Just Say No to the Herk and Jerk.

by Michael Wickett

I have to wonder if Seth Godin and Greg McKeown conspired to publish their respective articles on the same day. Both end up making the same point from slightly different directions and taken together, they really are magic.​

Greg:​

Go through the process of answering the essential strategy question: "What will we say no to?" It is that question that will reveal the real tensions in your team. It is that question that will uncover the core trade-offs in your organization. It is that question that can deliver the rare and precious clarity necessary to achieve game-changing breakthroughs in your business.

and Seth:

The short-term herk and jerk that is delivered by an organization that responds to those that amplify problems into catastrophes inevitably leads to poor performance in the long run.

The point is that saying "no" is more important than saying yes. It's more important to your strategy and to your success in the long (and probably short) term. It's also a lot harder. It's easy to say yes to lots of little projects and to pull them off (barely). It's much more difficult to say no to those distractions and maintain focus on what will really benefit the organization or business. 

Even a really busy team can take on "one more thing." They're smart, hardworking people and they will find a way to get it done. Usually, those small things will be done just to the point of completion and not one micron further. You can't blame them, once they reach the threshold of "done enough," it's on to the next thing. Over a longer time scale, these small barely finished things add up to mediocre performance. When viewed from the ground, they look pretty impressive, but at a higher level it becomes easy to see the cracks in between. 

By removing these distractions and freeing the team to work on a small number of deep projects, each person gets to contribute to their full potential and the project benefits from this high level of polish. Knock down a few of these bigger puzzles pieces in a row and things start to fit together much more tightly. The "herk and jerk" goes away and makes everyone more focused and productive. And satisfied.

Blogging in School

by Michael Wickett

Blogging in academia is a tough topic to figure out. Is it acceptable? Maybe even encouraged? (One can dream). Do those working in academic institutions ​– be they faculty, staff or administration – truly understand the web and what it's capable of?

Matin Weller, an academic himself, breaks down some of the challenges that universities are facing as traditional academic practices are disrupted by the web. ​I suggest you read his post. 

Institutional reputation is largely created through the faculty's online identity, and many institutions are now making it a priority to develop, recognize, and encourage practices such as blogging.

​This point fits in perfectly with my post on education as a product. The web is now the ultimate gauge of reputation and reputation is a huge part of how a higher-ed institution is successful. It affects recruitment, graduate employment and faculty attraction and retention. Most of those factors influence funding to some degree. The cycle goes on, and on, and on.

By embracing blogging and open digital sharing from faculty, students and staff, an institution can benefit from increased visibility, transparency and reputation.​

Kyly Baxter at Tightwind takes Weller's point to the next logical step. At least it's logical in my mind:

Students should have every incentive to begin heavily researching something and writing about it, and if they do so well enough, it should absolutely count toward their degree. Odds are they will learn much more by doing their own self-directed work than they could in a classroom, the results of their research is public, and they can use it to tap into the community for their area of work.

​Students researching a topic and then writing about it. Tapping into a community. That sounds an awful lot like what graduate students do when working on a thesis or what academics do when writing papers. Maybe "blogging" isn't such a foreign concept to academia after all. 

Education as a Product

by Michael Wickett

Our education system is showing its age.

Many others brighter than I have written about the failings of our industrial-age style of teaching and learning including Seth Godin (seriously, read that post from Seth) and Richard Florida. Allow me to vastly oversimplify, the system as we know it was designed to produce workers to function as small cogs in large machines.

As our economy changes, it’s clear that innovation in education is desperately needed. Students are having a tougher time finding work. Change is happening, but far too slowly.

While listening to episode 33 of The Critical Path I was struck by what is happening to many of the large telecommunications and electronics incumbents like Sony, Samsung, Nokia and RIM. Each have recently reported dismal financial results. They’re all focused on the product “pipeline” and not on the product itself. The same thing is happening in higher-education. In schools, it’s less about the financials and more about student enrolment numbers and student engagement but the problems and processes are similar.

