The T-shaped individual.

Here be knowledge, here be expertise

Not long ago (at least to my recollection) all we heard about was how the people who were the most specialized would get the best jobs. This terrified me. I abhor specialization. I like to know a lot about a few things, and a little about everything. That’s just the way my ADD-addled brain works. So you can imagine my happiness as I read about how IDEO (the company I clearly idealize) looks for T-shapedness when hiring. They do so because they argue that this leads to better team formation; individuals with varied backgrounds are able to communicate more easily and with more empathy (because they understand each other’s backgrounds somewhat more – of course, empathy itself is something that is looked upon favorably at IDEO when hiring). Instead of occupying silos of expertise, teams are cross-functional – you get recombination and variation (basically like sex with ideas) and in general, better ideas and results.

Great right?

Of course it’s great. But the metaphor is incomplete. I went on to read about the importance of I shaped individuals by Bill Buxton, who, while not actually from IDEO himself, is apparently good friends with Bill Moggridge, the co-founder of IDEO. The difference here is that the bottom of the I is a grounding in practical experience. So, you have breadth of knowledge, deep expertise in one domain, and to cap that off, a lot of experience relevant to that domain.

Giving T-shaped people their feet.

Thank you, BusinessWeek

What does it mean?*

Seriously the greatest image to ever grace this blog.

*Because I can’t help but try and be funny in the middle of being serious, some of you will catch the reference to the Complete Double Rainbow Guy. If you don’t, go to youtube, and google that immediately.

Related links/further reading:

http://creativegeneralist.blogspot.com/2005/07/thinking-linking-doing.html

http://creativegeneralist.blogspot.com/2006/06/ten-faces-of-innovation.html

http://www.coderenaissance.com/2008/06/t-shaped-people.html

Full disclosure: I keep an ‘I’m reading’ list on my profile on LinkedIn and will be using the reviews there as the basis for my reviews here. If I could just import them here, I would, but there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to embed them right now. Also, by doing it this way it forces me to think about what has changed since I wrote that review, and the update will hopefully make the review more accurate.

The Ten Faces of Innovation: IDEO’s Strategies for Defeating the Devil’s Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization
by Thomas Kelley, Jonathan Littman

I’m only through the first two parts of ten, but I can say already that if you’re interested in making a design-focused organization, or even just improving your marketing through empathy and understanding your customer, you’re going to want to have this book on hand. Update: I’ve kind of stalled on this one, though it isn’t because I don’t like it – I just got caught up in a few other books at the same time. While this book is not exactly how-to, it has a lot of great ideas and case studies to make things happen and provide inspiration.

13 Things that Don’t Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time
by Michael Brooks

This book is blowing my mind. There are so many interesting scientific anomalies that currently exist – from death as an aberration to the problem (or not) with dark matter – this book is definitely for the scientifically curious. Update: (I wrote the previous part a few weeks ago) I actually just finished this book last night. The last few chapters were not as good as the first few, but it’s hard to say if that was due to the mysteries being less interesting or me getting a bit tired of them. Maybe 11 things that don’t make sense would have been better.

Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative
by Edward R. Tufte

So far this is simply an amazing book about the role of design in great communication. When you read the part about the Challenger Disaster you will learn about statistics, understanding data, and communicating risks properly. Edward Tufte is a true gem. Update: we both hate PowerPoint. That is all.

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days
by Jessica Livingston

This book is great for anyone interested in entrepreneurship in general or specifically tech start-ups. It is really making me want to get something rolling on my own, which is both distracting and very exciting. I highly recommend this book. Update: I still highly recommend this book. I haven’t picked it up in the six months since I read it, but I do still plan on using one of the interviews as a basis for a one hour lesson in my entrepreneurship class at BrainBoost.

Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire: The Methods and Madness Inside Room 56
by Rafe Esquith

I’m about to be teaching a course again and this book is giving me a nice grounding in the non-technical aspects of teaching that I want to accomplish, or re-accomplish, as it were. Very entertaining and enlightening. Update: I am teaching that class now, as above, and this book was inspiring, but perhaps it’s more for someone who hasn’t done a lot of teaching. Then it will really get you excited to teach.

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
by Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein

I’m reading this book because I’m a bit of a junkie when it comes to books about the brain, how it works, and how we can improve outcomes for people in general. If we can improve the lives of others by changing design, why shouldn’t we? Let the default be a great option. Update: Started reading this again recently. It’s still pretty awesome, and definitely a great place to start if you’re fairly new to the subject.

Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
by Jim Collins, Jerry I. Porras

A great book if you ever need to create a BHAG for a company you know little about and then give a presentation to its CEO less than 48 hours later. The Sauder MBA Capstone program – good times! Update: I haven’t looked at this one for quite a while now. It’s not for everyone, but it is particularly useful if you own/run/work for a small business and you want to set a course for the future.

The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits
by C.K. Prahalad

A great book that features tonnes of actual pragmatic advice and lessons learned from companies opening up the bottom of the pyramid. Perfect for anyone interested in making the world a better place through business. Update: This book makes you want to move away and go help the less fortunate all over the world. That feeling passes – however, that is probably a good thing, as there is always a lot of good you can do in your own backyard – like volunteer in Vancouver.

Duct Tape Marketing: The World’s Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide
by John Jantsch

Another book I’m only part way through, but this one has had some real gems in it. For example, mapping your customers out to see any interesting relationships between them. What if half your customers all came from the same neighbourhood? What does that tell you? Maybe you have an evangelist there, or maybe seeding a new neighbourhood with customers would be a good idea as perhaps it’s just friends talking to friends? You never know what you will learn from this exercise – and this is just one among many. Update: See, this is why I force myself to do this – why haven’t I picked this one up in a few weeks? I need to finish this one right away.

The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures
by Dan Roam

Clearly I’m reading way too many books at the moment, but this is also a keeper. It helps show my current theme/interest, which is learning to communicate more effectively and efficiently through a number of different mediums. A lot of what I have found in here is fairly intuitive, however, like many things in life, forcing yourself to sit down with the intuitive can sometimes be quite enlightening. Update: I’m guilty here – I’m totally skimming the exercises and that is making the whole experience a lot less useful. I will update this one again in the next set of reviews assuming I go back and do these drawing exercises. Mea culpa.

One of my favorite Tufte posters – click for full-size:

The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint

“You can look at a problem, and either go ‘oh, this is a problem, or you can, KABOOM! Blow it up and turn it into something great! You literally KABOOM the problem.”

Besides being one of the funnier episodes of Parks and Recreation in recent memory (this scene alone has several classic lines), the Kaboom philosophy* is actually kind of fun to live by. We started using it (or perhaps overusing it – at least as a part of speech) at BrainBoost Education not that long ago. Of course, literally kabooming problems makes little sense (though it’s fun to say), but the practical aspect of kabooming as we decoded it – that is, not getting too hung up on details early on a project, not allowing the role of Devil’s Advocate to take hold, and trying stuff with a view to iterate quickly – all of that is, in many ways, great management philosophy.

If you wanted to test out a new layout for some physical space in the office, you would discuss it briefly, get approval (usually to applause), go off and kaboom it and then get feedback. For bigger projects, we didn’t stick to the one day timeline as it was often too restrictive, but if something had in the past taken months to do we were pretty sure we could kaboom it in a week or two (like our website). Again, getting it right the first time is less important than getting it finished. Perfectionists will find this a difficult trade-off to swallow; after all, there is always something you can improve – many perfectionists would prefer it if a project was never ‘done’. The simple solution is that nothing is ever truly ‘done’ – any end state is a subjective assessment that generally comes about when either a) further inputs to the project return marginal and/or diminishing gains, or b) there are other projects that will deliver sufficient ROI.

For example, it’s easy to finish a web design, get your site ready to go, only to postpone going live because you are gathering more data. You can gather information forever, but as noted by Nielsen, you really only need a handful of users to test it before you’ve found all of the important problems.

Nielsen's usability findings

Of course, as noted in Nielsen’s findings:

The most striking truth of the curve is that zero users give zero insights.

So clearly, this project is not suffering from inputs that produce diminishing gains. It is not kaboomed.

First and foremost, kabooming is not about being careless. By all means, do some testing, allow some time for reflection, but get your web design or whatever project moved quickly to ‘done’. Kabooming is about optimizing to two constraints: time and completion. The interesting thing here is that time and completion trade off against one another. Completion is defined as the sum of a set of states that represent different features, actions or tasks. The more features that make up a project, generally the more actions and tasks are required to bring those features about, and in general, the more time this requires. The upshot of all of this is that setting up the scope of the project requires kabooming itself. It generally goes (or should go) something like this:

D: If we do that, then we need to redesign the website, and that’s a big task.
M: No it’s not – we can kaboom it.
D: Do you really think so?
M: We’ll literally kaboom it.
D: OK, what are the minimum requirements?
M: X Y and Z.
D: I think that will take one month.
M: Then cut Z.
D: Two weeks it is. Kaboom.

