropbox and you’re off. Doing what? I don’t know — whatever it is you do. Folders and files thrown into the Dropbox folder are silently synced with the cloud. On the Mac, unless you look closely, it’s not even clear what’s going on. I had to fire up my portable and set up Dropbox on a second machine to confirm that it was actually doing anything.

The magic of Dropbox is that it doesn’t ask you to think about what you do. You care about one thing: do I have access to the most recent version of my files? And with Dropbox, yes, you do. Wherever you are, so are your files.

A flawless 10 minutes. Once I convinced myself that Dropbox was actually doing something, I pushed it. I dumped a large Keynote into Dropbox on one machine and then jumped to another machine and deleted a different file. How long until everything was reconciled? It wasn’t instant, the Keynote copy was limited by bandwidth, but it worked flawlessly. And besides, you don’t need instant access to your files because you can’t be in two places at once. What you want is to never be bothered by the fact that your files are in the cloud. Dropbox is designed to never get in your way… even when you do something stupid. More on this is in a second.

Unexpected awesomeness. While it wasn’t in my first 10 minutes, the unexpected awesomeness came when a friend asked for a presentation that wasn’t mail server-friendly. He emailed me a link to a shared Dropbox folder, and when I clicked on it, the folder was immediately integrated with my existing Dropbox hierarchy. That’s right, I can construct a complex shared hierarchy in the cloud and you know what that complex collaborative beast looked like? My familiar directory structure.

It’s these types of design decisions where trust begins.

Trust begins when I can see the design intention of an application. What in NetNewsWire, for example, is the end result of endless fretting over every design angle regarding reading feeds. What I expect is that when I’m stumped, its author, Brent Simmons, has not only thought about why I’m stumped, he’s already provided the right feature configured in precisely the right manner to circumvent my stumpedness.

When I use Microsoft Word, I see corporate intent. I see how different warring internal groups tugged the UI to and fro for a decade. I see the intern who did that one feature four years ago. I see a land of misfit toys in the features that haven’t been touched in years.

When I’m using Word, I keeping seeing Word, and I don’t see what I should be seeing, which is what I am writing. When I’m using Dropbox, I don’t even know that I’m using it because it is designed be transparent.

The Screw-Me Scenario

How does Dropbox solve the screw-me sync scenario? To date, Dropbox hasn’t said a thing to me. It hasn’t given me a single decision to screw up. Dropbox is very smart because it never asks you a thing about sync or any file operation. This is the brilliance: Dropbox knows that any question is a chance to make a wrong decision. And a chance to make a wrong decision is a chance to erode trust.

Yes, you can create the conflict scenario. When it occurs, Dropbox quietly creates a conflict file in your folder and lets you figure out what to do. See, Dropbox isn’t going to ask because that’s not the model. That’s not the design. The Dropbox flow is: “We’re not going to bother you with sync because we’re just keeping track of you changing stuff and your stuff is only changing when you change it and there is only one of you. If there’s a problem, you’ll figure it out when you’re good and ready”. It’s not elegant; I still have to eventually go and clean up the mess, but the more you trust a tool, the less you care about the edge cases.

Dropbox is not dumb. In fact, Dropbox is quite smart because it lets me be dumb.

And I’m dumb. Two weeks ago, I sat down to put the final touches on a presentation. I fired up the portable, looked in the usual Dropbox location and it was empty. Ok, well, I saved it to my desktop, right? Ok, no. Maybe another location inside Dropbox? Ok, no. I can taste it’s-deleted-forever adrenalin in the back my mouth now.

Spotlight reveals nothing and I’m starting to blame Dropbox now, so I fire up their web interface, where I discover they keep track of each discrete file operation, and it looks like last night I deleted the presentation in a fit of psychotic folder cleanliness. But here in the Dropbox web interface is every single version of the file that I saved, as well as the ability to restore them.

Click. Restore. And I’m saved.

And that’s smart.

Build Anything

As an engineer, if you want to piss off someone who is asking you whether you can or can’t build a thing, just say, “Given enough time, I can build anything”.

They’ll believe you’re dodging the question, and they’ll think you’re arrogant.

As a means of negotiating a schedule or a feature, this answer is not helpful. You need to take the time to explain your thinking to this person. You need to walk them through your development process. It’s an opportunity to educate and not come off like a jerk.

However.

Given enough time, an engineer can build anything.

I’m optimistic.

And I hire optimists.

Like any profession, software development is chock full of radically different personalities, but I want the optimists. I’m not looking for Yes-folk; I’m looking for those folks who, when backed into a corner with a gun to their heads, respond with, “Fuck it, we’re going to figure it out”.

This base optimism can be hidden in all types of personalities, but when the shit hits the fan it shows up and often creates the impossible.

In my two decades of working in Silicon Valley, I am happy to confirm that this valley is full of these insane optimists. These are people who:

• Work hard
• Over-commit and still deliver
• Rampantly go out of their way to help each other
• Have a track record of stunning success

This is not a population limited to the valley, it’s a population spread across the country and across the globe, but today I’m thinking about my country.

We’re nowhere near the bottom of this disaster we’ve voted onto ourselves. I don’t think the majority of Americans fully understand the severity of our financial crisis. We’re all fervently staring at Christmas, confusing the holiday spirit for hope.

Yet, I remain optimistic.

Regardless of who wins the election, the question remains, “Do we have it in us to re-invent ourselves? Can we rebuild our country into a place we respect?”

Yes, we can.

I live on the west coast of the United States, which is a region pioneers traveled to so they could choose how to define their home, but this whole country is built on that idea — we choose who we will be.

Where I sit, with the cranky engineers —the insane optimists — I hope we all share this optimism because, given enough time, we can build anything.

FriendDA

The lesson of the Holy Shit is that when you stumble upon a truly revolutionary idea, you have the ability to recognize it. There are lots of people who, when they first saw a web page, thought, “I can order pizza on the phone with a live person. Why would I do it on the computer via, what’d you call it? A browser? Also, why is that text blinking?”

You didn’t see pizza. You didn’t even see the blinking text. In fact, you saw nothing in particular; you just had a gut feeling. There was no logic or strategy behind the gut feeling, it was a sense of deep potential. Your amorphous thought was, “I can’t think of anything I won’t be able to do on the web.”

A Holy Shit is the instant of instinctually recognizing massive potential.

As epiphanies go, Holy Shits are few and far between. My gut says you’re lucky if you stumble upon one a year. However, smaller versions happen all the time.

