What’s In A Name?

It is quite often that I meet new & interesting people. It is one of my favorite things to do, and something that I spend a good portion of my time doing. Often, these meet & greets are fairly personable, and curiosity comes forth in both directions. Sometimes I will find myself asking someone what “they do”, of course to be implied as what they do for work or life in general. Often times, this question can be and is answered in shortest of form, and usually will go something like “I am title at company name” or “i am a role in the industry name.” So, What’s in a Name?

So, What Do You Do?

I have never been a very pretentious or title conscience person, and my own title has always been of relative little importance to me. Naturally, however, not everyone feels the same way, and to some, a title means and says a great deal. And in many situations a title is required for legal clarity. But, more often than not, a title is an important and possibly confusing piece of information required for various types of conversations. For instance, when you visit your relatives and they inquire of how your work is, you tell them you’ve recently transitioned to a new role, or started a new venture. As I said, this is where it can get quite confusing…how do you explain your entire profession, career, one of the largest pieces of your waking life, in one small paragraph?

On most of the business cards I have ever been responsible for, I had always left the space for my “title” blank, or replaced it with some sort of personal message, or my sens de la vie .

A number of years ago I was given and had adopted the title “Architect,” since this most accurately described my role and the types of roles I was fulfilling. And, though I still retain the ability to sit and crank out code, my greatest strengths, and therefore my greatest value, lies in my design ability. I am most at home and at my happiest when I’m designing & engineering an elegant solution to some impossible problem. That’s often the hardest part, but still easily what I enjoy best. So, I adopted the very accurate title: “Senior Architect”, with some variation depending on my focus during the engagement (such as Experience, or Web, or Solution, or Business, etc).

So You Build Houses, Do You?

Even today, few people outside of the technology industry even realize that “Architect” was a job description within the Tech Industry. For instance, my wife, who for many years has found it difficult to explain that ever so popular question, “What does he do?”, has on more than one occasion retreated from using the title “Architect” to avoid being asked for a referral on their home improvement project. Like many people outside the world of Technology, she had previously only heard the term architect used to describe those who design buildings and other structures such as bridges, and it seemed unfair to arm with a technical job description of “Architect” to someone with the same experience.

Drawing Straws

As I mentioned earlier, titles have never really meant much to me personally. However, I have recently been in this process of self-branding, and role creation within a small handful of new organizations. As this process began, I had to do what I can’t stand to do…label myself. I finally arrived at the title: “CCO (Chief Creative Officer).” While not a common title, though I’m not the first to use it, it is at least fairly self explanatory. CCO gives people enough information to know that I’m very involved with the creative aspects of a company, and at the same time that I am also an officer of the company.

The other side of my coin is my deep involvement with technology design, the art of crafting creative solutions to problems using science (AKA-building technology solutions). Most chief designers or creative types are more involved with marketing than with technology, and I’m in no way interested in a chief of technology role. But, I do spend a good deal of time on architecture, within technology, for a variety of disciplines. Whether it be experience, information, solution, integration, application, platform, or all of the above, my value add as a creative is my ability to apply a solution from top-end down to implementation.

Additionally, as self explanatory as I thought Chief Creative Officer was, there are still a few who are confused by mixing creativity and technology, and still some yet who think it is impossible. All of this brings us to a new year, new ventures, and the ultimate, and I hope final, solution to the naming game for a while: “CCO & Chief Architect”. It think it covers both disciplines quite nicely, and provides me a continuing role in technology without taking the helm.

Of course, I would rather you just call me Joel.

As of today, I will continue to serve as CCO and Chief Architect for two new companies, and will do so until a conflict arises. Luckily, one of them is my very small but able creative studio partnership, and no one cares about our titles so long as we deliver on our engagements.

One. Two. Tweet. What Do You Mean?

Yesterday on the drive to pickup my daughter from school, I had a few minutes to my own thoughts, and I started to pondered about the true value of Twitter. I know this seems as if I have nothing better to do with my thoughts, but I have been slowly using the service more, read about it every day, have a conversation about it every other day, and see new ideas and applications built on Twitter five times a day. So, I pondered away. What I realized at first was that…it hasn’t changed my life. Yes, it has proven to be a great micro-networking site, sort of compared to a huge billboard on the side of the highway where 10 million people drive by every day. That has proven helpful, valuable, and easy to manage. However, for the time I spend on the subject or the site itself…it doesn’t seem to be providing me the personal ROI for my time & energy. A new job, a new friend, a new idea, a new experience, can all lead to wonderful things, and can be provided via Twitter. But, does it actually provide me value, glimpse meaning of myself, others, and the universe, and fundamentally change me or anything?

