Only slightly bent

Bob Sutton has become one of my favorite management book authors. This particular book – Weird Ideas That Work – How to Build a Creative Company – deals, as the subject suggests, with some more practical advice on how to build a creative and innovative workplace. It’s a relatively straightforward book in the sense that the bulk of the book consists of 11½ ideas in 12 chapters that many, especially the more conservative managers, may find weird.

How weird? Well, Sutton tells you, for example, to:

• Hire people who make you uncomfortable, even those you dislike
• Encourage people to ignore and defy superiors and peers
• Find some happy people and get them to fight
• Avoid, distract and bore customers, critics and anyone who just wants to talk about money
• Don’t try to learn anything from people who seem to have solved the problems you face

Just how weird they are depends on your point of view. In any case, unless you’ve studied innovation processes more, at least some are likely to come off as somewhat strange and counter-intuitive. However, as also stated in the title, the ideas work; there is extensive literature and research to support these ideas. While much of the actual research can be found via the references, Sutton does give plenty of examples where possible and appropriate.

One important thing to keep in mind when reading – and especially when implementing – the advice in this book is that it’s meant as helpful stuff for creative or innovative companies. You do not – I repeat DO NOT – want to implement these things in a place that needs rigid adherence to a standard process or extreme repeatability. What’s also worth bearing in mind is that while the result is likely a more innovative company, it will not be the kind of place all people enjoy working in. It will also mean, with high likelihood, that you fail more. While that may sound bad, it’s only natural because a high success rate means you’re probably not very innovative. I quote a quote of James March from the book:

Unfortunately, the gains for imagination are not free. The protections for imagination are indiscriminate. They shield bad ideas as well as good ones – and there are many more of the former than the latter. Most fantasies lead us astray, and most of the consequences of imagination for individuals and individual organizations are disastrous. Most deviants end up on the scrap pile of failed mutations, not heroes of organizational transformation.

How about the downsides of the book itself? Well, having read quite a bit on innovation, many case studies easily get repetitive. I for one am getting tired of hearing the same examples over and over again; for example, whenever the best innovative companies are discussed, there is IDEO. There’s also 3M and the stories of microreplication and Post-It notes. Other ubiquitous companies are Apple, IBM and Intel. Don’t get me wrong; they’re all great companies that make for inspiring examples, but enough is enough.

Overall Weird Ideas That Work is a wonderful book that’s a quick and interesting read. What I particularly liked is that it’s comparatively down-to-earth in the sense that there is plenty of actually implementable advice in the book, not just some kind of ethereal ideas. While an analytical person might hope for some more proof that these ideas actually do work, with enough background information you realize that they in fact are highly likely to work. But again with the caveat that you should only try these if you want to increase innovation in your company or unit and are also prepared to deal with the negative consequences. But as they say, “no pain, no gain”.

As a summary I can highly recommend this book to at least 95% of the companies who claim to be innovative (and these days, who doesn’t?) – but fall far short of a actually being truly innovative.

We’ve all heard the supposed reasons behind the increasing food prices; rising fuel and other costs, failed crops and all that. Some of them are downright lies and the others are becoming increasingly dubious as over the past 6-12 months the prices of energy and commodities have fallen quite significantly. As such, all or most of these reasons have become to resemble excuses. If the reasons behind the rising costs disappear, one would – naively, perhaps – imagine that prices would come down.

That logic may work elsewhere, but not in Finland.

Curiously enough, food prices in Finland continue to rise at much higher rates than pretty much anywhere else. In 2008 food prices rose by 10,7% in Finland – a higher rate than any other European country with the exception of Iceland. What’s more, while food prices have recently started decreasing in some countries, food prices in Finland still rose by (what I hope is annualized, the story doesn’t say) an incredible 7% in January of 2009. As an example comparison elsewhere, in the U.S. the food price inflation is currently running at an annualized pace of 1.4%.

