Innovation iconoclasm: Beyond the cult of the start-up

I stalled out about a quarter of the way through Geoffrey Moore's Dealing With Darwin, which has nothing to do with the quality of the book (which is excellent), and everything to do with my ability to be distracted.  Now I'm picking it up again as my "nightcap" reading. 

It kind of hit a nerve when I learned that the office where I spent the best years of my career has been broken up into functional "pods" (for lack of a better term).  That's on the heels of a shake-up that saw a spike in my LinkedIn social circle.  Zo wellz--the silver lining is that it spares me the risk of nostalgia.  I mean, yeah, I can be nostalgic about the days when 20 or so of us were proudly referred to by the boss as "The Island of Misfit Toys."  But we were also working on a scrappy new bet-the-branch-office product then.  That takes a particular alchemy--not mere chemistry, which is far too predictable--of personalities to pull off.

And then at some point, you wake up and find youself and your product find yourself in a more mature market--which is a whole 'nuther game.  That's what Dealing With Darwin is about.  And probably why it's overlooked on most business reading lists.  After all, Moore (and his colleagues) are known for the consulting work that preceded and spun out of Crossing the Chasm.  The latter focuses entirely on growing a product market from the adventurous early adopters to the more sceptical mainstream (by bridging the gap between their very divergent needs).

That early stage company bringing something brand-new to a market with no mental map for what they're making/selling is what (nearly) everyone associates with "innovation," right?

Darwin, however, hammers home the much-neglected truth that there are more species of innovation than the brand-new product.  Things like the following require "innovation":

• Adding new features to an existing product (e.g., a camera to a phone)
• Making an existing product do more with fewer resources (e.g., lower-power computer chips)
• Tapping a new (unexpected) market for an existing product (e.g., Viagra was originally a failed treatment for high blood pressure)
• Up-scaling an existing product/market for higher profit-margins (Starbucks, Apple Computer, Whole Foods)
• Streamlining and standardising supply chains and work-flow (e.g., Ford Motor Company, McDonald's, Dell Computer, etc.)
• Re-tooling work-flows and supply-chains to emphasise quality and reduce the cost of mistakes (e.g. Toyota Motor Corporation)
• Reducing transaction friction/overhead with the end-consumer (e.g., Zipcar, Netflix)
• Abdicating responsibility for labour and safety laws by declaring your employees "contractors" and yourself a "technology platform" (e.g. Uber, TaskRabbit)
• Itemising core services and adding surcharges for them (e.g., airlines, banks)

Okay, so maybe those last two are a little bitey, but that doesn't change the fact that there's a certain level of (ahem!) "creativity" in them, not to mention a relentlessness in execution that has--regrettably--made them the new normal.

The point is that established companies can't rest on their proverbial laurels.  Any good idea will have copycats--some better and faster than others--and the "first to market" advantage has a limited shelf life.  After that, it takes management discipline (and probably no small amount of luck) to stay ahead.  Which will yield higher returns--investing R&D dollars into making a better product, or into reducing costs?  Or maybe (just maybe) is it time to start exiting the race to the bottom and bring that skunkworks project into the light of day?

Those are not easy questions to tackle, particularly with all the baggage and politics of an established money-making track-record.  While individuals may too often throw away tangible good in pursuit of phantoms, organisations are not so often guilty.  Maybe it would easier if we'd more readily recognise  innovation when it wears business casual in Toronto instead of just a Red Bull-stained hoodie in Silicon Valley. 

Frivolous Friday, 2015.08.21: Do it for Darwin

There are currently two categories of Darwin Awards.  There's the kind where the recipient has removed himself or herself (but mostly himself, as it turns out) from the gene pool.  And there's the Honourable Mention--a.k.a. still dog-paddling in the gene pool. In the midst of the huffing and--let's face it, pure schadenfreudish glee--of the Ashley Madison hack/leak, I can't help but see a Darwinian window of opportunity.  Humour me for a minute and hear me out, because I'm sorta-kinda-maybe serious here.

