Steve Neiderhauser

It's the Talent...

It was a Tuesday afternoon in Dallas when I entered a Deep Ellum restaurant and joined a Linkedin lunch. 22 people from the virtual world of social networking had decided to meet in the real world and network the old fashioned way.

As people introduced themselves, I learned that four of them had written movie scripts while several others were seeking movie deals. A film professor, from a local university, reminded us that it’s not about the money; it’s about the talent, since PC software has made filmmaking easy and affordable.

His remark reminded me of a Dallas Observer article regarding Shane Carruth, software engineer-turned-filmmaker, who won the Sundance Film Festival’s top award this year.

The next day, I had lunch with a friend who works in the telecom industry. Connie starts telling me about local kids who are making it based on their talent--her favorite is Delux_247 who stars in a Coca Cola commercial. Then she said, “It's all about the talent.”

You know, she’s right. Will software engineers leave their jobs in droves to join the movie industry? Nope. Are you starting to see a pattern we can learn from?

Object-oriented development is becoming easier and easier; this trend favors talented employees with business and technology skills. When you understand business and use the power of objects to create business models (in weeks instead of months), you position your company for innovation, since real-time customer feedback cascades ideas and generates nonlinear results.

In fact, if you were bold enough to follow the examples of agile manufacturing companies described in The New Pioneers, you'd make software professionals work in business jobs to assure they truly grasp your business. Imagine that, software development learning from manufacturing.

Goodbye Waterfall, Hello Rapids

This Computer World article describes how some CIOs are trying to speed software development.

For instance, Ameritrade has switched from the waterfall method (projects completed in nine months) to rapid development (projects broken into increments of six to ten weeks).

When you read this story closely, you notice it covers procedures and tracking methods, but it doesn’t even mention abilities. Building capabilities into your development environment is the real key to rapid development.

For example, using object-oriented frameworks allows your team to spend less time worrying about technical details and more time building applications.

The CIO of Ameritrade added that if a competitor launches a new product or service, "we're 12 weeks away from responding to it under a worst-case scenario."

It’s my experience that if this goal is to be met, Ameritrade will also need a software framework related to their market. If options aren’t build into Ameritrade’s products from the beginning, it will be difficult to deliver new products in 12 weeks. Some companies achieve rapid product development by using a product platform -- they create variations of the product based on a common theme.

It’s not rules and regulations that create value; it’s flexibility and freedom that allow employees to deliver value to customers. When companies start losing customers because their competition is better, faster, quicker, they will drop the cost-cutting lodestone and start building capabilities into their organization.

Surprisingly, rapid development and creativity have much in common -- they both require that you’re in shape.

How to be Creative

"Be Creative. Ohmmm..."

That's the magic mantra many companies chant. Surprisingly though, few people can tell you the steps to creativity. Ah, but even if you do know the steps, it's impossible to climb them if you aren't in shape. For telling most employees to get an idea is a little like telling a person with frail legs to run a 100-yard dash.

In How to Get Ideas, Jack Foster tells us there are eight ways to think that will condition your mind to be creative--these methods are the foundation of creative thinking. Here's one way to condition your mind.

* Think Visually

In school, we were trained to think with words. But many of the most creative minds thought with pictures. Einstein said that he rarely thought in words. He solved problems with images, and only later tried to express in words and formulas; he wondered what the world would look like to a person riding a ray of light as it sped through space, then he wrote the Theory of Relativity.

Think in pictures instead of words. Once you get the visual, the words flow like water.

Pump Up the Inputs

According to Jack Foster, author of How to Get Ideas, it’s possible to increase the number of new ideas you get by increasing the number of ideas you're exposed to.

Visit the zoo, read a book, eat at a different restaurant. Feed your curiosity. Since I had just finished lunch, I opted for Tom Petzinger’s The New Pioneers -- a new book for me. As I raced from one page to the next, a fountain of ideas sprang from the pages.