Therefore it’s not very surprising that Martti Luukko from The Finnish Consumers’ Association comments ever-so-carefully (translation mine) that:

- Onko nyt jotenkin niin, että kilpailu ei toimisi ihan täydellä teholla, Luukko kysyy.

- Could it somehow be so that competition is not working at full power, Luukko questions.

“Could it somehow” my @$$! Ahh, the beauty of an oligopoly – the story of Finland in so many other areas as well. I have no doubt that there are people even in Finland who go hungry because of this.

Since I’m on a food-related rant here, there are two other issues that tick me off:

Here’s some cheaper food – only you can’t buy any!

There actually are places in Finland where you can find semi-reasonably priced groceries. These are the cash-and-carry wholesalers which there are a few of, but the catch is that for some inexplicable reason, they are off-limits to normal consumers.

I really, really cannot come up with a good reason why this is so so could someone tell me why such idiotic rules are in place?

When the economy packs save money only for the merchant

One of my pet peeves when grocery shopping in normal stores are so-called economy packs. Of many products, there are economy packs available – i.e. larger amounts of the same stuff. Supposedly these are cheaper per unit (liter, roll, kg, whatever) – but the annoying fact is that the so-called economy packs are cheaper per unit in maybe only 50% of the cases. Half the time the stuff in the bigger package, though cheaper per unit to produce and to sell, is more expensive to the consumer.

That’s just deceitful.

Resources:

• YLE: Ruuan hinta kallistuu edelleen (in Finnish)
• Eurostat: Harmonised indices of consumer prices
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Consumer Price Index Summary

Some time back, I made a list of best practices for creating a mobile-optimized website. For some inexplicable reason, it seems not all companies have followed my advice yet To highlight some of the better sites, however, I thought I’d write this short post about sites I use most from my phone; it’s worth mentioning that we’re talking about Nokia N82 in this case, as the sites may not appear similar on devices other than Nokia’s N/E-series handsets.

Why so few sites? Well, even if browsing is tolerable on a smartphone, it’s still a far cry from something you’d actually enjoy doing as such. If a big-screen PC is available, I’d rather use that thank you very much. Browsing on the smartphone is really limited to situations where nothing else is available – like when killing time on a bus or a train, for example.

As a result, I tend to focus these short periods of browsing time on relatively few sites. In the order of time spent, these are the sites along with respective screenshots that I use the most: (apologies to the international readers for the couple local sites which are utterly useless for everyone except those living in the Helsinki area)

NY Times at http://mobile.nytimes.com – already highlighted earlier, this is my favorite mobile-optimized site. Interesting and useful stories, well presented with the appropriate amount of photos. Considering the phone’s capabilities, I really couldn’t ask for much more.

Of course, there is a minor annoyance with one ad at the top of the page, but that falls into the acceptable-category.


Helsingin Sanomat at http://m.hs.fi/ is best for local Finnish news; the new site works well enough, even though the ads along with the title & navigation bars takes up too much space at the beginning of the page (see the screenshot). Still it works sufficiently well and includes the occasional photo.

I also like the URL. If only all mobile sites were this fast and conveniently named. The “m” prefix should become a de facto-standard if you ask me; .mobi is a bad idea but everyone who owns their domain should have no problems in making the mobile-version prefix “m” (and have the mobile-prefix as an alias also)


Facebook at http://m.facebook.com.

The mobile-optimized Facebook site is a very crippled version, but it’s still useful for status updates and quick checks. A good mobile interface is essential for things like Facebook – otherwise, one’s status would always be something boring like “at home” or “at work” like you see from time to time.. (Names removed from the screenshot here to protect the innocent.)

The Australian at http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/wireless is another mostly well-done mobile newspaper version, despite the long URL. Downsides are that there are practically no photos and it could use category links on every page – but it also shows that making a relatively functioning mobile site does not need to be a a major undertaking. This is the kind of site that one should be able to pull out of any half-decent CMS with not much trouble at all.