A by-product of obsessively, constantly surfing the net to discover the bright and the shiny is a steady flow of promising new ideas. Mostly slight variations on existing great ideas that tickle your fancy. For example, after staring at Twitter for nearly two years, I’m guessing I’ve had a dozen bright ideas about Twitter-inspired products. These ideas tend to show up in the morning during the drive, after appropriate caffeination, and more often than not they fade the moment I walk into the office.

But some stick.

My rule is: if I’m still thinking about a bright idea when I’m driving home, it’s worth writing down. By passing the idea through my fingers I make it slightly more real… I give it definition.

And then I sleep on it.

The following morning, if I’m still chewing on the bright idea, I start to worry because the logical next step is to pitch a friend. The rule here is: all ideas improve as a function of the number of eyeballs that see them. The troubling converse rule is: as soon as your idea gets out in the wild, it’s no longer yours.

In the corporate world, there’s a legal instrument to protect bright ideas generated inside of the business and it’s called a Non-Disclosure Agreement or an “NDA”. When you sign an NDA for a company, you’re legally saying, “I’ve agreed to take on the responsibility of protecting and not revealing the company’s intellectual property even if that intellectual property consists of ideas that came out of my head in the first place.”

There are lots of interesting variations of the NDA, but the two significant ones are: the Two-Way and the One-Way.

The Two-Way NDA says, “Anything either of us says is private”. The more scary One-Way states, “We can use anything you say, but you can’t use anything we say”.

Neither of these legal instruments is useful to me when I merely want to pitch a friend about my idea. The concept of getting Phil to sign an NDA over a beer while we shoot the shit about my random drive-to-work idea makes no sense. Phil’s a friend.

But I want Phil to know that what I want to chat about is more than our average conversation. I want slightly more than a smidge of ceremony before I spill the beans about my bright idea and I call this ceremony the FriendDA.

The FriendDA is a non-binding, warm blanket agreement that offers absolutely no legal protection. I’d suggest if the idea of legal protection is even crossing your mind that the FriendDA is totally inappropriate for your current needs.

Take a look.

Ideally, the understanding you want to get to with the FriendDA requires only a simple question. The moment you’re about to pitch Phil on the idea you ask, “FriendDA?”

Phil takes a sip of beer and nods.

And you’re off.

The Culture Chart

They played bridge every Wednesday at Netscape. In the middle of the cafeteria. Like clockwork.

The players were a collection of ex-SGI guys and they worked for a variety of different groups at the company, but as I learned a few months later, this core group of men quietly defined the engineering culture of the company… with a bridge game.

Ninety Days

If you follow the rules in Ninety Days, you’re going to have a solid feel for the construction of your immediate team. Who is who. Who does what. What they know. Who the freak is. Who the free electron is. In a start-up when there are only 12 of you, you’re done. You know the people landscape because, from where you sit, you can see them all and you interact with all of them regularly. In a larger company, however, ninety days is only going to give you a brief glimpse of what you need to know about your co-workers, the company, and its culture.

Fortunately, in a large company, tools and documents have been created to help you traverse the culture and process and figure out where people fit. For example, what do you do when you get a random urgent mail from a co-worker stranger? Even if the stranger takes the time to explain who they are and what they do, you still fire up the corporate directory with the simple question: “Who does this bozo work for?”

The corporate directory is the digital representation of a formerly very important document: the organization chart.

A quick glance at the org chart answers a lot of ego-based questions like:

• Which org does he work in? A cool one?
• How many direct reports does he have? More power?
• How close is he to the CEO? More influence?

As sources of information go, the org chart is essential, but it is an incomplete picture of your company, which brings us back to bridge at Netscape.

Bridge

If you looked up the four core bridge players on the org chart, you’d learn a bit. One engineering manager, another guy from some oddly named platform team, another guy who had a manager title, but no direct reports, and the last guy who looked like a program manager.

My org chart assessment: Meh.

What I learned months later was that the folks sitting at that regular bridge game not only defined much of what became the Netscape browser, they also continued to define the engineering culture or what I think of as a culture chart.

Unlike the org chart, you’re not going to find the culture chart written down anywhere. It doesn’t exist. The culture chart is an unwritten representation of the culture of your company and understanding it answers big questions that you must know:

• What does this organization value?
• Who created this value system?
• Given this value system, who contributes high value?
• Who is most aware of how value is being created?

This is fuzzy philosophical mumbo jumbo, so let’s bring it home. In your current job, right now, tell me what it’s going take to get you a promotion.

“I need to work really hard.”

Ok, so you knew you need to work hard to get a promotion before you set foot in your current gig. My question is, what specific thing do you need to do in order to be promoted? I’d argue that for any engineer who is actively managing their career, it’s essential to figure out the answer to this question as quickly as possible, and to do so you need to understand the culture.

Detecting Culture

If you are going to be promoted, you are going to succeed in a group of people when you provide that group things that it think it needs. Now, your gut instinct is that this group of people is the management team, and that’s a good org chart-centric answer. The problem is it’s your job to stay ahead of your manager. You’re not going to get promoted giving your manager what he wants; a promotion comes when you give him what he wants as well as what he does not expect, but desperately needs.

It’s unfair. This guy is tasked with your career development and I am saying it’s your job to tell him what he wants. You don’t have to do this; you can take the reactive cues from your boss, but I derive intense professional satisfaction when I deliver the unexpectedly needed and I discover the unexpected by first finding the culture.

To deduce the culture of a company, all you have to do is listen. Culture is an undercurrent of ideas that ties a group of people together. In order for it to exist, it must move from one individual to the next. This is done via the retelling of stories.

“Max was this nobody performance nerd and three weeks before we were supposed to ship, he walked into the CEO’s office with a single piece of paper with a single graph. He dropped the graph on the table, sat down, and said, ‘No way we ship in three weeks. Six months. Maybe.’ The CEO ignored the paper, ‘We lose three million dollars if we don’t.’ Max stood up, pointed at the chart, and said, ‘We lose ten if we do. We must not ship crap.”

Whether this story is true or not is irrelevant. The story about how Max saved the company ten million dollars by telling the CEO “No” is retold daily. In hallways. At the bar over beers. The story continually reinforces an important part of this company’s culture.

We must not ship crap.

There isn’t a corporate values statement on the planet that so brutally and beautifully defines the culture of a company.

There are other stories that you’re going to hear over and over again, and inside each of these stories are the real corporate values. Each one, while designed to be entertaining, teaches a lesson about what this particular company values, and these are the lessons that are going to get you promoted.

