Innovation should be a part of any normal healthy product and strategy development process. Unfortunately, because it represents the “new” and the “risky” by definition, it is often treated as some type of magic goal, where normal rules do not apply. This “otherness” makes us jump to wild conclusions as we feel totally out of our element as business people.

Broadly, there are 5 major steps to any innovation initiative:

• ideation
• evaluation
• implementation
• integration
• monetization

At any point along the chain, something may go wrong to prevent innovation, even if it has nothing to do with innovators or good ideas.

“@rolfsky The OpenOffice version is worse, though”

Without the context that I was wrestling with Microsoft Office’s bulleted list implementation, it didn’t make a lot of sense to RT. Something only a bot would do.

Another curious element was that the retweet by “unixland” was made with the Perl Net::Twitter package, not by any recognized twitter client. Suspicious.

A quick check of unixland’s feed shows a fair number of retweets that seem to have little common thread, and then liberal inclusions of links to “Computerhulp” in Amsterdam, and the owner’s personal photography website. Bogus.

This got me digging a little deeper, and I clicked on the hashtag for eBay’s recent developers conference, #eBayDC10. Bizarrely, though the conference had ended, there were several tweets about it not having happened yet. Bizarre.

10 Tips for Identifying Fake Twitter Accounts

1. tweets seem to follow no central theme or narrative, perhaps referencing conflicting locales or geographies
2. tweets reference items in the past as if they haven’t happened yet
3. many tweets begin with an ascending series of letters (an attempt to fake uniqueness)
4. first name is filled out as “Name” or username is in the form of “firstName_lastName” or a string followed by digits “fooBar1234”
5. posting application is some type of automated or command line driven method such as just “API” or “Perl Net::Twitter” (needed for automation)
6. many/most of the tweets contain links
7. the recurring links lead the same place (or even the same tweets, repeated!)
8. no web, bio, or location information
9. are only following popular individuals
10. are only followed by other accounts that have very few/no tweets

Of course, this is now a cat-and-mouse arms race, escalating the conflict between the virtuous Twitterers, and the despicable spammers that want to profit off everything. And even writing down this list will help the spammers, as a number of these items are easily resolved, such as adding in additional stolen information for web, bio, and location links, creating more varied tweet schemes, and automating via the web instead of API.

I say, bring it on spammers. (Because at the very least, that will create at least one anti-spam job position at Twitter.)

Why are moaners jerks? Because they’re not adding anything to the conversation, they’re merely causing strife because they can.

Even when they see the problem coming, what do they do in their moment of power? Whine, warn, and admonish?

If everybody recognizes the problem already exists, they’re just stealing valuable time and air when we could be getting real work on a solution done. If nobody else recognizes the problem, then what they should really be doing is trying to convince.

Convincing is not restating your assessment of the situation repeatedly in louder and louder words. I’ve been there, it doesn’t work. Really.

The word “convince” has two Latin roots:

• con- /(com-)  – “with”, or “a lot”
• vincere – “to conquer”

Now, you can read the “con” prefix as an “intensive” so the word means “to conquer resolutely”, of you can read the other meaning as “with”. This would change the meaning of convince to mean “mutual victory”.

In order to win this fight, you’re going to have to work with your opponent and come to a mutual conclusion. This may mean changing your method, your media, your language or even your dress if it’s important enough.

Just because you are right, doesn’t mean anybody has to listen to you. Any more than you are required to listen to them.

Al Gore is not a jerk, because he believes we’re destroying our planet with greenhouse gases, and he’s doing something about it. To get his message across, he created a new piece of media in the form of a lecture and a movie, accessible to entirely new audiences. He did this while maintaining his credibility with a different generation, by dressing in a suit and tie to deliver his message. Clever, eh?

Because ultimately, what good is “knowing” what’s going to happen, if you don’t do anything about it? The “I told you so”, is a joyless victory shared by gumbling I-told-you-so-er’s on the porch of a house in a world they saw coming, and did nothing to stop.

My understanding was that the previously “unlimited” data plan wasn’t really unlimited, but more like 5GB before they started to complain at you. If we assume that “unlimited” really meant 5GB… that breaks down as the following:

• old plan $30 for 5GB: $6/GB
• new plan $15 for .2 GB: $75/GB
• new plan $25 for 2GB: $15/GB

AT&T says that if you’re on the $15/month plan, you can get an additional 200MB for another $15, or $10 per each 1GB if you’re on the $25/month plan.

To support their notion that these plans “make it more affordable for more people to enjoy the benefits of the mobile Internet”, they cite the two following statistics:

• “Currently, 65 percent of AT&T smartphone customers use less than 200 MB of data per month on average.”
• “Currently, 98 percent of AT&T smartphone customers use less than 2 GB of data a month on average.”

Here’s the rub: The stats they cite about smartphone data use all hinge on the very first word of their sentences: “currently”.

Yes, while currently these plans would seem to make sense and lower costs for users… that is of course before widespread adoption of the data-hungry iPad 3G, and the new iPhone which will likely support video calls. Surely these stats will change when the new iPhone rolls around.

AT&T never has the best interests of the customer in mind. They are in the business to make money. Just a friendly reminder.

PS. I personally will be sticking with my “$15/month unlimited MEdianet non-smartphone plan”.

And what do we call these things anyway? PDAs? Handhelds?

Since 1999, I’ve had 4 devices with a touchscreen, which ostensibly keep track of what I should be doing, but usually were just a way for me to read the news.

The PalmPilot and the iPod/iPhone may not look related, but Apple owes a lot of “inspiration” to Palm. The concept of “swipe”? Palm did it first. Installable apps, check. No qwerty? Check. No multi-tasking, but fast switching? Check. No directory structure of files? Check. Clean-slate designed experience? Check.

If you think installable apps are the sole invention of Steve Jobs, think again. Palm had thousands of developers writing a myriad of apps for their platform, even if they never really grasped the concept of supporting a sanctioned app store. Because of this, various 3rd party sites sprung up to support the app market, (including individual developers), leading to a fractured marketplace.

On the far left is my venerable PalmPilot Professional. Released in 1997, it still merrily springs to life with a fresh set of 2 x AAA’s and gleefully powers the 160×160 pixel monochrome screen in the deep-purple/light-green scheme that I remember. This was my introduction to handheld computing, and the best thing about this device? Battery life. I could literally go 3 months on one set of non-rechargeable AAAs.