One would think that all of that traffic, all of that information, all of those thought streams, and all of those spur of the moment conversations with no one or everyone, would reap deeply rewarding benefits personally to each member in some way or another. I am sure the folks at Twitter ponder this daily, hourly even, and understand this that the value of their service is currently being stored in a cloud, an invisible poof of web services. But to me, the user, the human, and now, the interested party, I seem to be begging for more than just having a socially open instant messenger & micro-blog. I am looking for value. It’s a relationship, and all relationships have one thing in common, and that is the  shared value each participant directly or indirectly produces, or receives from the relationship. The relationship people and products share have the same characteristics, and any advertiser, marketer, Ikea designer, or Apple employee knows that.

Out of this pondering with one’s own mind, while driving in the rain (a perfect time for creativity to breed ideas), came the thought of Jonathan Harris & Sep Kamvar’s “We Feel Fine“. I was first introduced to We Feel Fine through the TED talk from Jonathan Harris released last June, aptly titled The Web’s Secret Stories. I too, like Jonathan, am a story teller at my core. My wife, who hears more information from me through story telling, can no doubt have a few things to say about this, aside from agreeing with me. Under this pretext is how I came to really gravitate towards this type of work, this “meaning making”, connecting of dots, information visualization, and new perspective on the things we do or say and share online around the world, whether we realize it or not. In the last few years, this field has grown exponentially, all you have to do is take a look at some of the projects coming out of the artefact labs, the beginnings of web 3.0 chatter, ben fry’s projects, the life of Tim Berners-Lee, and the host of Twitter Visualization applications alone. Keep looking and you will see an underbelly brimming with activity, in every major brand, corporate headquarters, startup brainstorm session, and grocery checkout line. People are looking for something new, meaningful, and something valuable to engage with. They are starving for connection, to help their neighbors, to be helped, and to change their own little world or the entirety of Mother Earth herself. The world is on the brink of simply agreeing with itself about this, but too often we feel too disconnected from ourselves and everyone else to understand what to do.

I remember back in late 2007, a Google group was started called Social Network Portability, of which I was a part of, just to see what was happening. Social networking has of course helped the internet reach to become a People Web since then, and grown astronomically in many ways not even imagined during that time. During the beginning discussions of that group, we talked about a paper written at Yahoo Research by Andrew Tomkins and Raghu Ramakrishnan, and published by IEEE, named Toward a PeopleWeb. It was more about the Semantic Web than anything, but the abstract was based on creating a richer content structure and to introduce a significant shift in online communities and information discovery…or; how to provide meaning out of all the heaps of data being created every nano-second. I digress, but the point is that as the information age evolves, it’s reach is widened and the interaction is deepened, we still aren’t changing lives on the massive scale, I believe, that we each hope to reap from all of the time, money, and attention we give to creating or consuming information. But, I don’t think we are far off, at all. Just visit TED.

In this changing economy, shifting global perspective, and radically growing extension of our daily lives we call the internet, now is a perfect time to boost innovation organically, through entrepreneurship, with the resources we have already at hand. Cloud computing, thought streams, web services for everything imaginable, and a new spin on the need for innovative startups setting out to change lives through providing personal meaning to the humans that touch their products, is all we need to capture some imagination. From there, who knows, as the rest could become history, and this post becomes a pre-shift piece of chatter. We, as humans, have an enormous power…and this is called our creativity. We have the mind, the consciousness, and the will to create that which we desire to see. The more we genuinely see what we have been creating, and how to create healthier, more sustainable life patterns, the more we can change.

In the meantime, we’ll see what comes out of that car ride where I drove in deep thought about how to bring meaning to myself and others simply through Twitter’s stream of real time thoughts, emotions, desires, regrets, dreams, plans, suggestions, ideas, and more.

What are your core values?

Here’s a great question to reflect on from time to time…

“List at least 3 of your core values and why they are integral to your way of being in the various roles in your life.”

~ Where did they come from?
~ How do you demonstrate them?
~ What are their opposites?

_Self - it is of the utmost importance that we value our _self at all times in all walks of our life (home, work, activities, etc.). Our sense of _self is what will lead us to and manifests true meaning in our lives, in turn manifesting meaning externally to the people and circumstances around us. _self provides us meaning.

_Purpose – in every action, in every word, in every minute of our acute attention, should there be _purpose. A driving force behind these moments is the intention, revealing the _purpose for the actions, the words, or the attention we give them. _Purpose makes it count, makes it real, and sustains it through doubt and wavering circumstances. _Purpose provides us decisiveness.