Combining elements from computer science with elements from Tom’s book, my imagination was swimming with new ideas. Where’s the proof that combining old ideas produces new ones? Petzinger writes that the proof is overwhelming:

After spending two years watching research scientists conduct hundreds of experiments, Kevin Dunbar of McGill University in Montreal concluded that they “rely largely on analogy -- the process of applying knowledge in one area to solve problems in another.”

That eases my mind because, just for a moment, I thought my imagination was playing tricks on me.

Outsourcing with a View

Do I believe in Protectionism? Absolutely, I do.

Several years ago, I took a business trip from Dallas, Texas to Appleton, Wisconsin. Halfway through the Midwest Airlines flight--somewhere over Ohio--I got bored and reached for the in-flight magazine. As I thumbed through the pages, I bumped into an article about a paper mill located near Green Bay that had tried to implement an ERP software package. After spending $20 million on the project, this company decided to seek Chapter 11 protection and new management.

That’s the type of protection I believe in--protecting a company from misguided management. Are there other times when we need protection? Sure there are.

The New York Times (registration required) reports that the external affairs minister of India had this to say about outsourcing software jobs, “The U.S. has to realize that by outsourcing, its companies remain competitive and save jobs.”

Ka-what!

If you’ve read It’s Not the Big that Eat the Small...it’s the Fast that Eat the Slow by Jason Jennings, you might hold an opposite opinion. Speed and agility create a competitive advantage--not cheap labor.

What’s the biggest problem I’ve experienced in the software field? People with little, if any, software experience end up managing projects and making poor decisions. Let me share a leadership concept with you:

You can’t manage what you don’t understand; you can’t understand what you haven’t done.

We need to be protected from people who don’t know what they're talking about; we can accomplish this goal through education. When you read this article by Jon Strande, you’ll see why it’s critical that we make an apples-to-apples comparison regarding outsourcing.

The Upside Down Organization

There I was, listening to a sales rep give a product presentation, laden with jokes as stale as day-old doughnuts. What’s more, he made the mistake of complaining about how much influence their software engineers had. He didn’t get it. Many executives in the Silicon Valley do.

Innovation allows software companies to compete and remain viable. When a company embraces an organic organization model, they enable employees to connect with one another and share ideas. In essence, the software engineers are empowered to create new products that will drive revenue gains and market share.

Still, there remain many companies that create vertical jobs and embrace hierarchical management models. They pay lip service to empowering employees--tin words that fall on deaf ears.

In The New Pioneers, Thomas Petzinger suggests that the connections created by each employee’s ensemble of relationships represents their true value. He captures a quote from David Weinberger:

"A sign of value to the organization will not be standing at the top of the heap but having the most hyper-linked roles. Integrative knowledge will become at least as important as specialized knowledge."

Ideas and Objects

As described in How to Get Ideas, a new idea is the combination of old elements. If these elements are simple and clearly defined, it’s often easier to combine them to create a new idea.

I recall reading an article about a CFO who could hold the corporate Excel spreadsheet in his head, and calculate the bottom line as certain variables were changed. This guy may have been a Rain Man: "$2,419,627 net profit, definitely $2,419,627."

I confess -- I’m no Rain Man. But there’s something to be learned from this CFO.

From a software perspective, if you can manipulate objects in your head, you are likely to start combining ideas and dream up new applications that produce value.

As you know, objects that are clearly defined, and can be used independently or in any combination, help you produce new ideas. You see, ideas and objects work hand in hand.

How to Make Your Next Presentation Sing

Cliff Atkinson, a management consultant who specializes in organizational issues related to PowerPoint, sent me his newsletter the other day. He refers to a Harvard Business Review interview with Robert McKee, Hollywood's king of screenwriting. While McKee suggests that we throw away the PowerPoint and rely solely on story, Cliff provides a way to use both.

I shared one of my stories with Cliff, and he walked me through the steps that marry story with visual presentation. Pretending that a director would film the story, we created a storyboard for the major scenes--eight in all.

The next step? Create a PowerPoint presentation with eight blank slides (white background, no text).

From the menu, choose View => Notes Page.

From this view, paste each scene's text into the text area.

