My Own Pirate Radio

Over on the Brightspark blog Mark Skapinker wrote something that really struck a chord with me:

“More “Bill Gateses”, not more graduates”
The press in Canada has been full of articles about how Bill Gates thinks that if Canada and the US want to stay ahead, they should “focus on improving the quality of education and expanding the number of young people who study math and science in school”. He wants us to create new computer scientists, engineers and researchers. Academics like Roger Martin answered him in the Globe and Mail by saying that North America has its lead because of our great MBA schools (like The Rotman School of Business where he is Dean) and management studies and the creation of more managers.”

Mark argues instead that what we really need is “more Bill Gateses. We need entrepreneurs who are willing to “go for it”, start new companies and create startups like Microsoft was not so long ago.”

Woot! This one speaks to me. Lessee, I studied Math and Computer Science at Waterloo, worked at Microsoft, and married a Queens University engineer who recently completed an MBA at Rotman. And now we’re both neck-deep in trying to get a startup off the ground. Must… voice… opinion.

I would love to see more entrepreneurs in Canada, especially in technology. Canada has a huge per-capita gap relative to the US on this. But what’s the cure? Check out some of the comments Mark’s post received:

• “Entrepreneurs are born, not made.”
• “[Bill Gates] was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, and ruthless enough to profit from it.”
• “[one of] our biggest barriers to entrepreneurship is the negativity surrounding failure”
• “few of our graduating students have entrepreneurship as their goal beyond education”

My take:

On nature versus nurture: It’s both.

Take Gates for example: Sorry naysayers, luck and drive were necessary-but-not-sufficient conditions for his achievements. I used to think wishfully that I could have done the same thing if I was just lucky enough. You know, show up at just the right time to become the driving force behind Windows and Office, grow a company from 2 to 60,000 employees, that sort of thing. But then I met Bill, and reluctantly swallowed my delusions of genius and grandeur.

While at MS I gained a good deal of respect for him. Don’t get me wrong; I’m no toady. He has his flaws, as do we all. But I assure you he is also an extremely talented technical problem-solver and business strategist, and — this is important — a big, big risk-taker. He was very, very good at being chief technology freak in a company chock-full of technology freaks. He will most likely be very, very good at running the Gates Foundation. Some of this capability derives from his nature — raw smarts, passion, drive, and guts — and some of it from nurture: family wealth and encouragement, access to great schooling, brilliant friends and colleagues, among other things. It takes both.

On schooling. Education is a huge enabler. It creates opportunities. In particular, for tech jobs, great problem-solving ability is essential. In large part, this can be taught.

Some might argue that problem-solving skill should emerge from a technical degree, or an MBA, or great community college programs, or from inspirational highschool teachers. I think debating this is a waste of time. We need ALL of these… and we should let the market decide how much of each. Entrepreneurs will emerge from all of these halls, and from the school of hard knocks too.

On funding. Entrepreneurs need financing. As Mark argues in earlier posts, we need a more concerted effort to make funding available for startups through a broad variety of non-governmental orgs.

The government tries, but can’t get it right. Case in point: $40M of government funding pumped into MARS Discovery District. It’s big. It’s beautiful. It makes for great PR. But that same money could have launched a thousand small startups instead.

The funding also has to be made available to companies from early stage up, not just startups that are mature enough for VCs to consider. And it needs to be available from a wider variety of funders, enough so that there is real competition amongst them to find and nurture the next great entrepreneur.

On risk. Innovation is fueled by risk. This single factor underlies everything else, in my opinion… the educational choices we make, the jobs we take, the inventions we create. The Canadian culture and economy needs to get much more comfortable with taking and supporting risks. And as things stand, Canada’s traditional risk-aversion is a real barrier to entrepreneurship. It makes it harder to get funding, it makes it less socially acceptable to fail, and it heaps too much emphasis on doing only “safe” things in school and in the real world thereafter.

That’s my recipe. I’d love to hear yours.

This is a post about making smart career choices within a tech company. It’s inspired by email letters I receive — about one every week or two — from colleagues I worked with and hired at Microsoft. They’re reaching crossroads in their careers and looking for advice on how to make their next decision. In a nutshell, “Should I stay or should I go?”

It’s a familiar question. About once a year I pop up from my rabbit-hole and wonder, am I in the right place? Is there something else I should be doing instead? Is this what it’s all about? Then I put on my peril-sensitive sunglasses and go back into my hidey-hole.