The thing that struck me the most about the news--okay, okay...the thing that struck me after I stopped smirking over the completely unsurprising revelations about Josh Duggar, Jason Doré, and Ottawa, Ontario--was how many blithering, mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging idiots used "real" email addresses to register an AM account.  Like, email addresses that their spouses would recognise.  Or, more stupefyingly, their work email addresses.  Seriously, this is the level of stupid that warrants having one’s email privileges revoked.  Possibly for life.

Attention, I/T Managers of the world:  This is your moment.  

Having clocked in two years of desktop support and babysitting servers, I feel your pain.  And I was one of the lucky ones--we only had one virus on my watch, and that (mercifully) not even a Zero Day.  But I've heard your war-stories.  And I think we all intuitively recognise that the Ashley Madison species of idiot shares the majority of their DNA with the type of co-worker who's habitually guilty of:

• Installing malware (e.g. Napster, browser widgets, fake “virus scanners,” etc.) on their workstation #truestoryaboutnapsterbythebye
• Double-clicking any (and every) email attachment that lands in their Inbox
• Leaving files open (and thereby read-only to everyone else) on the shared drive
• Forwarding chain-email
• Adding misspelled words to the spell-check dictionary because they’re convinced that they’re right and Microsoft is wrong
• The Dreaded Reply-All ('Nuff said, amirite?)
• Font crimes (Again, ‘nuff said.)
• Being congenitally incapable of grokking the difference between CC: and BCC:
• Likewise, being congenitally incapable of printing double-sided copies of anything...or even switching their default printer during repairs
• Storing Every. Single. File. (and program shortcut) on the Windows desktop
• Using the same password for every system...and storing it on a Post-it taped to their monitor
• Insisting on access to systems/reports they never actually use
• Calling support because their workstation is "slow," only to have support arrive to find Facebook open and the browser scrollbar a millimetre tall
• Passive-aggressively weaponising the issue-tracking and/or project management system

I'm sure other SysAdmin veterans could expand the list in hilarious and/or toe-curling ways, but I think that I've established my point.  That point being that I/T folks now hold in their hands the power to effectively chlorinate the office gene pool--perhaps even for a generation.

I/T comrades, for the love of those of us who don't drag you away in the middle of critical system rebuilds (or at least playing FPSes for hours on end to, uh, "gather performance metrics" on said systems), get ye to the darkwebs! And bring thy RegExp A-game with thee!  Scan those lists!  I can (almost) guarantee that if you find your company domain(s) among them, the correlation between those AM sneaks and your laziest Luddites, your most slovenly sociopaths, your most vapidly venal office-critters will be statistically perfect.

In which case, you know what to do.  Take screenshots.  (Bonus points for correlating them with router logs.)  Send them to every single printer in the building and "forget" to pick them up.  Then wait for the radiation fallout to stop glowing, and you'll find that many of your work-day problems have taken care of themselves.  And, more importantly, you will have done everyone who can be trusted with a computer a huge solid.

My I/T brothers and sisters, it's time to step up to the plate.  This kind of opportunity doesn't surface often.  Personal codes of ethics aside, I think we can all agree that using your work email account to cheat on your spouse or significant other shows a breathtaking lack of professionalism--quite apart from the sheer sleaziness of it all.  Yeah, I don't want to work alongside that, either.

All networks are not created equal

I'm not knocking La Crosse, WI (more accurately, French Island), but we had pretty sorry luck in neighbour relations.  On one side, the summer weekend evenings were spiced by the Four Letter Badmitten Olympics.  On the other, a couple who couldn't wrap their brains around how anyone could find their beagle's 30+-minute barking jags annoying.

I figured that the lack of camaraderie was largely our karma:  We tend to keep ourselves to ourselves, and my West Coast work schedule probably didn't help with those random encounters that cement those relationships bit by bit.

Grande-Digue has been rather different, pretty much from the get-go.  The residential lots in these parts tend to run larger than the quarter-acre of our French Island subdivision.  Yet, almost counter-intuitively, the bonds tend to run a lot stronger.  Part of it is the Acadian nature of the place--generations of Poirers, Fougères, Bourgeoises, Legers, LeBlancs, Robichauds, Melansons, Gallants, Cormiers, et. al. growing up like an extended family.  But apparently, not so tribal as to shun arrivistes like ourselves.