There’s a chance you’re not going to find these stories. My hope is that you’re in a company where engineering is valued and, as such, has an influence on the culture of your company. If it’s been six months, you’ve been actively looking, and no one has told you a great story about how engineering shaped the fortunes of your company, there’s a chance that in your company engineering doesn’t have a seat at the culture table. My question is then, “How are you going to succeed, how are you going to be promoted, where engineering isn’t an influential part of the culture?”

Culture Definers

After you have a healthy collection of stories, you’re going to have a good idea about some of the culture, but you’re still missing essential data for your culture chart. See, the folks who tell the stories about culture usually aren’t the folks who created them.

Stories are told, but first they are born.

The people who are responsible for defining the culture are not deliberately doing so. They do not wake up in the morning and decide, “Today is the day I will steer the culture of the company to value quality design”.

They just do it. The individuals who have the biggest impact on the culture and company aren’t doing it for any other reason than they believe it is right thing to do, and if you want to grow in this particular company it’s a good idea to at least know who they are and where they sit. You need to pay attention to this core group of engineers because as they do, so will the company.

Game Over

Your company is networked in more ways than you can possibly imagine. Just because you’ve reverse engineered the development culture in your organization doesn’t mean you’ve got a complete map of the overall culture. There are endless connections tugging any decent sized group of people in multiple directions at once. There’s the been-here-forever network, the I-survived-the-layoff people, and the untouchable-did-something-great-once crew.

Culture assessment is an information game and it’s never over. Your job is to continually situate yourself in such as a way that, as quickly as possible, you can assess subtle changes in the culture of your company.

I wasn’t concerned when Netscape started losing market share to Microsoft. I didn’t sweat it when the stock price stalled. The reason I started thinking about my next gig was, months before either of these two events occurred, one of the lunchtime bridge team left.

The game stopped. The small group of four no longer spent a long lunch quietly, unknowingly defining the culture of the company and everyone who was watching noticed.

They noticed when one of those who had humbly done the work that defined the company no longer believed enough to stay.

Horrible

I can turn a phrase.

High school journalism is where I discovered this. Mrs. Wickett kept bringing stories to me in my junior year “Needs a clever headline.” I’d read the story and throw out a terse, clever headline.

No clue where this ability come from. If I actually think about how I pick the words and construct the idea, the ability vanishes. The less I know about it, the better.

I’ve been riding this talent for years. Turns out the ability to summarize isn’t only handy for writing headlines; it’s useful in meetings, too. “He just said that, you think this, let’s move on and stop saying the same thing over and over again.”

It was this appreciation of summarization that I took into my first executive product presentation at the last gig. 10th floor of corporate headquarters. Four VPs and their minions surrounding the table. My thought: Wow them with crisp, clean, and clever thoughts. Alliteration. Witty. Headlines.

So I did.

“This is the product. Here are the 20 clever phrases to describe it. Thank you very much!”

Silence. 30 seconds of awkward silence followed by the VP of Marketing breaking the tension, “What exactly are we reviewing here?” The next five minutes were less pleasant as the room realized I was done and all I’d accomplished was filling the air with clever alliterative phrases. There was no obvious strategy behind the headlines.

The Russian Lit Major was standing outside my door as I limped back from the beat down “How’d that feel?”

“Disaster.”

“Yeah, details bore the shit out of you and you suck at talking to executives.”

“… I what?”

I See Bell Curves

You are horrible at something.

You are a bell curve. A standard distribution. At one end of the curve, you have your talents. You’re naturally and uniquely good at them, but you’re not quite sure why. At the other end of the curve, you have your natural deficiencies and, while I am an optimist and I do believe you can learn your way through just about anything, you’re genetically predisposed to be pretty bad at these things.

Now, chances are you are a horrible at a whole bunch of things, but I want to focus on one thing. It’s the thing that will have the most impact on your career. By being bad at this thing, you limit your career growth.

I’m going to make a leap and assume that you’ve already identified your horrible. At some point in the past, you realized you were bad at this thing. “I am unable to read people.” “I love to program, but I am a lousy architect.” “I dress like a goofball.” Whatever your realization was, you become aware that you were deficient relative to the rest of the world, and you took one of two paths.

The first path: you structured your days and your life so that you wouldn’t stumble over this deficiency. Bad programmer, but deeply technical? Ok, you stuck with QA. Unable to read people? Ok, stick with code, don’t manage. Horrible fashion sense? Right so, you’re not first in line for customer visits. As path of least resistance strategies go, this can work. You can sit there and hide from the horrible, but my thought is, if you’re reading this weblog, you chose the other path and you attacked the horrible.

Your thought, “I refuse to suck at this,” so you took the other path and forced yourself to learn through the horrible.

Educating yourself in your deficiencies. Learning. Researching. Practicing. I’m a fan. There is nothing quite like the sense of accomplishment when you know that Darwin is rooting against you. I would go so far as to say that success at overcoming the horrible is far sweeter than success when you know what the hell you’re doing.

And yet… you still might suck at your horrible.

I Want More of You

Back to the Russian Lit Major lurking outside my executive disaster,

“Yeah, details bore the shit out of you and you suck at talking to executives.”

“… I what?”

“You have a product there, but your problem is that you believe that since you can see, everyone else can. They can’t. You need to stitch together the details of how you discovered the product and you need to say it in the language of executives. I’ll show you.”

That night, she took my presentation home and ripped it to shreds. The following morning she sat me down with a completely revised presentation and she walked me through it, slide by slide, pointing out that while I was making fine points, I was skipping over essential details the executives needed to hear. My thoughts were big, but they lacked meat and executive-friendly messaging.

It sucked. It’s one thing to know you’re horrible at the something, but discovery of this horribleness by the rest of the team is a whole other order of magnitude of embarrassment.

Except the slides were better. My messages were still there, but the deck made sense to someone other than me. Two weeks later when we presented again, the questions were enthusiastic, not problematic. I was saying the same thing, but the additions of the Russian Lit Major’s natural ability made my message clear.

Big Trust

There’s a defining moment in your career when you choose to trust someone beside yourself. I’m not talking about trusting them with the small stuff: “Hey, can you fix this bug for me?” I’m talking about big trust “Hey, your design sense is 10x mine, what the hell is wrong with this dialog? Be brutal.”

