Ergonomics of Innovation
Recently I came across an article on how to encourage innovation within an organization. The article by Hayagreeva Rao and Robert Sutton appeared in The McKinsey Quarterly (2008 vol. 4) titled “The ergonomics of innovation“.
Given below are the main points of the article. I think the main points can apply to any organization and even helps in improving personal life. Some ofthese points also tie in to another post I wrote about “Myths of Innovation”.
- Create a new blend of old ideas – You don’t have to reinvent the wheel but apply proven techniques from other disciplines/organization in your own discipline/organization.
- Set goals that count – Set concrete numbers, dates. Goals should grab attention, make people believe it is a worthy cause and move them to action.
- Name the problem – Naming the problem makes it seem more tangible, focuses energy, attention and generates pressure to deal with it.
- Get the “hard count” – metrics are needed to ensure people focus on every little thing that moves them towards the goal.
- Ask people to take small but effective steps – Focus on small things that have big impact. People tend to respond better to a series of smaller steps that are concrete and manageable.
- Use affordances – People need concrete, easily learned and implemented tools such as checklists. Use of such affordances will make it easy for novices to learn. Veteran employees won’t find it difficult to learn. Affordances should start with obvious problems and mundane solutions. Affordance (definition) – “a quality of an object, or an environment” that allows an individual to perform action” – Wikipedia
- Engage the network – Leverage external networks to scale rather than building out. Think of using web based or other networks to find support.
Link to original article:
http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/PDFDownload.aspx?L2=21&L3=35&ar=2197
Leadereview - another interesting business
A few months ago I wrote about businesses that are built around your passion and those that pay you to enjoy doing what you love to do. I was introduced to another business called Leadereview which reviews books on leadership and then sends you those books to read. Once you read the book, you get an opportunity to discuss the contents with the author as well as others in a group. This is not only a great way to pick up new ideas but a great way to network with like minded people.
Disclaimer: I am not a member of Leadereview group and don’t know the experience of participating in the discussions. I do think it is a neat idea to make some money while having fun.
Is Yahoo doomed?
All the press articles like to use superlatives and forecast a scenario which may or may reflect the truth. Lately Yahoo has the target of such articles. Granted that Yahoo is trying to find focus in the current market scenario with Google leading the way. Microsoft’s bid put the wrong kind of attention on the company. Microsoft wanted to buy Yahoo because Yahoo represents something to them. It is not like the company is worth nothing and Microsoft isn’t throwing its money.
I don’t really know how people inside the company feel but if they were to read the articles they may get the impression that the company is going down fast. This will likely make people jump ship to ensure that they have a secure job.
It may be healthy for Yahoo to go through such a cleanup process so that all the people who are not interested in the company can leave. Of course there will also be some collatral damage with loss of good passionate people who think they can’t fulfill their dreams at Yahoo. Others may leave just to avoid all the distractions at work of the uncertain future of the corporation and lack of direction in the day to day initiatives as senior management focuses on possible outcomes. The folks that remain have a change to re-focus and try to keep the company going. It is going to be an interesting year to see what happens at Yahoo.
Sometimes public perception can decide the fate of the company without any basis on factual data. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy of doom. Let’s see what happens.
Please take a nap instead of a caffeine or sugar
All of us go through a mid afternoon period of dullness and often try to stay awake by drinking caffeinated drinks like coffee. There are many published reports/articles on the benefits of afternoon naps. Naps are much better for the body giving us energy and clarity to stay focused for afternoon work.
In many cultures, taking naps in the afternoon is customary and considered healthy. Virtually all businesses shut down during the rest period. Unfortunately the modern day working mentality says we should go go go and those who feel dull are wimps.
Many years ago I read an article documenting NASA sponsored research on pilots who take a nap on long flights. They found that those pilots who took a nap had better reflexes during landings. Similarly another article found that many senior executives now have couches in their offices for napping. Those who nap are much more effective and productive for the rest of the day. They are able to make much better decisions as a result.
I have always lived close to work and for the past few years, I worked from home. Having the freedom to take a nap or just lying down to rest and closing my eyes helped to get things done in the afternoon. Some of the tech companies allow their employees to take naps. Companies should consider providing some space for you to rejuvenate and they will get better results and more alert workers.
You may be one of those who likes to take a nap but don’t do it because you feel groggy after the nap. This could be due to napping too long. Ideally the nap should be between 20 to 45 minutes. You can read more about the nap cycle in this Boston Globe article: How To Nap
Enjoy your nap and become more productive. Time for my nap…..zzzz…..
LinkedIn worth a $1 Billion Valuation?
Many of you may be using LinkedIn already, if not, LinkedIn is a professional networking site. You connect with people you know and they connect with who they know. This way the network grows and now LinkedIn boasts that around 20 million people are in its database. All the people voluntarily keep their profiles up to date. If you want to reach a person in Company X, you find a path through your network of contacts each of them then relays your message until you reach the desired person. Depending on who is in your network it is just 2 hops and can take more hops if you don’t have connections to the desired party.
The company makes money by providing a job board and fees to getting introduced to unknown people. I don’t know how much revenue they have but according to an article on TechCrunch, the current round of funding values the company at a cool $1B. Now I don’t know if it is really worth that much. I think a lot of people signed up for curiosity thinking it will help in the future. Now whether they are actively using the network on a regular basis is unknown. In my personal case, I use it occasionally just to keep up with what my contacts are doing. I used the network very sparingly to reach someone. We will just have to wait and see if the company continues to thrive or the usage patterns tail off once the novelty wears off. Is this part of a new bubble? I don’t know.