Just kidding. To cope with such soul-troubling times I built a handy little checklist of questions. Here it is:

1. Do you find the work intellectually stimulating? You want a job that’s challenging, after all, one in which you’re learning new things at a manageable clip. You need to scratch that intellectual itch. At the same time, your work environment shouldn’t be so diverse or chaotic that you never build true proficiency in an area. So find a job that’s difficult enough to stretch you and keep you engaged, and stick with it at least long enough to master and complete something substantial.

2. Are you valued fairly for your contribution? It’s no fun doing a job that your co-workers perceive to be low-value. As a program manager, for instance, you can all too easily find yourself doing work that is essentially secretarial… writing specs to match already-existing code, for instance. As a tester, you might find yourself testing something that was clearly written without the slightest thought of quality assurance or product support. Not surprisingly, jobs like that are soul-killing, and management values them little when it comes time to hand out performance rewards. These problems were common at Microsoft when I worked there, especially in engineering-dominated groups that preferred “coding for coding’s sake”.

Find a team where you can truly add value and be part of the core, rather than sit on the periphery. For program management, this means looking for teams with a strong desire to understand their customers, and teams that face a high degree of uncertainty and complexity. For test engineers, this means looking for teams where developers and testers work together from start to finish, rather than paying lip service to the quality assurance role. For developers, make sure the software you’re writing is truly essential to the product, and integrates cleanly with what your co-workers — in all job roles — are doing.

The twice-as-good rule applies here: “If you can’t make it at least twice as good as what already exists, choose something different to work on.” The Office team used that rule to help decide what features to put in a new product version, and I think the rule works well for choosing jobs too.

3. Are you passionate about what you do? If you’re working at a company like Microsoft, or Google, or insert-cool-tech-company-name-here, you’re probably a smarty-pants with a techie bent and strong ability to get the right stuff done. Frankly, you can work pretty much anywhere you want, if you put your mind to it. So, here’s a news flash for you, my fine-feathered friend: life is short. So work on something you actually like. This is especially true in positions that require long, intense hours… sooner or later, and probably sooner, there will come a day when your compensation package cannot possibly make up for burning the candle at both ends. At times like these, and indeed on not-so-hectic days as well, it’s passion that fills the gap and makes the work worth doing. If you can’t get excited about your job for, say, more than half of the time you’re putting into it, move on.

4. Are you working with good people? Do they inspire each other, help each other, treat each other with respect? Or do they just drag each other down? Again, life is short, and there are an infinite number of jobs out there, so it’s incumbent on you to find one staffed with people you like. In my experience, great people are often the differentiator between a good job choice and a bad one.

That’s it. Four simple questions. Learn ‘em. Use ‘em.

Parting advice: if you are at a point where it’s time to move on, do so with grace and integrity. Deliver on the goals you signed up for. Complete the promises you made to co-workers and customers. Hand off your responsibilities so they don’t just drop on the floor. And time it right, too… don’t leave just before a performance review, for instance, because weak managers will often use that opportunity to short-shift you. There will never be a perfect time to move on, but some times are certainly better than others.

Pass it on.

I’m interested in the general theme of competition and consumer advocacy, especially as it relates to Canada and the US. Having lived in both countries I find it frustrating that Canada generally lags behind the US on this point. For example, the US rolled out its National do-not-call registry in June 2003. Canada still doesn’t have one, and its looking like 2008 before we do. Or consider mobile phone number portability, which the US initiated in 2003. Canada finally rolled out MNP just a few days ago, to the sound of… well, nothing, from the mobile phone giants. They must be hoping nobody will notice.

So it was with pleasant surprise today that I read Competition Bureau officers are “talking and meeting with limited-service brokers in the United States to gauge the potential effects of real estate restrictions in Canada”. (Read the article today if you’re interested… it goes behind a subscription wall after 24 hours.) The US DOJ and FTC have been looking into anti-competitive real estate policy and legislation driven by the National Association of Realtors (NAR) and several US states for the last year or so. It’s nice to see Canada doing a fast-follow on this one.

What’s the DOJ all fussed about? Their main bone of contention is so-called “minimum service” laws, which make it illegal for real estate professionals to provide limited service offerings (which cost less) to their clients. For instance, advertising a home for sale on the MLS and allowing the customer to handle the rest of the transaction is now against the law in 10 US states. The FTC and DOJ have voiced concern about this, advising the states that such rules will probably be deemed anticompetitive. The DOJ has also filed a lawsuit against NAR objecting to “overly restrictive” online property listings policies. The battle has been joined.

Why should Canadians care? Well, it turns out that CREA, NAR’s Canadian equivalent, has been trying to impose similar rules on its member MLS organizations for the last half a year or so. The Inman article cites several Canadian discount real estate companies that are struggling in the face of CREA rules, including Realtysellers, co-founded by Stephen Moranis, ironically a former president of the Toronto Real Estate Board and director of CREA. Realtysellers announced in November 2006 that it was suspending operations pending resolution of the CREA issues.