My Sony Clie from 2002 was a replacement for my PalmPilot, with a sharper display and more memory. Honestly, if this device had wifi, it’d still be very serviceable today. There’s even a native Facebook app and a perfectly usable web-browser which can be used to access any current mobile site.

With the iPhone, Apple brought to the table a responsive processor, delicious graphics, a refined input method, and a rationalized app store. I would say that the iPhone/iPod Touch is the spiritual successor of the Palm line, just better. I haven’t had a chance to demo a Palm Pre, but it looks like that’s what they were going for.

On the far right is my latest communicator, the Nokia 5800 Music Express Navigation Edition. Let’s be clear, this is no iPhone 3G, not by a longshot. Why? all the things I mentioned above as improvements to the Palm line that Apple has done, none of them are part of this device. It’s slow, dark, tedious, and has a very poor app store.

So why’d I buy the Nokia 5800?

The most obvious difference here is price.  An unlocked iPhone 3G is between $600 and $700. The Nokia 5800 MusicExpress Navigation Edition only cost $250. And since I was already carrying the iPod touch with me everywhere, the Nokia just has to stand in when I actually want to receive a call, navigate via GPS, or take a photo. And if I get really desperate, I can always use the wifi sharing to give my 3G connection to the iPod Touch and get some real work done.

why I’m unfollowing @barackObama: a social contract broken.

It’s in sad contrast to this hope I felt watching astonished through the morning of President Obama’s swearing in ceremony, that I now am going to unfollow @barackObama.

Quite simply put:

• it’s not Barack tweeting
• it’s boring, impersonal news from the DNC

While I understand that it may be some type of national security risk for the man himself to be tweeting,

“Michelle, Sasha, and I are having a great game of croquet on the South Lawn…”

I honestly have to admit that it’s a little bit of what I expected when I followed @barackObama.

I expected that, because that’s what Twitter is for.

Let’s be clear, I haven’t gone out and renounced my faith in the man or the President, I’m just really disappointed in what his twitter feed is delivering to me. Instead of the more personal, timely communication, tweets can deliver, today I got this tweet from Obama,

“With tonight’s Senate vote on Wall St. reform, we’re a step closer to protecting consumers & our economy, and holding big banks accountable.”

Blarg, whatever.

To be sure, this is a great message, but ultimately not why I’m into Twitter. Perhaps you noticed how I phrased the intro, “today I got this tweet from Obama”, as if this had been whispered to me in passing down a long hallway.

A quick visit to @barackObama clears up my confusion:

This Twitter account is run by Organizing For America, the grassroots organization for President Obama’s agenda for change. To follow the Whitehouse Twitter account, go to: Twitter.com/whitehouse

OFA is a special project of the Democratic National Committee.

There’s frequent references to “I” and “we”, which implies that it’s actually Obama doing the tweeting but instead of an inside view into the life of the president, I get a recounting of news which someone else is implying that Barack himself would be interested in. There’s also a problem here where someone is speaking with the voice of a public figure, and in a sense, impersonating them.

To quote more intelligent folks than myself, “ur doin it wrong”.

And that’s sad.

(Because, seriously, how awesome would it be to see pictures of the dog, and drawings from the fridge, and to hear Obama complaining about Mondays, how lame the American Idol contestants are, and how much he could totally eat a cookie right now?)

PROS:

• nice build quality with braided cord, etc
• very good sound quality for voice recording
• simple, unobtrusive, functional
• fairly inexpensive

CONS:

• save $$ by buying online
• no “good” way to grip mic when inserting headphones, feels a little scary as the jack is tight
• connection between mic and cord has minimal stress relief (molded inflexible plastic)
• durability concerns reported in Amazon reviews (with frequent use)

I’ve found this inexpensive iPod accessory to be a great tool for a professional speaker, or just someone wanting to learn the trade. By recording yourself as a public speaker you can create slidecasts, promotional material for yourself, or just hone your presentation skills.

Available online from various merchants such as Amazon and eBay (prices range between $10 to $25 including shipping), the Griffin SmartTalk provides not only an high-quality noise-canceling microphone which attaches to an Apple iPhone or iPod touch, but also a headphone pass-through and a pause-play/call answer/next-track button.

EASE OF USE

My first opportunity to use the SmartTalk was while speaking at the SenseMaking conference and it performed quite well. While the sound engineer was attaching the official wireless mic for the presentation, I whipped out my ever-handy iPod Touch and clipped my own mic next to his. I asked him to verify that it didn’t cause any interference with the wireless, and he confirmed it didn’t. The small clip for the mic is spring loaded and seems to have a pretty good grip, relatively on par with any semi-pro lapel mic I’ve used. I was able to easily slip my iPod into my pocket without the cord tugging on anything. Because this accessory works with something I already have in my pocket, a digital recorder is 1 less thing I have to bring traveling.

SOUND QUALITY

For this talk, I recorded an hour and a half of audio with the dead-simple “Voice Memo” application which comes pre-installed on the iPod touch. If I remember correctly, the resulting filesize was approximately 32 megabytes. The sound guy there asked me how long the recording could be, and I had to admit that I didn’t know, but likely it was “unlimited” up to the space available.

When I returned home, I was able to listen to my recording of my session, and I have to say that I was very pleasantly surprised. I’d clipped the mic on a button-up shirt and got very good audio quality, picking up primarily a good clean audio track of myself presenting, but also a fairly useable sound from the audience (laughter, some comments, etc). I wouldn’t say that the mic is high-gain — I wasn’t able to understand most comments that were more than 10 feet from me — but some incidental conversation I captured between myself and someone standing 5 feet from me was very understandable. Some announcements made in the room from 10 to 15 feet away with a firm voice were very clear. The recordings are available in iTunes for playback, but I’m also looking into ways to export them to a native AAC so I can perform editing. More research to be done here.

OTHER THOUGHTS

One part of the SmartTalk that I haven’t delved into much is the heaphone pass-through. This allows you to change any set of regular headphones into an iPod-compatible one, allowing you to do any of the functions you’d find on a one-button Apple headset. This will not allow you to change the volume, however. I didn’t mess with this much, as I primarily intend to use this as a recording device, but this would allow you to use high-quality headphones for your iPhone to make a voice call, or a Skype call on the iPod Touch. One thing I need to investigate more was that it seemed like the pass-through tended to make music more “bass-y”. I don’t think this was my imagination, and on the whole, some people might like that attribute.

