Relentless Simplicity :: The Bonanzle Tech Blog

What does experience buy an employee? It buys a body of knowledge to draw upon. Reflecting upon the nebulous “things that went wrong,” savvy veterans can provide great value to a company by using the lessons learned from past failures to steer clear of disaster on future projects.

But this is only in the perfect case.

In the real world, most people do not have the capacity to remember specific examples of what they’ve seen. Instead, most leaders that I have worked under develop a “gut feeling” that guides their judgement. If asked to substantiate the gut feeling, these leaders can be evasive, because without being able to remember the examples, one might not be sure what specifically led to that feeling being formed. Instead of the example that brought about the feeling, they will more often cite a recent-but-not-too-relevant example that comes to mind.

As a leader, I have found that I am as guilty of this as the leaders before me. I do not have the ability to remember every situation that has led to my gut feelings, and so I can sometimes find myself unable to substantiate even my “stronger” gut feelings.

Now, the fact that we tend to develop a gut feeling that we can not explain is not in itself a problem. If your gut feelings are correct within the context that you assert them, fine.

But here’s a little secret that I think is the key failing of many highly experienced leaders: their gut feeling is to avoid risk, and while that gut feeling is understandable, it is also stupid.

Think about it: indiscriminately avoiding risk is the natural culmination of years of collecting examples of things that go wrong. First you work on a project that was overly ambitious and got overscheduled, so you remember to keep your scope refined. Then you work on a project that used very elaborate systems that caused you to run out of memory, so you remember to avoid very elaborate systems. On a third project, you try a new 3d algorithm that ends up being thrown out during alpha because of low-level incompatibilities, so you remember to be wary of new algorithms.

Combine all of those lessons into one lesson and what do you get? At the most abstract level, all three of these examples suggest that by taking a risk (large scope, elaborate systems, new algorithm) the project suffered.

This is why I believe that many experienced people learn to avoid risks as a habit. And this is why I make it a point not to learn from my mistakes.

You can not make significant innovations without taking significant risks. Yes, you expose yourself to second-guessing, particularly if your risks have failed before. And yes, it is far more difficult to implement a nuanced risk-aversion plan that considers the specific reasons behind past failures, rather than simply avoid all possible risks that could beget failure.

But as an employer, I believe that the holy grail of maximal ass-kicking job applicants are those that have been through projects before, failed, but are just as willing to push the envelope as they had been during their first project. They need to have learned something from their failures so as not to be derelict, but learning to simply avoid risk is the recipe for perpetual sterility.

Bill Hiring, Rants

Every day I spend with my nose to the grindstone, it keeps sneaking up on me. It started as “maybe someday,” and eventually progressed to “hopefully soon,” “maybe four months,” “about two months,” and now, three wee-little weeks: my (partial) liberation from the man as I transition to working a half-time shift!

I’m (partially) ecstatic. I don’t yet know exactly how calling my own shots will effect my day-to-day life, but it sure sounds terrific. Currently, I’m squeezing 25-30 hours a week between late weeknights and long weekend days. Time to meet with people is limited. Time to develop the site myself is non-existent. For all the time I’ve spent looking for someone else to give the executive branch of this project a shot in the arm, I’m now betting that in three weeks, I’ll be infusing the project with about as good a boost as could be hoped for at this point. For progress and morale alike.

I can still clearly remember the first morning I woke up in my own apartment after arriving in Seattle. The apartment was a complete disaster: cheap, run down, and littered with leftover food and partially emptied boxes. I woke up at about 8 in the morning after just a few hours sleep. Though I had thrown off my blanket when dusk broke a few hours earlier, I was still drenched in sweat from the sun shining through my window, baking me on my futon. I looked out my clear, sunny window onto the neighbor’s cluttered porch and an already bustling 15th Avenue. I deeply inhaled the pale smell of cigarette and newly washed dingy carpets, and pasted a grin on my face that lasted the rest of the week.

