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[kwangchow]

Live with it

"As you build something new and different as the watch, you finish, and you live on it, and you figure out what's really the essence of this thing, and appreciate which problems are the most important to solve, we realized the watch is all about glanceability. It's useful to the extent that, okay, I can solve my task, I'm done. If I'm up here and I'm waiting and I'm fiddling around, my arm's getting tired, this is no fun anymore, I'm going to do this a different way. And with that as our obsession for the last year. We've taken all of those tasks and said you've got to be able to finish the task, end-to-end, in two seconds. Right? And that means the launch had better be instant part because now we need to let the user think and do something in two seconds and get it done. With that focus, you find a way. We chipped away."

- Craig Federighi on the watchOS 3

I still wear my Apple Watch but I wouldn’t say I love it. I look forward to seeing if this radical rethinking of the OS can change my mind, though I fear it will be a case of marginal gains.

Listening to Federighi talk reminded me of Matt Mullenweg’s essay, ‘1.0 is the Loneliest Number’:

“I like Apple for the opposite reason: they’re not afraid of getting a rudimentary 1.0 out into the world...But if you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version you waited too long...

A beautiful thing about Apple is how quickly they obsolete their own products. I imagine this also makes the discipline of getting things out there easier...

Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you’ve created until it’s out there. That means every moment you’re working on something without it being in the public it’s actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world.”

Matt’s essay is still my favourite link to share when I’m talking about deliberate, measured, rapid iteration and the modular design discipline that underpins and facilitates it. The essay still feels fresh even though it’s almost six years old. The Apple he talks of, however, doesn’t feel so current. I find it incredible that large numbers inside of Apple lived with it prior to launch and we still got the first iteration of watchOS. It felt so unfocused and unfinished. The latter I can live with but the former betrays the purpose of an embrassing 1.0.

[kwangchow]

Homo economicus is extinct

Source

The Remain FUBAR reminds me a lot of independent game makers. I know your thing is better but it’s not enough to share knowing nods with the intelligentsia. Stop looking so smug, homo economicus is extinct.

You need to be humble enough to seek out and understand your actual audiencee. You need to empathise. You need to capture imagination by telling better (honest) stories. You need to win hearts and minds. 

It’s not enough to presume to know what’s best for them, you need to practice empathy, demonstrate you understand their problems and illustrate how your thing might be the best way to solve them.

“Emotions are the lubricants of reason.” - Faris 

[kwangchow]

Institutional Bias

"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution." - Clay Shirky

Listening to 'The Business of Music', a BBC Radio 4 documentary on the record industry, I was reminded of "Shirky's Law". Royalties aren't the problem when it comes to artists getting paid for online streaming, it's the fact that they have to travel through the record industry before they arrive at the artist.

Fortunately, the institutional foundations are crumbling.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b078nqbf

[kwangchow]

I’m making explorations. I don’t know where they’re going to take me…. I want to map new terrain rather than chart old landmarks… As an investigator, I have no fixed point of view, no commitment to any theory—my own or anyone else’s. As a matter of fact, I’m completely ready to junk any statement I’ve ever made about any subject if events don’t bear me out, or if I discover it isn’t contributing to an understanding of the problem. The better part of my work on media is actually somewhat like a safe-cracker’s. I don’t know what’s inside; maybe it’s nothing. I just sit down and start to work. I grope, I listen, I test, I accept and discard; I try out different sequences–until the tumblers fall and the doors spring open.

Marshall McLuhan on writing (via austinkleon)

[kwangchow]

Getting out of the building

The first test was awesome. The prototype was clumsy, the code was awful, radio signal buggy, but it worked! Enough to make the kids happy for one hour and ask for more. We had a confirmation.

I'm fascinated by what Vai Kai are cooking up in the kidtech space, I'm also impressed by their super lean approach to prototyping, learning and iteration.

Always get out of the building

[kwangchow]

Be a sellout

The Shake Shack Effect: Inside the Fast-Casual-Food Revolution

Piloting a "fast-casual" concept in 2015 is like being in an indie band that licenses a song for a car ad: Everyone's doing it. And there's no societal pressure against selling out anymore. "We're at the beginning of it," says Eater food critic Ryan Sutton. "There are so many more chefs just starting to figure this space out."

Two things I've encouraged for a long time: * Look at culinary trends and synthesise them * Be a sellout, the idea is to make money, that money buys you the freedom and latitude to do more great work.

The Shake Shack Effect: Inside the Fast-Casual-Food Revolution is a great introduction to both. There is so much in here that could be applied to apps and games.