WOULD I BUY AGAIN?

Yes. Though I paid $20+tax at a local merchant, the Griffin SmartTalk can be had for less money online. Even at $20, I think that it’s a good investment. If it fails prematurely, I may think differently.

WHERE TO BUY ONLINE

Amazon – Griffin SmartTalk Headphone Adapter with Control and Mic

eBay – “Griffin SmartTalk”

When I speak at conferences, I am often posed with questions like:

• how can I be more innovative?
• how can my company innovate more?

In that question there is another question hiding, is “innovation” something born, or something bred?

Can you learn to be innovative, or only ‘have it from the start’?

Innovation is the combination of both the knack, and the skills.

With the knack only, you will get great ideas and fail to make anything come of them. With the skills only, you will be forever waiting for inspiration.

In the corporate world, we often see companies with the skills, but no knack for great ideas slowly wasting away into mediocrity. This is a problem of selection bias, as few companies with great ideas and no skills ever progress beyond conversations in the pub. The few who are left, if stagnating in their industry, are clinging to optimizing one good idea they had a long time ago.

Individual innovators and innovative companies share something in common: the capacity to embrace the trend-setting, mold-breaking, mind-bending concept brought forth in innovation and then execute on that idea with passion, flair, and speed.

If you want to build amazing houses, you need amazing architects, and amazing builders.

Whether by accident or intent, successful innovative companies and innovative individuals have found a way of balance both the nature and the nurture of great ideas. The incredible is heard with welcoming ears, prioritized against the current goals, and swiftly put in place if possible. Having the idea is one step, making it happen is another one all together.

Luckily, great ideas and innovators are easy to spot if we know where to look (just look for wild gesturing and a fire in their eyes); and once we know who they are, we can build a team around them if need be.

As both employers and employees, we can focus on the setting up the structure upon which great ideas can happen; helping the nature along with a little nurturing of our own.

The Atari 2600 defined an era of gaming. For many, it was their first introduction into what would become a long obsession into video gaming. The ability to program Atari 2600 games however, required a certain type of obsession all its own.

No sissy object oriented programming or procedure calls here, generating even “simple” graphics like the one on the right, was an exercise in patience and clever programming.

Consider the following three restrictions on how graphics were painted to the television through the “Atari Television Adapter Interface”:

The TIA is responsible for generating the picture on the television set as well as providing access to features in hardware for the purpose of generating the game graphics, tones and noises. … The video is created from … a playfield … which is stretched across half the video line … and 5 graphics objects consisting of:

• Two 8-pixel lines which make up the ‘sprites‘ Player 1 and Player 2. These are single color and can be stretched by a factor of 2 or 4.
• A ‘ball’ – a line that is the same color as the playfield. It can be one, two, four, or eight pixels wide.
• Two ‘missiles’ – a line that is the same color as its respective player. It can be one, two, four, or eight pixels wide.

If you read through the programming guide, it rapidly becomes clear that this Atari graphics chip was really designed to create a game like “pong”. This should be unsurprising considering that the Atari 2600 was created by the same company (Atari) in 1977, just two years after Pong.

Primitive as it was, clever programmers dug into the guts of the TIA, and were eventually able to create interactive experiences as complex as “Pitfall!” which featured such complex graphics as “tar pits, quicksand, water holes, rolling logs, rattlesnakes, scorpions, walls, fire, bats, and crocodiles.” This was not Pong even though the technology was largely the same.

Though this isn’t Halo or Super Mario Galaxy, the graphics achieved in Pitfall! were a tour de force with the available technology. (Remember, The Atari 2600 ran in the single-digit mHz range as well, maybe 500 less powerful than your iPhone).

What this should begin to underline for you, is what is achievable not by reducing constraints, but increasing constraints. This spurs creativity, hard work, and a focus on the task at hand.

Rather than asking your teams to “go innovate” with a wide open green field, push hard on one field and you might be amazed with what they come up with.

Their video clip is not easily embeddable, so you’ll need to head over to the interview on their site if you want to see me coming down from my post-talk high.

[Side note: am I always that twitchy?]

The iPad is not what you say it is.

You’re defining something not quite like what we’ve seen before, because that allows you to define every aspect and control every nuance.

It’s OK, you’re going to sell a bajillion of them.

Behold the iPad: an over-grown iPod Touch with 3G, or iPhone too big to hold to your head, or an eBook reader with short battery life.

The doubters will tell you that it’s not going to work, because of all the things it is like, the iPad is better than none of its competitors at what they do. Too input-hampered to be a laptop, too expensive to be a bunch of other things. Stacked against the competition it’s a loser.

But, that’s not what it’s all about, is it Steve?

What they nay-sayers don’t get, is that while the iPad will not be very good at being any one of those other things,the iPad will be great at being an iPad.

A few months back I was showing my Christmas-iPod touch to my 80+ year-old relative. He really liked it, but couldn’t help but to squint at the tiny screen. This thing did what he wanted (email, web, facebook) without the pain of a computer. What he wanted was this iPad.

Here’s what finally tipped me off to your master plan: the iPad accessories page.

PSSST: Steve’s making a computer, a very special type of computer.

It tipped me off because looking at the “dock with integrated keyboard” now finally makes sense. You’re making the next step in the computer’s evolution:

The iPad: a magical world unhampered by viruses, conflicting software installs, buttons, right-clicks, confusing menus or any of the numerous other pains computer users deal with.

This is what the computer will become, something truly personal, simultaneously both usable at a desk, and mobile; a glossy, simplified, connected experience which is one step closer to fixing the wrongs obviously done to you at some point in the past.

There are a few things “missing” from this dock. It would be easy enough to put a USB jack (or a few) tucked inside along the edge of the iPad or the dock, or even a nice secure-digital card reader lurking somewhere. But that’s not going to happen while Steve is on watch.

Why? Because every open standard is one less thing that you can control, opening tiny cracks in the walls of your utopic  computing universe. It’s one giant conduit through which all nature of creative, unapproved accessories which might cause the poor iPad to crash or memory to be corrupted. Additionally, if you add such simple things as USB and ethernet, then the thing really starts to look like a crippled laptop.