The independence was intoxicating, unlike anything I had felt in my life to that point. Every trip to the deathbed Safeway on 50th Street was a field trip where anything was possible. I couldn’t give a damn about yielding at crosswalk signals, paying bus fare, or doing the dishes.

Even today, many of my favorite moments are those where I shun convention in favor of the freewheeling ethos that personified that time in my life. Given that, it is something of a wonder that I managed to do the 9-5 routine even for the three-plus years I’ve been at it. From what I have read and what I can sense, making the leap away from security and into a self-directed challenge that will engage me daily promises to hold the same clear air of possibility that blew by me as I baked on that futon almost 10 years ago today.

Bill Entrepreneurship, Motivation, Progress, Rants

Myself and a bunch of friends are going to jump from a plane in a couple weeks. I have mixed feelings about how much I’ll enjoy it. The safety statistics don’t concern me much, nor does the thought of jumping from the plane particularly make me sweat. The part of the trip I am most dreading is the many hours that we will have to sit around the wherever-you-sit-at-a-skydiving-joint and think Think think about all the tiny logistics of what we’re about to do. The same unending stream of thoughts that makes my brain so very useful for discovering creative solutions/solving deep-rooted problems isn’t discriminating about what it will analyze; therefore I’m probably destined for some miserable hours. It is one thing to go from hanging out and drinking beers to jumping 14,000 feet. It’s another to sit around with little diversion for hours and ponder how someone could hit the wing.

I’m thinking the skydiving experience will most likely prove to be another everyday example of preventable customer discomfort. I believe that these discomforts exist in large part because, often times, customers do not even realize their discomfort is preventable. The example on Creating Passionate Users of two potential dentists’ offices comes to mind. One dentist office looks more or less like every dentist office I have ever been to: dry, clinical, and, um, black & white. The other one is dressed in warm colors, “smells like cookies,” and has a wine bar. Every time I have gone to my dentists’ since seeing this graphic, I think to myself, “Where’s the damn wine?” Every time I sit in the seat, stare toward the ceiling, and listen to the sweet lullabys of the dental drill, I think, “Where’s the plasma TV with ESPN or Xbox 360 or anything?”

Simply put, service providers have a tremendous opportunity to see past conventions and create an experience that makes the customer happy from the moment they enter to the moment they leave. The service itself is but one aspect of the experience. In many cases, the service itself might take only a small portion of the overall time for the experience (how many times have I sat 20 minutes or more in an empty patient room at a doctor’s office, waiting for a doctor that spent five minutes with me before rendering their verdict?). And the service is frequently not what’s on the customer’s mind during most of the experience.

It is the experience that I remember, and it is the experience that I think about when considering whether I’d go back.

Bill Rants, User Experience

Yo non-profiteers, ye so virtuous, ye so in touch with your internal belief set, and working every day to further your altruistic cause: you suck!

Yo for-profiteers, ye so obsessed with pennies in a billion dollars, ye so proud and ascribed to the adage “It’s business, it’s never personal”: you suck too!

Yo Mickey Mouseketeers, ye with such freakishly proportioned ears, ye so happy on the inside and somehow also happy on the inside: you suck three!

Is that everyone now? Good. Let’s continue.

I want to meet people who are benevolent and like getting paid. From what I can tell on TV and even in real life, it seems that people are largely split into the two groups. The non-profiteers want no part of the capitalist, affluenza pandemic that has infected rappers and America and especially for-profiteers. The for-profiteers, on the other hand, want money severely. They want money so badly that they will pollute environments, defraud geezers, or otherwise embrace whatever vices blacken the bottom line.

In the middle, there is an island upon which I hope to find some fellow refugees. What’s so bad about getting paid?