Why don’t we treat school more like a product? In many ways, we already do, but most of the “product” is about all the parts of going to school except for class itself. Institutions sell and market based on services like residence, food, amenities and campus design. Students pay money in exchange for learning, prestige and access to existing networks. They pay money for benefits. They “hire” a school to achieve a function (job, career, future). At the most simplistic, it’s just like shopping for a new phone.

Apple has created massive disruption in a number of industries by focusing, rather, obsessing over the product and the user experience. They still have all the other “business” parts of a large corporation, but rather than iPhones and iPads being products to stuff into a pre-built pipeline, they are carried to market on custom moulded silver platters (Apple: You can have that packaging idea. It’s yours to run with). The silver platters in this terrible analogy are all the parts of the institution that aren’t the product itself. This only works because customers want to use the product. Apple doesn’t need to manufacture demand through marketing – but they still market aggressively.

Let me be clear. I know that many higher-ed institutions are working on solving these problems of declining enrolment and struggling programs. Many smart and talented individuals are working hard to solve these problems and build the education system of the future that our society needs. School as a product isn’t a new idea. My point here is that it’s not that easy. The concept is simple, but the execution is incredibly hard. RIM is a good lesson here.

Listen to RIM thrash around trying to pull out of its death spiral and most of what you hear is focused on “targeting customer segments in the enterprise” and “doubling down on marketing”. Most intelligent observers have long ago realized that RIM’s problem is its products, not marketing, distribution or carrier partnerships. Those in charge at RIM know this as well, but are realizing how hard it is to create good products. It doesn’t happen overnight, it takes sustained iterative failure. Over and over.

Similar thrashing is happening in education. Rather than actively trying to build programs and courses that fit a need that customers (students) have, we try to compensate for declining enrolment by increasing the volume and frequency of marketing and promotions. It’s trying to prop-up the existing pipeline without fixing the product.

Schools, school boards, colleges and universities function much like old-guard, MBA driven tech companies. They have processes, boards and committees. They use words like “operationalize”. All this cultural inertia slows them down when it comes time to adapt to changing conditions. Most schools have realized the importance of the student experience. The student experience is more than just new buildings, fancy places to eat and great residences. At the core of the student experience is learning. If students are delighted and (pleasantly) surprised by what happens both in and out of the classrooms, they have a good experience.

Students have to jump through hoops, get shunted from department to department and can’t find basic information easily. No wonder they aren’t happy. No wonder less of them are buying the product. I realize there are other factors (economics, demographics etc.) at work here, but at the root, they don’t matter much. The product can’t suck. Full stop.

Education needs to take a lead from Apple and start making products that people desire rather than tolerate. That means obsessive attention to the experience on all levels. It means bulldozing existing silos within institutions and letting talented people do great work for customers. It means throwing out conventional management ideas. It means taking risks – a whole lot of them. Failure will happen and that’s ok. It’s actually a good thing. It’s how we learn and learning is the whole point

Biking in London

by Michael Wickett

​I'm participating in London's Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy and was pleased to see a question on cycling and infrastructure. Excerpt below:​

Tell us your views on London's walking and cycling infrastructure. Are you satisfied or dissatisfied, or does it matter to you? What are the next steps in fixing or expanding this infrastructure?  What advice would you give a novice cyclist, younger or older, before cycling in London?

​Here is my answer:

I ride to work at Fanshawe College three to four days per week almost all-year round. My one-way ride is 12.4 km (coming from Hyde Park area). The route I normally take is to Brescia via Lawson Rd., through Western to St. George and then along Cheapside to Fanshawe.

For me personally – and I believe for the city – better on-road bike infrastructure is absolutely essential. Whenever I speak with someone about my commute, they always say "Isn't it dangerous riding on the road?" or "What about all the traffic?" The absence of bike lanes through most of my ride means that I need to ride more defensively (sometimes even aggressively) to keep myself safe.

I ride with an aggressive lane position (up to 1 meter from the curb when necessary) and take full-lane position at stops and red lights. When I ride, I obey all traffic laws and behave as if I were driving a car. Even with this, I get passed too closely and get pushed by cars rushing to pass when there isn't enough room. LTC busses are especially disrespectful. When I approach an intersection, I find vehicles continuing to race past me only to cut me off at the stop sign.