CREA recently backed off on passing formal regulations, but it’s taking another stab at it next week, this time with its policies recast as “interpretations” of existing CREA rules. The interpretations document is up for vote at CREA’s general meeting on March 24. In a nutshell, it implies that Realtors (CREA members and trademark users) cannot provide limited service offerings, cannot “merely list” properties on the MLS, and must remain middlemen at all times in real estate transactions … whether their clients want the help or not. Furthermore, property sellers’ name and contact information cannot appear on the MLS.ca website. You can see the proposed interpretations on the Real Estate Marketing web site.

Consumer choice is good. CREA should acknowledge that and change its tune, before the Competition Bureau forces it to do so.

Happy New Year!

I hope 2007 is starting off on a peaceful note for you. You’re probably reading this from your office, I’m guessing, evading work and responsibilities for just a few moments more before everything roars back into full swing around you. I’m doing the same: writing from my home office, and using a flu as my excuse for being a bit of a recluse and attempting to achieve only easy things today. So begins the year.

I hope also that 2007 is both happy and productive for you. So in that spirit, here is some inspiration from The Economist’s Dec 23rd 2006 issue, which focuses on the theme of happiness:

…some fortunate people … found deep satisfaction from losing themselves in their work: “forgetting themselves in a function”, as W.H. Auden put it. … This happy state, which Mr Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow”, arises most often in work that stretches a person without defeating him; work that provides “clear goals”, “unambiguous feedback” and a “sense of control”. Mr Csikszentmihalyi is now one of three scholars behind the “Good Work” project, which aims to make “flow” a more common experience in professional life.

Makes sense to me.

I wish you much good flow in the year ahead, both at work and at play.

Google’s Steve Yegge wrote a lengthy critique on Agile development about a month ago. The piece is ostensibly about agile development, but it’s really more about how Google works and why it doesn’t need capital-A Agile methods.

My favorite bit: “developers can switch teams and/or projects any time they want, no questions asked; just say the word and the movers will show up the next day to put you in your new office with your new team.”

Sounds like fun. It’s not something every company can do, though, especially not well-established ones. The way I see it, this amazing degree of freedom stems from two particular luxuries.

Luxury #1: Incredibly deep pockets. When you’re flush with cash you can hire the best and brightest, and reward them heavily. Google is so rich that it can spend disproportionately on acquiring and retaining talented people, even when going head to head against its richest competitors. And its business model is so highly profitable — again, compared to competition — that it should be able to continue doing this indefinitely.

Luxury #2: Very few dependencies. Google delivers software straight to the web and millions of largely nameless customers, rather than into the hardware production pipelines of a handful of OEMs or the IT integration pipelines of a few thousand corporate clients. That’s why they can pick and choose what to build, and when to ship it, if ever. That’s why they can label products as “beta” in perpetuity if they wish to: their customers aren’t yet demanding any more than that. And that’s why Google developers can vote with their feet on which projects to work on: at the end of the day, there isn’t a customer on the phone line holding them accountable for a slip in the schedule of Project X.

Lucky ducks.

Email: 1579 inbox items. 998 unread. 400 more incoming by end of day.
Voicemail: 12 messages, 7 of them new. And the phone is ringing.
Calendar: booked solid from 8:30 AM to 6:00 PM in 30 and 15 minute segments.

Does this sound familiar to you?

Now imagine pumping all of that — the email, the phone calls, the meeting reminders — through a desktop PC, a laptop, a Pocket PC, and a mobile phone. And add ubiquitous high bandwidth wireless connectivity so that you can be online all the time. Every. Single. Second.

Sound familiar now? For your sake, I hope not. But if you work in a knowledge-based job and use so-called “productivity” tools like email, voicemail, task lists and calendars to channel your workflow, this almost certainly rings a bell. I keep bumping into people who work in these sorts of “information overload” environments, and their struggles are much the same.

Below I’ve compiled some recommendations on how to survive in an information overload environment. This is a collection of techniques I learned over time from the workmates I most admired at Microsoft: the 1% slice of engineers, researchers, designers, marketers, admin assistants, and executives who were at the top of their game in quality, productivity, and work-life balance. I used their tactics daily to stay afloat.

To be clear, I’m not offering a magic wand for fixing overload situations in their entirety. In most workplaces the overload problem stems directly from the structure of the jobs, the collaboration methodology, and the number of hours you’re expected to put in. There’s no magic cure for that, short of re-engineering the corporate culture from top to bottom. I’m writing instead about what you can do on an individual level to retain your sanity, maximize productivity, and have more fun.