_Courage – have the _courage to do the right thing, to listen to your conscious mind and what it tells you. Use _courage to take risks. Use _courage to help shape our integrity. Use _courage to practice honesty. Use _courage to help shape our humility. _Courage provides us strength.

_Awareness – how can we affect things we are not _aware of? _Awareness is a deep level of understanding, a connection, a bond to the facts or fiction, that allows us the freedom to practice honest judgment. It allows us to peek into the future, understand the past, and shape the present. Being _aware is a tool that can free our attention to focus on _purpose or finding our _self’s role or gives us _courage to act. _Awareness provides us freedom.

The opposites are as important to be _aware of:

_self-interest
_indifference
_ignorance
_fear

These values are a daily goal to achieve. Each day they play a part, or their opposites will. They bleed from home to work, friends to family, relaxation to struggle. They are all around us and within our reach.

Each day begins with the goal to uphold these values; in every situation.

Notice: Company-Blocked Web Sites

I received this message this morning.

IMPORTANT REMINDER:

Please do not attempt to access Web sites which stream live video, sites which are blocked based on company policy, and/or are not essential to performing work-related duties. These access attempts cause slowdowns for others trying to access [company-name]-approved Web sites.

Over the last several weeks, there has been an abundance of access attempts to sites such as MSN Video, You Tube, Face Book, and MySpace, as well as countless others. Currently, those sites are being added to a list within Surf Control which will prevent access.

If you have any questions as to whether a site should or should not be available, please contact your supervisor and/or HR Business Consultant for clarification as needed. You may also refer to the Employee Handbook (Section 5.09) to review [company-name's] policy on voicemail, email and computer usage.

Thank you.

Keep it small. Keep it simple. Let it happen.

I woke up this morning thinking about change, agility, & something I’m not exactly sure I think of much, emergence. This morning’s thought pattern was not only in terms of my life, but in terms of the many projects I am currently involved with and even about one particular organization. I want to use my life as an example of how emergence can be blocked, change controlled, and agility used more of as a buzzword than an action or way to act. Before I do that, here’s Andy Hunt with a few (geeky, yes) thoughts on the subject…

Emergence is one of the founding principles of agility, and is the closest one to pure magic. Emergent properties aren’t designed or built in, they simply happen as a dynamic result of the rest of the system. “Emergence” comes from middle 17th century Latin in the sense of an “unforeseen occurrence.” You can’t plan for it or schedule it, but you can cultivate an environment where you can let it happen and benefit from it.

A classic example of emergence lies in the flocking behavior of birds. A computer simulation can use as few as three simple rules (along the lines of “don’t run into each other”) and suddenly you get very complex behavior as the flock wends and wafts its way gracefully through the sky, reforming around obstacles, and so on. None of this advanced behavior (such as reforming the same shape around an obstacle) is specified by the rules; it emerges from the dynamics of the system.

Simple rules, as with the birds simulation, lead to complex behavior. Complex rules, as with the tax law in most countries, lead to stupid behavior.

Many common software development practices have the unfortunate side effect of eliminating any chance for emergent behavior. Most attempts at optimization — tying something down very explicitly — reduces the breadth and scope of interactions and relationships, which is the very source of emergence. In the flocking birds example, as with a well-designed system, it’s the interactions and relationships that create the interesting behavior.

The harder we tighten things down, the less room there is for a creative, emergent solution. Whether it’s locking down requirements before they are well understood or prematurely optimizing code, or inventing complex navigation and workflow scenarios before letting end users play with the system, the result is the same: an overly complicated, stupid system instead of a clean, elegant system that harnesses emergence.

Keep it small. Keep it simple. Let it happen.

—Andy Hunt, The Pragmatic Programmers

Do we wait for unforeseen occurrence? Or, do we tie things down very explicitly in order to control outcome, circumstance, and behavior? How would a flock of birds do if we tried to control their flying pattern with overcomplicated rules, without allowing emergence in their own individual patterns that result in an emergence of the flock?  Poor birds I say.

In my life, I often catch myself blocking emergence, simply by projecting controlling behavior in the name of a predefined result I am not getting. Even though I may think or know the best way to an outcome, blocking emergence in these situations is simply what I am doing. I am not allowing, letting go, and trusting that the desired outcome can come to its own conclusion. That does not mean I disown or remove myself completely, but it calls for taking much smaller steps much quicker in the most simple way possible, instead of trying to own the whole thing all at once. Things take time to form, to emerge, and to happen. No situation or project is the same. Everyone one and everything is its own unique experience. By simply letting it happen you can use much less energy, emotion, & effort in working toward the desired outcome. You can use your skills & experience in smaller, more specific ways. You can learn how to apply simplicity to complex problems & situations by letting go, paying attention, and not being attached to the result. You can offer your advice, your help, your experience, your time, your skills, your resources, but you really cannot control outcome or result and expect it to look the way you want it to.