Of course, it leaves you to solve the big conumdrum for yourself

What these guys know is there are a lot of people who want to eat higher-quality fast food. What's less clear is how to manage our warring impulses for what's artisanal, inventive, and locally sourced with what's standardized, trusted, and ubiquitous—which, face it, is what we really want when no one's looking.

[kwangchow]

Your worst self

“What’s one thing you’ve learned at Harvard Business School that blew your mind?” by Ellen Chisa is a fascinating read.

The part that jumped out for me was,

People often know what they’re good at (it got them where they are!) Unfortunately, things won’t always go well in your career. How you react and recover impacts everyone around you. One of the best things I did this year was answering these two questions honestly, for myself: What is my worst self? When does my worst self come out?

As I dig deeper into my Buffer Culture experiment, I find myself more comfortable and transparent with such questions.

What is my worst self? Cynical, defensive, impatient, assumptive, stubborn, output-driven

When does my worst self come out? When I feel I'm not in a position to do the right thing or craft meaningful outcomes.

This mostly manifests when I attach myself to bad cultural fits; whether that be ill-fitting organizations and projects or negative people. It also occurs when I don't take good care of myself.

The good news? I can avoid all of this through simple self-awareness and positivity!

[kwangchow]

"What if..."

I'm a big fan of Culturematic by Grant McCracken.

What is a Culturmatic? Grant describes it as a "a little machine for making culture. It is designed to do three things: test the world, discover meaning, and unleash value".

"A little machine for making culture." I love that phrase!

One of the most empowering takeaways from the book is the concept of "What if...", creating tiny cultural collisions and unleashing the results.1

To that end, what if The Buffer Culture collided with Oblique Strategies?

Let's find out...

Grant explains the "What if..." mindset in this HBR interview

A culturematic is a little experiment that in a playful counter-intuitive way, broaches a kind of what if. And people try a little experiment, really just as a way of seeing what’s out there in the world. And in the case of– Bud Caddell for instance, said well, what if I pretend that I am a member of the mail room in the TV show, Mad Men. But what if I tweet as if I were inside that mail room.

↩

[kwangchow]

Active listening

Seth Godin on active listening,

Active listening, on the other hand, requires that you interrupt when you need a clarification, and it requires that you ask a truly difficult question when the speaker is finished. If it's worth listening to, it's worth questioning until you understand it.

This post is gold and has inspired me to try and build a new habit.

[kwangchow]

If you don’t learn to love your work and remind your brain to make new steps every day, there can be no progress. - Jiro Ono

[kwangchow]

Two excellent pieces of advice on getting ahead by being nice.

Leo Widrich, The small ripples we create:

the more positive ripples we create, the more random acts of kindness, where we help strangers, take great are of our friends and loved ones, the more positivity we’re bringing into the world, which will equally affect us and make our lives better.

Dylan Collins, You have to forgive your enemies to get ahead in startups:

Being the nice guy is easy if you're in command of the situation (as an investor or the dominant player on a deal). The harder thing is to be the nice guy when you're on the wrong side of something. Nice doesn't mean getting screwed. It means you're smart enough to keep your options open.

Bill and Ted knew the secret to karmic living.

[kwangchow]

The Art of the Scene brilliantly dissects the opening scene of Raiders of The Lost Ark.

Some lessons:

Move fast and make things After the financial and critical failure of 1941, Spielberg wanted to prove to Hollywood that he wasn't a reckless liability. He resolved to come in under-budget and under-schedule. He used pre-production to prototype scenes. He shot fast and, famously, improvised.

Steal like an artist The iconic boulder scene was inspired by a Scrooge McDuck comic!

Illusion not simulation - The boulder audio? The sound of a Honda Civic driving over small rocks! Basically, a wonderful hack!

Last word to Spielberg on embracing constraints:

"I decided not to shoot for a masterpiece but to make a good movie that told George's story very well. Sure, I could have gone out and made this movie for $30 million instead of $20 million, in 100 days instead of 73. But it would have boiled down to the same ideas, the same characters, the same continuity of scenes. I could have tried to give it a remarkable veneer that only I and this year's graduating class at USC film school and Stanley Kubrick would have noticed. Or I could have just made the picture and substituted humor and invention for time-consuming technique and additional angles."

via Kottke

[kwangchow]

Grab your compass

"Know what you're trying to do before you do it. Turning knobs at random isn't enlightening any more than throwing paint at a wall blindfolded will let you paint a nice picture." – Steve Albini

Whatever creative expedition you're about to embark upon, you're going to need a North Star and a compass.

Set the bar. Define what the end looks, sounds and feels like before you make a single thing.

I like Spotify's "Think It!" approach to making products.

[kwangchow]

Making is thinking

Nathan Heller's New Yorker profile on Richard Linklater is a joy.