But even after three years and change, I'm still sometimes caught out by how tight-knit the place is.  Today was one of those days.  For instance, Post Canada left a delivery notice for a package that required a signature...which I promptly left at home.  I rarely see the lady who takes care of late-afternoon customers, so I pulled out my driver's license to prove that I indeed matched the addressee on the pack.  She waved it away with a smile:  "I know who you are."

An hour or so later, the neighbours for whom we've been cat-/chicken-sitting stopped by with a thank-you gift from their weekend in Quebec.  In the context of chatting about their travels, I casually mentioned that we're considering a jaunt to Newfoundland.  Turns out that because we also mentioned it to another neighbour, it was already old news.

I should have known.  In both cases.

And so, while the social media mavens obsess over the magic n-squared-minus-n-all-divided-by-two formula, it's wise to remember that the strength of connections trumps the number of nodes.  At least when you're actually interested in making more than a superficial impression.  That's the way most folks around here seem to want to roll.  That's cool by me.

Cynical Saturday, 2015.08.08: Meowtivation to stay focused

For the second time in a handful of weeks, we're looking after our neighbours' chickens and cat while they're out during normal feeding time.  Dennis is the Chicken Whisperer of the household, so I'm on cat detail.

My sister (wisely, in light of years of sibling warfare) rarely ever asked me to babysit her three kids, so I still have some of that whole "being a corrupting influence" thing to work out of my system.  Brioche (the afore-mentioned cat) isn't yet an adult, so she's a good candidate.  Starting with the joys of the laser pointer.

She's crossing over from kitten to adolescent, currently in that phase when the ears, tail, and feet are waiting for the rest of her to grow into them.  And in that time, her hunting style has changed.  Kitten Brioche would tear pell-mell after the red dot, braking too late and sliding across the floor and into a chair.  (Ooops--I made sure that didn't happen again.)  Teenage Brioche (mere weeks later) slinks in the cover of shadow when possible, advances on silent paws, and darts in short bursts so as to easily pivot.  Moreover, I think she may have started to clue in:  At one point, the dot disappeared from her view, and while I was attempting to manoeuvre it back, she intently watched the hand that was holding the laser pointer.

One thing that hasn't changed, however, is the cat's preference for the dot over a string.  As an experiment, I dangled the string tonight, let her catch it, and while she was wrestling me for it, shone the red dot in her line of sight.  She immediately abandoned the physical "prey" already in her grasp for the flashy, infuriatingly elusive one.  And I thought, "There's totally a metaphor in here."

Like an unlucky alignment of the planets, Thursday evening was Debate Night for both Canada and the United States.  In the U.S., Fox News showcased the top ~60% of the candidates they will endorse for the next sixteen months.  In Canada, the leaders of the Conservative, National Democratic, Liberal, and Green Parties held their first debate for the national elections coming up in October.  (Shocking precisely no one, none of the Canadian candidates threw verbal molotov cocktails--either during the debate or the following day.  Ahem.)

In short, there was a lot of politics in the air.  And if internet forum comments are anything to go by, the similarities between (some) humans and Ms. Brioche can be marked.  Particularly in the way they can be manipulated to ignore the hand holding the string or laser-pointer.  But even more particularly in their tendency to abandon working toward tangible goals in favour of chasing phantoms.

On both sides of the border, roads and bridges are a mess.  Health care systems are top-heavy.  Educating the next generation too often devolves into political spit-balling.  (In the U.S. it's passing off fairy tales and wishful thinking as "science"; in Canada it's segregating French and English as if they'll somehow contaminate each other like it's 1066 all over again.)  Corporate welfare needs to end--period.  The tax code punishes people for earning a living rather than siphoning record profits off an increasingly outsourced economy (esp. in the U.S.)  The only plan for the coming grey boom is importing young people from other countries.  (Which seems particularly counter-productive when automation and relentless off-shoring will increasingly steepen the ratio between workers and available jobs--another fact that no one seems to have the guts to look in the eye.)  There is far, far too little daylight between the regulators and the regulated in industry.