The art of letting go has as much meaning in our personal lives as it does in our professional lives. In technology or software projects I have seen not letting go of the end result in the beginning can change the entire outcome all together, and very rarely with a more positive spin or value proposition. People love to control, and everyone has a different life experience and thus their view of the end result is different. Managers are best at control, experts are great at agility, and innovators are best at emergence. Managers try to control behavior, pattern, and result. Experts, through their experience, have come to understand the value of agility and how to apply it by taking smaller steps and pacing themselves. Innovators have found that emergence happens only in the absence of something. These three personas can be found in any project, any relationship, and any walk of life.

When you have two or more people who see the same thing through shared experience or through humility or out of a desire to let it happen, great things happen. Great products get built. Great companies are born. Great relationships are formed and flourish. Today’s lesson for me is to continue to detach myself from the result. To continue to keep things small (one step at a  time). To continue to be agile and flexible as life moves and changes. And, to let things happen.

I am surrounded by situations I cannot control. Many of which I know could be done differently or even better. At home, at work, on projects or products or in companies…I am surrounded by the lack of control. However, how I influence them is dependent very much on my ability to let go. I know when to walk away from something, and sometime that is what it takes. But when that something is not something you can or want to walk away from…a change in approach is necessary.

Use your energy wisely, the world needs it more than you think. Allow things to emerge. Allow users to experience. Let things happen.

emergence:

Meaning #1: the gradual beginning or coming forth

Meaning #2: the becoming visible

Meaning #3: the act of coming (or going) out; becoming apparent

Meaning #4: the act of emerging

10 Rules For Startup Success

Loic Le Meur’s Ten Rules For Startup Success

Financial Times has a profile of French (now Silicon Valley) entrepreneur Loic Le Meur today. Loic is an accomplished entrepreneur – he founded uBlog (merged with Six Apart), organizes the annual Le Web conference and has now created Seesmic (note that I’m an investor in Seesmic). So even though he’s French, his advice, when given, is worth listening to. Included in the article are his ten rules for startup success. Reprinted below.

1. Don’t wait for a revolutionary idea. It will never happen. Just focus on a simple, exciting, empty space and execute as fast as possible
2. Share your idea. The more you share, the more you get advice and the more you learn. Meet and talk to your competitors.
3. Build a community. Use blogging and social software to make sure people hear about you.
4. Listen to your community. Answer questions and build your product with their feedback.
5. Gather a great team. Select those with very different skills from you. Look for people who are better than you.
6. Be the first to recognise a problem. Everyone makes mistakes. Address the issue in public, learn about and correct it.
7. Don’t spend time on market research. Launch test versions as early as possible. Keep improving the product in the open.
8. Don’t obsess over spreadsheet business plans. They are not going to turn out as you predict, in any case.
9. Don’t plan a big marketing effort. It’s much more important and powerful that your community loves the product.
10. Don’t focus on getting rich. Focus on your users. Money is a consequence of success, not a goal.

non self-conscious individualism

OK, first of all, what is non self-conscious individualism? As Dr. C put it, it is a “strongly directed purpose that is not self-seeking.”

Fun stuff:

• Man’s Search for Meaning
• A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose
• Future of Civilization
• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
• Job – e – Jobs
• TED: What Makes us Happy?

the website is down

.a MUST Experience.

users are designers

am i a certified a$$hole?

Turns out…no. I scored a big fat 0.  Try it out and see where you stand…

Step 1.

Find Out With the Asshole Rating Self-Exam (ARSE)…it’s a 24 question hole-in-oscopy!

Step 2.

…then maybe pick up…

…but definitely check out Bob Sutton’s blog. And, while you’re at it, you can check out Guy Kawasaki’s blog about the ARSE.

 

Bob has also just asked a great question (Does power corrupt?) on LinkedIn, and there are hundreds of answers already…check it out.

What About Bob? Robert Sutton is Professor of Management Science and Engineering in the Stanford Engineering School, where he is Co-Director of the Center for Work, Technology, an active member of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, and a cofounder of the new Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. Sutton is also an IDEO Fellow. Sutton studies the links between managerial knowledge and organizational action, innovation, and organizational performance, and has published over 100 articles in academic and applied publications. Sutton is author of Weird Ideas That Work: 11 ½ Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation (Free Press, 2002) and co-author (with Jeffrey Pfeffer) of both The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Firms Turn Knowledge Into Action (Harvard Business School Press, 2000) and of Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management (Harvard Business School Press, 2006).

In other words…Bob knows a bit about the subject.