As the project rolls along, generally two phenomena will occur. The first is a reluctance to stay committed to the deadline as you realize you can’t make it. You will try to move the date backward. If you have a manager that understands kabooming, they’ll hold your feet to the fire and remind you that because it’s a kaboom project the only thing you absolutely have to do is ship on time. This second thing is that this generally leads to great spikes of productivity individually and as a team, particularly as the deadline draws near. You make the deadline either with all the features or without, but that’s the end of that cycle of production and the project has been officially kaboomed. Whether it needs another cycle of kaboom with the same team, a different team, or no team (there are more productive projects available) is up to the project owners. Generally, if all features have been completed, some small subset of the team will set about refining the project, but the engine will roll on to the next big thing that needs kabooming.

“Remember: take a man kabooming, he kabooms for a day. But you teach a man how to kaboom…kaboom, kaboom, KABOOM!”

Kabooming is addictive and I’ve adopted it to suit many of my own projects. I think part of the attraction is that when you commit to kabooming something there are two positive feedback mechanisms: first, you will experience a sense of blissful productivity as you knock items off the feature, task and action list; second, no matter the results, you get a strong sense of accomplishment even when the final result is unpolished. There is no better example of a kaboomed project than this website/blog. When I set out to get this website rolling, I began thinking about all the little obstacles that were in my way. I would have to decide on a domain name, a provider, a hosting service, a blog title, a layout, whether to use a CMS, – and quickly I would feel overwhelmed and rather than begin I would try to do something else. However, when I decided the project was kaboomable, I gave myself a four-hour window to finish the project. It wasn’t polished at the end, but the deadline forced me to make all kinds of decisions rapidly and I was proud of the output. Now that it exists I can devote smaller increments of time to its upkeep and optimization.

* Despite what happens later in the episode, KaBOOM is actually a real thing and they really do build parks for kids (though I’m not sure if they do it in a day).

What does a cover letter do?

The job of the cover letter (in tandem with a resume) is to provide enough useful information to a decision maker as to whether they ever want to meet you, let alone work with you. I’ve done this work before, sorting through piles of resumes and cover letters, and I’ve talked to a lot of people who have done it, and so I know that for the most part, these decision makers are overworked and will spend generally less than a minute going over what took you sometimes an hour to write. That’s pretty disheartening, I know. But what options are there? If it’s unrealistic to examine each letter in detail, to really read every word and think very deeply about what the person is communicating, then the options are to use the cover letter as a screening proxy or to throw it away. Of course, a proxy is a useful tool in this case, so scanning quickly for requirements and typos/misused words can reveal at least some information about the candidate in question. Moreover, once you learn to scan professionally, you can sense whether the letter was written fresh (and thus means the person either generally cares about this job or is just beginning their job search) or is a rehashed mishmash of past cover letters (and thus the person is demonstrating a lower level of commitment or desire).

Cover letter = symbolism gone mad

camus would have hated cover letter writing

And this is really the whole crux of what is so disheartening about cover letter writing – that what you are creating is, in many ways, not a real letter, but instead a symbol, or a signal if you will. It says something about you on a meta-level without it even having to be read. And because it has to pass this smell test first – that is, it has to appear to be something that someone gave a damn about – the symbolism of the cover letter actually has primacy over what you are literally communicating. That is the thing that I find nauseating. That the whole task of baring your passion for a position, matching the position requirements to skills you own, tweaking your resume to match the job, and then communicating in way that is fresh without being creepy – that that whole song and dance can be undone by something as simple as incorrect typesetting, or a missing period. Or addressing the letter to ‘Hiring Manager’ because despite googling for 30 minutes you could not find out the appropriate person’s name, or whether a certain ‘Pat’ or ‘Robin’ or ‘Manu’ was a man or woman.

Everything would be fine if you heard all the time about how Sally down in HR found a real gem and interviewed this guy whose been with the company five years now, all this despite the fact that his cover letter had a sentence that ended nonsensically. But she took a chance and interviewed him and kaboom! Look where we are now. Guy practically saved the company. Thank God we don’t use cover letters as a simple proxy for screening candidates.

And for me, even after all that, what makes cover letter writing unbearable is that it is so rote. Do these things in this order, say this, don’t say that, jump through this hoop over here and now wiggle your ears. It’s so damned repetitive. I prefer trying new things, learning about and mastering them, then applying them and moving on. Sadly, until I get the job I want, I will not be moving on from this task. So clearly I still have some learning to do.

Which brings me to the point of this post: I believe the cover letter is dead.