#1: Eliminate Interruptions
That means the “bling!” noises and popup windows and phone rings and myriad other silly widgets that signify status changes, meeting reminders, and the arrival of new messages. Turn that crap off. It distracts you from the task at hand, annoys people around you, and elevates your stress level by keeping you in a constant state of alert. Set the taskbar to autohide and reconfigure your productivity apps to stop harassing you.

Don’t worry; you can always flip all the bells and whistles back on later if you get lonely. But once your sanity starts ebbing back, you probably won’t want to. 95% of those interruptions are needless distractions. Eliminate them.

#2: Archive Aggressively
This rule is also known as “keep a clean work surface”. Find everything on your physical and virtual desktops and in your email that’s stale –- items you haven’t touched in the last 3 weeks, let’s say -– and file it in a set of reference folders.

Really, go ahead, do it now. You’ll feel much better.

For instance, I use Outlook to manage email and Windows to manage documents. In Outlook I have a small number of folders, one for each active project. I also have an archive that contains my old mail. Similarly in the My Documents folder I have a handful of folders, one for each project I’m actively working on, and then a “Reference” folder that contains reams of old stuff that I rarely need to look at. The archives keep all the old stuff out of sight and out of mind.

Again, don’t worry; you can always dig out all that junk later if you need it. But 95% of the time, you won’t. And with desktop and intranet search tools, you can always find something if you really need to. So archive it. Your archive is for reference material; your work surface is for active projects.

#3: Chunk Everything into Projects
It’s easy to fragment your concentration by treating tasks and messages as a swarm of unrelated bits and pieces. Sadly, most productivity tools push us further and faster down this slippery slope. (Public enemy number one in this regard: e-mail.) These tools are the fast path to overload, because they make it so easy to bombard each other with hundreds if not thousands of documents, emails, phone calls, tasks, and meetings. We end up with too many disparate things to concentrate on, and inevitably start to thrash or enter a state of analysis paralysis.

There’s no surprise here. Humans just aren’t good at focusing on lots of things at once. One way to get around this is to aggregate all tasks and messages into a small number of projects. Then treat every item as part of a project.

It sounds simplistic, and it is. But if you can do this successfully, then projects become a useful primary pivot for your thinking, as follows:

• Schedule your time at the project level, not the task or message level
• Structure your day so that you work on one and only one project at a time
• Work in contiguous blocks that are of optimal length for your personal productivity. (Do you work better in 15 minute chunks or 50 minute chunks? Experiment to figure it out, and then chunk your work that way.)

I find about five projects is a reasonable upper limit for me; more than that and I’m back in the same trap of too many things to focus on. This relates closely to a particular philosophy I aspire to live by: do a small number of things really well, rather than many things with mediocrity. (Hey, give me a break; I said it’s an aspiration.)

A common objection to projects is that they just mask the underlying complexity, and ultimately one must still deal with all the nasty individual bits and pieces. Granted, the complexity still exists. But masking that complexity is the whole point: projects help you avoid getting bogged down in the details, and give you a nice clean structure for managing your time, energy, and priority tradeoffs. Which leads us to…

#4: Prioritize
Once you’ve arranged your work into projects you can ask three useful questions: (1) What is the relative order of prioritization? (2) Which projects need more time, or less time? (3) Which ones can you starve or drop entirely, so that you can carve out time to take on new, higher-priority commitments?

This little mantra is incredibly useful, both as an internal mental conversation and with work colleagues. Repeat as necessary.

#5: Filter
What to do with the onslaught of incoming stuff? Filter it, like this:

• Assign each incoming task and message to a project.
• Screen out the stuff that isn’t in your list of committed projects.
• If you don’t own something, hand it off to the person who does.
• Deal with the under-30-second items immediately. Add all longer items to a project, for later action that you schedule into your calendar.
• Try to touch each item only once (to read it, delete it, route it, or file it).

This is straight out of Getting Things Done, for the most part. It works. In particular, check out the free workflow diagrams, available here.

Repeat the filtering routine once in a while, but as a scheduled task, not a continously running activity. Filtering your email every 5 minutes while you’re in a meeting or a conversation just fragments your attention. Which leads us to…

#6: Be Fully Present
Think about the last time you were in a meeting or a conversation with several other people. Was everyone really there? I can’t count the number of meetings I’ve been in where most participants were mentally absent: browsing the intranet or internet, buried in email, or perhaps IM’ing someone across the meeting table or down the hall. Or the number of times a face-to-face conversation was interrupted to take a phone call.