Also, I’m calling you out on Flash support. It has nothing to do with batteries or bandwidth or processor power. It has everything to do with a fully exploitable virtual machine that not only allows random, unapproved content providers to create applications which compete with iPhone-platform applications, it also opens a huge hole for potential attacks. And that, Stevo, is why you hold back, lack of control.

All that being said, I’m fine with what you’re doing. If you want to create your tiny world filled with unicorns, sweeping hand gestures, and locked-down accessories; go ahead, we need someone to lead the way. Modern “computers” are a total pain in the ass, and you know it. They are riddled with problems, and honestly ill-suited for most of the tasks we use them for.

I’m not worried, because I think you’re going the right way in spirit, and I know in my heart that “open” will always win (eventually) over closed. If you need a refresher, mull the words “PC-compatible” over in your head a bit while you sleep in your satin sheets. The more money you make, the bigger target you’ll be, and they will come; believe me, they will come.

They have a cave troll, and it’s called Open Source.

I thought the energy in the room was great, even though we were closing in on the last few talks of the conference, and the morning after what had been for some the 4th consecutive “morning after”.

Without further ado, here’s my deck that everyone wanted:

Feel free to click through it, and in the bottom left there is a link if you want to download the preso (you will need to create a Slideshare.net account).

UPDATE: I have added the audio portion of my SXSW presentation to this Slideshare deck, but it is currently unsynchronized due to limitations in their service. Visual and audio may not be related, but are in the same order.

Also, if you’re going to tweet or blog about this, please use the hashtag #dangerouscurves so I can track all of it.

Best,

-Rolfsky

The technology sphere has been trying desperately for years to make the barcode a consumer necessity. Only problem it, nobody’s fully thought this through…

A notable attempt to put barcode technologies into the hands of consumers was the ill-fated CueCat, which assumed that people would find an advertisement so compelling that they would take their magazine or newspaper to their computer, initiate the dialing sequence of the modem, scan a barcode, and then watch as some type of advertising loaded over their 56K.

Eh, maybe not CueCat, a decade ahead of schedule.

More recently, every year is “the year”, when barcode scanners will be universal on mobile phones and everything will be tagged, marked, and hyperlinked to some overlay on the physical world.

Imagine it, Paris tourist destinations hyperlinked to their Wikipedia entries, street signs linked to traffic reports, and Christmas cards linked to your Facebook accounts. The technology exists to make pretty much any camera-phone do this without all the painful waiting of yesteryear, so let’s jump on it!

There’s only one problem folks, and it’s not about adoption or competing standards or any argument commonly put forth. The problem is the barcode itself.

Barcodes are designed to encapsulate information in the smallest amount of space possible, while still being usable. All barcodes work off some type of mapping of image (pixel) content through an algorithm, which then decodes it to relevant information. If you’re curious, here’s an awesome overview of the competing barcode standards, which I recommend you visit!

Barcodes are built to minimize the space they take up, and be machine readable. Let’s remember our history here: barcodes are designed to be machine readable, first and foremost. This is great, for machines.

What’s not so great is when a human tries to read a barcode. They are pretty much universally indecipherable and give no clue as to what content they contain. They could contain a link to http://pbskids.org, or http://somethingawful.com . You’d never know by looking at it.

So why not just print the URL next to the barcode? That would work in theory, except that you’d have no proof that the printed barcode and printed URL had anything to do with each other. You could still have a clean printed URL and a naughty destination.

As we are increasingly absorbing information from the ambient environment, we are beginning to place a pretty high level of “trust” in what’s there.

With no way to know where a barcode would be “headed” or what type of content your reading device would be receiving, you could do a pretty good job of culture jamming, spoofing, phishing, or otherwise generally raising mayhem by simply using a sticker to cover the intended barcode. Clever hackers could potentially “fill in” existing barcodes with a sharpie, then buy the new nonsense URL, and carry on their merry way. How is the unsuspecting Paris tourist to know that QRCode on the Eiffel Tower shouldn’t  lead to an ad for a Paris strip-club?

Because there’s no human-readable aspect of the barcode, they can’t really be trusted.

In order to remedy the problem, a human-readable text would need to be included in the barcode. This text could be quickly verified by the human, then incorporated as part of the validation code within the machine logic. If the printed URL doesn’t match the destination, don’t decrypt. Then the problem becomes that you’ve made a barcode… not really a barcode.

Are you going to eat the apple, even if you don’t know what it does?

With the speaking panels officially released for SXSW 2010, I can finally tell everyone the news about my invitation to speak at South By Southwest in Austin, Texas!

Though I probably won’t draw the crowd that Nina Hartley ("Porn Star, Sex Educator, Social Networker") will draw with her talk, or match the new hotness of Avner Roven’s talk about Boxee, I know an interested group will want come to my talk and learn about Dangerous Curves: Hockey Sticks, Swine Flu And More.

And what are these dangerous curves? Well perhaps I’ll just quote Josh Shepherd, who’s quoting me talking about my talk:

Public Enemy first instructed us all….”Don’t believe the hype!”  That’s a hard thing to do in these times.  When everything around us is about hype, how does one distinguish between the trends?   There are subtle signs of growth and decline in anything.  Learning how to catch all those signs may determine the future of your business be it iPhone App. designer, kindergarten teacher, entrepreneur, or lawyer.  That’s where Rolf Skyberg’s SXSW 2010 presentation, Dangerous Curves: Hockey Sticks, Swine Flu and More, comes in.

“There are lies, damn lies, and statistics,” Skyberg said. “Correlation does not imply causation. Hopefully people will walk out of my talk thinking differently about some of the patterns they see. Is it really exponential growth? Where is this trend in its hype cycle? Should I walk away, or should I run? Are we “storming”, “norming” or “performing”? I hope to give people new tools with which to interpret what they see happening around them.”

This SXSW presentation is [part of] Skyberg’s continuing look at trends in the marketplace and learning how to correctly identify the trends.  Once those trends are figured out, it’s time to use that as an advantage.

That’s right kids, my talk will be filled with stuff that makes you go, “huh, I could use that”, and walk away thinking.

So come join me at SXSW for learning and lounging, and maybe you’ll learn to walk away, and when to run.

