mark[sweep]

My wife has a purse that she bought in December of last year. I noticed that one of the straps was fraying and pointed it out to her. What started as a simple public service announcement soon turned into a Jobs To Be Done interview about when and where she bought it.

At the Switch Workshop NYC, one of the tips given was to start at the point of purchase, so I followed this advice and began at the “end” of the JTBD timeline. In Jobs To Be Done, one of the tools used is the concept of a timeline. The idea is that you want to place the consumer back in time and relive their emotions and thoughts going “in” to the purchase. Post purchase, if you ask them how they feel about things, they are prone to rationalize and you’ll get false information - if you recreate their thinking going “in” to the purchase you get a better understanding of the forces at work when they hired the purchase to do a job.

She kept claiming that the purse was an “impulse buy” but we shall see that that’s not quite true. She explained how she was shopping at DSW on her lunch break, it was December.

“Why were you shopping?” I asked.

She explained that the impetus for shopping was that her niece’s birthday was coming up and she was looking for a gift for her.

“So you were looking for shoes for her?”

“Well, no, actually, I really needed a pair of new boots.”

It turns out that her black boots had holes in them and she needed new boots. She had holes in her boots since last year but, as she explained, it wasn’t until it got to the Fall and was cold, rainy and snowy that the holes became a problem. She would still wear the boots when it didn’t rain or snow, but it had rained recently and since it was cold she had to wear pumps and got her feet icky and wet!

“Okay,” I said, “So you waiting until December to buy new boots and picked up a purse as well? Why did you wait so long?”

She paused to think about this, “There must be some reason… I know! I have another pair of brown boots and they finally got a hole in them too! That’s why I could wait on the black boots until December.”

So here I realized that there was actually a parallel timeline involving boots that I had uncovered that was related to her purse purchase.

In the Jobs To Be Done timeline, you try to identify key points or events and capture the emotional energy around those. For my wife, she noticed 1 year ago her old black boots had developed holes in them. In the timeline, this would be called the “First Thought”. However, she didn’t actively act on this idea for a year. She had her other pair of boots to fall back on and with the warm weather in Spring and Summer, the boots weren’t on her mind. It wasn’t until her second pair of boots developed holes that her thoughts were triggered back to “I should really look for a new boot”. In the timeline, this event marks the change to “passive looking” - and the 2nd boots hole discovered is called Event #1. She still wasn’t shopping yet, but the level of emotion was rising.

Later, she really developed urgency and switched to “active looking” when she got caught on a rainy day and had to wear pumps. Her feet got wet and gross (New York City streets) and then the emotion really ramped up. Event #2 was the trigger to start shopping.

I wanted to get back to the purse, so we switched gears .

“So back to the purse purchase, before this did you not have a purse to use? Why get a new one?”

She pointed to her old purse, “Oh I had that one. But you can see it’s cute but too big. I can’t use it on the weekend.”

“Weekend? What do you mean?”

She then went on to describe how she wanted a big, but not too big purse (a long monologue ensued about women and huge purses). The old purse was good because it could fit her book, which she needed for her long subway ride to work, but on the weekends, she didn’t have a book to read, and then the purse was a little too big. She did own a cute small purse that was better for weekends.

So every weekend before we headed out, she would unpack the contents of her weekday purse onto the bed, and them repack all the items into the weekend purse - minus the book and her work pass. Then on Sunday night, she would unpack the contents of her weekend purse and put all that back into the weekday purse - plus her book and work pass. This went on for a year.

I kinda stared at her in disbelief.

“Crazy huh?”

I asked her when she bought her old purse - it was also about a year ago when a friend was visiting from California. They went shopping together and her friend found the purse and suggested she buy it. She did indeed buy it but soon after that she had the first thought: “This purse is too stiff and bulky for the weekend.” From there, she starts to passively look the first time she has to empty her purse and the only actively look as she enters the DSW and sees the purse rack on the way to purchasing her boots.

This highlights another point in the JTBD timeline - the experience of the purchase and the satisfaction or the dissatisfaction with the purchase. In this case, the dissatisfaction with the original purse became the first thought to getting another purse. The timeline for her old purse purchase flows right into the timeline for her new purse purchase.

So in this single interview, there are actually three purchase decisions we could unpack. The boots, the old purse and the new purse. I also asked her about how satisfied she felt after using her purse.

“I like it. It can fit my book for the subway and is small and cute enough for the weekend. Plus it has a lot of pockets to organize stuff.”

Of course, now that I’ve pointed out the strap was frayed on her new purse…

Resources:

• New York Jobs To Be Done Meetup
• Jobs To Be Done Radio
• A Template for JTBD interviews

There’s a way of thinking about startups and products that sat at the feet of W. Edwards Deming, godfather of Lean Manufacturing and the famed Toyota Production System. It is a simple but powerful concept that can cut down on product wastage and dismantle misconceptions about what people actually want.

Lean Startup?

Nope - it’s the Jobs To Be Done Framework.

Jobs To Be Done is a way of uncovering the forces behind a product purchase. The idea is that customers don’t buy your product, they “hire” them to perform a job. Clay Christensen, author of the Innovator’s Dilemma,  talked about the framework in the “Milkshake” talk.

I remember seeing the milkshake video online and being captured by the power of the idea. It was such a simple concept - stop thinking about features and satisfaction, start thinking about jobs your product is hired to do. But then I was stuck. There wasn’t any meat to the idea, nothing to grab a hold of.

And so Jobs To Be Done was relegated to the dustbin of my brain where cool but impractical ideas live. This went on for a while until…

Fast forward to the Mattress Interview. Here finally was something I could sink my teeth into. The beginnings of a digestible framework. Bob Moesta, Chris Spiek and a community of practitioners at Jobstobedoneradio.org have started to disseminate practical tools and examples of how to tease out the job to be done. If you haven’t listened to it yet, stop now and queue it up.

Remember when you first heard of The Lean Startup? It was that same revelation of a powerful, simple and logical idea. Since 2008, Lean Startup has grown to be a worldwide movement and phenomenon. It’s been debated and practiced and evangelized throughout the startup community. I remember wishing I heard learned about it earlier and trying absorb as much as possible in as short a time as possible.

Jobs To Be Done is just as powerful an idea - in fact, it’s the perfect complement to Lean Startup. It’s on the same trajectory so don’t miss the boat, this one is going to be big.

Resources:

• Jobs To Be Done radio
• The Critical Path Episode #19: The hiring and firing of milkshakes
• NY Jobs To Be Done Meetup
• The Re-Wired Group
• Innosight
• Ryan Singer on Jobs To Be Done 

Scene from Looper, Sony Pictures

Theory 1:

You’re not allowed to change things in time travel. Every thing that happens is fated to happen and will happen regardless of what you try to do. Each person has only a single timeline which can “loop” back upon itself but never replace one or the other. So at any given point in time you may have multiple “instances” of a person but looking at the entire timeline, there is only one instance of a person that starts with birth and ends with death.

Let’s take an example:

Collin and Mary are driving along a road happily. Suddenly a deer appears, Mary screams closes her eyes and slams on the brakes but is unable to avoid it. Collin is thrown from the car through the windshield and Mary finds him dead on the highway.

Mary, now grief-stricken continues on in time until she reaches a point at which time-travel is possible. She hops into the time machine to the point prior to the accident and then time-ports Collin our of the car and further into the past. History is changed right? 

via Kara & Ezme blog

In time travel theory 1, because past Mary saw and witnessed Collin’s death, Collin has to die at that point in time. Even though future Mary seems to have saved Collin from his fate, events will conspire so that Collin ends up back in the car at the point of death.

In our fictional scenario, future Mary tells saved Collin about his untimely death and how she came back to save him. But now, destiny cannot be thwarted and fate takes over. Like the monkey’s paw, it’s inevitable that future Mary’s well-laid plans will go astray.  