It’s tricky to leave that swell little island of you. It’s hard to suck up your pride and acknowledge there are those who excel where you suck. But whether you’re an individual or a manager, your job is to learn to scale at what makes you great. Yes, you want to fill your professional experience gaps, but if you work where I work, you’re in a hurry. Getting anything done requires a balance of your natural talent and your ability to find and leverage the talents of those around you.

By putting big trust in someone else, you’re solving three problems: you’re increasing the chance you’ll get your project done, you’re building a strong team, and, oh yeah, you get to watch and learn as someone deftly works in a place where you’re horrible.

By watching someone be great, you’ll learn just like I learned. I don’t need the Russian Lit Major for every presentation, but I know whenever I want to be great, I’ll go and find her.

Impossible

Right now, there’s a CEO standing in front of his 85-person start-up at an all-hands meeting and he’s saying, “In the next 90 days, we need to do the impossible”.

The particular version of impossible doesn’t matter. What matters is that everyone in the room is shocked when he says it. You can tell by the intensity of the silence.

“We’re going to what in the what?”

What gives this guy the right to ask the impossible? Sure, he’s the CEO, but does that mean he gets to stand in front of the room and ask the team to build a levitation machine?

Yeah, it does.

However, this does not mean the CEO isn’t screwing up.

Asking for the impossible is an advanced management technique and it’s one that is particularly abhorrent to engineers. They are very clear on what is and isn’t possible because they’re responsible for building and measuring all the possible. When you ask an engineer to do the impossible, they often laugh in your face not only because they think it’s an absurd, irrational request, they also have the data to prove it.

Yet, given this irrefutable data, I still want you to consider this request. There is an upside to pulling off the impossible. Not only is it a great morale booster, it can also be incredibly profitable, because all your competition thinks the impossible is, well, impossible. Better yet, WHO DOESN’T WANT A FLUX CAPACITOR?

There are three measurements to take with regard to your CEO and his request when the team has been asked to do the impossible. These measurements aren’t going to help you pull off the miracle, but they will help you size the impossibleness.

A Hint of an Insane Plan

First, let’s figure out if your CEO is insane. Listen carefully to the actual request. If your CEO is standing in front of the engineering team asking you to transform lead into gold, you should grin, nod, and start mentally editing your resume, but don’t bolt from the room just yet. Now, if he’s asking you to reduce your release cycle from 90 days to 10, you can let yourself be shocked, but be relieved by the fact that you’re not being asked to perform matter transmutation.

There’s a subtle difference between insane and impossible.

You should respect your gut when that internal “he’s insane” flag starts waving, but that doesn’t mean you should stop listening. There’s more data to gather and there are times where an insane approach might be the right thing.

Our next assessment has to do with legwork. Has your CEO done any preliminary work to actually figure out whether the impossible idea is achievable? What is his strategic intuition about this crazy idea? Is he able to articulate, however vaguely, why this idea is a good idea for the company, and how you might pull this off? You’re not looking for a definite plan, more the strategic broad strokes, a point from which the managers can begin sketching in the details.

A word of warning: there are managers and executives out there who can pitch the impossible on confidence alone. They need no intuition or evidence regarding feasibility to get their teams’ buy-in, and while these chutzpah-laden individuals sure are inspiring, you should trust that nagging feeling that shows up later when you’re driving home, the high fades, and you’re left with a strategic emptiness. That emptiness is the practical result of the CEO’s request lacking everything but confidence. The absence of some thread of an idea about how you’re going to do the impossible, and you might be screwed.

The lack of a glimpse of a plan beyond the charisma translates to a lack of hope.

Skin in the Game

Next, you want to figure out how much skin your CEO has in the game. How much of the company is he betting on this request? If this is a bet the company decision, I’m comforted by the fact that he’s backing this impossible request up with his job. He knows that failure means everyone is looking for a new gig. That’s motivation.

If the request is smaller, if this is a bet the department request, well, the risk is more localized. The cost of failure will likely be born by the senior guys and gals running the show. I’m not suggesting the CEO thinks any less of the importance of this impossible request, but, trust me, he knows that it’s not necessarily his job on the line if the team blows it.

What you’re assessing here are two things: size of the request and level of executive commitment. Having a gut feel for these two things is often a moot point. Depending on your seat on the org chart, you might not even have a chance to choose whether you’re saddled with the impossible. However, developing this swag out of the gate means when the impossible hits the fan you can be one of the first to act.

The Importance of Respect

The glimpse of a plan and confidence. These two fuzzy mental assessments are in play when deciding to ask the impossible, but there is one more that needs to be considered.

Remember, this is an impossible request. This isn’t, “Hey, can you fix these 10 bugs by Friday?” It’s “Hey, can you rewrite this major component in half the time it took you to write it the first time?” Forget whether it’s remotely feasible. Forget whether the confidence is oozing out of every pore of your CEO. You’re not going to be convinced, and more importantly, you’re not going to engage if you don’t respect the person who is asking you to do something

Financial rewards, promotions, IPOs, promises of future interesting projects. All of these incentives matter and can be used to light a fire under a team, but an individual’s decision to engage in the impossible starts with the question, “Do I respect this person enough to tackle the impossible?”

There’s a book to be written about how to build respect in an organization. My brief advice is, when you are asked the impossible, carefully consider every hard request already made of you. Does he ask the impossible every month? Every Monday? Does he follow up on his impossible requests or does he expect you to run with them? Have we ever successfully completed an impossible request? Is he there at 3am on Sunday morning with everyone else, looking like he hasn’t shaved in a week?

I don’t know how many impossible requests you get, but I do know that frequent impossible requests result in an erosion of respect and a decaying of credibility. And that means when the CEO is standing up in front of the troops asking them to perform magic all they’re thinking is, “This crap again?”

What He Really Wants

Nothing I’ve described is concrete. Nothing I’ve described is going to placate your initial intense, negative engineer reaction when your CEO asks you to do something utterly absurd and irrational.

It gets worse… I mean better.

There are times when your leadership should be unencumbered by your version of reality. There are times when it’s important that your CEO isn’t intimately familiar with a product space or lifecycle. Day to day, doing business requires reasonable expectations and an adherence to plans, but those things actually prevent the extraordinary from occurring. The extraordinary requires a catalyst like an impossible request.

What’s important when the CEO asks for the impossible is that he’s pushing the definition of possibility for what the team can accomplish. Maybe your CEO only has an idea, and can only feel the possibility in what he’s asking, but it’s not his job to make it all happen. That’s where you come in. You’re the person responsible for transforming the feel, the intuition, the glimpse of a plan, and the confidence into knowing and doing.