See you there,
-Rolfsky

Instead, I usually deflect this comment by helping the audience understand innovators and innovation:

• an innovator is an advocate for the possible
• innovation is seeing the possible, and doing something about it

Scott Berkun has posted a well-thought (if a bit Santa-destroying-emperor-has-no-clothes style) article regarding the “secret of innovation secrets”. Similar to my belief, Scott mentions that it’s not simply enough to see possibility where connections haven’t been recognized before, you also need to be successful in DOING something about the new connections.

A section from his post: (edited, with emphasis added)

… the most misleading thing in much research on “how to innovate”, … is the focus on creativity as the bottleneck. Inquisitiveness, sparks of insight, and creative talent is the focus of much writing on innovation, [but] it’s far from the whole story. … ideas are cheap. … finding successful people who … are willing to do the legwork to convince others of the merits of something that doesn’t exist yet… , that’s the challenge.

If there’s any secret to be derived from Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, … [it] is the diversity of talents they had to posses, or acquire, to overcome the wide range of challenges in converting their ideas into successful businesses.

In this sense, an innovator is part scientist, technologist, part project manager, and part salesperson. If we were setting up a role-playing character, the best innovator would of course have +10 to intelligence and +10 dexterity, but also +10 to charisma and +10 to stamina.

Successful innovators successfully challenge the norm, and innovative companies repeatedly define new business opportunities by making happen what other companies don’t believe is possible. The work is what you have to do in-between your idea and reality. The real secret of innovation is how to find/attract/mold/educate individuals capable of that work. Is it possible? That remains to be seen.

What we do know to be possible is that companies can be taught (with the right executive support) to understand and support innovation so that it is successful. How do you do that? Well… that’s a secret.

Every unpleasant activity is an opportunity for you to make money, build a name for yourself, and get ahead. How? Become a professional toilet scrubber.

Admit it, you hate scrubbing toilets. No, seriously you do. Why? Because it’s icky, because it’s time consuming, because it never really works right, and because you could pay someone else to do it for you.

The opportunity here lies in doing things for other people that they don’t want to to themselves. Does that mean you’ll have to do icky things? Well… scrubbing toilets isn’t as bad as you think.

There are a few reasons why any task is “icky”, which all really boil down to a few elements:

1. uncertainty
2. repeatability
3. return on investment

You can apply this pattern to any other undesirable task you like, say, painting your house. It’s easier to pay someone else to paint your house, because you don’t have to be uncertain about the outcome, it gets done every time you spend the money, and you haven’t spent a bunch of unnecessary time and money learning a bunch of skills and buying specialized tools, for something you’ll only do once every 10 years.

The professional house-painter and toilet-scrubber have a few things working towards their advantage:

1. they know how long this takes
   Humans hate not knowing, it screws up their whole day, week, year. Professionals have done this many times, and can finish the job while still making it to yoga class without breaking a sweat.
2. they’ve got the skills to pay the bills
   They’ve done this before, many times and they know how to get the best result. Practice does make perfect and they’ve had a lot of practice. No wasted effort or doing it twice here. Their minds are also filled with esoteric knowledge you only get with experience.
3. they’ve got state of the art tools
   You don’t even know what the art is, let alone the best tools for it. Professionals do, because they rely on their tools and skills everyday. They are optimized for this task at hand and it makes sense to buy that $100 paintbrush if you’re going to be using it every day.

So how to you get rich scrubbing toilets? Pick a task, and get really good at it. The more loathsome, boring, tedious, heinous, disgusting or foul the task, the better. The more equipment, time, or experience required to complete the task well, the better. The fewer people already providing this task, the better. The more people who have this problem daily, the better. The more emotionally sensitive the task, the more irrationally people look at the task, the better.

So find your toilet, love your toilet, own it, dominate it, master the skills, buy the tools. Then when someone groans about that nasty thing, leap to the cause and say, “I’ll scrub your toilet… for $10.”

One of the design practices I employ is to assume I am working for evil rather than good.

I sit down and I ask myself, “what if I really wanted this to fail, how would I sabotage it?”

There’s many ways you can intentionally wreak havoc on a project:

• pollute data sources with useless keywords
• bury the search results
• deliberately create poor documentation for your successor
• make help text nearly invisible
• create inconsistent, unfathomable options
• do nothing while I see problems arise
• make it impossible for users to give you feedback

Thinking like this gives me the vision of an outsider, a skeptic even perhaps. It works because the skeptic’s viewpoint isn’t clouded by all the justifications you’ve made for inconsistencies that leaked into the final product.

Design is a conscious action, where these pieces have been designed via inaction.

Individually, these unintentional results aren’t exactly evil, but merely middle-of-the-road annoying or too-hard-to-fix-right-now. The big problem here is when a choice made by inaction or inattention results in the same decision as if the choice were made to maximize maliciousness.

If “doing nothing” results in the same as “being evil”, you’d better do something.

You can apply this to anything in your life – from your next PowerPoint, to your current relationship:

• “if I were stupid/ignorant/unprofessional, how would I design this slide?” <—OK, don’t do any of those things.
• “if I wanted her to think I was ignoring her, how I would achieve that?” <—OK, you’d better say something to her or buy some flowers.
• “if I wanted it to look like I didn’t care about this job, what would I do?” <—probably time to break out the razor, put on a belt, and polish the shoes.

In all the cases above, there’s nothing wrong with the way that you were doing it before, but you may be giving the inadvertent impression that you are lazy, stupid, or even actively sabotaging the success of your project.

A proactive way to look at this is to ask yourself, “if I were a saboteur, where would I attack this for the greatest impact?” Whatever you come up with are the top things you should be making sure don’t happen.

Mitch Ditkoff over on his Heart of Innovation blog has posted “56 Reasons Why Most Corporate Innovation Initiatives Fail”. Browsing through this list really rings true to me, as anything and everything that can and will go wrong on a new initiative. I’ve witnessed (and played a part) in more than one of these errors.

I took Mitch’s list and broke them down into three categories I mentioned in my earlier “understanding failure and success” post. Most of his reasons for failure are simply the nitty-gritty of executing any plan, while there’s also many items about fuelling motivation and buy-in. Buried within are few select gems which speak directly to the heart of innovation: visionary leadership and motivation.

My three categories are:

1. the vision – what to do and why it must be done now
2. the will – the fruits of leadership, the desire to do the vision
3. the way – reality check: time, resources and implementation

From his post, my bucketing returned the following results:

• 5 failures regarding vision and motivation
• 13 failures to inspire a passion for innovation
• 38 simple failures of execution

It’s interesting that his list of 56 directly reinforces the pattern in almost a mathematical way, as we get further along in the process, each step has 3 times as many things to go wrong with it. (Would it be naive to assume that there are 3 times as many people involved at each following step?)