PS I wanted to check something out on LinkedIn.com while composing this post but the site is presenting a blank page! Perhaps the support folks are busy counting money 
Update 8.28 am: It’s back to serving regular content:
Metered internet
With soaring gas prices and huge profits for oil companies, some big internet service providers (AT&T, Comcast) are now thinking of charging customers based on the bandwidth consumed to get more revenue. The argument is that while one person is using minimal bandwidth for occasional emails vs. there are those who download movies and other rich media thus consume more bandwidth.
Having a limit on bandwidth usage will restrict or even change the usage patterns for internet users. Guess what consumes least bandwidth, pure text based traffic. Will websites be rewritten to optimize bandwidth usage? I don’t think so.
You would think that due to competitive markets, large companies would do everything in their means to woo customers. Instead they follow suit and thus impose similar metered policies on their customers, if one player begins metering. Wouldn’t it make sense that they observed over a period of time if the users are really abusing the service and then work out an altenate arrangement with specific users. I guess that would be too much work to deal with customers on a case by case basis. My local internet service provider is now offering fiber to the home with unlimited usage and their policy is to enable people to develop businesses and when the bandwidth usage is way out of line, then ask them to pay business rates. If you are in the service area for one of these large companies, please make sure you voice your opinion otherwise you might get stuck with a service plan that will make you think twice about which sites and content to view.
Here is an article from NY Times on this topic: http://tinyurl.com/4de2ro
Update 6/17:
Most home users may not be using much bandwidth but home office workers may not want to think about bandwidth for the convenience of working from home. In other countries internet usage is already metered so it is a matter of getting used to tiered pricing but I doubt the base rate for minimum usage will be very low.
One side effect of metered downloads might be that people may start using internet at work to download large files such as Linux distribution images or other software.
Life After 40s in IT
My father introduced me to the writings of Subroto Bagchi, one of the founders of Mindtree Ltd – a Indian IT Consultancy company. Though I don’t remember the original article which was forwarded to me, I spent some time reading other articles by Subroto. His writings are now archived at http://www.mindtree.com/knowledgecenter/subroto_speaks.html.
One of the articles that is hidden in the archives is a presentation titled “Life After 40s in IT”. Though the presentation is not transcribed, the slides are sufficient to give an idea of the talk. During a recent conversation with a friend, we discussed this topic and some of the points raised reminded me again of this presentation. As a follow up to the conversation, I decided to write this blurb and include a link to the presentation.
Sanjay – here is the link to the presentation – http://www.mindtree.com/downloads/life-after-40.pdf. Let me know if you agree with the points in the slides.
Will work environment in the USA allow this?
A friend of mine forwarded this news clip video of a Ford plant in Brazil. The finishing comment on the narrated video is quite interesting. It says that labor unions will not allow such plants to be built in the US. If this is the story at Ford, I wonder how many other companies are in similar situation and therefore setting up plants elsewhere in the world. After all this talk of off shoring and its ill-effects, perhaps the root cause and work culture of a given environment needs to be examined.
US thrived on innovation and mechanization. You would think that process efficiencies would be welcome for cost reductions and productivity improvements. Now the question is whether other countries will use such efficiencies to elevate their own economies and take it to the next level.
The video is less than 5 minutes. Take a look:
http://info.detnews.com/video/index.cfm?id=1189
Google App Engine Pricing
On May 27, Google announced the pricing for Google App Engine. The announcement can be read at http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/annc/20080527_google_io.html.
The bottom line:
Free quota to get started: 500MB storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million pageviews per month
$0.10 – $0.12 per CPU core-hour
$0.15 – $0.18 per GB-month of storage
$0.11 – $0.13 per GB outgoing bandwidth
$0.09 – $0.11 per GB incoming bandwidth
Web applications are the main market Google App Engine is targeting unlike Amazon’s Elastic Cloud which is providing more computing and storage resources for other purposes.
I wonder if Yahoo will also look into its operations and find a way to monetize all the costs that went into its infrastructure development. I find it fascinating that businesses like Amazon and Google are monetizing the infrastructure that they developed for their core businesses. If only other corporations figure out a way to share their experience and become enablers to let others build on their expertise and experience. It will become a very interesting and dynamic marketplace. During the dot com bubble there were some efforts to carve out technology pieces from existing businesses but it never took off. Perhaps the time has come for companies to take another look at themselves and expose services which can breed new companies.
Mindfulness Video
I came across this video at GoogleTalks – a site where talks from different walks of life are video taped at the Google campus. I find there are very interesting and diverse topics available from GoogleTalks series.
One of the topics that is very dear to my heart is “meditation” and improving work life balance. Recently a friend at Intel had forwarded some information about a talk on “Conscious Living” – how to manage work and daily life stress through mindfulness. I had always felt that there should a healthy and open discussion about such topics at work place. Especially those environments where hard work means putting in 60-80 hrs/week. A lot of Fortune 100 companies talk highly of work life balance on their websites but I don’t know how much information is provided to employees on how to achieve more by taking care of themselves. I am glad that such topics are being discussed and speakers are being invited to give talks at companies. I hope such that such talks are not limited to “new age” companies or tech industry in Silicon Valley.
Even if you are a long time meditator following a particular type/style/brand of meditation, the message is still relevant – functioning from a settled state of mind improves effectivity and therefore achieve better results.
Note: The video is about 70 minutes long