I don't mean for this to be a rant about drivers, because for the most part, my commute is quite safe and uneventful, but I do find that I need to be the one to establish the boundaries around myself and take control during interactions with other vehicles.

I attribute most of this behaviour to the traffic culture that London has. Because driving across the city takes a long time with a lot of traffic, Londoners tend to rush, running yellow and red lights, being aggressing when turning left etc. This translates into a lack of respect for slower (but fully legal) vehicles like bikes.

Bike lanes do make a difference. The clear delineation of space that a lane creates reminds drivers that cyclists are there and need space as well. The other factor is education, which is a challenge. We need to remind drivers that cyclists are people as well, just trying to get somewhere.

The advice I'd give a novice cyclist is to be prepared at all times. Use lights all the time, wear a helmet and be ready for unexpected pull-outs, dangerously close passing and for rude drivers to yell and honk at you for simply being on the road. Beyond that, I'd tell them that commuting by bike in London is fantastic. It's cheap, healthy and efficient. It takes me ~20 minutes to drive to work and only ~35 minutes to bike. That's pretty great.​

Procrastinating

by Michael Wickett

We all do it. Actually, we all struggle with it.​

Our attention is so fluid, so fragile. It takes only the slightest bump to send it bouncing around like a flashlight on a string in a dark room. If you're like me, you battle constantly the urge to check twitter, your RSS feed or the front page of your favourite news site. It's easy to blame the Internet as a distraction. Certainly, having all the worlds knowledge and entertainment hiding behind the equivalent of a saran-wrap ​(yes, I had to look up the spelling of "saran"...and had to force myself to come back to writing this) wall doesn't help the battle. 

It's more than just the ease of which we can choose to distract ourselves – make no mistake, it's a choice – that makes our attention so breakable. ​Sometimes, when we procrastinate easily it means that we don't truly care about the task at hand. I accept that caring is a critical part of getting something done, but I think there's more to it than that. There's lots in life that we don't care about, but that we still need to do. It comes down to mindfulness and discipline. Both those things are really hard, even when you do truly care.

I want to write more. I try to write more and usually fail. Lately, I feel like I've been failing at it even more than normal. For me, writing is hard. I wish it wasn't, but for whatever combination of reasons, it is. The only way I can change that is to force myself to do it more. If you identify with any of what I just said, go read this. I'll wait.​ Done? I know, right? (I hate people who say that, sorry). 

A part of writing that I really struggle with is getting words on a page (screen, whatever) without constantly stopping and editing what I've already written. I need to get better at locking into modes. The first mode is just spewing out words. The second is re-writing (actually, usually deleting) what I just wrote until it seems to make sense. The third mode is a final edit to make sure there aren't any stupid mistakes.​

There, I'm aware of that failing. I wrote it down. I'm mindful of it. When I'm writing in mode one and catch myself switching to mode two before I'm done, I gently force myself back to the blinking cursor at the bottom of the screen and keep hitting the keys. I need to accept that the time for mode two will come. If you haven't already figured it out, this post is just an excuse to force myself to keep writing more words. I'll have to make sure to leave the last sentence in when I'm editing in mode two (and I did!).​

It's mindfulness of our own cognitive patterns and habits and the discipline to correct them that makes the difference between staying on the tightrope of attention or falling off into the abyss.​ If you care at all about this stuff, I urge you to go and listen to Back to Work with Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin. Don't use it as a procrastination tool though, please! Start at episode one and listen to all of them. It's worth it, I promise.

Many of you are probably already listeners, but I'd be doing a disservice if I didn't mention it. Actually, if you are a B2W listener, most of this post is a total rip-off. I make no apologies though, because without a constant reminder it's easy to lose the habit of being focused and actually producing something.

We try really hard to find excuses when we procrastinate. There is always some external force that we blame, to absolve ourselves. With honesty, we realize that the only person or thing to blame is our own laziness.

"Part of our evolution as a species"

by Michael Wickett

Jonathan Coulton in a recent interview (via Gigaom):​

​I, for one, think that the internet is one of the greatest human achievements, ever. It’s an amazing tool and we have only just begun to explore the possibilities. To me, it feels like it’s a part of our evolution as a species. I value it as much as I value the Bill of Rights.