Bill Entrepreneurship, Motivation, Rants

When’s the last time you heard that you did a “really great job”? Even better, when’s the last time you heard that you did a “really great job, and here are some ideas as to how you can do an even better one”? Hopefully in the last few weeks, but working at the average company with average boss, chances are that it’s probably measured more in months or years. As an individual in search of constant improvement, I am severely bugged when I see this happen. When one acts as their own sounding board, the veracity of the evaluation they give to themselves will be inherently more random. And with randomly correct data about what was and wasn’t good, the precision with which you can determine how to improve your actions is low. After working even one year without meaningful feedback, you end up with a lot of data points representing tasks that you completed, but no bin to sort them into. They are points in space, and the value of that experience is largely diminished because of it.

So, not getting feedback=bad. But is getting feedback=good? Sometimes. A concurrent epidemic that seems to have infected many of the noble feedback givers is that of not assigning degree and example to feedback. Did you ever have a class that was graded on a curve in college, and sit in class on a day where the professor jubilantly declared that “everybody did so well on this test, I am so proud of you all!” Seldom was there a compliment that I less wanted to hear. In reality as we know it, there are few, if any, absolutes. So feedback such as “you did well last week,” ranks only slightly higher in data conveyed than no feedback at all. A disclaimer is in order here that this is coming from a computer programmer who works in a world of logic and quantifiable principles, but in my eyes, a compliment that does not come attached to a comparison and an example will still be only marginally informative. Strictly speaking, whether you are “smart” or “good at what you do” does not exist in an absolute world. It only exists relative to other people (or your past self) who do those same things worse.

“Harsh,” you might be thinking, because it is. Society likes to sugarcoat the reality of comparison by labeling those that see the world as a place of relative degrees as “competitive.” Competitiveness of this type is often discouraged in casual affairs, or even in some business settings where it is important to preserve feelings. But whether you’re winning or not, the relative nature of success is here to stay. Deal with it and grow richer in your understanding of yourself and the world. Deny it and protect your self esteem while you remain ignorant to how you could do better.

It’s “Realitivity.”

Bill Hiring, Rants

I had an interesting talk with an intelligent young man this evening, and it got me to thinking about an entrepreneurial question that runs right past mere entrepreneurship, and straight into the human condition. That question is: “Why aren’t people more productive?” Or, as my brain construes it: “Why do so many people watch TV five nights a week?”

The cynics will tell you it’s because we’re lazy and brainwashed. The idealists will say it is to relax and to understand the world we live in. The intelligent young man (who also had a name, “Ben”) said it’s because people will take the path of least resistance to personal satisfaction. I say “dunno.” I think Ben might be thinking along the right track, because the act of turning on television/turning off brain is easy easy enough to initiate, and it’s interesting for the first few minutes. But after those five glorious minutes of watching the contestant pick random briefcases in search of $1,000,000, the question re-surfaces: “Why aren’t people more productive?”

My best guess is that the watcher has failed to discover what it is that they’re really interested in. Because once you know what you love doing, you have an option that both passes time and prevents brain decay.

It’s not hard to see how this relates back to entrepreneurship. I consider myself a ridiculously lucky human to have been given a consciousness that innately craves challenges and is action-oriented. I enjoy thinking up and organizing ideas the same way that others enjoy stamp collecting, gossiping, or theatre. But despite the feelings of well-being that I bask in every time I tackle a new entrepreneurial challenge, it still takes some time to climb up the stairs before I get to sled down that hill. TV is the other way around. When you first turn it on, there is ramp-up pleasure to be derived, but after the brief fun, your brain turns off and an hour later you suddenly wake up feeling dirty.

I know that entrepreneurs aren’t always so hot with math, so I’ll work this one out for you. One hour of spare time + TV = 5 minutes fun, 55 minutes flub. One hour of spare time + hobby = 5 minutes pain, 55 minutes passion. I will not work out how those numbers extrapolate to an entire evening, because if you’re the TV watcher it would probably hurt your feelings. Suffice to say,

Harding: 1. America’s Favorite Past Time: 0. Booyah.

Bill Motivation, Rants