You’re the one who is actually responsible for delivering the impossible, and all I’m asking is that you consider the request, because agreeing to engage in the impossible shatters normality and ignores fears and I love that.

The Quirkbook

It all started with a tweet:

“Making a list of superstitions / foolish consistencies / lightweight OCD behaviors e.g. I always put my RIGHT shoe on first. You?”

This right shoe behavior started during ice hockey. The team was bad… like 0-10 bad. Last game of the season against the best team in the league who slaughtered us in a previous match-up. As I sat in the locker room considering a perfect beat-down of a season, I decided to become zen about situation… deliberate. Rather than stressing about the size of the beating, I considered the small parts of manageable reality sitting immediately in front of me.

“In what order shall I put my gear on? What is practical? What feels right? You know, I like putting my right skate on first. I can’t tell you why, but the order feels important. Right skate, then left.”

We killed them. 9-3. Sure, they started by playing half their game because they were already in the playoffs, but after I scored that hat trick in the first period, they woke up. We slapped them around for another two periods. It was glorious.

I credit the skates. No, I credit the skate application process.

It’s that story that goes through my head each morning as I stare down. I remember deciding to care about how I put things on my feet. It’s a silly superstitious quirk transformed into an unavoidable daily routine and that’s why I twittered it. I wanted to know who else was saddled with these foolish consistencies.

Steven Frank took the time to write me a lengthy mail on my tweet. He mentioned, “For a while I used to semi-believe that if I could tap out a certain rhythm on my desk while the modem was dialing, I’d get through to the BBS instead of a busy signal. Never actually worked in reality.”

I did that, too.

Steven continued, “Anxiety, OCD behaviors, and depression almost always come as a package deal. I’m sure that anyone who reports one has the others. And for some reason, they always seem to affect a lot of folks in tech. I’m not sure which way ‘round the causality is, though.”

There’s a risk with giving a clever name to neuro-behaviorial developmental disorders. I wrote the original NADD (“Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder”) article expecting the inevitable comment, “You, sir, are making fun of people with legitimate disabilities. Jerk.”

Mostly those comments never arrived. Readers understood the meaning of NADD was not to belittle those with a disability, but rather to see the clever ways we’ve adapted our perceived deficiencies into distinct abilities.

It is with this thought that I present the following responses to my original tweet. I find them informative, sometimes hilarious, but mostly comforting.

• aquarium I hate to be on the left side when going somewhere
• bobthecow i check my zipper every time i walk out of a bathroom. even if i only went in to wash my hands.
• bonsai 1 cup of coffee in the morning. Always. Even when camping in the middle of nowhere.
• borkware I like light switches to be up when on, and down when off.
• brentsimmons I always sit on the right side of the plane, where it’s safe.
• ckolderup volume levels on TV/stereo/etc must be even or divisible by 5
• decafbad Toilet paper rolls go on with paper rolling OVER the roll, not under. Geez, people. ;)
• dreid I make code fit in 80 columns, I delete trailing whitespace, spaces never tabs.
• dstringf Weird quirk - I drop the last word off sentences a lot, especially if I am nervous.
• elaptics putting my hand in my pocket to check that my keys are still there - even if I have just put them in there
• epochblue M&Ms must be eaten in even numbers. You wouldn’t want one side of your mouth to get jealous while the other eats an M&M, would you?
• ergelo always click my pen open twice before writing, it certainly won’t write as well if i don’t
• gooddoug Also, whenever I get a paper coffee cup sleeve, I _HAVE_ to line up the fold with the join in the paper cup. Always.
• hmfullen I can’t resist stacking things, basically any time I’m waiting for anything.
• isaacschlueter I avoid white cars.
• janl Use the right spoon size for the food (complex); when in doubt, a fork. Shoes off or laces lose when coding or sitting comfortably.
• jaredg I always sort the jelly and jam by flavor when eating at restaurants that put the carrier on the table.
• jexner same here - right shoe first. I also try not to step onto broken parts of pavement.
• jtradke must use phone on right ear. even if right hand is needed elsewhere.
• kissane My closet door must be closed at night so nothing can eat my shoes. (We keep neither dogs nor raccoons.)
• kmcg selected eating utensil must be right weight/heft for the moment. (utensils obviously not a matched set.)
• KuraFire car stereo volume in increments of 5; aligning cutlery in restaurants; aligning stacks of things; OH GOD THE LIST GOES ON.
• lfmoliveira must untangle tire air hoses at gas stations (and phone cords anywhere).
• luomat Realized one of my oddities tonight - I will *often* NOT click on the first result in Google until I’ve checked out some of the others
• maczter I always put my pants on both legs at the same time.
• mdhughes All gadgets/tools must go in pockets in the exact right order before leaving home, come out onto desk when I get to work/back home.
• meeju I can’t sleep if not having a mouthful of water before lay down
• melle Browser tabs and task bars have to have their items in specific order, or else they’ve gotta be closed up and re-started.
• nathansmonk When parking my car, I have to have a corner spot.
• naturallygeeky Always push the walk button at crosswalks 10x. That way it knows I’m in a hurry.
• nebulous If one of my feet stumbles/stutters on the ground while walking, I try to replicate it with my other foot.
• nevenmrgan every device light - MacBook, USB hub, TV, clock - must be covered at night. Ambient light is ok, small lights are NOT
• OcelotPotPie I always set my alarm clock in odd numbers. For example, waking up at 8:00AM is an alarm set to 8:01AM. Or 8:59.
• pburleson I don’t get up unless the clock is on a multiple of 5 ( i.e. 5, 10, 15, 20 )
• popthestack I constantly clear my clipboard by copying a single space. I accidentally pasted sensitive things in IM chats one too many times…
• robertpalmer I always wet the toothbrush before putting toothpaste on it. (We started a book of these where I used to work: “The Quirkbook”)
• ryanmears firefox and textmate windows must always be in the same upper left hand corner of my screen, and be the exact same dimensions.
• rynosoft I never realized it until a friend pointed it out, but I tend to sort my fries when eating fast food.
• sandrift Even after I *know* I’ve put my keys into my bag, I must double-check that they’re there before closing car door or trunk. Total OCD.
• simplepixels Checking my pockets repeatedly to make sure nothing fell out. I once had my pocketknife fall out in a pediatrician’s office…
• spotthehall It’s that 1-2-1, 2-4-2, 1-2-1 algorithm - applied to gaps between the pavement slabs…
• ssanchez I knock on subway / Tube doors to ask them to let me on / off, but only if they are the automatic, not push button to open ones
• studlycaps Whenever I see an open cupboard or drawer, I have to close it. I can’t bring myself to leave the room with it open
• tjeremy I have to chew the same number of things on the left side of my mouth as I do on the right side. Even down to color and #, eg: M&M
• zanshin Stairs have to be counted in groups of four.
• ZooFood The join in the paper coffee cup must align with the drinking hole on the lid. Must turn lights off when leave room, close cupboards.

