A few weeks ago I spoke at the WebApp Summit in San Diego. This was a UIE (User Interface Engineering) event. It was the first one I’ve spoken at, and the first time I met the folks in charge of UIE, but they made me feel as if I’ve known them for years.
Jared Spool, the guy in charge, and Christine Perfetti, the VP & Managing Director, are solid people. Engaged, interesting, kind, friendly, down-to-earth, and curious. They took great care of the speakers, put on a nice show, and Jared broke the ice with his magic (literally — he’s an aspiring magician and did tricks on stage between presenters).
But the one thing that really sold me on these folks is why they invited me to speak in the first place.
UIE professes a user testing and research driven methodology. We have a different point of view on how to build usable and useful products. Most folks who make their living on testing and research would not invite someone with a significantly different approach to speak directly to their customers. But UIE knows that different perspectives are ultimately good things for their customers.
Just like how Amazon lets their competitors sell against them on Amazon’s product pages, or how Progressive Insurance gives you the quotes for their competitors, UIE is a purveyor of valuable information, not just their information. I think that shows the mark of confidence and a genuine interest in helping people make good decisions. Shielding people from opinion because it’s not your opinion is petty and shallow. UIE is smart to avoid that tack. They know well rounded customers, a.k.a. informed shoppers, are ultimately better customers.
So big thanks to Jared and Christine for being good people. We wish you continued success.
It sucks. It blows. It’s useless. It’s too expensive. It feels too cheap. It doesn’t do enough. It’s too complex. They don’t care.
Bitching is such a succinct form of expression. It doesn’t require or usually entail deep analysis. It’s the easiest way to write something “interesting”. Readers flock to controversy, dissent, and drama. The words of bitching are short and carry plenty of punch for that drama.
This makes bitching a perfect fit for the 140 characters of Twitter.
It takes a lot less work than writing a blog entry, but gives you the same rush of making your voice heard. Telling it to The Man. Shout “so what are you gonna do about it?” (after the other guy left the bar). It opens up the process of wide-area bitching to a whole new group of people who otherwise wouldn’t have gone public with their opinion — or even realized they had one.
That’s not a slam on Twitter, by the way. I’ve been truly impressed with the other kinds of behavior and new forms of interaction that it is fostering. For the more creative outlets, the 140 character limit is a brilliant limitation.
Rather, I think it’s just a form fit for the human desire to find fellowship in dissent. Twitter made it as easy to post “it sucks” as it is to think it. And with no draft mode or no need to fill in paragraphs of thought before pressing publish, there’s little time for rewrites or regret.
That will undoubtedly lead to some very special, inciteful bite-size nuggets of opinion that would not otherwise be shared. But we’ll have to chew through a lot of fat to get to the meat.
“Ma Gastronomie” is a cookbook/biography by the great French chef Fernand Point (1897–1955).
Charlie Trotter says, “If someone said to me I could only have one cookbook, this is the one.”
Thomas Keller says, “I believe Fernand Point is one of the last true gourmands of the 20th century. His ruminations are extraordinary and thought-provoking. He has been an inspiration for legions of chefs.”
Keller told Charlie Rose (video below) that Point is the one chef, either living or dead, that he would like to meet. Every new employee at Keller’s restaurants, French Laundry and Per Se, has to read the book.
It’s more his feeling about food and his love affair with food…His point was you need to take ownership of what you do. Treat it like it’s yours and one day it will be. Have a true dedication and a true commitment to cuisine and that will elevate you beyond others.
Continued…
Wanna build something cool and useful and maybe win an Apple gift certificate worth up to $3000? Build a mashup application or mashup your existing application using both the Highrise API and the Lypp API and you could win. More details on the Lypp blog. We’re real excited to see what you come up with. Get coding!
So far our four-day work week experiment is working. We haven’t found ourselves collectively wishing we had an extra work day a week. We haven’t found ourselves gasping for extra hours. Instead I feel like we’ve been more focused and working better together.
Since going to the four-day work week just about a month ago we’ve released the following updates:
Could we have gotten more good work done if we worked those extra five Fridays? I seriously doubt it. Would we have been happier working five extra days over the last 30? I seriously doubt it. Is a four-day work week better for morale and productivity than a typical five-day work week? I seriously believe it.
One thing I’ve come to realize is that urgency is overrated. In fact, I’ve come to believe urgency is poisonous. Urgency may get things done a few days sooner, but what does it cost in morale? Few things burn morale like urgency. Urgency is acidic.
Emergency is the only urgency. Almost anything else can wait a few days. It’s OK. There are exceptions (a trade show, a conference), but those are rare.
When a few days extra turns into a few weeks extra then there’s a problem, but what really has to be done by Friday that can’t wait for Monday or Tuesday? If your deliveries are that critical to the hour or day, maybe you’re setting up false priorities and dangerous expectations.
If you’re a just-in-time provider of industry parts then precise deadlines and deliveries may be required, but in the software industry urgency is self-imposed and morale-busting. If stress is a weed, urgency is the seed. Don’t plant it if you can help it.
The Library of Congress has its own Flickr account, and if you have a few hours to spend, I highly recommend flipping through their photo albums.
These color photos from the 1930’s and 40’s are so striking and intriguing. When it first came into existence color film was $5 a roll. Minimum wage was 25¢ an hour.
More amazing old timey photos can be found at the Flickr Commons site. You can learn more about the program here. (Thanks George!)
Thanks for the facts, Erika!
Here’s one last post on Maverick: The Success Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace, the Ricardo Semler book that has inspired 37signals in many ways. In this post, you’ll find some of Semler’s advice on how to work smarter…
Treat employees like adults:
We simply do not believe our employees have an interest in coming in late, leaving early, and doing as little as possible for as much money as their union can wheedle out of us. After all, these are the same people that raise children, join the PTA, elect mayors, governors, senators, and presidents. They are adults. At Semco, we treat them like adults. We trust them. We don’t make our employees ask permission to go to the bathroom, nor have security guards search them as they leave for the day. We get out of their way and let them do their jobs.
Write less (he’s talking about memo headlines that get to the point, but the same approach works well with email subject lines, post titles, etc.):
If you really want someone to evaluate a project’s chances, give them but a single page to do it — and make them write a headline that gets to the point, as in a newspaper. There’s no mistaking the conclusion of a memo that begins: “New Toaster Will Sell 20,000 Units for $2 Million Profit.”
And so Semco’s Headline Memo was born. The crucial information is at the top of the page. If you want to know more, read a paragraph or two. But there are no second pages…
This has not only reduced unnecessary paperwork, but has also helped us avoid meetings that were often needed to clarify ambiguous memos. Concision is worth the investment. The longer the message, the greater the chance of misinterpretation.
Of course, one-page memos took some getting used to. People sometimes had to rewrite them fie or ten times before managing to synthesize their thoughts.
This wouldn’t have surprised Mark Twain, who once apologized for writing a long letter because he didn’t have time to write a short one.
Continued…
Folks from 18 states plus London, Paris, Antwerp and Montreal have registered for our Third Seed Conference on June 6th in this amazing building.
Speakers include Jason Fried (37signals), Jim Coudal (Coudal Partners), Carlos Segura (T26), Jake and Jeffrey (Threadless), Edward Lifson (NPR, Harvard), and Gary Vaynerchuk (Wine Library TV). Gary is pouring wine at the reception after the show as well.
Seats are going quick. We’re close to 50% sold in just the first week. We look forward to seeing you there.
