Month: January 2007

In watching all of the fundraising going on in Vancouver the last while, especially those focused around Stanley Park’s restoration, I was reminded of a particular passage from a sci-fi novel that I had read a long time ago, The Man Who Never Missed.

“—see the way the fish swim through that funnel, Emile? It’s plenty big enough to pass through, but once they’re on the other side, they never can seem to find the narrow exit to get back out.”

The boy nodded at his father and watched the fifty kilo grouper swim around inside the trap. There were five or six of the big blue-gray fish flippering back and forth. “They’re stupid,” he said. “The hole in the middle is the same on both sides.”

Hamay Khadaji looked down at his ten-year old son, then back through the glass walls of the observation tank. “No, son, they aren’t stupid, no more than any other fish. It’s the way they look at things. It has to do with the space around them, with the way their eyes and minds work. Just because somebody or something doesn’t look at the world the way you do doesn’t mean it’s stupid. It’s just different—”

Now obviously this passage above is about diversity and the need to respect it. Why I think it’s important in regards to fundraising and donations is that often people see things only from their perspective. For example, one person may be very conscious about the global situation and donate money to causes around it, as well as recycle wherever they can, whereas another person may think it’s out of their hands and would rather not think about it. Does that make one person better than the other?

Now what if I told you that the person who didn’t care about the climate had a family member who passed away due to cancer and donated substantial sums of money to organizations that do cancer research? Again is one person better than the other? No, I don’t think so. They’re just different or diverse but both are actually helping the world in a way that is the most meaningful to them.

Seth Godin on How to get re-elected.

The meeting was called for 8. At about 8:10, when the trustees were seated and ready (and the room was packed) the mayor decided to take the trustees and leave the room for a private session on a matter unrelated to the issue at hand. We all sat quietly for more than fifteen minutes. During the entire time, each person was saying to himself, “I will never ever vote for these rude people ever again.”

During the hearing itself, eye contact was in short supply and at one point, a trustee even berated an applicant. Emotions were running high, voters were paying attention and the politicians completely dropped the ball.

All it would have taken were a few encouraging words and some appropriate body language.

In other words, if you want to get re-elected, do the exact opposite of what his town trustees did. And Seth is right. A few encouraging words or even just recognizing the people and thanking them for coming down would have been a step in the right direction. It would have shown that the trustees were connected to the people and cared about them, even if just a little.

This is a perfect example of an organization or system placing too much importance upon itself over those it was created to represent. To me it’s no different than a company in which the management thinks it’s more important than the employees who comprise the company. Basically as soon as you stop treating people like people, you’re going down a path that’s going to be hard to come back from.

Hugh MacLeod has a drawing of culture on his site today.

It looks about right to me. Culture isn’t something that is structured or static with nice neat little packaged boundaries to it. Instead it’s somewhat messy and chaotic with borders that are flexible. In other words, it’s not perfect. It’s real.

Tara Hunt mentioned on her Citizen Agency site the other day that she was in the middle of reading Small Giants which is a book about “companies that choose to be great instead of big”. Interested in what Tara had to say, I decided to pop over to the Small Giants book website today and read some of the excerpts from the book. When I did, I immediately got excited when reading the following quote in the Introduction of the book that talks about an indescribable quality that these companies have that was sometimes referred to as its “soul” or “mojo”.

I had the same reaction to all the companies on my list that Reese had to CitiStorage. There was a quality they exuded that was real and recognizable but also frustratingly difficult to define. I could sense it as I walked around the business. I could see it in the contents of the bulletin boards and on the faces of the people. I could hear it in their voices. I could feel it in the way they interacted with one another, with customers, and with total strangers. But I found the “it” awfully hard to put my finger on.

There is so much said in this one paragraph that I almost wanted to laugh out loud when I read it because it finally feels good to not be alone in being aware of this “feeling”. Up until I became aware of what this quality was, I only had my intuition to rely upon. I just had to trust it and know that I wanted to work in a company that had “it” and didn’t in those without “it”.

But what was “it”? Danny Meyer of Union Square Hospitality Group talked about businesses having soul. He believed soul was what made a business great, or even worth doing at all. “A business without soul is not something I’m interested in working at,” he said.