Perhaps saved Collin now goes to sleep but inadvertently rolls over into the time-machine and jumps forward back to right before the point of impact and is now in the backseat. He sees past Mary close her eyes, he sees future Mary jump back and jump out the past Collin.

The car hits the deer and from the backseat, saved Collin is thrown through the front window and dies.

When past Mary opens her eyes she sees Collin dead on the highway. She doesn’t realize that this Collin is a few hours older than the Collin that started the road trip with her, to her it’s the only Collin she knows. 

Future Mary wakes up and finds saved Collin gone. She rushes to the scene of the accident, fearful of what she knows happened. There’s saved Collin, dead in the highway. No matter how many more times she comes back to try to change the past, she can never prevent the events that she herself witnessed. Fate must be served.

In this theory, we see that each person can only have a single time-line. There is no branching possibilities, if you did something in the past, that thing has to happen. It cannot be altered. You may think you alter it but whatever you are currently experiencing must occur. An individual’s time-line can “loop” back on itself and there are two instances of the same person visible at the same time but taking a macro-view that’s actually only one person. Each person is represented as a single line with an anchored beginning and end. No matter how many times you twist and loop the string it always ends at the same point.

Notice that this doesn’t prevent possible time paradoxes. For example, supposed Mary’s bringing back of time-machine technology is confiscated by the government in the past. They use that technology to develop time-travel in the future. This is the same time-travel technology future Mary uses to go back in time to try to save Collin - thus inventing time-travel.

Terminator series

The Terminator series of movies is an example of this theory. In the future, a sentient computer network called “Skynet” is being defeated by a human named John Connor. “Skynet” decides to send a robot from the future back in time to kill John Connor’s mother before he is born - thus preventing SkyNet’s imminent defeat. Lo and behold, events conspire so that *spolier alert* the very act of trying to alter the timeline ends up creating John Connor.

Scene from Terminator 2: Judgement Day, TriStar Pictures

Later on in the series, we discover that the act of sending future technology into the past ends up creating SkyNet and the Terminators. The future is inalterable and all attempts to change it only serve to make the future more inevitable.

Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft are terms coined by noted German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies over a century ago, to describe two concepts in social groups. Gemeinshaft and Gesellschaft are loosely translated into “community” and “society” respectively.

Gemeinshaft (community) is characterized by:

• - Emphasis on the togetherness of the group
• - The group being more important than the members
• - Strong communal relations
• - Shared moral values and beliefs
• - Weaker division of labor (less specialization)

Examples of gemeinshaft social groups include rural neighborhoods, families, tribes, garage bands, sports teams.

Gesellschaft (society) is characterized by:

• - Individualism overriding community
• - Contractual relationships over covenental
• - Stronger division of labor (more specialization)
• - Diverse social mores

Examples of gesellschaft social groups include corporations, diverse countries, social clubs, universities.

In practice, Tönnies would not classify a social group as purely either gemeinshaft or gesellschaft. More than likely both types are at work in a social group at varying strengths.

Tönnies theory provides a useful lens to see social groups and social networks through. Because of the mixed nature of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft in social groups, you can see transitions where groups that used to be gemeinshaft-oriented move toward a more gesellschaft nature.

Let’s take a look at Twitter and in particular early Twitter and modern Twitter. In the early incarnation of Twitter, the use case and the social groups that formed around the service were much more gemeinshaft oriented. In a recent Build and Analyze podcast, developer Marco Arment mentioned how Twitter used to be a conversation with friends and now the signal to noise ratio is much lower. When Twitter was small, the community that existed had much stronger bonds. Twitter as a service was used as a public conversation with friends. 

As a late-comer to Twitter, I have a very different use for Twitter. For me, Twitter is a utility to get news and stay on top of what is happening. The social group I make on Twitter is predicated on a contractual relationship where I as the individual am much more important that the circle of followers/followings that I formed.

Thus we see the rise of App.net, where the early adopters of Twitter have a chance to pick up and move their social group to a place where gemeinshaft is better facilitated. Because of the paid nature of App.net (a yearly fee of $36 is required), it is likely that the service will keep it’s smaller community and be able to keep the gemeinshaft communities served (providing it survives on a smaller group). 

We see this transition from gemeinshaft to gesellshaft often in modern social networks. On Facebook, we see “friends” start as a small set of friends into a directory of acquaintances. In order to restore gemeinshaft, Facebook allows you to now deliniate “friends” vs. “family”. In Google+, this takes a similar form of being able to define “circles”.

As social networks grow in size and scale, there is an almost inevitable transference from gemeinshaft into gesellschaft and an equally inevitable conflict. Periodically, there is backlash and those seeking gemeinshaft splinter off to form a new social network or protest - seeking to return to the days when the network was smaller.

You could also say that gemeinshaft and gesellschaft underlie some of Geoff Moore’s ideas about Crossing the Chasm. In order to move past early adopters and “cross the chasm” to mass market, Moore recommends establishing a small narrow “beachhead”. The beachhead is a small slice of the mass-market - a gemeinshaft community, if you will. Identifying and taking over this “thin edge of the wedge” allows you to expand out to other groups and cross the chasm to mass market.

Gemeinshaft communities are easier to attack because of the nature that these communities take. Gemeinshaft communities are characterized by shared social mores. People in the group tend to share beliefs and values (even if the shared value is individual uniqueness). You can cater to the common elements of a gemeinshaft community much easier than the looser associations and individuals of a gesellshaft group. This is one reason why every other startup pitch is: “It’s like Facebook for X” where X is a smaller gemeinshaft community of:

• - dog lovers
• - urban hipsters
• - vegan foodies
• - vegan foodie urban hipster dog lovers

As Tönnies himself pointed out, gemeinshaft and gesellshaft are “normal types”. They are idealized notions useful for conceptual framing. In real life, they are mixed and complex. They are useful from the theoretical standpoint in framing and talking about social groups but when you’re dealing with actual social groups, it is necessary to delve deep and empirically research the mixtures of the two types.

Comments, flames, thoughts? - @marksweep

Perhaps you may have read “Leaders”, the seminal book on leadership by Warren Bennis. Or maybe you’ve skimmed over “The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership” by John Maxwell. Perhaps you have a well-worn copy of Steven Covey’s the “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” sitting on your bookshelf…

You probably haven’t heard of this book. Or if you have, it’s not in your leadership section of your local Barnes and Nobles. The book I’m talking about is called “Steel my Soldiers Hearts” and it’s a war book.

Instead of being a book about leadership, it’s a book about leading. Specifically, it’s an autobiography of Col. David Hackworth’s time in with the US Army’s 4/39 Battalion of the 9th Division in South Vietnam. And it’s an object lesson in leadership.

The 4/39th Battalion was a sad-sack reject battalion with low-morale and lower combat performance when Col. Hackworth (then Lt. Col.) took over. Its mission was to patrol the quagmire of swamp and rice paddies in the Mekong Delta. And it was failing badly. More soldiers were casualties to booby traps and landmines than enemy fire and morale was terrible. It was the Army’s worst fighting battalion.

In the space of a few month, the battalion was transformed into the “Hardcore Recondos”, one of the fiercest fighting forces in Vietnam. It’s a great story, a turnaround story as great as any business leader’s, even greater because lives were at stake.

The book seldom talks about leadership, it rarely distills the lessons into laws or maxims. Instead, you as the reader have to shift and analyze what Col. Hackworth did to turn this “pussy” battalion into warriors. 

Leading from the Front

By the time Col. Hackworth left the 4/39th, he had received his seventh Purple Heart. The brass deemed him too important to be shot at and turned him stateside. By leading from the front, Col. Hackworth endeared himself to his men. He wasn’t willing to sit back at the fire support base in an air-conditioned command tent while his men were in deep in the thick of the fight. 