YTV Journey Planner at http://aikataulut.ytv.fi/reittiopas-pda/fi/ is one of the most useful mobile sites ever, despite the horrible URL that’s a pain to type before bookmarking it. The Journey Planner basically tells you what public transportation to take to get from Point A to Point B, along with schedules and route maps.

Google Reader at http://www.google.com/reader/m/view is a nice interface for accessing your bloglist on Google Reader on the move. Nothing fancy but it works nicely enough; unfortunately at least on the Nokia phones, it doesn’t remember your login information for very long (i.e. not days or weeks), so you have to occasionally re-login which is a bit of a pain.

Rain radar at http://testbed.fmi.fi/

This is an exception in the sense that the site is not mobile-optimized. Still, it’s simple enough to be usable on the phone and the service it offers (Doppler rain radar + temperatures of the metropolitan area) is so useful it deserves to be on the list.

Who’s missing?

The above sites are quite sufficient for most purposes, but I would really like to see the following sites come up with better mobile versions:

• The Economist
• CNN
• Several forums, mostly running PHPBB or vBulletin; their mobile versions suck.
• IMDB

Mainstream indicators

One reliable indicator when a technology or service has gone mainstream is when it’s being advertised on bus stop billboards. This Elisa ad from this week in particular shows not one or two but three things that have recently gone mainstream: Facebook, minilaptops/netbooks and mobile broadband. In particular it’s interesting to note that netbooks (the cheap small laptops) have gone mainstream so soon – while they have also been blamed for destroying business models, for many consumers they’re the best thing sliced bread. I’ve yet to jump aboard myself, pondering the usefulness of one of these versus the smartphone which has so far proven to be sufficient for my mobile needs.

Of course, all three go hand in hand. A netbook is utterly useless without the ‘net, requiring mobile broadband. Luckily flat-rate plans with reasonable usage limits are becoming more and more available. And then you need something to while on the Internet, and what could be a better example of this than the runaway success of Facebook?

When doing the right thing twice means doing the wrong thing

When the leftmost sliding door is broken, it’s only natural to instruct people to use the door on the right. And when the door on the right breaks, the correct course of action is to tell people to use the door on the left.

Unless it’s already broken, that is. If it is and you do that, you end up with an endless loop. Luckily it’s very easy to spot such simple, straightforward errors in logic on the spot, right?

Right?

*sigh*

Even though I know core competencies shift, I was somewhat surprised to find myself reading this book with precisely that in mind: developing a core competence. It has indeed come to the point when giving presentations is actually an important part of what I do, so I figured the least I could do is become the best possible presenter. Though I’ve had some training on the topic, this book - slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations by Nancy Duarte – was to be one more stepping stone on that road.

An easy way to say what slide:ology is would be to say that it covers everything you need to know about creating presentations. But that’d be a cop-out, even though it does include a wealth of material that very few presenters have ever thought but should think about. There’s seriously a lot of stuff in the book; from choosing color palettes to designing slide layouts to displaying data to the placement of various elements, all wrapped with an array of design hints and case studies. Even dissecting the life and mood of different fonts is covered, so there’s certainly a feeling that everything you need is there.

But then there are also problems. One issue comes from the author; it’s clearly a book by a designer. This is not a bad thing as such, of course, but it means some elements in the book are more likely to be just personal preferences or styles of the author. It also means a near-complete lack of technical advice on how exactly to accomplish the stated ideas. Other problems come in the form of resources; following every advice in the book will require a team of people working on your presentation full-time. Al Gore may be able to afford that, but most other people in the day-to-day business life cannot. As a result, it can be hard to not feel discouraged when you consider the real-life resource and time constraints you have to live with.

Having said that, slide:ology most certainly earned a spot in my reference library and is a book I’m sure to return to when creating presentations. The book reads well, there’s a plethora of useful information and rules of thumb and some nice examples. And make no mistake, 99% of the people, myself included, would benefit from implementing even a fraction of the advice in slide:ology in their presentations.