It’s interesting to note Danny Meyer’s use of the word “soul”. It’s also interesting to note how many people feel about large corporate organizations in the sense that they would often describe them as “soulless”. 

The comment had stayed with Erickson following the trade show. Whatever mojo was, some smart people evidently thought that it was important, and that Clif Bar had it. In any case, it was something he needed to pay attention to. From then on, “mojo” became his watchword, and I could understand why. Having once had the honor of introducing the legendary blues man Muddy Waters at a concert—”I got my mojo working but it just won’t work on you”—I thought the word seemed just right for the mysterious quality I’d seen in Clif Bar, CitiStorage, Union Square Hospitality, and the other companies I’d looked at.

It was a quality that you could apparently lose by negligence. In his wonderfully engaging book, Raising the Bar, Erickson said he thought Clif Bar’s mojo was “something about the brand, product, and way of being in the world that was different. I realized that mojo was an elusive quality and needed to be tended carefully.” Hoping to sharpen his thinking, he’d given people at Clif Bar a homework assignment. After relating what had happened at the trade show, he had asked each of them to choose a company that had once had mojo and lost it, and then explain why they felt the company had had it and how they believed it had been lost.

It is most definitely a quality that can be lost. The web firm that I worked for previously in Vancouver had “it” when I started working for it. I even remember telling my boss one day that if I won the lottery, I would be coming in to work the next day and I was totally serious. I loved my job, the atmosphere, the “feeling” of “it”. But then over time, as we grew bigger and more successful, it slowly disappeared until near the end it felt “soulless” just like any other large corporate environment I’d seen (even though we hadn’t really grown that large).

Of course, I’m talking about the company’s culture here or more appropriately the characteristics or values of the company’s culture as if you were describing them as the traits of a person. For example, when I first started working for this web firm, we all worked in the same large room. This gave a feeling of being “open”, “sharing”, and “caring” because everyone was aware of what everyone else was doing and was close at hand to quickly help out if need be. Near the end though, when success had taken hold of the company and certain key company figures had their own offices (which shut people out and created walls in the company), this created the exact opposite feeling. Trust is obviously one other trait that changed. In the beginning, you trusted management and believed that they cared about you. Near the end, distrust was all that was left. Of course, the Clif Bar company employees noticed this as well when they tried to describe what companies lost when they lost their “mojo”.

The assignment had evidently struck a chord with the employees, who turned in dozens of thoughtful responses. They wrote about companies losing their creativity as they grew. About losing the emotional connection with the consumer. About losing authenticity and compromising quality. About becoming “too commercial” and focusing excessively on reducing costs. About ignoring the relationship with the community and failing to retain the culture. About getting too big too fast.

Again look at the traits described above as though they were the traits of a person. Also note that the Clif Bar employees even spelled it out so much as to say that these companies were “failing to retain the culture” that they once had when they first started out. Again think about one of your best friends and right down their traits or the traits of your relationship with them (i.e. open, caring, sharing, trusting, etc). Wouldn’t you say these are the traits of a good relationship?

Now here’s my final question. Why should the business world be exempt from the rules of a good relationship? In my opinion it shouldn’t. And many of these companies, such as the ones described in Small Giants, probably realized this. They weren’t focused so much on getting customers and selling products, as they were in helping people and building relationships (i.e. being caring, connected, etc). Of course I won’t know for sure until I read the book but the six common threads that each of these companies had within them, as described at the end of the Introduction, pretty much gives me a good indication that I’m pretty close on the mark. Basically these companies didn’t want to lose the traits that had made them so successful. They didn’t want to become something else because that “something else” just felt indescribably “wrong” to them deep down inside.

Oh and one final point. I’ve spoken before about tangibles and intangibles. This “indescribable quality” of culture is a perfect example of an intangible within a company that is just as critical to a companies success and sustainability as the tangibles it has (that being the skill and knowledge of employees). I’ll also hazard a guess as to say that in the future, we’ll see more and more companies, especially larger ones, hiring Cultural Consultants to help them regain this cultural “mojo” and then even hiring a Chief Cultural Officer afterwards to ensure it is maintained.

