Start Things

I am currently working on a project for a class titled “Senior Design” it is supposed to be the capstone of my learning experience as an engineer, designed to teach me how to take a project from idea to implementation. The class steps through a series of required documents (project proposal, functional specification, project plan, and theory of operations) all of which can be useful tools (depending on your view of the agile methods).
Anyways, my issue is not with the documents themselves but with the format required for them. There are nearly ten teams with ten different projects in this class, but each team is required to mold its document to a single template (a 1990’s style formatted word document nonetheless).

The 21st Century is supposed to be about the knowledge worker (see Peter Drucker), so why do our schools still insist on teaching technological processes as if we were building software during the industrial revolution. We’re producing left-brained drones for a right-brained creative economy. Sure, there are some jobs that just require code monkeying or other forms of technological grunt labor, but those are not the jobs helping us survive the outsourcing onslaught in this country.

We should be teaching creativity and initiative. Templates create drones, they take intelligence and creativity and put it in a box from which it is very difficult to escape. Templates stifle innovation and don’t belong in the creative world. Rigid structure and format have their place, but that place is not in the creative realm.

Remember the class I was talking about? Senior Design, it sure doesn’t feel like it sometimes.

Other Related Links:

Kathy Sierra

Sir Ken Robinson

I usually don’t talk about myself on this blog directly, but today I have some especially exciting personal news that I wanted to share. I’ve incorporated for my consulting business. All the papers have been filed with the State of Oregon and the IRS, and I should be a legal entity by sometime next week. I talk a lot about entrepreneurship here, and I really believe that entrepreneurship is “doing”, something that is worthless without action. I have been slowly progressing towards this for quite a while now and it feels great to actually do it. My website for the company is not up yet, but you will be able to find it soon at www.lightboxit.com, we do Ruby on Rails development, deployment, and consulting passionately and we’re Getting Real. If you have any more questions about Lightbox write me at jamie at lightboxit dot com.

This is an interesting quote from Steve Jobs, talking about the development of the iPod.

Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like, That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

Here is another great quote, this one is from the legendary Michael Jordan.

I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

I’m going to start posting some quotes that I find inspiring. This first one is by Steve Jobs, from his speech given at the 2005 Stanford Commencement Ceremony.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary……Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

I was at the 37Signals “Getting Real” Conference this week in Chicago, and while I had already read the book I found a lot of interesting insights into the world of being agile. The web has definitely ushered in a new world not simply because of the way we interact with information, but how its products are made and marketed as well. Before the web there was more risk, expensive risk, and as a result there were long software release cycles and precisely executed print marketing campaigns. It is no surprise that this has translated similarly into web development and marketing, but should it? The web is not print, pixels do not live on a screen as print lives on a page, the web is by nature ephemeral. Is A/B testing really cost effective when you can execute change in a day, or minutes? Is extensive campaign planning before release really necessary when you can test everything and see what sticks? Obviously there is a place for these things in the web-less world, but Corporate America’s full embrace of the web economy is still far from being realized. So if we can be agile, lets do it, if we can do less and achieve more, why not? Moving forward means forsaking the past and embracing the future. It means Getting Real, which is really just a euphemism for not trying to apply yesterdays ideas to today’s problems.

“great new things often come from the margins, and yet the people who discover them are looked down on by everyone, including themselves.” ~Paul Graham

Change rarely comes from the inside. In technology, the chasm exists in because the mainstream hates change. Environmental problems increase because of our resistance to change. Just as “old habits die hard”, so do those companies who resist change. Look at the record companies that are drowning today because they refuse to let go of old media and embrace an collectively intelligent, connected, Web 2.0 world. Change requires sacrifice, it requires unpopularity. Be willing to be laughed at, misunderstood, be willing to make mistakes. There are many people waiting in the sidelines willing to if you are not. Reality is as Seth Godin realized, “The people who reinvented music, food, technology and politics have always gone outside the existing dominant channels to create something new and vital and important.” In entrepreneurship sacrifice precedes glory, complacency kills.

21st Century marketing is about conversations, its about the user being the champion of the brand, its about honesty and transparency, its about listening more than speaking. Cluetrain and Pinko are inspiring.

Have you ever noticed that most of the people in the gym don’t look like they need to be there, or those people you know that eat healthy could maybe squeeze in a few more calories and still be fine. Things often seem that way, but how do you think those people got to the place where they are? Not by being lazy and eating fast food, thats for sure. Aside from a lucky few who hit the gene pool jackpot (and there will always be those few) they got there by consistency and determination. The same can be said for business, why loathe the people who work hard for success, sure there will be cheaters and those lucky few, but many make it because of consitency and determination. Why not you?

It seems that one of the easiest ways of being successful is to open new horizons for people, to make something possible that before was only available to somebody with a lot of money, or someone with a certain specific skillset. Simply Democratize. This isn’t a new concept, Henry Ford was successful because he democratized the automobile, Apple was successful (In its early years) because it democatized the computer. The idea of “The Long Tail” (see previous post), which seems to be the blueprint for success as of late, is simply democratization on steroids. Is there a direct correlation between empowering people and success? Absolutely.