“I want to put a ding in the universe.”

Good night sweet prince.  I didn’t really want to join the throngs of blog posts that cover the Internet like a Christo installation, but how can one fail to recognize one of the most influential product developers of our time.  Steve Jobs changed the entire direction of products and their design and we will miss his presence and influence.

Time will tell if his visions for the next phase of computing devices will sustain in his absence, but this man definitely made his “ding.”

RIP Steve Jobs…

Do Sweat the Soft Stuff

Last year* I was at a conference focused on technology and processes for global product development. In the hallway a representative from Lucent Technologies offered me his latest revelation:

“Ya know, sitting in all these presentations, it’s really clear to me what the problem is. It’s not network security or the limitations of current collaboration software…it’s the cultural issues. Every speaker has said that’s a problem. How do you get your people to embrace such big changes? You should do a conference on those issues.”

The Hustle and Flow of Lean Product Development

In times of cerebral duress, I’ve often found myself yearning for the quiet dignity of manual labor. While jobs that are composed of repetitive tasks can quickly become boring (and are not often financially rewarding), there is a romantic appeal to clear task goals and more frequent senses of accomplishment. Activities of invention and creativity, such as marketing and engineering, offer tremendous intellectual freedom, but often at the price of a lack of direction or confidence that you are doing the right things.

If my company had a shop floor, I actually wouldn’t mind spending a couple of weeks every year running a workcell and spending my time trying to hit throughput goals. Is this just a case of the grass being greener? Consider the following book excerpt about a study done to determine what conditions create the right environment for job satisfaction:

“The types of activities which people all over the world consistently report as most rewarding…involve a clear objective, a need for concentration so intense that no attention is left over, a lack of interruptions and distractions, clear and immediate feedback on progress toward the objective, and a sense of challenge…”

[p. 65, Lean Thinking, Womack & Jones, Simon & Schuster 1996]*

The authors of this study say that when these work elements are achieved, it creates a type of psychological ‘flow’ where the worker becomes so absorbed as to lose self-consciousness and sense of time. In other words, “time flies when you’re having fun.” An appropriate sports analogy would be a player who gets “in the zone,” such as a pitcher working on a no-hitter or a basketball player who just can’t miss a shot. Athletes who seem in a constant zone like Michael Jordan often report a sense of surreal suspension or slowdown of time as a result of being into the ‘flow’ of the game.

R&D Metrics: Should you punt on fourth down?

I play Fantasy Football every year and it is an entirely metrics-based pursuit.  If you’ve been under a rock, on Mars, with your fingers in your ears, you probably don’t know that fantasy sports take the statistical numbers from real players, teams and games and turn them into a composite score for fantasy team managers to compete against.  Maybe that doesn’t sound very sexy or fun, but it has become a billion+ dollar industry in the last several years.  It is HUGE.

Managers of product development have often fantasized about having the ability to manage ‘by the numbers’ similar to professional sports.  The allure is quite simple to understand, I mean, who wouldn’t want a binary system for decision making, if you end up wrong, you have your posterior fully covered by math.  Nobody questions the hard, cold logic of math, right?

But from experience, we know that math isn’t always a straight line, and that separated from human intuition, can often be dangerous.  Intuition is often mistaken for “guessing,” when in reality it is more like “subconscious logic” that taps into real data that your awake brain is not fully aware of.

In addition, humans faced with numbers often still need to interpret them, which puts a very inexact science on top of exact figures.  Back to football, a great example of this is Arkansas high school football coach, Kevin Kelly.  Coach Kelly is known for taking standard football conventions and standing them on their heads.  By his interpretation of the numbers, Coach Kelly never punts on fourth down and almost always attempts an onside kick after scoring a touchdown.  In one particular game, his team scored 29 points before his opponent ever got a possession.  Football purists may cringe, but it’s hard to dispute his results, after all, just look at his numbers!

MRT’s “Metrics” workshop addresses how to use the logic of measurement without losing sight of the end goals and ensuring that metrics never supersede the project vision, check it out:

R&D Metrics: Quantifying Portfolio Decisions, Projects and Profits with Instructor Wayne Mackey

Article: Down 29-0 before touching the ball

Fall on the sword or cover your A$$?

Is this yet another sign of how America has lost its way?  Once a land of honor and integrity, there is much truth to the cynics who declare that America’s “me first” culture is the root of our many societal woes and diminished competitiveness on the world stage.

Case in point, as a follow up to yesterday’s post regarding the steep price cut of the Nintendo 3DS, it was reported today that the company’s president, Satoru Iwata, is taking the blame for this costly blunder and that executives will be taking pay cuts as a result, even issuing himself a 50% salary reduction.  This is like the modern day equivalent of the ancient Japanese custom of removing a digit from the hand in the face of dishonor.

Now contrast this with what happens here domestically.  In the US, when a CEO bungles the strategy and greatly harms shareholder value, they don’t stick around to fix their errors like Iwata and forego compensation, instead they resign and take multi-million dollar contract buyouts and easily find another company to destroy.

Source: Kotaku