Rehash of I Work For The Web.

I am a daring, imaginative, adventurous, sharing, caring, diverse, open, trusting, honest, flexible, responsible, and connected person.

I am the Web.

 

Just discovered a link to Citizen Agency when I poked my head in over at Dave Seah’s place (Hi Dave!). Citizen Agency focuses on “changing the world through empowering individuals”. What I also found interesting though, and what Dave found interesting as well, is one of their recent posts entitled Looking over the CA horizon into 2007 in which they discuss their new focus on happiness.

Looking over the horizon of 2007, we got really introspective. During xmas and right before NYE, Chris and I spent some time on the east coast at his parents place in New Hampshire. We were offline and had lots of time to talk and hear ourselves think. And, I’ll tell you what:

It was amazing.

At one point, we were sitting back, taking in the quiet and I thought to myself, “I want more of this.”

Of course when you return to the everyday grind, things get back to being stressed again (as they experienced) but they figured out some ways to get that happiness back and in addition wrote out a promise to themselves to help sustain this happiness. What stood out for me in the quote above though are the few words of “hear ourselves think”. This reminded me of an interesting show I watched the other day on spiritual mediums in which one of the mediums, an elderly lady from Vancouver, said something to the effect of “People don’t sit and listen as much as they used to which is a shame.”

Now she didn’t mean sit and listen to other people. She meant sit and listen to yourself, your inner voice. Of course that’s part of the problem today is that we are being mentally bombarded by so many things, that it’s difficult to even hear our own wants and desires versus the desires being pushed at us by the various mediums of advertising. Therefore, if you get the chance to get away from it at all, as they did at Citizen Agency, you suddenly start hearing your inner voice again and things become suddenly clearer. Put another way, seek your happiness, not happiness defined by someone else.

And yes Dave’s right. This is “a missing piece of the puzzle”. But I think all you need to do is look at the core values of what Citizen Agency believes in and I think you’ll start seeing the bigger picture. Again we have a group of individuals collectively pushing their own cultural values as to what they believe is important, even though those values may go against the normalcy of business today. Why go against the flow? Because the flow is changing.

Peter Merholz, the president of Adaptive Path, recently wrote an article entitled Experience design is not about brands. I must say it’s definitely a breath of fresh air to hear a person in Peter’s position talk this way because it validates some of my similar viewpoints on the subject that I’ve had in the past.

Experience, though, needs to be about the people. What do they want to accomplish, achieve, do? For experience to succeed, it must start with the person, and from there, impress upon the company. “Experience” is outside-in.

Simply put, if you want to truly connect with a person then focus on solving their problem instead of trying to sell your product. By helping them with their problem, you will in turn sell your product. Yes, it seems like only a minor deviation in how you interact with the person but it really makes a big difference.

The title of this post is a byline I was going to use for a new site I was developing but have now scrapped (as I’m just going to merge the content in with my existing site here). The basic premise of this concept is somewhat similar to The Tipping Point in that there are a myriad of individuals in the world today who are possibly unknowingly changing the culture of the world through their unbeknownst collective actions. In other words, all of these individuals are each doing their own thing, that is doing the things they believe in, in a way that fits in with their own values. Yet all of their personal cultural values are collectively somewhat similar and it is this collective cultural change that is driving a massive paradigm shift in our society’s culture today.

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

Mahatma Gandhi

The reason that this is possible is because just as a culture influences us (as it is somewhat like an environment we are within), so too can we influence this culture in turn. Therefore, every single action you do literally helps collectively to change the world around you and can then in turn influence other people to change as well. Of course, you can’t force people to change their minds. I learnt that lesson the hard way a long time ago. Yet still, by showing them a better way through your own actions, you can still be a strong influence on them by at least planting the seed in their mind.

This approach is now one of the primary directions I’d like to take with this site. In a sense, I’ll be relaying the situational awareness of this cultural change, so that others can see the change and change themselves if they so wish. I’ll be doing this by simply making people aware of other individuals out there who are helping to make this change possible. One recent example of this is my post on Joi Ito. If you watch the video mentioned in that post, you’ll see what positive values and beliefs Joi is pushing out into the world (i.e. openness, sharing, caring, diversity, etc). These are the same similar values that I see being relayed by other people in the world and even more so by the inherit nature of Web itself.