Double-click on the slide area (now you’re in “Normal View”); copy and paste an image that illustrates the scene’s idea. Note: This step allows your images to appear in both slide and notes view.

The benefits? Cliff explains:

1. By distilling the story into a storyboard, you become even more intimate with your story’s structure and flow. With text in the Notes section, there's no need for text on the slides.

2. Each slide is now a 'visual trigger'--a trigger that prompts you to continue with the next 'beat' of your story.

3. Each image by itself is ambiguous enough that it requires you to explain it and make the connections. Seeing the slides alone, without text, makes no sense. But with you, it creates a synergy between you, the media, and your audience.

4. After the meeting, give Notes Pages to the gathering. The handout provides a verbal-visual document that can be used to evangelize your story.

These benefits dovetail nicely with story--together, they help you connect with your audience. If you’ve created an edge with great design, your product deserves a great presentation.

Sarah McLachlan’s Fallen is a beautiful song when she sings it. Now, imagine for a second some helium-voiced comedian singing the same poetic lyrics. Not a soothing feeling, is it? If you have a remarkable product, but give a dull, lifeless performance, you might find potential customers looking elsewhere for solutions.

You want to stand out from the crowd, you want to be remarkable, you want to be different. If you aren't different, you’ll disappear into the crowd. Using story is one way to be remembered.

Memorable experiences are important according to Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, authors of The Experience Economy. The authors write, "Those businesses that relegate themselves to the diminishing world of goods and services will be rendered irrelevant. To avoid this fate, you must learn to stage a rich, compelling experience."

Master storytellers use words to paint rich, powerful pictures. Just ask Scheherazade, who staved off nightly threats of execution by telling an enchanting story. Yes, well-told stories have always been powerful.

While others stress, and strive, and strain to influence, you’ll get past the ego defense shield that's put up when people are confronted with facts and figures.

How is this possible?

You, my friend, are using story and images.

Geek Theater

About once a year, I confer with Blake Burris to discuss the latest technology trends. Not as well attended as an O’Reilly conference, although I did notice two people at the Barnes & Noble store eavesdropping as Blake regaled me with stories from the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference.

It wasn’t emerging technology that mesmerized my mind; it was technology emerging buzzworthy that captured my imagination.

Picture this: During a presentation, an audience member fires up a collaboration app, starts taking notes, and shares the document. Now, other users can edit the document, adding their thoughts about the latest advances in technology and how it affects them. Someone doesn’t understand a point, they type “???”; another person jumps in to answer the string of question marks. Immediately after the presentation, the brave speaker turns the tables through the magic of the anyone-can-type-anywhere-anytime app, and takes the audience’s pulse.

That’s SubEthaEdit. It’s a free OS X app, developed by three German computer science students in their spare time, that lets you participate in collaborative note taking. SubEthaEdit uses Rendezvous to discover users--on a local network--who want to join the fun. Fun is how some spectators-turned-actors have described this experience.

Experience is the marketing. So say James Gilmore and Joseph Pine, authors of The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage. They suggest you plan experiences that move your customers: “The way to reach your customers is to create an experience within them.”

Will the SubEthaEdit adventures move Macs?

Let’s not jump to conclusion island. Remember, this confab is attended largely by early adaptors. If Apple is to increase their box office draw, they need to exit stage left, past the alpha geeks in the round, and draw the rest of the theatergoers to the show.

You put your spreadsheet in my database

Last Thursday, I attended an introduction to Oracle’s newest database--Oracle 10g; g stands for grid computing. One interesting note from this seminar, you can now define a spreadsheet in the database--within limits.

For those of you who don’t need a massively parallel spreadsheet, but still need to answer the vexing question: “How do I get a database in my spreadsheet?” -- there’s a product from Real Insight that may interest you.

Described as “Excel on Steroids,” Real Bridge provides a connection between your spreadsheet and database, and much more.

Many a finance professional, untethered from the constraints and creative limitations of GAAP Accounting, has brewed an Excel app that even FASB couldn’t audit.

Sarbanes-Oxley, anyone?