The Coffee Mug Affair

At my favorite local coffee shop, Lorraine gives me shit when I purchase coffee in a paper cup, “You… are not saving the world.”

She’s right. I’m not, and it’s actually worse. Each time I reach for a sip and this sad little corpse of tree flesh greets me with its pathetic weight and palpable sense of Al Gore guilt, I’m lonely.

I’m missing a key member of my creative posse.

A Box Full of Fail

The next chapter in documenting the accessorizing of my obsessions was an investigative report on paper. I’ve got 27 links regarding the history of paper queued up and ready to be read, but I don’t honestly care a lot about paper. I can’t separate the notebook from the paper.

In fact, I’m pissed at paper. Forget about the environmental guilt, cups made of paper are a sure fire way to ruin any cup of coffee because they change the taste. Coffee mugs are the only way to go and I’ve spent a lot more time fretting about mugs than paper. That’s the other thing Lorraine doesn’t know: I’ve got a box full of failed coffee mugs.

Unlike prior excursions, with coffee mugs, we can brief. There is no need for comparison tables. There are just two use cases that define a great coffee mug: Driving and Writing.

Driving

The Driving case is tactical. How do I move from point A to point B without spilling scalding liquid over me and the car? Technology has provided a bevy of James Bondian metal travel mugs guaranteed to safely transport a hot beverage, but this technology comes with a cost. After three uses, like paper, your coffee tastes like whatever material your mug is made of.

This means I’m paying two bucks for the privilege of not being scalded by a cup of coffee that tastes like old aluminum.

No.

Plastic, while less hip, suffers from the same taste degradation over time. Glass-lined or not, three uses and the taste of old coffee and angry plastic permeates every sip. This conveniently leads us to the first key construction point for the perfect mug:

It must be made of ceramic. After years of foul tasting cups of coffee, I’ve discovered a ceramic travel mug, while a hazard if dropped, is the only material that doesn’t affect the taste of the coffee. Combine this with the cleverly designed removable plastic top and you have the Pottery Barn travel mug:

Will it last? I don’t know. Can it survive a drop? Probably not. Will I lose the top? Probably. Does it deliver my coffee as intended? Yes. I have six.

Writing

The Writing use case is strategic because it’s an essential part of my writing process. Right this second, I’m editing this article and, as you might expect, there is a process. First, I sit up. Writing is serious business for which your spine must be straight. I also lean my head slightly downward, looking up at my words as I write. Occasionally I mumble what I’m typing… no clue why.

And then I stop and I take a sip of something from a ginormous coffee cup… which is when I really start writing. The sip of coffee is a pause with weight. As I described in I Don’t Multitask, these moments of silence are invaluable. They are when I step out of what I’m doing to consider what I’m going to do, and for this brief journey I need a companion, and that’s my coffee mug.

To understand this relationship, you have to consider the sip. It’s a conversation and that conversation has two elements:

It must begin with character. The appearance of the coffee cup needs to speak.

It must continue with weight. A full coffee cup is a two-handed affair. The coffee must be blistering hot and a threat sitting three inches to the left of my keyboard. Reaching for my mug is a commitment. It is a reminder that, “Hey, we’re focusing elsewhere for moment. Don’t screw this up. I’m hot.” My coffee mugs are ginormous. My sips — carefully orchestrated.

It’s a brief conversation and it has only one goal: a creative elsewhere.

The Posse

I’m only addressing half of this situation. There’s a coffee bean article to be written, but it’s time to get back to management and design, so I’ll cut to the chase: whole bean + grind at home + French press = FTW.

A great cup of coffee is not just a gorgeous caffeine administration vehicle; it’s part of your creative posse. On my desk, all within a 12 inches my hands, I have the iPhone, the Zebra Sarasa gel pen, a sweetly decaying Field Notes, and the Life is Short coffee mug. None of these items are required for me to write — they are conveniences — but they are essential to accessorizing a moment of creative, companionable silence.

Sweet Decay

I sidestepped the evaluation notebook issue in The Gel Dilemma, but this omission has bugged me because I’ve cared about what I’ve written on for a lot longer than I’ve cared what I’ve written with.

The Mom is to blame here. When I was 10 she gave me a journal entitled “Moments Worth Remembering”. There was a rainbow on front. I asked the Mom:

“What’s this?”

“It’s a journal.”

“For?”

“Writing down what you think.”

“About rainbows?”

The idea had never occurred to me… writing for myself rather than for Ms. Ockerman, the 3rd grade teacher.

Every five years, I go back and reread portions of that journal, looking for the same transition. I start the journal and it’s clear that I’m still writing for school; assuming that someone is going to read and grade my journal. Then, halfway through those pages of horrible cursive, I stopped expecting to be graded and started writing for myself. It was a treatise on the coolness of the Rubik’s Cube and it was just for me.

Since the Rubik’s epiphany, I’ve been writing constantly in journals. During college, I spent two years drunkenly plunking down my thoughts on the computer, but I gradually moved back to the handwritten word since, well, notebook computers weren’t there yet and I wanted to write wherever I damn well pleased.

The Goal

The primary goal of a notebook is to get out of the way… to disappear. It does this by perfectly fitting into your writing situation. How accessible does it need to be? What notebook tangibles do you need? How will it withstand a beating? By fitting into how you write, a notebook becomes invisible. It wastes none of your time because any moment you spend noticing the notebook is a moment you could be noticing something else, and writing about it.

But that’s not what makes a notebook truly sexy.

I have years of experience with some notebooks, weeks with others. As you can see, I’ve explored a wide variety of notebooks. The photo above is ordered chronologically, with my oldest journal on the bottom and my newest discovery, the Field Notes brand, the notebook in which I’m writing the first draft of this article, on the top. Like The Gel Dilemma, I’ve evaluated notebooks according to specific buckets of criteria.

My collection represents a wide variety of the notebooks out there, but they are merely the ones I’ve stumbled upon or had recommended. It is by no means a complete or representative collection. But know this: when I see a store with notebooks for sale, I always stop. I examine. I flip the pages and figure out if there is anything new. I do this regardless of current company, country, or convenience. I am a social introvert, but will stop a complete stranger on the street if they’re sporting an unknown notebook.

