inessential.com: Flexibility and power

There’s a complicated relationship between the two things. Sometimes flexibility may add to power — if I could just make these things green, my eye could pick them out more easily, and I’d get my work done more quickly.

But flexibility detracts from power just as often — or more often. Flexibility is an invitation. It says, “Hey, futz with this. And this. And this. You’re not getting anything done, but at least you kind of have the illusion of doing something.”

via inessential.com

"...it takes thousands of good ideas to make a successful product" ☛ Ed Catmull

Ed Catmull, Pixar: Keep Your Crises Small

 
Choice (paraphrased) Quotes...
  • Successful companies lose their leads by making serious mistakes that people outside the companies readily recognize...The people outside the company that recognize the mistake are like Cassandra
  • Quoting a Studio Executive: "Our central problem is not finding good people, but finding good ideas!".  Ed Catmull ask's people which do you think is more important, good people or good ideas?  His answer is this...  "If you give a good idea to a mediocre group of people, they'll screw it up.  If you give a mediocre idea to a good group, they'll fix it or they'll throw it away and come up with something else."
  • When we first started out with Disney, we got a few things right... We had a culture where artists and technical people were peers with each other.  They socialized with each other.  They each thought the other was world class. The compensation structure was the same. They were allowed to intermarry.  If there were problems, and there were always problems, people felt comfortable about coming in and expressing their problems.  We couldn't fix every problem but it was important to hear them.  We also had a brain trust... that trusted each other... and could be brutally honest with one another.  But they didn't think of it as being brutally honest but being "necessarily honest" and it was always taken that way.  It was never a matter of ego or putting somebody down.  It was always about the story.  Therefore you can say something hard, but it was taken in the right spirit.  Getting that kind of comaraderie in a key group of people is just gold.
  • We had a review process that was unique.  In the process of making the film, we reviewed the material every day... people normally tend to want to hold stuff back till it's "right".  The trick is to stop that behavior. We show it every day when it's incomplete.  If everybody does it every day, then you get over the embarrassment.   And when you get over the embarrassment, you're more creative... starting down that path helped everything we did. ... the advantage to working that way is that when you're done, you're done.  ... A lot of people want to hold it and show it two weeks later to get done... only it's never "right". So they're not done.  So you need to go through this iterative process...  The trick was to do it more iteratively to change the dynamics.
  • Going into our second film ("A Bug's Life") we had a major disaster... The notion of controlled information flow that we had, pissed everybody off... We confused our organizational structure with the communication structure.  They are different.  Yes you must be organized, and things must happen in the proper order or you can loose control.  But Communication needs to be able to happen between anybody in the company at any time.  It really is "peer to peer".
  • Success hides problems...
  • The confusion is that "an idea" as a singular entity is key to success...  wrong, it takes thousands of good ideas to make a successful product. And you have to get most of them right to do it!  That's why you need a team that works well together.
  • The goal of our development department was not find good ideas but to put together teams that function well together.  This group is loved by the directors because it's a support group.  Not someone telling them what to do it's a support group.  We measure progress by how well the team functions together because initially, when films are put together they're a mess. It's like everything else in life, the first time you do it it's a mess.  But if the team functions well, they will succeed.
  • Competitors could try and copy our technology or story ideas, but they could not copy our process.
  • Postmortems are great but nobody likes to do them.  If you don't continue to change the postmortem process each time, participants will try and game the system.   A deep postmortem is always valuable even though no one likes doing it.
  • "Once you can articulate an important idea into a concise statement, then you can use the statement without fear of changing behavior."  It's not what you say, it's what you do!
  • Why do successful companies fail?  Human organizations are inherently unstable.  They will fall over and you have to work to keep them upright. But they fall slowly.  Most people don't notice it... They let their success blind them. The falling takes place slowly but the collapse is quick...  I think the greeks had it backwards.  Cassandra wasn't cursed, it was the people who did not listen...

"One person is responsible for getting it done and another one is responsible for getting it right." ☛ Fred Brooks

In teams, that has to be one of the overriding challenges maintaining that conceptual integrity.
Yes. And so, when I was teaching a software engineering lab, I would tell the teams (typically consisting of four people), “Choose one person to be the boss and another one to be the technical director.” And I use the analogy of the producer and director of the film. One person is responsible for getting it done and another one is responsible for getting it right. And those are different functions, and the producer had better not interfere with the artistic concept of the director—that is, the designer.
via sdtimes.com

IBM adapting Apples model?

The management changes, announced in an e-mail message to I.B.M. employees, were intended to improve the company’s products and services, Mr. Palmisano wrote. For example, computer hardware and software are for the first time being placed under the oversight of one executive.

Increasingly, Mr. Palmisano wrote, computer systems must be “designed and brought to market as tightly integrated” packages of hardware and software.

via nytimes.com

"A/B testing is like sandpaper. You can use it to smooth out details, but you can't actually create anything with it."

That's the problem with A/B testing. It's empty. It has no feeling, no empathy, and at worst, it's dishonest. As my friend Nathan Bowers said:

A/B testing is like sandpaper. You can use it to smooth out details, but you can't actually create anything with it.

The next time you reach for A/B testing tools, remember what happened to Phil. You can achieve a shallow local maximum with A/B testing -- but you'll never win hearts and minds. If you, or anyone on your team, is still having trouble figuring that out, well, the solution is simple.

via codinghorror.com

"It's an art form, like any other art form... I would spend time rewriting whole sections of code..."

In writing MacPaint, Bill was as concerned with whether human readers would understand the code as he was with what the computer would do with it. He later said about software in general, "It's an art form, like any other art form... I would spend time rewriting whole sections of code to make them more cleanly organized, more clear. I'm a firm believer that the best way to prevent bugs is to make it so that you can read through the code and understand exactly what it's doing… And maybe that was a little bit counter to what I ran into when I first came to Apple... If you want to get it smooth, you've got to rewrite it from scratch at least five times."¹
via computerhistory.org