Eric Romer's campaign to get hired website

Or maybe it’s not dead, but it has got to be dying, because it turns out there are a lot of creative people out there who felt something similar to me, and instead of analyzing and complaining about the situation (or maybe they did as well, who knows), they tried something else. And in general, it worked.

There’s this guy, Eric Romer, who went out and bought a domain name (hiremeheadblade.com) and started a social media campaign to get hired by HeadBlade, the very company looking for a great Marketing Manager.

Or this girl, featured over on Steve Pratt’s blog (of CBC Radio 3 fame) – Sabrina didn’t get hired at the time but as Steve points out he would never forget the resume and would recommend her in a heartbeat.

Sabrina's amazing facebook-style resume

And then of course you can simply search for ‘creative resumes’ and get lists like this one. A lot of brilliance on that list, and of course, Sabrina’s brilliant facebook resume is there at number two.

Obviously, we will always need to set ourselves apart so long as the cost of interviewing and hiring is high. So, you know, maybe it’s not that the cover letter is dead, it’s just that it’s changing, and I’m excited to see that creativity is becoming more affordable in the sense that it is both rewarded more frequently and the cost to using the technological tools is rapidly approaching zero.

What I learned about myself

When you hate cover letter writing as much as I do, don’t apply for jobs that are going to be repetitive or force you to operate within a narrow band. That should have been obvious I guess, but thinking back to some of the first cover letters I sent out quite a while ago, clearly it was not.

When you have as little experience in areas you care about as I do (if you can follow that), don’t go for a standard cover letter/resume combo. You’re already behind the eight ball in the hunt for those positions, so you better step it up a notch if you want to make it through the initial screening.

Apply to places that require curiosity and creativity and for roles that require a love of ambiguity.

When in doubt, refer back to this list.

If you’re in a hurry, you can watch from about 7 minutes to 10 minutes on the talk for the anecdote that encapsulates the definition, but I recommend giving the entire talk your time. Dan Barber is not only an excellent chef, but also an excellent speaker as it turns out.

If you’re like me, you check email obsessively. Sometimes you’re waiting for something important, sometimes you’re bored. In either case you should probably be doing something else. Enter Inbox Zero.

Inbox Zero is the brainchild of Merlin Mann (great name!), founder of 43 folders – a site dedicated to helping you manage your most limited resource – time.

The video above, which is about an hour long (but worth watching if you have trouble managing your inbox(es)), takes you through his entire system and philosophy. If you’re short on time, it can be summed up fairly quickly:

1. Your inbox is not a task list. Don’t use it as one.
2. Don’t check your email, instead PROCESS your email inbox once or twice a day, and when you do, PROCESS every email so that when you are finished you have an inbox with ZERO unprocessed emails.
3. When processing your inbox, you may only take one of four actions on each email (or thereabouts depending on how you adapt the system). You may: do it (if it takes less than x minutes (generally 2 minutes or less)), delete it (in gmail, archive is pretty much the same since space is virtually unlimited), delegate it (don’t forget to follow up on it if you’re ultimately responsible for the outcome – ie. set a reminder on your calendar), or defer it (if you need to do it but it will take longer than x minutes – this is akin to creating a future to-do list).

For my personal email account, I use a modified system where I have two task lists – one that includes everything I must do (‘Action’), and one that is more like the ’20% rule’ – stuff I’m interested in but doesn’t matter immediately. Then I set about completing all the of the tasks marked ‘Action’. If I’m bored or need to reinstate flow, I switch to the ‘Someday’ folder and complete whatever tasks I might be interested in, or further archive items if I’ve now decided the item is no longer of interest to me.

The important lesson behind Inbox Zero is that we all need some form of a system to process the information that piles up on our virtual doormats everyday.

What system(s) do you use?

And this brings me to the topic of improving the user experience. First, let me say that I am about to whole-heartedly plug my favourite extension to date, because it has truly improved my user experience of browsing the internet, and that I will say right now everyone should be using this thing because it is really that great. The thing is called Ubiquity.

I will say a few things about it first, and then I encourage you to watch the video which I have (hopefully!) embedded correctly below.  (On that note, if anyone knows why I am so far unable to embed things in wordpress, please let me know.)  Ubiquity is about improving the way in which we interact with the internet.  The idea of the project is to create more  of a flow experience in that what you want to do online should really take as few keystrokes as possible – consider Ubiquity a shortcut to a less impressive but still amazing future not unlike the kind of object manipulation and interaction Hollywood has presented to us in films like Minority Report.  So, for example, if someone wants to meet you at a certain location and sends an address to you in an email, you should be able to press one or two keys and have a map of that place in front of you.  Ditto for adding that date to your calendar.  The idea (in my mind at least) is to create shortcuts that get away from the ol’ highlight text, copy, google search, click link, paste, hit enter etc. of yesterday and to get us closer to a future of true object and data manipulation in real-time.