I think the wrong way to read this would be to assume that we should focus the most on category 3, the way. Just because there are almost 9 times as many ways we can fail at execution doesn’t mean that execution is 9 times more important. On the contrary, I think a better way to read this is that useful improvements in vision and leadership will give you 9 times the leverage against your problem.

Ultimately, successful innovation requires all three of these parts and the total must add to “1”. This means that at an item level, vision is most important, followed by the will, and ultimately the way. Knowing the structure helps you prioritize where you should be focusing your energy, and whether you should be paddling upstream, downstream, or pulling your boat out of the water.

Why do projects fail?

Projects do not fail because of poor planning, the wrong people, or a bad idea. All of these can be remedied over time with dedication, time, and resources. Projects fail when we give up, “run out of time”, or have no money left.

These items break down into two basic elements:

1. the will
2. the way

Projects fail when either the resources to achieve success run out (the way), or the motivation to continue falls away (the will).

Last week while attending the Marketing 2.0 conference in Paris, I had the pleasure of dinner and few beers with a fellow speaker, Scott Foe from Nokia’s game division. Over a pint of Guinness (tragically, from a can), Scott mentioned to me that his greatest business mentor was a graduate of West Point and had imparted to him that business really was war.

Attack the way and the enemy can’t fight back; attack the will, and the enemy won’t want to.

The military strategy of “shock and awe” is a perfect example of combining the two: simultaneously removing the capability and desire to fight, in a show of rapid dominance. Modern wars are fought not only with guns and tanks, but also with pamphlets, instructions on how to surrender, and subversive radio.

One missing element:

To the list of two ingredients above, we should add a third:

1. the will
2. the way
3. a definition of “success”

Without evil, we cannot define good; unless we define success, we are doomed to failure. America’s involvement in Vietnam ultimately failed because America’s leadership failed to define a compelling vision of success and ultimately lost the support of the people.

(On a side note, success was perhaps specifically not defined, as to do so would have been admitting that it was an anti-communist proxy-war. Also, our traditional methods of warfare were completely unsuited to destroying “the way” of a military infrastructure that had limited structure.)

Success and failure the business world.

In the business world, our projects fail and succeed for the same reasons. Either we run out of time or money, the business ultimately decides to shut it down, or there is no possibility of success because success has never been defined. When sitting down to a new project (and throughout the project’s progression), ask yourself and your superiors three questions:

1. “is there a desire within the company to continue this project?”
2. “do I have the time/resources” to achieve my goals?”
3. “what does success look like?”

If you start hesitating on any of the three questions (or the answer is no), your project is in serious jeopardy.

Rescuing “failing” projects:

Luckily, the three elements of success are interrelated. Fixing one often means tweaking another.

Resources (time, money, people) are ultimately the most concrete of all three elements. These are allocated on balance sheets by people who count numbers. If your resources are running out, this can often mean that your primary concern should actually be your support. Why isn’t the company willing to invest in this any longer? Why has the will failed? Hint: there is always more time and money, you just need people to help you look.

Motivation and Support (recognition, impetus, desire) controls the purse-strings on your project. If the company has no desire to continue your project, they won’t. Maybe you screwed up and blew your budget, or maybe the market has changed, and the will has focused on other priorities. Without securing support, securing resources is impossible. To secure support, you need to present the vision of why supporting you is a good idea.

Your Vision of Success (possibilities becoming realities) is the foundation upon which all support and resources for your project is built. If this compelling vision hasn’t been defined outside your team (from above), this is the most critical element to focus on. This vision will carry you through the hard times and serve as your yardstick to success in the good times. If you want management to believe in your project, tie it into their definitions of success, then give them something to believe in and deliver it. If they can’t commit the resources to attain your grand plan, let them know how they’re knocking down their own vision of success.

Any war stories to share about your encounters of success or failure?

The confusion between the haves and have-nots is essentially one of savvyness: the old-guard incorrectly assumes the content has decreased while the initiation cost has stayed the same.

This is akin to yelling,

“stop Twittering, you’re WASTING all THAT PAPER with your mindless drivel!!”

It’s only been in our recent history of written and correspondence that we’ve felt the need to make communication it “worth it”. The Ten Commandments were only carved into stone tablets announced with a brushfire because they set the foundations of Western society.

Detractors of Twitter also think that just 140-character snippets of daily life are somehow going to “devalue” all communication. The main refrain is not a new one:

” doesn’t making something this short ultimately dilute all experience? ultimately leading to ruin, chaos, and alienation?”

If you think that 140 characters is too little space to say anything meaningful, we’ve forgotten that the beauty of the tribe is built on short grunts, cries, hoots, and hollers.

The noise of the tribe, is fundamental to who we are.

(and now we’re getting it back.)

Every battle worth fighting needs a good enemy. Who is your enemy?

MySpace has Facebook.
Chevy has Ford.
Luke Skywalker has Darth Vader.

If you’ve failed to define the enemy, whether it’s “Competitor X”, or “boring mediocrity”, you’re robbing yourself and your employees of vital motivational energy.

Enemies clarify goals and focus energies. Now, the extra hour in the office polishing your PowerPoint deck isn’t about pride, it’s about sticking it to the man.

We tend to forget that our companies are made of individuals, each needing some type of motivation. The notion of “us vs. them” is core to how we have evolved as humans, only slightly less important than “I’m hungry” and “I’m tired.”

Tribes instinctually need something to fight for, and something to fight against. It’s what defines the tribe and guides their decisions, and it has to be something more than “better next quarter” or “15% YoY growth”. Without a cohesive, visceral message about the battle you need won, what’s to keep them on the battlefield?

For bonus points: enemies don’t have to be people or competitors, they can be “ideals” or notions. Apple’s enemies are: mediocrity, confusion, and apparently, “buttons“

The new Pepsi logo has generated a stir among those people who pay attention to such things. Among the various opinions, most of the negative comments tend to converge around the idea that it is “too generic”, or looks downright “cheap”. Moogy.org has a nice overview and collection of links.