Col. Hackworth had the utmost respect for the American fighting man. Remember that these were not the highly trained, expert warriors of the modern U.S. Army. These were members of a draftee army, pulled from every neighborhood (mostly poor) in America. These were average citizen soldiers who had the misfortune of not being born to rich parents and having an unlucky draft number.

Before he took over the battalion, the previous commander had had a porta-potty flown in and planted next to the command tent. Cold beers and hot showers were normal luxuries in the middle of the Mekong Delta. Hackworth did away with all those, imposing lean, hard and austere conditions on the men. They complained, they resisted, but they also knew that it wasn’t a double standard. Everything they had to suffer, their commanding officer suffered with them.

A New Identity

Infantrymen at that time had to wear “steel pot” helmets which had a camouflage helmet lining made of canvas that was strapped over the helmet. When he arrived at the battalion, Col Hackworth noticed that the G.I.’s had scribbled invectives on the lining that reflected their dissatisfaction with the Army. He ordered everyone in the battalion to flip their linings inside out. Instead of a camouflage print, a simple brown color now covered all the 4/39th’s helmets. As the battalion learned their new tactics, they starting hearing enemy chatter about the hated “brown-hat soldier” and how they were to be feared and respected! This simple act of discipline helped instill psychological fear in to the enemy and gave the soldiers a bonding symbol.

Col. Hackworth had to change the culture of the outfit and started slowly but ensured that the cultural changes were ruthlessly enforced. When starting out, he would only issue two new rules. When the battalion mastered those two rules, he would give two more. Like turning a massive tanker, he tackled small meaningful things first and kept at it until those small things were retained. The first two rules - weapons clean and present at all times, helmets always on. Little things.

The 4/39th were given a new name. When saluting the soldier would have to say “Hardcore Recondo, sir” - and the officer would have to reply “No F*cking Slack.” Recondo was a combination of recon and commando. It sounds hokey and silly but as a testament to the power of naming things, “Hardcore battalion” became a source of enduring pride. Special insignias were made for the members of the battalion. Stationary was changed. It started out as silly until it became a badge of honor.

Vision and Details

All of these leadership tactics would have been moot if Col. Hackworth didn’t have a vision for how to fight the VC. What ended up being cool, could have been “Mickey Mouse” if the commander didn’t lead them to victory.

Having spent years before in Vietnam, Col. Hackworth had a strategy to win. He would have the Hardcore Recondos “out G the G”. The would be better guerrilla warriors than the guerrillas themselves. Using ambush tactics and smart deception, the 4/39th built up a fearsome record in the Mekong Delta and severely shut down VC activity in the area.

But it was not enough to be a big picture guy, one of the traits of all great military commanders has been their ability to focus down and make sure the details are right at the tip of the spear. Col. Hackworth would personally greet every replacement soldier, as well as walk the perimeter and chat up the soldiers in the forward areas. 

His supply officer, recalled the time when a soldier complained that his boots were too large for him. Col Hackworth chewed out his supply officer and ordered him to pull apart the country looking for boots that fit. This officer ended up finding a pair of women’s boots that worked. “This taught us all an important lesson, that Hack cared for the lowest of soldiers and he expected his commanders and staff to damn well look after them.”

Col. Hackworth knew the value of knowing the greater pictures as well as zooming in to the small details.

O God of battles, steel my soldiers’ hearts.
Possess them not with fear. Take from them now
The sense of reck’ning ere th’ opposèd numbers
Pluck their hearts from them.

Henry V - Act IV, Scene 1

Col. David Hackworth died at the age of 74 in 2005. After leaving Vietnam, he spoke out against the war in Vietnam and criticized the Army’s disregard for soldier’s welfare. He formed Soldiers For The Truth Foundation, an organization dedicated to military reform.

To the very end he was a soldier and a leader of men.

I went to a Brooklyn Nets game the other day. Having lived in both New Jersey and New York, I’ve now been to both recent incarnations of the team and was struck by the differences.

The Urban Stadium

The Brooklyn Nets have a fancy new stadium called the Barclays Center. It sits in the heart of Brooklyn at a major subway hub. My wife had the opportunity to visit the Barclays Center while it was still under construction. The builders mentioned to her how it was a smaller stadium than they were used to building.

The stadium is surrounded by sidewalks not parking lots. While this means there is no “tailgating”, it also makes the center much more intimate to the community. You can literally look into the stadium from the street and see people in their seats through the glass entrance. In addition, the stadium doesn’t dominate the skyline, it’s sunken into the ground. Street level is actually at the top of the first section of seats. It’s not an imposing structure, it’s approachable, manageable. 

Most stadiums have giant screens that blare out light pollution all night long, however the Barclays Center seems to have been designed with this consideration in mind. The main screen is shaped in a unique “doughnut” type structure which blocks much of the escaping ambient light. Like the MCI Center in D.C., this stadium part of a new breed of urbanized stadiums - integrated into community.

Compare this with the Izod center (Continental Airlines Center when I attended). Situated in the marsh known as the Meadowlands it’s a large elevated monolithic block structure surrounded by acres of parking lot. It rises from the swamp like a some sort of mausoleum to sport.

You come to the center via car or bus (or train now) to consume your sport and then your leave to go back to your home. There are no local restaurants, there are only miles of concrete highways and swamp. 

The New Look Nets

One thing I found really interesting about the new Brooklyn Nets was that the team really wasn’t about the Nets at all. It was all about Brooklyn. I’ve never seen a team that is attempting to be so identified with its location.

Notice the (oft-criticized) Jay-Z designed logo- a B for Brooklyn rather than an N for Nets. When you’re in the stadium cheering for the team you don’t say “Let’s Go Nets” or even “N-E-T-S, Nets, Nets, Nets”. The chant for the team is a taunting hip-hop flavored chant of “Brook-l-yn, Brook-l-y-n.” 

The video highlights during the breaks highlighted community activity. The team was shown serving Thanksgiving dinner at the local soup kitchen St. Joseph’s Bread and Life. Throughout the game, the usual sound clips (bugle calls, “Charge!”) were replaced by sound bites from rap songs featuring the word “Brooklyn” or New York artists. 

In an age of corporate team moves - where the “Jazz” play in Utah instead of New Orleans and the NY Jets play in New Jersey it’s interesting to see a team focusing on making the community the focus instead of the team. If they’re successful, it will be a powerful identity -

Brooklyn is the Nets and the Nets are Brooklyn.

Let’s hope they don’t move to Tulsa…

There’s a new corporate buzzword that’s making the rounds now and perhaps you at MegaCorp have heard of it:

“Disruption”

The idea behind disruption is that fundamental innovations allow new players to disrupt the existing businesses of the old leaders. Because, the old guard is so effective and entrenched in their existing (mega-successful) business, they are unable to accomodate the disruptive change.

Someone hands you a book called “The Innovator’s Dilemma” which looks nice on your shelf but you’ve already come up with a solution to the dilemma.

“The startup division”

You create a “startupy division” at MegaCorp. One that can think the innovative thoughts and do the innovative things while the rest of the corporation continues to excel. Perhaps you call this MegaCorp Research Division. The mavericks and “young” folk are placed into this windowless “war room” where they can innovate like a start-up.

The first year works great - sure the division is losing money but they come up with some cool web products that add prestige to the company. You start supplying them with new fangled Macintosh computers and they’re allowed to use GMail instead of the ole Novell system everyone else uses.

But even now the cracks are starting to show…

Some people in the IT department are getting upset at crazy requests the startup division is asking for. Things like open ports in the triple-redundant firewall or something called Mongo. This is opening up the company to attack from hackers! The CIO demands to have a chat with you about what’s happening to MegaCorp security because of this maverick division.