Purpose

The Purpose section represents the hard facts regarding this selection of notebooks. As a means of simplification, I’m going to use the word notebook to describe the bevy of different writing receptacles I’m going to evaluate. I could have just as easily used the word notepad, journal, workbook, or sketchbook.

As you can see above from the variety of notebooks I’ve used, there are widely differing intended uses. Anything pocket-sized works better than anything else when you’re sitting on a 16-hour flight to New Zealand. Given that intended use significantly affects value, there is no clear winner regarding Purpose, but there is judgment.

Brand	Size	Binding	Cover	Paper Weight	Pages
Cachet Sketchbook	10.5 x 13.5	Stitched	Hard	Heavy (70#)	~150
Watson-Guptill Sketchbook	8.5 x 11	Stitched	Hard	Heavy (70#)	~200
Moleskin Cahier Notebook	7.5 x 9.75	Stitched	Soft	Medium (20#)	60
Moleskine Reporter Notebook	8 x 5	Stitched	Hard	Medium (20#)	192
Paperchase Notebook	5.75 x 4	Glue	Pleather	Thin (20#)	~250
Moleskine Japanese Notebook	3.75 x 5.5	Stitched	Hard	Medium (20#)	60
Moleskine Notebook	3.75 x 5.5	Stitched	Hard	Medium (20#)	60
Field Notes Notebook	3.5 x 5.5	Saddle-Stitch	Soft	Heavy-Medium (50#)	48
Moleskine Cahier Notebook	3.5 x 5.5	Stitched	Soft	Medium (20#)	64

• Binding is one of those attributes you’ll never notice until it fails. In my experience, sewn binding never fails. I’ve had both glue-based and stapled bindings blow out on me, usually as a result of purchasing an overall poor quality notebook. A blown-out binding means a dead notebook, and that means everything inside of that notebook will be forgotten.
• The Japanese Moleskine has zigzag folded pages with heavier paper. This was novel for about a week and then was totally annoying because I kept forgetting where in the zigging and zagging I was currently writing.
• I love ginormous notebooks with sketch paper. We’re talking MacBook 17” ginormous here. In all-day off-sites with strict no laptop policies, the massive notebook is a security blanket. This is not an everyday notebook, but grab the biggest damned notebook you can find the next time you’re in an art store. It’s a great conversation piece, while also being a handy place to mentally wander when a meeting goes boring.
• Paper weight, the thickness of the paper, is the Achilles heel of many of the Moleskines. While I appreciate the off-white’n’yellow coloring of the paper, the paper itself is thin. I’m guessing 20 pound-ish. This bugs me less than the fact that I can see through the paper to the next page if I’ve already written on it. This is a noisy visual distraction that detracts from Moleskine’s general high quality.

Intangibles and Accessories

Getting into the more esoteric aspects of individual notebooks. These features tend to be where folks start to foam at the mouth with regards to their favorite notebook.

Brand	Lines	Detachable	Color (Cover/Paper)	Availability	Pocket	Band
Cachet Sketchbook	None	No	Shiny Black / White	Art store	No	No
Watson-Guptill Sketchbook	None	No	Matte Black / White	Art store	No	No
Moleskin Cahier Notebook	None	Partial	Brown / Off-White	Everywhere	Yes	No
Moleskine Reporter Notebook	None	No	Shiny Black / White	Everywhere	Yes	Yes
Paperchase Notebook	Grid	No	Shiny Black / White	Borders	No	No
Moleskine Japanese Notebook	None	No	Shiny Black / White	Everywhere	Yes	Yes
Moleskine Notebook	None	No	Shiny Black / White	Everywhere	Yes	Yes
Field Notes Notebook	Grid	No	Brown / White	Mail Order	No	No
Moleskine Cahier Notebook	None	Partial	Brown / Off-White	Everywhere	Yes	No

• I’m fervently anti-line on the page, but for the sake of science, I’ve tried a couple of lined notebooks. The result: yeah, you eventually stop seeing the lines, but read that again, you stop seeing what? I don’t need lines on a notebook. I needed lines in 3rd grade when I was learning how to write. I’m good now, thanks.
• Several Moleskine versions offer detachable paper for a portion of the notebook and this apparently floats some boats, but I never rip pages out of a notebook. I keep the notebooks which survive forever, which means a notebook with ripped-out pages is a violated notebook.
• Notebooks are always black. Sorry brown.
• Inner pockets are like mail rules. By using them, I forget whatever I put into them.
• The elastic band differentiates many of the Moleskines, but it also encourages a curiously annoying habit — you save stuff. The band gives the comforting illusion that your notebook is an enclosure, so you start shoving receipts, postcards, and business cards into the notebook. If packratting information is your schtick, the band helps, but I find once I start packratting, my notebook becomes less a writing tool and more like luggage. This is a mixed blessing as we’ll see in moment.
• There are huge families of notebooks that I haven’t included in my evaluation and the reason is they have too many moving parts. Ring bindings, refillable, tabbed, multicolored, combinable, and linkable notebooks — there’s something for everyone. All I see in many of these features is an opportunity for my notebook to explode.

Sweet Decay

This section was originally titled “durability” because any notebook evaluation must analyze how a notebook is going to survive. We need to understand how a notebook can take a beating because what’s sexy about a notebook is how it survives.

Scars are stories. What I want out of my notebook is that it looks better after three months of beatings. A great notebook decays gracefully. A great notebook weathers its use and becomes more than what it began as. As a notebook is beaten up, its character improves. Therefore, the ratings in this table are different. They explain how, after heavy usage, the various aspects of the notebook survived.

There is additional measure on this table, Character. Character is a purely personal opinion of how the entire notebook looked after three months. As I’m not going to anoint an overall winner, consider Character to be the best gauge of my overall opinion of Purpose, Intangibles, and Decay.