Is that other thing – whatever it happens to be – really so burningly important that it cannot wait? Probably not. So ignore it. You will complete the current task faster and with higher quality by staying focused. Close the laptop, turn off your phone, and give the people around you your full attention.

#7: Match the Medium to the Message
Email, chat, text messages, phone calls, face-to-face meetings, blog posts… which medium to use? Does your communication need to be real-time or is an asynchronous medium more appropriate? Are you trying to deliver a monologue or create a dialogue? In-person or remote? One-to-one or one-to-many? Does the communication even need to happen, or is it more effective to say nothing?

These choices matter because they affect productivity a great deal, both your own and that of people you’re communicating with. My roles at Microsoft were all extremely communication-heavy, so I made these sorts of choices continually throughout the day. I never became a star at it -– I still rely too heavily on email, for instance, as my workmates would testify –- but I did get a lot more adept over time at communicating effectively. This included actively shifting conversations into more appropriate mediums, e.g. identifying the mass email that really ought to be a meeting, or the meeting that really should be resolved with a document. That skill helped me save a lot of time and avoid spamming others.

Choose wisely -– on a per-message basis -– which medium to use, and encourage others to do the same. If you do, you’ll get the message across much more effectively. More signal, less noise.

#8: Take Breaks
Nobody can continually put out top quality work, especially creative work, without taking a break once in a while. So at least once an hour, stop for a few minutes. Get up. Stretch. Go for a walk. Get a drink of water. Do something else and give your brain a chance to recharge.

The same thing holds at the macro scale: take vacations. There is never a good time to take a vacation, so don’t worry about that. Just take it. And make sure the vacation is long enough to (a) fully flush work from your brain, and (b) dissuade your workmates from stockpiling new work for you. I find there is a magic threshold around 10 days after which the rate of incoming mail drops a great deal.

A related technique I used a few times was to post an Out of Office message that read something like this: “Thanks for your mail. I’m on vacation until xx/yy. I’m deleting all email received while I am out of the office. If you need me to act on your email, please resend it to me after I return.” It takes guts to do this, and your workplace might not allow it. But if you can, try it. It makes re-entry a whole lot easier. A close second is to automatically route all mail during that period into an archive folder, which you can reference later if you really need to.

Another tactic in this bucket is to declare an email and/or meeting moratorium one day or half a day a week. (Or a blog holiday, like I’ve been doing the past few weeks.) This works nicely if you can get the whole workgroup to do it at the same time.

#9: Be Draconian With Your Time
You own your time. Be greedy about it. You dig?

Learn to say no to things that are low priority, and to inefficient uses of time, so that you can say yes to the truly important (and usually more fun!) opportunities. When you or your management commits you to something new, explicitly review your project list for something else you can stop doing.

At Microsoft, the true masters at this are Executive Assistants. I will never forget working with Kay Barber-Eck, who handled Paul Maritz’ schedule. On my first day in the team Kay explained to me, with a wicked grin on her face, that the only meetings I could get with Paul would be the 3 minute travel times between one meeting and the next. She meant it, too! Kay would gladly school anyone who violated her time and priority rules, VPs included. She was a blast to work with and worth her weight in gold, because she made everyone else around her far more effective.

#10: It’s the Method, Not the Tools
Don’t confuse productivity methodology with productivity tools. They are entirely different beasts.

A tool used skillfully can help your productivity, and a tool misused can destroy your productivity. This is true of Outlook, Nelson Email Organizer, Gmail, and at least ten other tools that I’ve tried. Good tools are necessary but not sufficient.

Much more important than tools is your methodology -– your mental process -– for managing time and attention. That’s what this essay is about. There are plenty of other productivity methodologies out there, like Getting Things Done, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and related classics like The Mythical Man Month. Find an approach that works for you, and master it. Doing that will trump any tool you can lay hands on. Once you have a methodology under control, you can generally use all sorts of tools to implement it.

Good luck staying afloat!

Seth Godin blogs, “One guy gets a $10 bonus. The person sitting next to him seethes for weeks, while the bonusee forgets it soon enough.”

Yep. But what’s the solution? No bonuses, Seth would argue. Probably works in a small business with fulfilling work and good baseline salaries. But with growth, watch out for free-riders.

I have yet to see a business setup that incents everyone to do great work, and cannot be gamed, and does not breed resentment in some part of the employee population. It is possible to do this in a small organization, but at larger scales all models I’ve seen fail on at least one of these counts.

I put forward some idealistic notions on this earlier, here. Feels to me like they’re headed in the right direction, but not yet ready for prime time.

I guess if the perfect model existed we’d all be using it.