HR starts complaining to you about the crazy hiring forms that the startup division is supplying. One of the requirements forms for a web developer says this:

Requirements:

- Smart

- Gets things done

- Plays nice with others

Ridiculous! HR needs a list of real requirements like all the technologies the candidate needs to be an expert in, and how many years of experience in each. 

In MegaCorp, it is well known that the way to get power and influence is through headcount. Since MegaCorp makes money using billable hours and uses FTEs (full time equivalent) as the measure, the more FTEs you have, the more powerful and prestigious your division is.

As a result, the startup division tries to go on a hiring spree. They hire some mediocre candidates but they happen to be cheap! Sure they don’t fit into the culture and sure they underperform, but the division is growing in size and that’s a sure sign of success at MegaCorp.

You have a minor crisis when the startup division starts flying a pirate flag in their team room. Personally you laugh, but soon the head of the Operations department comes storming in talking about liability and it blocking the clean-up crews. The SVP of BigClient comes in and complains that BigClient people might come in and see this thing and think we’re not “professional” enough. You order the flag to come down.

The final straw comes when the startup division inadvertently creates a cheaper better way to service BigClient. Suddenly, it becomes faster and easier to do the work for BigClient, but it also means less revenue from BigClient. Less revenue means your business shrinks. Business shrinkage means layoffs and that’s a big No-No for the SVP of BigClient. It’s also embarrassing.

Companies are about growth.

Prestige is about how many millions you bring in.

What will you tell your CEO-buddies at the country club? That you started a division that ended up shrinking your balance sheet and reducing the number of people you employ? They will laugh you off the golf course.

So in the end, you had to “re-direct” the energies of the startup division. It becomes a support division for your company. Now it helps to make your more efficient at doing the business you’ve always been doing. It no longer is a threat to your business, it’s now an asset! Disaster is averted and you’ve learned a valuable if expensive lesson…

Best not to rock the boat.

An ounce of information is worth a pound of data.

An ounce of knowledge is worth a pound of information.

An ounce of understanding is worth a pound of knowledge.

Despite this, most of the time spent in school is devoted to the transmission of information and ways of obtaining it. Less time is devoted to the transmission of knowledge and ways of obtaining it (analytical thinking). Virtually no time is spent in transmitting understanding or ways of obtaining it (synthetic thinking). Further more, the distinctions between data, information, and so on up to wisdom are seldom made in the educational process, leaving students unaware of their ignorance. They not only don’t know, they don’t know what they don’t know.

The reason so little understanding is transmitted by teachers is that they have so little to transmit. They are more likely to know what is right than why it is right. Most why questions do not have unique and simple answers, and therefore are difficult to use in examinations or to grade when they are used. Explanations require discussion if they are to produce understanding. The ability to lead fruitful discussions is not an attribute of most teachers.

- Russ Ackoff

A few months ago, I bought my mom a new iPad for her birthday. She was quite excited when she got it. She called me to tell me about how she gave her old PC laptop to my dad because now she had a shiny new iPad and couldn’t wait for my brother-in-law to come by to help set it up. Birthday success!

Or so I thought.

A few weeks later, I got a text from my sister: “Mom hates the iPad! She doesn’t know how to use it!”

Wow, what happened there? I had thought the iPad would be a perfect match for my mom - she was somewhat tech savvy and I thought she would have been fine with the much simpler iPad. Wasn’t the iPad supposed to be for mothers and small kids?

I called her on the phone to find out what went wrong. After a few minutes, it was clear there were a few things that she had to learn in order to enjoy the iPad.

Three things

1. Everything is an app - The problem with the iPad was that my mom was a reasonably savvy PC user! She had to unlearn what she had learned on her laptop. She was trying to access her email, her Yahoo! Finance, her Facebook account all through the web browser. On the PC there was really only one app she used - Internet Explorer. On the iPad she had to unlearn this and realize that everything had a dedicated app. The big idea behind the iPad was single focus applications.

Once she learned this concept, she quickly glommed onto the Mail app, a good finance app and Facebook for iPad.

2. You don’t need to log in again - Another thing my mom was confused about was the stateful nature of the iPad. Whenever she used her Yahoo! mail on the PC, she knew she would have to first login to access it. This was kind of a reassuring ritual for her. 

When she started trying the iPad, her sessions were saved, and her state was constantly being saved. In her mind, this was suspicious activity! I explained to her that this was a new paradigm for the iPad. The iPad was a very personal computer - it recognized you as the primary user and kept the position (ideally) of everything you did. 

3. FaceTime is a killer app - Before the iPad, we actually did do video calls over Skype. It was a great way to keep connected with the grandkids. But since it was on the laptop, it was whole ordeal to get things ready. They would call on a regular phone to see if we were available, then we’d load up Skype and make the call. Invariably, there would be a problem with the USB webcam, or there would be no sound/video or both. If my sister’s kids were over, they had to awkwardly spin the laptop around to try to capture running children for a quick “hello”.

Even though a laptop is a portal, it was always connected to the wall or a dozen USB cables. The iPad however was truly portable. My parents now chat with us on the couch. They can try it at any time to see if we’re available. There’s no cable to mess with or audio problems to figure out. It’s a killer experience for families.

Following Up

I asked my sister again how mom was doing with the iPad. Now that she understands the paradigm of the iPad she uses it every day. She’s moving on to more advanced things like how to share photo streams. The barrier that held her back wasn’t that she was not tech-savvy enough for the iPad, it was that she was too familiar with the way of the laptop.

A few weeks ago, my sister got my mom an iPhone.

“It’s like an iPad in my hand!”

A few years ago I upgraded my copy of Adobe Photoshop on my Mac. I went online and found an upgrade version to purchase and waited a few days for it to arrive. Upon arrival, I unpacked the box and shrink wrap and slipped the disk into the CD drive. 

Upon installing, I was asked for the original serial number of the previous version of Photoshop. I pulled out a large CD folder (the kind with multiple sleeves) and transcribed the 16 digits and letters into the application.

Then I was prompted to enter the new serial number which I found inside the packaging.

This is a broken system.

An App Store World

With the success of the iOS app store, and the introduction of the Mac App Store, Apple has changed the model of computer and phone software forever. Other companies quickly followed suit but they are all following the pioneering model that Valve made successful with Steam.

The App Store model mitigates some of the problems of traditional software purchase:

1. Making registration unnecessary -  If you purchase a piece of software, you no longer need to worry about SERIAL-KEYS and entering verification numbers or calling companies to activate your software. The App store knows which computer you downloaded to and knows who purchased it.

2. Reducing lag time - App purchases are instantly gratified with an App store. Yes, there is download time but compare this to getting into your car, driving to Software Etc., purchasing a physical disk, driving home, installing, registering. As a testament to the instant gratification app stores allow, my friends each have 30+ unplayed Steam games on their hard drives from simple 1-click purchase decisions made instantly.

3. Friction free purchasing - Purchasing can be hard work. Even online, if you’ve had to go across the room, grab your wallet, find your credit card, flip over the credit card to find the secret code, you know that it’s not instant like with an app store. App stores have the advantage (and peril) of keeping your payment information on file so that process in friction free. Friction free means that you have less time to decide NOT to buy something, which means you buy more.

Problems with the App Store

The problems with the App Store model are many and varied but here are two prominent issues.

1. Paid upgrade model software - In the traditional software model, you purchase a disk for Adobe Photoshop CS X and then in 2 years your purchase your disk for Adobe Photoshop CS X+1. What do you do in the app store model? At least in Apple’s app store there is no provision for upgrading only a totally new purchase. If you purchased Adobe Photoshop CS X you get a discount for upgrading to Adobe Photoshop CS X + 1, in the App Store, you have to purchase CS X+1 at full price. 