At this point, it may help to invoke the great Wayne Gretzky:

“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”

I believe that Pepsi has succeeded in skating to where the puck is going to be.

Maybe the new logo doesn’t match the current aesthetic of today’s world but that is because they are already marketing to tomorrow’s world. In two years, Pepsi’s new logo will simultaneously be both contemporary AND familiar. In twenty years, their logo will be cherished as an emblem of “simpler times”.

Maybe in the downturned economy, buying generic cola will be equivalent to creating a wartime victory garden or making mayonnaise cake?

On a side note: even if their logo proves to me a miserable failure, it shows that Pepsi has the balls to fight for their brand and make choices they believe to be best for their business.

Here are 5 tips that I wish someone had given me before I started designing anything:

1. know what you’re solving
   Design is the process of creating solutions to problems. More often than not, the problem is actually something different than what it at first appears. Probably, those asking you to do the design are phrasing the question incorrectly. As a designer, it’s up to you to figure out what they’re really asking for. Once you know what you’re solving for, then you can begin researching all the use-cases which you’ll incorporate into your successful design. (And there will be plenty of use-cases that weren’t initially mentioned.)
2. someone has already designed this
   The world seems like a blank slate. Never has a designer encountered these problems before, and you have the chance to create something truly new! Wrong. Your “entirely new” problem is likely one of the age-old problems many systems or products have approached before. The circumstances may be new, but looking to the past at how other designers have solved something like this will help you learn from someone else’s mistakes. If you can’t find something like this before, ask around, and read some books; the truth is out there.
3. this is not a meritocracy
   In the end, your design will not evaluated solely on its merits. Any design you deliver to a committee or team will have to pass their own special set of requirements. Their perception is your reality, and if it looks complicated to them, it is. There is no sense or joy attempting to convince them they are wrong, it’s your job to explain the rationale behind your design decisions and how they solve the problem. At times, you’ll need to educate about what the actual problem is. After you’ve done all this, you have to let it go and move on.
4. you are not designing for yourself
   You’re way deeper into this than you realize. By even thinking about this design problem in the first place, you have already become a power-user. There are plenty of edge-cases to explore, don’t get wrapped up in them, just because you know they exist. Focus on delivering the functionality in priority order by solving most users biggest problems first. Also, remember that the users of this product are not designers. Namely, your users probably don’t have a few of the luxuries you have: LAN connection, two 1600×1200 monitors, really good eyesight, an hour of undivided attention. I always think of this way: imagine this design as if I were trying to hold a baby in one hand and still accomplish my task. Does the design still work?
5. the better the design, the less people will talk about it
   Secretly in your heart you long for fame and fortune as a designer. A sad truth to design is that the better something works, the less publicity you’ll probably get. Inspired design is invisible, subtle, and elegant. To achieve any sort of notoriety, your design must be so invisible that its invisibility is noteworthy! Also, designers are like authors or actors: for every super-star, there are 1000 nearly-as-good who will never see their name in lights.

Any additional thoughts? I’d love to hear from any readers who are designers themselves!

It’s eerie sometimes, isn’t it, how a dog can look like its owner. Would it be outlandish to imagine that a company looks like its CEO?

Or, not looks like, exactly. But perhaps acts like?

Does the structure, strategy, and practices of Microsoft echo how Bill Gates presents himself? Do we see ripples of Steve Job’s subdued glasses and black turtleneck mirrored in the current lineup of Apple products? Does the iconoclastic multi-business Virgin conglomerate remind you of its multi-talented iconoclastic founder Richard Branson?

Does the company of eBay look a little like Pierre, overlaid with Meg Whitman, and a dash of John Donahoe?

The individual in a position of power uses the same mental model to make decisions both about their company and their personal actions on a daily basis.

The brain being used to negotiate multi-million dollar contracts is also being used to choose which pair of shoes to wear, and whether it matters if those shoes match their belt.

As an example, we all know CEOs who have a sense of style and believe in the importance that of experience and impression in their lives. They believe or understand style and presentation to be critical to success, so they will make sure their company can execute with the same level of “flair”. They will hire, fire, promote, and guide with these goals in mind, placing an importance on interaction and presentation that might not be seen in other companies.

But don’t get into the correlation == causation trap! There’s many reasons people might choose that tie or dress. Does the CEO wear sandals because they are actively rebelling against the “conformity” of shoes? Or because this is perfectly acceptable attire at university and they haven’t updated their wardrobe? Maybe they feel they have something to prove about succeeding without dressing like others in business.

The next time I interview for a job or invest in a company, when they get to the section where I can ask questions, I will have these two important queries:

• who’s really “in charge here”
• what are they like outside of work?

The little details about what car they drive, what shoes they wear, and where they choose to have their home may have critical foreshadowing as to how they run their business.

So how well does your boss dress?

Optimization is the enemy of innovation. Or should I say, innovation and optimization usually inhabit opposite ends of the strategy spectrum.

Innovation is the process of identifying the possible, constantly changing and expanding upon what is currently achievable. Optimization, on the other hand, is the process of refining existing processes, cutting them down to the more and more essential pieces for greater efficiency.

Earlier this week I presented at and attended the Innovation Immersion conference in Phoenix. There, my eyes were really opened up to what other organizations call “innovation”. It seems there are as many implementations of innovations as there are different company structures.

While preparing for my presentation, I looked back on our Disruptive Innovation team, and how it fit within the grand scheme of eBay’s organizational structure. While we were far removed from John Donahoe’s statements about disruptive innovation of the organization, I believe we played a small but vital role in the end.

One conclusion I came to was that the desire to have an “innovation team” is a direct response to a perceived lack of internal innovation capability. Whether or not internal innovation is really lacking, perception is reality.

I then sat down and really asked myself whether I should be advocating for organizations to have an innovation team. If the team was really a placeholder for a perception of needing change, wouldn’t it just be better to change the culture?

I believe that all small, young companies are probably innovating “enough”, perhaps as much as they can possibly handle. In the beginning stages of a business, innovation is a way of being. There is never enough money, time, or resources to get things done “right”, so things are done however they can be done. The possible is recognized and embraced daily.

Over time, patterns of success are recognized and emphasized and the business slowly begins to tilt in those directions. Growth reinforces success. And processes that work, become mandatory.

The business will align itself with whatever it has “found” to “work”. Managers will begin to manage to these principles because their success relies on the success of their employees, and everybody will try to hire the prospective candidates which appear best suited for the environment.