Small teams need people who can wear different hats. You need designers who can write. You need programmers who understand design. Everyone should have an idea about how to architect information (whatever that may mean). Everyone needs to have an organized mind. Everyone needs to be able to communicate with customers.

37 Signals
Getting Real

This quote perfectly describes why I’d love to find work in a startup company in town or at least a small establish company which has the culture of a startup. More importantly in these type of environments, everyone has the chance to contribute because everyone is usually involved in a project in one form or another (due to the many different hats worn).

I was fortunate enough to experience such an environment when I worked for a small web firm in town at it’s initial stages. Due to the environment, I was able to help with whatever I was capable of helping with instead of just only being able to help with what I was paid to do (i.e. my “official” job title). Therefore, even though I was initially hired as just a web developer, I was still able to help with client proposals, computer support, business advice, and more.

Yet in a larger corporate environment, usually the opposite is expected. Stay in your cubicle and don’t bother the other departments. In other words, just do your job (that being the speciality that you were hired to do) and nothing else. The end result is that instead of having a close knit team of people who fully understand the needs of each others work, you instead end up with a fractured team of people who are often in conflict with one another because they often don’t understand each others needs.

I guess that’s why I would describe myself as an explorer instead of a specialist though. Explorers explore new terrains and usually need a diverse set of skills (with the additional ability to quick adapt and learn new ones) to be able to survive within them. Specialists on the other hand, come onto the scene after the explorers have fully mapped the territory and it’s been settled. Their focus is not so much on sustainability but on growth instead.

The thing is, as many people are aware of, we are moving into rapidly changing times where the horizon has yet to be fully explored (as the Web is still in it’s infancy). Therefore I believe the future will bring a larger demand for these “quick learning generalist” explorers, since we’re undergoing a massive paradigm shift right now which is rethinking the way we do business and the way we interact with one another. Only time will tell, if I’m right or not though.

“Even better, hire people with multiple talents who can wear different hats during development. The end result will be a more harmonious product.” – Getting Real, 37 Signals

It’s funny. This quote above got me thinking about harmony and made me remember a discussion with a friend of ours who is an avid mountain biker about the word “balance” (i.e. “We need to achieve a balance in our lives”). When I mentioned this, he said he didn’t believe in that. He felt that life should be lived to the fullest and his passions (i.e. mountain biking) allowed him to do that. I think I understand now what he meant by that.

You see we shouldn’t be “balancing” our lives in the sense that we shouldn’t do anything extreme. In that sense, what he said made perfect sense. If you lived a “balanced” life, you’d probably live a very boring one because it equates to not pushing yourself out on a limb to fully experience life. Instead what we should be doing is achieving a harmony with our lives so that we can experience the full range and dynamics of it.

In this sense, think of an orchestra. Within it are various instruments that give the lows, midranges, and highs to the music being created. Therefore if one instrument continually played louder than the rest, drowning the rest out, the music probably wouldn’t be that enjoyable. Instead the unity and diversity of the instruments all playing in varying degrees at different moments in the music ensemble makes the experience of listening to it that much more wonderful than just listening to a single instrument.

So to should our lives be like the harmony of music made from these varying instruments. We should have a diverse range of interests, some extreme and some simple. Together as a whole, they will allow us to achieve this harmony within our lives. For example, a person may be extremely passionate about his work to the point of being an evangelist for the company that he works for, yet at the same time he may value his family immensely and therefore when he’s away from work, he fully disconnects from it so that he can fully connect and be with his family. Therefore just like the variations in tone within an orchestra, this person changes their tone at different moments in their life to achieve this harmony within it.

And finally, as I’ve mentioned before, I am not my just my work. I am not just a web guy. I’m not just a geek. I’m not just a gamer. I’m not just a lover of nature. I am all of these things and much much more. It is all of these things combined together in harmony that truly create me and make me the unique person that I am today, just as the various aspects of your life help to create the unique person that you are today as well.