A famous example of this was Tweetie 2. Tweetie was a successful Twitter client that made the jump to 2.0. When this happened the developer had to create a new App in the app store and remove the old one from. This caused confusion and customer dissatisfaction.

2. Downward pressure - App stores can save developers a lot of money. There’s no need to stock shelves and fight for space at Staples. On the other hand, app stores have relentlessly forced downward pressure on the price of apps. This is because the model of the app store is based on “commoditizing your complements”. What this means is that the platform owner (Apple, Google, Amazon) has different ways of monetizing their platform and apps are just a complementary service, not the main driver of profits. This incentivizes the platform owner to drive down the cost of apps to make their platform more enticing.

A new model for software

What I think we’re seeing with the rise of the app stores is a new model for software. One in which iconic software takes precedent and the upgrade cycle is less and less of a driving force for applications. 

Iconic software - Applications will be identified by a single name. You might know the intricate details if you’re a nerd of what version number you’re running but for the majority of app purchasers, it will be a single name. Take Google Chrome for example: You might know that you’re running version 15.0.874.106 but the majority of users just know it as Google’s browser. It’s iconic, it’s not Chrome and a version number it’s just Chrome. 

In-app purchasing (content and features) - Instead of upgrading to a new version, the majority of software enhancements will be in-app purchases. You will still have that iconic piece of software but the features, upgrades and enhancements will be purchased inside the app itself. You can see this shift happening now in the iOS App Store where the majority of games are moving to a free model but require and unlock for content and levels. 

Monolithic vs feature software - Monolithic is software that does a lot of things. Photoshop for example has a tons of different features in it. So does MS Word. In the future, we’ll see monolithic software rely on in-app purchasing to continue to drive revenue forward. In order to get the latest and greatest features, simply launch the application and purchase the new features. 

Feature software are small focused applications that are single feature only. These applications will rely on the growth of the platform for revenue. They will get continual free upgrades up till the point that there are now more new users to capture and they have maximized the value they can get out of the platform. The developer will then need to come up with a new feature application to write and sell. 

Conclusion

As with all prognostications, take this with a grain of salt. If you took a magic eight-ball and asked it what is the future of software it would come back with “Reply hazy, try again”. Based on the runaway success of the iOS and Mac App Stores however, I’d say it’s a good bet we’re gonna see these trends accelerate in the future.

Love to hear your comments - @marksweep on Twitter.

“How many of you are Project Manager Professional certified?”

Almost every hand rose in my class.

“There is no project manager in Scrum. I just wanted to let you know that you signed up for a class in which you don’t have a job.” said the instructor.

I recently took an Agile project management class that focused on Scrum. Scrum is an Agile framework for managing projects in a more iterative way. It was a great class, with many personal experiences shared by the instructor and students, but the real interesting part of the class was the sea-change that many students had to go through in order to convert their minds to Agile thinking. 

Traditional vs. Agile

Traditional project management focuses on creating a plan for a scope of work and getting your team to stick to that plan. You assign tasks and resources to the project in order to fulfill its pre-planned requirements. Traditionally, this was done through something called the Waterfall Method. 

In Agile, the focus is on delivering short increments of working product to the stakeholders in short periods of time. The goal is to allow to team to prioritize and deliver potentially shippable products and adapt to changing requirements.

Here’s a few hang-ups I saw from the plentiful questions raised in the class:

What’s the process?

A lot the question in the class involved the process. What’s the process for documentation? Who’s accountable for meeting the plan? What’s the way we track change requests and reduce scope?

This is a fundamental difference between traditional project management and agile. The Agile Manifesto states 

we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

This is a very difficult adjustment for us project managers. We’re used to using tool and techniques to get the team to stick to plan, but Agile focuses on getting the team to work at velocity and focusing on removing impediments to the team. 

That’s not to say there aren’t processes and tools used in Agile but that the focus of the tools and processes is to help the team get better.

What do I report?

In traditional project management, a lot of the focus is on reporting back to upper management whether you are on track or not. The emphasis is on what has been delivered. A lot the questions in class involved how you report your plan to management if you have no plan!

In Agile, the long term plan is not specific. There is probably a high level product roadmap and possible a release plan but these are 10,000 foot level artifacts. The shorter your time horizon (2 weeks) the more detailed your plan is. One of the mind-blowing things for project managers in the course was that the “short term project plan” was actually updated daily by Scrum teams. 

In Agile, long-term planning is guessing. Instead, the metric is working product. 

To quote the Agile Manifesto again:

we have come to value:

Working software over comprehensive documentation

The focus is not on what you have done, but what’s left to do. In a sense, the product is never done, but always done. There’s always potentially shippable product at the end of every iteration. Because stakeholders are involved from the start, they can see their needs being met constantly and are able change course frequently to get the solution they want.

Command and control vs. servant leadership

During class we did an exercise called the Daily Standup from Hell. It was an Agile version of the Kobayashi Maru. The Daily Standup is a quick 15 minute meeting in which the team is supposed to plan their actions for the day. During the exercise, the Scrum Master was tested with all sorts of wacky archetype team members trying to derail the meeting. What ended up happening was it turned into a command and control meeting in which the Scrum Master received status reports from the team and the Scrum Master started coordinating the tasks.

Instead of command and control, Agile preaches servant-leadership. The role of the Scrum Master is not to tell people what to do, or to coordinate responsibilities but to serve the team and help the team self-actualize. Our instructor told a story about how he spent his day getting coffee for the development team because the office coffee machine was broken, and a trip to Starbucks was a 20 minute productivity loss for each team member. That kind of service to the team helps to enable the team to get things done effectively.

A lot of the questions in class revolved around what do you do as a Scrum Master; and the answer was that you serve the team and help the team self-organize using Scrum.

That won’t here syndrome

Can Agile work at my company? We have a manual QA process that takes weeks at my company. We need to do Sarbanes-Oxley reporting at my company. We are ISO certified at my company. We do have siloed people at my company. We have matrix management at my company. We make widgets not software at my company. We only have huge projects at my company.

The list went on and on. Our instructor posted up a “Wall of Won’t” in the classroom to capture all the objection that came up about their specific company not being able to do Agile.

Sure, but will it blend?

The answer to “Can Agile work at my company?” was yes, but it takes work. It takes creativity, it takes getting a champion and getting buy-in. It may take getting an Agile coach to help you. It may mean convincing your team to do something it’s not used to.

But despite all the “wont’ work here” stories in class, there were also powerful “We did it, and it was awesome” stories from people who were able to persevere and implement Agile at their workplace.

——-

Comments flames feedback? @marksweep

Making group decisions can be a painful process. If you’ve ever been at a meeting that went nowhere or been with a group of friends trying to decide where to eat you’ll know what I mean.

But group decisions don’t have to be headache inducing. One of the things I learned while a consultant is that without a plan, getting a group of clients to reach a decision is like herding cats. Even if you somehow manage to reach a decision, someone is usually disgruntled or feels slighted or ignored. It’s a big mess. But with a plan, you can really smooth out a difficult process.

What we learned was that you need to have a framework for making decision as a group.

Deciding on the Decision 

One of the first things we would do was to have an objective. All group decision will naturally revolve around an objective. Deciding where to eat, settling on a strategy for your product, debating whether a feature should go into your app or not - these are all examples of objective. We would write in large letters across a whiteboard the objective the group was tackling.

The second thing that really helped to focus the group was deciding how to make the decision.

It seems like a strange thing to discuss, but by setting expectations and driving to consensus on this, it holds everyone to a social contract. As a participant, you agreed that this was the way to make the decision so it’s really hard later to be upset that the decision was reached in this manner.