From the Ubiquity about page itself:

The overall goals of Ubiquity are to explore how best to:

• Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)
• Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)
• Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.
• Extend the browser functionality easily.

While Ubiquity isn’t perfect, the great thing about it is that it exists today, it’s easy to install and use, it is fully customizable meaning you can program your own shortcuts (or mashups), and it really changes the way you think about all the little actions that make up everything you do online, at least in the sense that everything has a process, an order to it, which taken collectively makes the browser experience a series of repeated interactions and iterations that lack the level of interactivity that many of us have come to expect from the promise of a tomorrow that is never far off yet never quite comes into sharp relief.  The title of one of my favourite blogs sums it up best – Where’s my Jetpack?

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

The second design and user experience thing on my mind can really only be seen to be understood, and so I will once again try to embed a TED talk onto this site.  This gets a lot closer to the Minority Report ideal, but of course, while this thing exists, unlike Ubiquity it does not exist (yet) for you and me to use.  But it is definitely worth a viewing and it is less than 9 minutes long.  It is entitled Unveiling the ‘Sixth Sense,’ game changing wearable tech and it is presented by Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry, of the aptly-named Fluid Interfaces Group at the MIT Media Lab.

My guess is neither of these will embed properly so I have, quite amazingly, used foresight and added links to each video.  Ubiquity’s is here and Patti Maes is here.  Man, I really can’t wait for the future when I can simply think and have a blog entry appear online.  Good times ahead folks.

What free online productivity tools do you use? Do you know of any other demonstrations of human-computer interaction that could change the way we use technology in the future?

First, what does TED stand for?  What’s it all about?

My friend Matty G first tuned me into these talks and I have been all over them ever since.  We used them at BrainBoost Tutoring to engage students in the discussion of complex or philosophical ideas – because the presentations tend to be quite engaging, it was difficult for anyone to tune them out.  They had a way of making learning fun…not that it isn’t normally, but this was like ninja-style learning, as if you really had no idea what was going on, but all you knew was that you really wanted to be part of the conversation.  Your brain was always going, ‘Hey, wait a minute!’ or, ‘NO WAY!’, and you would generally have the urge to shout out something.  We even occassionally had students asking to pause the video so they could say something (not a common occurence in most classrooms where videos=sleep).

In any case, because the ideals of TED (a non-profit organization) are both lofty and inclusive (i.e. ideas have the power to change the world; they are free; so please spread them!), they really encourage others to use the videos in pretty well any way they see fit (so long as you don’t profit from them directly) – there is a list of ways you can help the TED mission on the site.  If you’re interested in something, I don’t know, maybe ‘urban design’, you just search for it there and at least a half a dozen videos pop up.  Or maybe you need a 20 minute break, just take a stumble through their themed archives and you are sure to find something extremely interesting.  Some pretty big names from just about every field you can think of have gone at some point to the annual TED conference and wowed the audience; notables include: Bill Clinton, E. O. Wilson, Dave Eggers, Jeff Bezos, David Kelley, Louise Leakey, Richard Branson, Richard Dawkins, Jill Tarter, Steven Pinker, Dan Dennett, Silvia Earle, Malcolm Gladwell, and my oh my, the list goes on.

For marketers, you pretty much have to check out Malcolm Gladwell’s talk on product design.

A ha!  Never mind!  I’ve learned to embed! Scratch that.  I most definitely have not learned how to embed video.   You will need to click through on the links provided. Damn you strikethrough!

And below here is one of my favourite talks that I forgot about until recently.  It is weird and wacky, but completely representative of the kind of creative and revolutionary thinking that goes on in the minds of TED speakers.  And best of all, it’s short if you only have a little time to relax and unwind.

Enjoy!

Update: New TED Talk from Evan Williams on How Twitter’s spectacular growth is being driven by unexpected uses. http://tinyurl.com/ba4uu7
l

I’ve turned that phrase over and over in my head, and it seems to say what I want this blog to be about: into the middle of things. Let’s not worry about how we get wherever it is we are going, let’s just get moving already. Entries will be short shorter than they used to be and to the point maybe not as wandering; in the past, I preferred the sound of words and eloquent phrasing – sometimes at the expense of meaning. I hope that this hiatus from writing will change all that.

Probably, it won’t.