Grandiose? Perhaps. Exactly right? I think so. Aside from a few "as big as the printing press" comments, we don't hear much about the impact of the Internet on a species level. Someone like Clay Shirky comes to mind, but I don't believe that the average person out there using the Internet thinks much about exactly what it is that they're doing.​ (I don't mean to ignore the thousands of academics doing research on the effects of the Internet on society.)​

In the grand scheme of things, the Internet is still a baby but it has changed the world many times over. I can't wait to see where we are in ten years. I'll bet we won't recognize it.

Caught Looking

by Michael Wickett

Aside from this Globe article being really well written, I think it looks at some interesting parts of our society. The fact is, as human beings, we're wired to look at other people and make decisions - some of them related to sex and attractiveness. ​We can't (and shouldn't) suppress what makes us human but we should be a respectful part of our society.

I do wish that the author had spoken with some younger people to get their perspective. ​Maybe it's just me, but I've seen some pretty rude and creepy behaviour from younger men. Although leering and comments have always been around, I've noticed some guys taking "checking a girl out" to a new creeper level. Not cool. 

The Way He Wanted It

by Michael Wickett

My late grandfather, Howard Wickett, really enjoyed baseball. He was a Toronto Blue Jays fan and followed them pretty closely. I particularly remember him and most of our family following the team during their great run to the World Series in the early nineties. One thing that stands out in my memory is the discriminating way he watched games.

I remember during our visits in the summer, he would sit in the upstairs TV room with the game on but the sound turned down. Beside him would be a small portable radio tuned to the broadcast of the game. He always preferred the radio commentary over the TV play-by-play. I can't remember exactly why, but I'm pretty it had something to do with "not liking those TV guys". 

Remember radio?

Looking back on it, watching games this way must have been frustrating. The commentary would have always been slightly out of sync with the picture. I get annoyed when the ​audio sync is out even slightly while watching video and would lose my mind trying to watch a whole ballgame like that. It speaks to how much my grandfather loved how Tom Cheek called baseball.

As I write this, I'm listening to Jerry Howarth and Alan Ashby call the Blue Jays vs Phillies in a Grapefruit league spring training game. I'm not listening to it on the radio though. I'm using my iPhone 4 and the MLB.com At Bat 2012 app. I can choose to listen to either the Toronto or Philadelphia radio ​broadcast. If I wanted to, I could pay more and watch the game in HD. On my phone.

The options we have in how we enjoy entertainment and media are pretty mind-blowing if you stop and think about it. "The Internet" is always complaining about how media companies don't get it, and while I tend to agree, things have changed an awful lot in a short amount of time. Our house has been cable free for close to a year now and are loving it. Netflix and iTunes provide 90% of what we watch and put us in complete control.

This post doesn't really have a point, other than as a reminder of how quickly the media landscape has changed around us in a short period of time. On the other hand, things are still the same with a lot more change to come.

I do know that my grandfather would have enjoyed sitting on the porch watching the Jays game on an iPad.​

​

Grown-up Productivity

by Michael Wickett

I spent a few fun hours the other day playing with a Rackspace Cloud server and Nick Wynja’s really great deploysecondcrack project (Github). Deploysecondcrack is an all-in-one (pretty much) tool to setup Marco Arment’s Dropbox based Markdown blogging engine, Second Crack. It had been quite a while since I’d spent time messing with a server CLI and thanks to Nick’s generous help, I didn’t pull out too much hair.

Although I got a Second Crack blog up and (mostly) running, in the end I decided to stick with Squarespace. It felt like a grown-up decision.

Nick hit on the reason for my decision with his recent post at hackmake.org:

When are we going to graduate past constantly tweaking our markdown writing systems (guilty) and just write?

What I really wanted to do was post something to my blog. Instead, I got sidetracked playing with a shiny new toy. Using Squarespace means I don’t have to mess around under the hood if I don’t want to and that frees up my attention to focus on writing. It’s hard enough to write consistently without unnecessary distractions.

All that said, if you’re looking for a great custom blog, check out Second Crack and be sure to use deploysecondcrack to get it up and running.​