It’s a form of buy-in that bypasses the actual decision made. In a group, you want to have as much buy-in as possible. People need to feel invested and not slighted by the decision. Even if they can’t buy-in to the actual choice made, they can still be invested in the process of making the decision.

Here’s a few examples of what groups came up with in terms of how to make the decisions:

1. Consensus - some groups opted for consensus. We actually tried to discourage this form of decision making because it’s the easiest to get tripped up on. Sometimes, people just feel too strongly to consent, even when everyone else is of the opposite opinion. Sometimes this is a good thing - witness the movie 12 Angry Men, many times this leads to frustration.
2. Majority vote - some groups decided that after some healthy debate and discussion, the group would vote to determine the best choice. This is a highly democratic method that placed equal weight on each person’s opinion. The downside to democracy is that there is a diffusion of responsibility for the decision made. Once a decision is made, it’s hard to follow through on it.
3. Decision maker - probably because we were working with business people, most of the groups we encountered settled on this form of decision making. In this method, the group strives toward consensus and then a “decision maker” makes the decision. In business, this is an easy hierarchy to make because there is a chain of command to follow. Often times the decision maker was the highest ranking person in the room, other times it was the subject matter expert.

Setting expectations

When you decide on the means of decision making you set the expectation that a decision will be made. You also achieve buy-in from the start for the process, even if you can’t get buy-in for the decision. It’s also a win for the group - you were able to accomplish something right off the bat. The seeds of success are being sown.

Consensus vs. Audience

Many times when making group decisions we subconsciously desire consensus when we should be desiring audience. Consensus is where everyone agrees on a course of action.  It’s nice to have consensus because everyone feels good. Many people are conflict-adverse and want everyone to agree before moving forward. They don’t like disagreement and confrontation.

For easy decisions, this is easy to achieve. But what happens when there are truly difficult decisions to be made? The choices are not obvious and strong opinions can divide the group. In this case, reaching consensus becomes on exercise in frustration for the whole group.

Instead, we found that we need to strive for having an audience rather than consensus. Being able to hear all sides before reaching the decision became part of the culture, instead of reaching a decision everyone agreed with. When we made healthy debate and being heard more important than consensus, it made the final decision much easier to take.

Divide and conquer

I used to think that brainstorming was the best way to get ideas and solutions from the group. In brainstorming you set a few ground-rules: 1) Everything is written down on a large whiteboard no matter what is said. 2) You never criticize someone else’s ideas, everything is accepted.

Turns out, research has shown that this is a suboptimal way to generate ideas. The best ideas, comes from healthy debate. When ideas are considered and argued over, the group is able to key off each other to come up with better and better ideas.

Instead of group brainstorming, the technique to use is divide and conquer. Breaking up large groups into smaller teams to come up with and debate ideas, allows a smaller span of communication while still encouraging ideas to be vetted and sharpened. Once a period of time has passed you can re-convene the larger group and present each groups ideas.

Role of the leader

In our case, we had a lot of “ultimate decider” type decisions being made. The role of the leader is a delicate one and as Spider-Man once said “With great power comes great responsibility.” The duty of the leader is to make the final decision. But while doing so, the leader needs to keep certain things in mind.

The leader needs to carefully consider and listen to everyone in the group’s opinions and ideas. Each person needs to feel that their contribution to the group is valued and taken seriously. This is the way a good leader can get people behind them even when they disagree with them. To be heard is a fundamental need of each person and the leader’s responsibility is to take that charge seriously.

The leader also should not make a decision simply because of their own personal preference. People respect the leader who sets aside their own wishes and personal ambition for the greater idea. An authentic decision involves the leader truly believing that this is the best decision of the group/company/vision and not just because they like their pet idea.

Art not Science

In the end, good group decision making is more art than science. The expectation setting, the divide and conquer, the understanding of roles were all things that helped your odds of success, but not the only factor. Being able to be a good facilitator, to get people to believe in the process and being able to surf the differing group dynamics were also very important. 

Hopefully, however, the ideas in this post help to create a framework for successful group decision-making. Good luck!

Comments, flames, feedback? Tweet me @marksweep

With the TomKat divorce and settlement making headlines all over your local checkout line, it seemed a ripe time to compare the workings of a real cult with the cult of everyone’s favorite fruit company.

Disclaimer: There are people who practice Scientology as a technology/religion that are not cultists and not brainwashed. However, the tactics used by the official Church of Scientology are controversial and have be labelled cult-like by many. 

For this comparison, it’s useful to have a model in mind. I’ll be using Steve Hassan’s B.I.T.E. model of cultic control from freedomofmind.com.

Behavior Control

A recent Fortune article, related this small anecdote about the changes in Apple under Tim Cook:

A former Apple employee recounts, for instance, a recent lunch with a current Apple engineer. At the end of the meal the ex-Apple worker, now at a Silicon Valley startup, assumed his buddy immediately needed to get back to work. “He said, ‘Eh, I have time for coffee if you like.’ ”
The outsider’s conclusion: “I think people are breathing now.” 

Cults don’t need to use physical force to constrain your behavior, though physical intimidation can be a factor. Cults can use peer pressure, events / large time commitments and rewards and punishments to control how you behave. 

Steve Jobs was able to force his teams to work exceptionally hard through sheer force of will, intimidation, guilt, inspiration and their reverence of him. Even the FBI commented on how he intimidated his associates.

At the Church of Scientology, a dark side has been exposed recently by many high-level defectors now openly speaking out about abuses at the Church. The leader of Scientology, David Miscavige, has been accused of ruling by physical intimidation - even to the extent of arranging an abusive game of musical chairs. In 2009, the Tampa Bay Times, delivered a chilling expose of the practices at Scientology HQ in a series of articles called The Truth Rundown:

 Staffers are disciplined and controlled by a multi­layered system of “ecclesiastical justice.” It includes publicly confessing sins and crimes to a group of peers, being ordered to jump into a pool fully clothed, facing embarrassing “security checks” or, worse, being isolated as a “suppressive person.”

Perhaps even more disturbing, Scientology has been accused of slavish child labor practices in it’s elite Sea Org, a sort of monk order for Scientologists.

It’s interesting to note that Apple has also been accused of child-labor through its supplier networks but has taken steps to audit and be open about this something that a cult would never do.

Information control

One of the key control factors that cults employ is the ability to filter the information that members receive. Through deception, secrecy and misinformation, a cult can shape how an individual views the world and removes critical thought from the thinking process.

Apple is famous for it’s secrecy. It’s been accused of spying on it’s employees, even to the point of purposely disseminating false information to plug leaks. New hires are sometimes placed on fake projects to gauge their trustworthiness.

In his book Inside Apple, Adam Lishinsky writes:

For new recruits, the secret keeping begins even before they learn which of these building they’ll be working in. Despite surviving multiple rounds of rigorous interviews, many employees are hired into so-called dummy positions, roles that aren’t explained in detail until after they join the company. The new hires have been welcomed but not yet indoctrinated and aren’t necessarily to be trusted with information as sensitive as their own mission. “They wouldn’t tell me what it was,” remembered a former engineer who had been a graduate student before joining Apple. “I knew it was related to the iPod, but not what the job was.” Others do know but won’t say, a realization that hits the newbies on their first day of work at new-employee orientation.

Lashinsky describes Apple employee secrecy as cult-like.

It works because they are believers. If they saw this as a job it would be a lot harder.”

Secrecy however is different from information control. In the end, Apple reveals it’s secrets to the public - in order to sell them. Some may accuse the company of deception (others call it marketing) but ultimately, thousands of critical eyes, reviews and tear-downs open up the secret sauce to the public.

Scientology on the other hand is insistent that their secrets remain only for the faithful. Scientology is based on a “leveling” system of enlightenment. There are currently 8 levels of enlightenment which can be reached through auditing (a form of spiritual counseling), courses, and cash.