There are no shortage of fires against which to hold our elected leaders' feet.  And they will--regardless of party--try to sidetrack any issue that affects their campaign contributions.  The current political machinery is geared to produce outrage.  Outrage is not necessarily a bad thing, if properly channeled.  But never, EVER follow "leaders" who encourage you to punch down, not up. 

Like the "leaders" who waste millions of taxpayer dollars drug-testing welfare recipients to catch a mere handful.  Like the "leaders" who shut down early voting, impose ID laws, and make people stand in line for hours to vote to stamp out fraud that was a statistical nullity to begin with.  Like the "leaders" who amend constitutions to prevent same-sex couples from enjoying the rights of their hetero neighbours.  Like the "leaders" who threaten, insult, or dox anyone who dares criticise them in front of God-n-everybody--thereby encouraging their posse to do the same.  Like the "leaders" who can slash education budgets to punish those "union thug" teachers while building sports stadiums for prima-donna athletes.

That sort of thing is the mark of the red dot.  Mercifully, Canadian voters have only about two more months before the election; we U.S. voters have sixteen moons of manufactured horse races, kerfuffles, ineffectual-to-non-existant fact-checking, bigotry, Breitbarting, grand-standing, and Borgia-class character assassination ahead of us.  (Anyone up for a betting pool on when Trump rage-quits, rage-returns, then rage-quits again?)

Those sixteen months will take focus.  But we're all smarter than cats:  We know better than to waste our energies chasing the red dots that are wriggled in front of us.  Riiiiiight???  Let's not get distracted by the flashy stuff.  We have serious work to do in the ballot-box.

The shelf life of books

Part of the problem with graduating as a History/English double-major is that you've had years to get used to stuff in print staying passably fresh.  Like the sour cream in the 'fridge that should be primordial soup by now, but still passes the sniff test.  Written history and literature may be reinterpreted, and every great once in a while new extant material is discovered.  But the words really don't change.

Yet, although my college education has served me reasonably well in the past quarter-century, the above is one mental bad habit I haven't been able to ditch.  But this past week brought it home forcefully that I was, to a certain extent, spoiled for four years.

For reasons I can't now recall, the leftover (read: oddball) bookshelf that ended up in our bedroom was mostly stocked with programming-related books.  But then I needed to move them to paint the baseboard and walls, which forced me to take a hard look at a collection that would have been better triaged before the big move in 2011.

Some things are timeless--at least as timeless as they can be in I/T.  Give up my copies of Kernigan and Ritchie's C Primer or Bjarne Stroustrup's The C++ Programming Language?  Not on your tin-type.  Alas, the years have not been so kind to other tomes, covering (among other things):

• Visual Basic 6
• C# 2010
• Adobe Flex 4
• Java I/O (circa 2000)
• Java Servlets (circa J2EE 1.1?)
• Microsoft Visual InterDev 6
• T-SQL querying for SQL Server 2005
• Java2 Certification prep.
• ASP.NET MVC 2 
• Two Java books I remember buying when I started my I/T career (1999)

In fairness, Dennis still does enough work in classic ASP that my 2001-vintage reference is still relevant to his work.  But otherwise, owch.  What in the noodley name of The Flying Spaghetti Monster was I even thinking when I packed some of these?

Maybe, in a perfect world, Sally Annes would happily collect these books to send to programmers behind the Iron Curtain who were still working on Windows 95.  Scratch that--a perfect world would not include the Soviet Union.  Okay, maybe those programmers are really Portlandia hipsters coding IE5/Netscape apps. ironically.  Or something.

But the harsh reality is that these language versions will--unlike even bad fiction--return to vogue, except possibly for 2038 remediation work, and I'm not about to guard them for the next 20 years to save the world from Unixmageddon.  (Sorry, civilisation.)

Now I just have to bring myself to dispose of them responsibly.  Being the kind of bibliophile who's still outraged over the Library of Alexandria, I'm not sure I can consign them to the wood stove this winter.  (Besides, that VB6 book is like, five inches thick.)  Pity we're not into vermicomposting--we'd be set for bedding for quite some time.  Not to mention that we'd have the nerdiest worms in the province.