Linklater doesn’t trust the precision of his writing enough to insist on its verbatim rehearsal, and he’s suspicious of other writers who demand that kind of deference. As a result, his work in progress is extremely hard to track. Sometimes executives will express enthusiasm about producing a Linklater project, so he will send in a screenplay he plans to film. The response is predictable. “They’re, like, ‘We love your other films, but this isn’t for us,’ ” Linklater says. “I’m, like, ‘Well, if you saw my other scripts . . .’ ”

Making is thinking.

[kwangchow]

Influence is bliss

Michael Chabon, Maps and Legends

All literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction….Through parody and pastiche, allusion and homage, retelling and reimagining the stories that were told before us and that we have come of age loving—amateurs—we proceed, seeking out the blank places in the map that our favorite writers, in their greatness and negligence, have left for us, hoping to pass on to our own readers—should we be lucky enough to find any—some of the pleasure that we ourselves have taken in the stuff that we love: to get in on the game. All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.

Everything is a remix.

Influence + Cultural Compass = Originality

[kwangchow]

Build your own airport

Matthew Weiner in the Paris Review:

"Anyway, once I got out of film school I said, they will not let me fly the plane. So I’m going to build my own airport. I shot my first movie, What Do You Do All Day?, in twelve days, in 1995. It cost twelve thousand dollars. Anybody can raise twelve thousand dollars—now it would probably be even cheaper, because there was no digital then."

Seek forgiveness not permission.

[kwangchow]

Frameworks for chaos

I’ve been thinking a lot about the how of work recently.

The how, the organisational framework and culture, are significantly more important than the what. The work is a by-product of the conditions it is created in.

Creative problem solving is hard, the conditions within which you work are critical.

The Chaos Theory of Startups is a wonderful piece of writing from Andy Weissman.

...maybe startups are actually about chaos. Not necessarily chaos meaning "a state of confusion," but instead chaos meaning systems that are explicitly designed to be dynamical and highly sensitive to initial conditions. the decision making process itself that goes into startups is primary: it's less about the actual decisions themselves then it is about the process used to make those decisions. Your framework for making decisions matters as much or more than the decisions themselves, because the "chaos" of the system makes most outcomes indeterminate (again, chaos theory: “long-term prediction [is] impossible in general”). So you need a framework, a set of first principles. That then guide your decision making and problem solving.

Frameworks. Processes. It’s such a smart, thought-provoking post, you should read it in full.

It immediately made me return to How Medium Is Building a New Kind of Company with No Managers, an insightful interview with Jason Stirman about how Medium is embracing holocracy.

Medium adopted the Holacracy model about a year ago. Calling it “hands down, by far the best way I know or have ever seen to structure and run a company,” Stirman says. He’s especially drawn to the strategy’s crystal clear minimalism and logic. “It’s basically an operating system for your organization, so the engineer in me loves it. In fact the Holacracy organization just released 4.0 of its constitution, so our company is upgrading — just like you would update to a new iOS.”

Organisations as operating systems is a compelling metaphor, it starts playing in your head.

An operating system (OS) is software that manages computer hardware and software resources and provides common services for computer programs. The operating system is an essential component of the system software in a computer system. Application programs usually require an operating system to function.

Is it too clinical, however, too manufactured? Perhaps.

Leo Widrich uses a different metaphor.

The best explanation I’ve found to date, is one that describes a simple analogy that everyone already knows well: A forest. From the book, reinventing organizations, this quote describes it very fittingly: “In a forest, there is no master tree that plans and dictates change when rain fails to fall or when the spring comes early. The whole ecosystem reacts creatively, in the moment.”

I’m naturally drawn to the organic metaphor, it embraces the chaos of life and seeks to do great work within it. As Leo says:

What I like particularly about the forest analogy, is that one can seemingly dive into any detail of the forest as an organism and relate it to how things are working at Buffer now. One element of that is that things from the outside look messy, if you walk into a forest, there’s leaves everywhere, and dead wood lying on the ground. There seem to be no paths to walk and everything looks chaotic. And yet, everything that needs to happen is able to happen, almost effortlessly. The only difference is that there’s no one that controls it.

I love this thinking but I do wonder if there is a role for forestry?

Forestry is the science, art, and craft of creating, managing, using, conserving, and repairing forests and associated resources, in a sustainable manner, to meet desired goals, needs, and values for human benefit

Are Buffer’s core values forestry? Or does such thinling undermine the organic metaphor and seek to control, rather than embrace, the chaos ?

Perhaps, the core values are simply oxygen?

Short answer is, I don’t know! But I intend to disappear down the Reinventing Organizations rabbit hole and further develop this thinking.

Update Buffer’s Kevan Lee has put together a fantastic summary of Reinventing Organisations.