When the show South Park revealed the inner cosmology of Scientology in it’s epic “Trapped in the Closet” episode, the Church of Scientology went ballistic, even going to the extent of rooting through the South Park creator’s garbage for “dirt” on the animators. 

Many of Scientology’s defectors cite the Internet as a reason for leaving the cult. In order to combat this, the Church had members (unknowingly) install software that would block access to sites critical of Scientology. 

From this contrast, we can see that real cults are not just interested in keeping information from leaking out, they want to insure information doesn’t leak back in as well.

Thought control 

Last year the New Yorker had an 26 page long interview with Paul Haggis, writer for Academy Award winning movies such as Crash and Million Dollar Baby, and ex-celebrity-Scientologist.

I was in a cult for thirty-four years. Everyone else could see it. I don’t know why I couldn’t.

One of the reasons Haggis couldn’t see it was because the Church had control over his thoughts. Ironically, Haggis always viewed himself as an independent critical thinker, but cults have very powerful ways of brain-washing you into believe you are open-minded even when the reality is you are not.

One of the techniques is “Black and White” thinking. Things are classified are all good or all evil. You’re either with us or against us. There is no room for shades of gray. One form of this is the use of “thought stopping” words. Thought stopping words are labels taught by the cult to prevent critical thought.

Labels are powerful tools. For example, if someone lies to you, you might be tempted to label them a liar. Now they are no longer a 3-dimensional person, they are 2-dimensional - they are a liar. Everything they say is a lie because it came from a liar.

In Scientology, there is the concept of “entheta” which is a label for something bad. If a site is labelled entheta by a leader, critical thought can be turned off because everything coming from that site is bad. In addition, whole persons can be classified as “liars” if they are labelled as Suppressive Persons (SP) by the church. 

Thought control also involves authoritarian obedience to a single leader. Nothing that the leader says is wrong/bad, everything the leader says is right/good. You are not allowed to debate the leader, you are not allowed to question the leader, only obey. 

Scientology has a term called “Command Intention” which is a thought stopping word for doing what the leader asks you to do. If it’s command intention it must be right, and you cannot question what is right. 

Apple in the past was accused of being a one-man show. Jean-Louis Gassée, former Apple executive and blogger extraordinaire, even calls Steve Jobs “Dear Leader”. His personality was so fearsome that the term “Reality Distortion Field” has been used to describe his ability to convince people of his truth.

The myth of the singular genius of Steve Jobs would lead us to believe Apple had a similar “command intention” with Jobs. Jobs was never wrong and no one ever questioned Jobs. 

However, behind the scenes we see snippets of executives challenging the wisdom of Jobs and even winning him over by attrition or argumentation.

In his biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson relates this anecdote:

Having argued with his senior team about whether to allow the iPod to work with Windows software (Jobs was against, everyone else in favor), Jobs finally threw in the towel.

The fact that there was a debate and questioning of the leader’s intentions bodes well for anti-information control. 

Emotional control

Cults can also utilize emotional control over their adherents in powerful ways. These techniques include excessive guilt, introduction of phobias and excessive fear. 

In Scientology, the primary means of delivering the religious “technology” is through auditing. Auditing is a form of confession / therapy that involves personal revelations to an auditor. Former Scientologist Amy Scobee says that this information is used as emotional blackmail by the Church and church leaders have “snooped” through private files to get dirt on people.

From the Leaving Scientology blog:

Anyone who defies David Miscavige is immediately pulled in for Sec Checking. Anyone who complains about anything in the Church of Scientology is sent to Ethics.

Scientology will mature when it ceases using confession as a method of control.

One of the most powerful way that the Church can exert emotional control over it’s adherents is through a policy called “disconnection”. When a person tries to leave Scientology, they are at risk of being labelled a Suppressive Person and then shunned and denied contact with their family and loved ones. The Church’s control over their parents or spouses can lead to breaking up families and separating parents from their children.

Steve Jobs was no stranger to emotional bullying. Famously, he gobbled like a turkey at an interview candidate and asked the interviewee if he was still a virgin. His psych profile would be headlined with Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  His long time friends Jony Ive had this to say:

I think honestly, when he’s very frustrated, and his way to achieve catharsis is to hurt somebody. And I think he feels he has a liberty and license to do that. The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don’t apply to him. Because of how very sensitive he is, he knows exactly how to efficiently and effectively hurt someone.

The emotional control of being able to fire someone on a whim, or suffer psychological abuse seems like a powerful phobia introduction in Apple’s culture.

The Cult of Apple

When the news media talks about the cult of Apple, they ultimately do not mean the way Apple controls it’s employees. What they are really talking about is the way that Apple fanatics love and worship the company’s products. All companies embody a brand message, all companies try to massage their brand perception but the reason that Apple has such a “cult-like” following has nothing to do with behavior, information, thought or emotion control. It has to do with how powerfully their brand message resonates with their customers and how well they are able to deliver on that brand message.

What I find interesting though, is that all the tools were available to Steve Jobs to actually create a cult. He had the charisma, the narcissism, the drive and the power to create a powerful business empire based on cultic mind control.

“Business cult?” - Don’t laugh, this is happening right now with the Moonies who own the influential Washington Times as well as millions of dollars worth of assets through front companies. 

In the end, no more fitting epitaph to how he did not follow this wide gate and broad road to evil can be written, than the advice he gave to his successor Tim Cook

“Among his last advice he had for me, and for all of you, was to never ask what he would do. ‘Just do what’s right,’” Cook said. Jobs wanted Apple to avoid the trap that Walt Disney Co. fell into after the death of its iconic founder, Cook said, where “everyone spent all their time thinking and talking about what Walt would do.”

The Cult of Startups

Steve Hassan likes to point out that cults are not limited to the religious sphere. There are martial arts cults, there are business cults, there are large group awareness training cults.

Perhaps there are even startup cults. The scary thing about this list of cultic influences is that you can clearly see some of the techniques at work in any startup you’ve ever visited.

There’s a reason that the word cult is embedded in culture. To a certain extent the same things that make a real world cult so scary are the same things that can make a startup powerful and efficient. Us vs. them thinking can spring up in startups quite easily given the often fearful struggle for survival and no one who’s done the “death march” of programming can fail to shiver at the faint hint of behavior control. 

In the end though, I think we can say that the cultic behaviors are designed to limit critical thought and limit creativity. The same powerful forces that help you be productive and efficient - taken too far - make you inflexible and unable to learn - and in the startup world, that probably means you won’t survive long enough to become propagate your cult…

Comments, questions, flames? Hit me up on twitter @marksweep

I’m no “rockstar” or “ninja” but I have cobbled together a site or two in my day. 

As a programmer, I get pitched a lot of ideas. Lots and lots of ideas. Everyone from my cousin to my co-worker loves to throw ideas at me to see if I’ll get excited. 

I’m not going to rant about how that’s dumb or how they have no “real” skills. Pitching and convincing people with your idea and your passion are a valuable part of what makes a great entrepreneur in my opinion. When you start off, you might not have much money, you might not have technical skills, but a good entrepreneur doesn’t need them to get started.

On the other hand, the world has gotten much more sophisticated. Gone are the days when a slick MBA grad from Wharton could come in with his suit and impress the local nerd into turning his “million dollar” idea into actual DOS code. 

Famously Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak teamed up in a garage in Palo Alto. Even though Jobs was not a programmer, he was able to convince Woz to sell a computer as a fully assembled part. Woz was skeptical but was persuaded by Jobs’ passion and arguments.

But fast forward today and Woz has read Mark Suster’s “Both Sides of the Table” blog. Woz has TechCruch in his RSS feed reader. He even reads the HBR Blog. He even has *gasp* ideas of his own!