Brand	Binding	Cover	Paper	Character
Cachet Sketchbook	Poor	Good	Excellent	Unremarkable
Watson-Guptill Sketchbook	Good	Good	Excellent	Unremarkable
Moleskin Cahier Notebook	Excellent	Good	Good	Wanna-be
Moleskine Reporter Notebook	Excellent	Excellent	Good	Hip
Paperchase Notebook	Poor	Good	Poor	Embarrassing
Moleskine Japanese Notebook	Excellent	Excellent	Good	Hip
Moleskine Notebook	Excellentt	Excellent	Good	Hip
Field Notes Notebook	Good	Excellent	Excellent	Hip
Moleskine Cahier Notebook	Excellent	Excellent	Excellent	Hip

• There is only one disaster among the nine books, and that’s the Paperchase notebook. No surprise here, it was a Borders impulse buy. It has a thin pleather cover, grid lines, and I was a third of the way through it before the pages just started falling out.
• Moleskine is over-represented in my sample, but that’s because they survived. I’m certain my sample of notebooks would be larger, except that I discarded many notebooks when they decayed quickly and poorly.
• Yeah, there’s an entire article to be written about how the ink lands on the paper.
• The Moleskine catalog is obnoxiously large, but in their quest to be anything to anyone, they’ve found some sweet spots. In particular, I think the small Cahier notebook is a tough combination of cover, binding, and stitching. Yeah, it’s brown, but convenient size and durability makes it my go-to traveling notebook.
• While the decay of the elastic band isn’t listed here, it’s worth calling out that represents a decay paradox. First off, who doesn’t want to be the dude from The English Patient where he’s capturing everything he’s seeing, feeling, and touching in his notebook? I do. The band helps here except when it blows out and becomes a limp black string hanging from my thoughts.

The Whole Story

There’s no obvious winner here because there are far too many uses for a good notebook. For me, notebooks are the home for the primal drafts of my articles. Right now, I’m finishing a draft of this piece on a flight to New York. There are two notebooks sitting in my lap that I’m using for source material because both are my New York notebooks.

How do you want to remember something you’ve done or thought? Your memory, while vast, is apt to alter itself according to your mood, your opinion, the time of day. And it fades and loses things over time. This is why we take pictures. Memory, while often comprehensive in terms of storage, is lousy at reconstruction.

Any context you can capture aids in reconstruction, which is why I write it all down. But better yet, my notebook, through its design, captures context as well. This is why New York looks like this:

There’s a story within a story here. It’s not just what I wrote down, it’s how what I wrote in captured what I didn’t consciously see.

We Travel in Tribes

The rumor that Twitter is abandoning Ruby on Rails comes as no surprise to those familiar with Twitter’s shaky uptime record and its tendency to lose its mind in increasingly impressive and creative ways.

So, new platform. Fine. Saw that coming. What continues to surprise me is this: why aren’t we more pissed when Twitter goes mute for three hours? How about when those tweets you sent just vanished? How come delete only works 50% of the time? Why aren’t the Twitterati bolting to Pownce?

The answer comes down to value. In the time that I’ve been using Twitter, it’s transformed from a curiosity to an essential service. What were seemingly random status updates have now become organized into organic conversational threads that bring a steady flow of relevant content across my desktop.

“Rands, you mean, just like an RSS reader?”

Yeah yeah yeah, that’s not the key value. The value lies in the network of people and how they illuminate the things I don’t know.

Don’t Give Me What I Asked For, Give Me What I Want

When I ask a question, I’m looking for an answer in one of three ways:

1. Specifics. Just answer the question directly and cleanly. I am the king of finding specifics. Average rainfall in Honokaa, HI? Yeah, that took three seconds to find.
2. Like or Related. Rather than answer the specific question, how about a related answer? I’m in a Sigur Ros mood — what should I listen to? Ratatat. Google can help with related answers, but useful discovery rates begin to drop here because relation is subjective. It’s influenced by personal preference — a judgment call. It helps if you know me before you suggest that this is like that and you think I’ll like it.
3. Rock My World. Fuck my question. Rands, here’s a random thing I know you need to know. There is no technological solution to knowing when or how to rock my world. Well, there is, but the technology is far less interesting than the people who use the technology, which brings us back to Twitter.

Affinity is the opposite of Infinity

Twitter is a social network, yes, but it’s a social network without the superpoke scrabtaculous zombie noise and, for that, I’m thankful, because I’ve got work to do. Yes, I could spend days tidying my profile and scrubbing my friends list, but to what end? I want to know more people, and sure, it’s interesting to see what they’re up to, but what I really want to know is what is going on inside their heads with a minimum of fuss.

I want to see how they see the world. This is why I follow people on Twitter. This is why they follow me.

I’ve already described how I maintain a healthy Twitter equilibrium. This lightweight following protocol keeps the average amount of content I receive at any given time to a readable volume and shields me from the increasing and poorly named problem of Twitter spam. As an aside, I don’t understand folks who are complaining about Twitter spam when it’s a fundamental tenet of Twitter: “You choose who you follow”.

There are two immediate networks that I care equally about. First, there are the folks I follow. I actually know or have met a majority of the people on my followed list, but there is also an increasing healthy dose of strangers.

The second list is the folks who are following me. Now, there are functional differences in how these two groups are treated by Twitter and its supporting cadre of third party applications, but, to me, there is no difference between those I choose to follow and those who choose to follow me. Both groups have amazingly high information value because of a simple choice: “By choosing to follow this person, I am acknowledging we may have something in common / an interesting intersection.”

The act of one human being choosing to follow another is a big deal. As long as nefarious intent is not in play, the connection creates what the social science nerds like to call an affinity map; by drawing a line between you and me, we can infer that we’re somehow connected. How are we connected? Who knows? Maybe you like nerd culture? How about gel pens? We’re not really going to know until we test that link by asking a question.

Via the LazyWeb convention, I expect reasonable, informed, and quick answers to most any question. Where I used to use Google, I now use Twitter for questions, because not only do I get the answer, I also get the opinion. And sometimes I get my world rocked with random, psychic, off-the-cuff, tangential information that Google will never give me because Google doesn’t know who I am.

We Travel in Tribes

I’m eagerly watching Twitter evolve and organize itself. I’m dazzled as third parties are giving Twitter memory and context. But what I care about, and what has value to me, is the tribe of people in my ecosystem. Twitter is the best social network out there; it’s a great social search engine; and it’s a short strategic hop from being a terrific next generation address book.

My tribe is not your tribe because you’re not using Twitter how I do. You wrote an Academy Award-winning screenplay, only follow a few people, but have thousands following you. You sell shoes and follow each of the thousands of people who follow you. You are a major airline, but sound surprisingly human.

Twitter’s value has nothing to do with the technology.

Measuring uptime is an interesting nerd exercise, but Twitter’s value lies in how it stays out of the way and allows people to easily connect so they can share their thoughts and, more importantly, explore their differences.

(c) 2002-2009 Rands  (Made you look)