As the business grows, these success patterns will become ingrained into the business. If growth is the primary objective, all decisions will be optimized towards efficiency. Whatever mix of employees you started with, they will be selected by evolution and “optimised” themselves.

You may end up with a corporate culture that has become some highly optimized that it’s unable to “innovate” any longer. Far past are the days of a small, lithe, company; this has become an efficient machine, and brilliant factory.

And yet here’s the kicker:

innovation is by definition the enemy of optimization, yet over-optimization is the enemy of long-term viability.

The balance is between achieving acceptable growth while maintaining long-flexibility. You never know what’s around that next corner.

UPDATE- The more general way of saying this is:

specialization is the antithesis of flexibility (unless, of course, you specialize in being flexible)

The problem of phishing happens expressly because there’s no easy way for me to separate legitimate emails in my inbox from illegitimate ones.

My solution comes from a game I regularly play with magazines or catalogs. When I sign up, instead of giving them my first name, I use their company name. For example, when I signed up for a subscription to Wired magazine, I gave my first name as “Wired”. Now, when any mail comes to “Wired Skyberg”, I know exactly who sold their subscriber database.

Here’s my proposal for a solution:

1. all email providers become OpenID or OAuth providers
2. whenever a 3rd party is asking me for my email address, they must authenticate via my provider
3. each sender receives a token which grants some type of access to my email account
4. I, as a user, can manage these tokens in any way I choose, via my email provider

This allows me to control who is able to place emails in my inbox, or various other folders of my choosing. It may seem like a lot of overhead, but it would be devilishly easy to manage if done right. The nice part is that the “overhead” can be handled either in-the-moment or entirely in the background.

Here’s a use-case showing one possible scenario:

• I’d like to sign up for a new service, and they ask me for my email
• I give them my email address, and a short temporary PIN I’ve already assigned with my provider
• they do their reg flow, and send me an email, including my temp PIN in the email header or subject
• while scanning my incoming email, my provider recognizes this PIN, and places it in a “Requesting Authorization” folder
• next time I login to my email, I can review their auth request in a special folder
• by clicking a button, I automatically send an email back with a PIN for their use only
• they will need to include this PIN in their email header whenever they wish to contact me in the future

Both the temp PIN and personalized PIN can be stored and accessed via OpenID or OAuth, for complete hands-off use. The personalized PIN could also be a public key if I wanted incoming email encrypted. The temp PIN could also be shared semi-publically on social networking sites or other trusted sites. Multiple active temp PINs could show you exactly where the referral came from, and if that temp PIN had been compromised or abused somehow.

An advantage of this system is that I can stop all incoming spam without resorting to changing my email address for all legitimate users. Too much spam “requesting authorization”? Change your temp PIN and they all silently disappear.

What if a user I’d previously granted access to now is sending me spam? Just revoke their personal PIN and they won’t be able to bother you any more. The personal PIN also has the benefit of making priority filtering easy. Want all financial stuff kept in its own folder? Just tag all PINs given to financial institutions as “money”, and they’re automatically sorted and categorized.

While this system does have a slightly higher bar to entry than existing email, isn’t that what we all really want?

Questions, comments, offers to develop this solution, all highly encouraged!

Here’s the session notes and presentation:

Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD. VHS vs. Beta. PC vs. Mac. AC vs. DC. As long as platforms have been a valuable resource, wars have been fought to control them. Eventually, either through trickery, persistence, or legislation, all wars come to an end. By understanding these wars, old and new, we’ll be better prepared to survive the next.

I recently posted about “sampling myopia” — the idea that it’s unlikely you’ll get a “good” answer from any type of survey or study you create, because you don’t know the full context — and also about why leadership based on bad data or too little data can be disastrous.

In his post he captures the essence of the two posts and my feeling towards the data in general:

…which I’ve always thought a bit harsh: I’m in no way a “touchie-feelie”, “it just kinda feels right”, “crystals will tell us” kind of marketing thinker. No, I think disciplined and evidence-based stuff is the only sensible way forward – we just need better (and perhaps less) research approaches which harness what we now know about human beings and not more and more of the same old stuff

So… are you seeing true, positive progress from your marketing and leadership, or more of the “same old stuff”?

If you take a look at the actual acronym: “ROI” return on investment, it seems like a perfectly logical way of directing your business activity. After all, who wouldn’t want to invest in the things that bring them the greatest returns?

The unfortunate simplification in action is that “return” is generally taken to mean revenue or cashflow, which is but one of the important aspects of running a business.

The problem here is that while revenue can be easily counted, recorded, multiplied and divided; other intangible dimensions cannot be. How do you quantify “trust”? How do you measure “excitement”?

What would an ROI of 20% on trust actually mean? Because the intangibles cannot easily be typed into Excel, they can’t be utilized on pivot charts, or factored into equations.

And because MBA’s live and die by Excel, anything you can’t count, doesn’t count.

ROI based on revenue or other “quantifiable” metrics prove to be an overly blunt way of looking at the world, missing the nuanced and very real ways that vectors like “image” and “brand” profoundly affect your bottom line. If you only have one “real” data point, you tend to optimize to increase that value.

This starts you off making very poor business decisions. Take, for example, 3rd party advertising on your site. Investment is minimal (just open a few content spaces on your pages), and return could be huge. BINGO, the ROI meter goes off, let’s do this!

Did anyone consider what it might look or feel like to have 3rd party advertising on the site? What type of message does this ROI-driven decision send to our customers and what do they think about it?

If you lined up a row of junior MBA’s and really forced them to “prove” it to you, their minds would ultimately jump to questionnaires, surveys, and satisfaction reports. Scratching at the walls to come up with NUMBERS they can give you, they’ll throw out all sort of tests and questions they can ask. Because they want to fit it into their Excel spreadsheet.

And this all takes time and money, and the results can only really be measured after you do something. Not to mention that more than likely, your “results” are indelibly tainted by asking the wrong questions.

so if you can’t measure it, what do you do?

Because so many of the truly important aspects of your business can’t be measured directly, you probably shouldn’t try. Measure the ones you can and then jump in to get a “feel” for the rest. No Excel magic to calculate ROI is going to help you here any more than it would help you learn to surf, or fly a helicopter. You’ve gone through ground school, now it’s your chance to really show what a good pilot you are.