So here’s a tip on pitching the new breed of nerd. Pitch your data, not your idea. The one thing we don’t have, is time to explore and work out every potentially good idea. If we need to do that, what do we need you for? Why don’t we just take one of our own ideas and start that from scratch?

My cousin had a really cool idea. But the idea wasn’t fleshed out. The idea required data sources from the government, but she had no idea where to get them from. Her assumptions weren’t carefully thought out so they could be tested. She had no sense of whether it was solving a real problem from real people. That didn’t mean it was a bad idea - far from it - it just meant she wasn’t in a position yet to convince me to join. 

You might have passion. You might have (what you believe to be) a great idea. But that’s not enough anymore. Show us the idea has data behind it, show us that the seed of product/market fit has been planted, show us you’ve talked to real customers about their real problems.

Convince us - it’s the mark of a true entrepreneur, but the bar is a lot higher now.

——-

Comments, questions, flames? Hit me up on twitter @marksweep.

You may know that this person is a rockstar.

You may not know that this person is also a rockstar.

What do they have in common? They were both at HDIForum 3: The Health Datapalooza held at the Washington Convention Center in Washington DC (Jun 5-6).

Todd Park, CTO of America

The man driving the conference was US CTO Todd Park, perhaps the most non-bureaucratic bureaucrat you will ever meet. His infectious enthusiasm was contagious and he held the stage whenever he talked. 

Park recently took over as CTO from Aneesh Chopra after amassing such resume busters such as graduating from Harvard, consulting for Booz Allen Hamilton, co-founding two health startups and a charity venture in rural India.

One of the primary purposes of the conference was to evangelize and energize the vision that Park had around health data and the government.

Unleashing the Power of Big Data

The government is the largest health insurance provider in the USA by a country mile. Through the two programs of Medicare and Medicaid, the US Government provides health insurance to almost 50% of the people in the country. 

The problem is that Medicare and Medicaid will soon consume 20% of the entire GDP of the United States. It will bankrupt the country. Compare this to Singapore which consumes less than 5% of GDP for healthcare - for similar outcomes of healthy population.

Health and Human Services, the organization under which Medicare and Medicaid sit is the largest government institution employing over 40,000 people.

And it has tons of data. Tons. 

It collects stats on everything from how often hospitals give you aspirin for a heart attack, to how likely you will die from pneumonia 30-days after your hospital stay. 

Part of the vision that Park outlined, that Bon Jovi was there to support, that Mitch Kapor was there to fund, is the belief that unleashing the data from hidden silos within the government would lead to lower cost care, and better quality health.

More than data, Creating and Innovation Ecosystem.

But the best part of the vision of Health Datapalooza III was the recognition that releasing data willy-nilly was not the strategy. The strategy was to gather together innovators and data owners and create an eco-system of innovation around this data.

The goal was more than the liberation of data, the goal was to create a virtuous cycle in which innovators, academia and entrepreneurs worked together with government to productize and popularize uses for the data, which would drive more liberation of data, which would create more products and innovation. This ecosystem of innovation is what drives “business clusters” such as Silicon Valley and Wall Street. 

In the end, it was an eye-opening conference. I saw many innovative applications from a better health search (symcat.com) to a disruptive crowd-sourced platform for conducting research (genomera.com). The Health Datapalooza started out as a small gathering of less than 100 people and in three short years has blossomed into a 1500+ conference featuring hundred of innovative apps, dozens of government agencies a music Rock God and a tech Rock Star.

The future is so bright you’ve gotta wear shades (because health data studies show that UV radiation is very damaging to the eyes….) 

As soon as I received the first square shaped JC Penney catalog in the mail, I knew that Ron Johnson was in trouble.

In November 2011, Ron Johnson left his position as SVP of Retail Operations at Apple Inc to become the CEO of JC Penney. During his tenure at Apple, Johnson oversaw the inception of the wildly successful Apple Stores. Johnson was instrumental in setting the tone and success of the stores. According to Forbes, Steve Jobs originally wanted Apple Stores to cater to creative professional but Johnson told him:

Well, then I’m not coming. If you want to be a store for all Americans, sign me up.

So when “the Steve Jobs of Retail”, jumped ship to the hundred year old clothing retailer, I read about it with interest.

Fair and Square 

Fast forward a few months and the core idea of Johnson’s re-branding effort is a new pricing model called “Everyday Low Prices.” Instead of using sales and discounts to drive revenue, the idea is to have low prices all the time.

The thing is, I’ve seen it before, and it didn’t work back then.

When I was on a co-op (internship basically) at Procter and Gamble back in the mid 90’s, my supervisor told me about P&G’s radical new initiative called - “Everyday Low Pricing.” The theory behind ELP is quite compelling. For P&G the catalyst for ELP was the reduction on the reliance on manufacturer coupons.

The idea was that coupons are a drug that induces bad buying behavior and captures “bad” customers. The people who use coupons are bargain hunters and only buy the cheapest product on the shelf. The brand loyal customers are actually punished because they would buy your products anyway but if they miss the coupon they miss the savings. Instead, if we offer everyday low pricing, we reward brand loyalty over penny-pinching. Pretty compelling logic, eh?

It didn’t work.

In my short time at P&G, they already had to re-introduce coupons back into the budget. Everyday Low Pricing was a failure. What P&G discovered was that there is a perverse law about incentives. The lower the price of the product, the more sales and discounts affected customer behavior. It was the law of Penny-wise and Pound-foolish. So whereas a consumer would never expect coupons on a $200 Braun coffee maker, they would put off doing laundry for weeks while waiting for a sale on Tide. 

As the perceived value of an item increased, the need for discounting on the item for a sale decreased. 

Disaster at the aisle

Fast forward to JC Penney’s latest quarterly results. Everyday Low Pricing at JCP is a horror show. Same store sales dropped a staggering 19% compared to Q1 of last year and online sales plummeted by 28%. In the results, Johnson said 

While we have work to do to educate the customer on our pricing strategy and to drive more traffic to our stores, we are confident in our vision to become America’s favorite store.

The key fallacy is that same store sales dropped because customers didn’t “understand” the new pricing model. In fact, I’ll wager like at P&G, customers knew exactly what the new pricing strategy was and they left in droves. 

What JC Penney is experiencing is a shift in the psychosocial segmentation of their market. Psychosocial segmentation is a form of market segmentation that uses psychology and demographics to place consumers into different buying habits. The shift to Everyday Low Pricing is moving JC Penney away from a cost-conscious coupon-clipping segment and attempting to move towards a budget design segment.

If we overlay a market segmentation on our graph, we can place a few iconic companies over each segment to simplify our understanding. JC Penney has traditionally occupied the lower segment, Target was able to move into the middle segment and Apple is decidedly in the high end of the segment.

Know what the common thread is?

Ron Johnson has worked at each of the three companies.

There’s a sale at Penneys!

Everyday Low Pricing is just the first step in a series of turnaround initiatives at JC Penney. Johnson has outlined the next step as a “store within a store” concept by courting high-end designers like Betsey Johnson, Jonathan Adler and Michael Graves. This again reflects the shift toward affordable design.

Now there is a race against time at JC Penney. The question is, can Johnson move the brand perception of JC Penney away from the coupon-clipping segment into the budget design segment before the bottom falls out. I suspect Q2 will be the nadir and then from there, we will see if the strategy is going to take wing, or fall into oblivion.

Either that or the Board will fire him after a disaster in Q2.

Ron Johnson is trying something ambitious and rarely seen at any historic retailer. It’s trying to change the way people perceive an established brand and in the process make it successful and relevant.

Unfortunately, as the clip below shows, he’s fighting decades of history -

Comments, flames, corrections? Tweet me @marksweep