May

1

Innovation lessons from Pixar

Filed Under changing the world, entrepreneurship, failure, fear, google, innovation, people i like, perseverance, things to remind myself | Leave a Comment

The McKinsey Quarterly has a really interesting piece on innovation at Pixar–the company who brought you Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and Ratatouille. Keep in mind that Pixar was purchased by the Walt Disney Company from Steve Jobs, the turn around artist and saviour of Apple (Apple Computer, who brought you the iPod), whose company in turn have Eric Schmidt (the CEO of a small little company despised by the behemoth Microsoft) on their board of directors.

Google and Apple are both well known for being innovators in their respective core markets, and suffice to say that they both share some innovation DNA from the top–and Pixar, through its relationship with Steve Jobs would probably have benefited from some of the common DNA between the two. Here are some of the highlights of this article, in which Oscar-winning director Brad Bird was asked about how he managed innovation.

The first step in achieving the impossible is believing that the impossible can be achieved. There was a point during the making of The Incredibles where we had a company meeting. We have them about twice a year, and anybody can bring up concerns. Somebody raised their hand and said, “Is The Incredibles too ambitious?” Ed Catmull said, “I don’t know” and looked over at me. I just said, “No! If there’s one studio that needs to be doing stuff that is ‘too ambitious,’ it’s this one. You guys have had nothing but success. What do you do with it? You don’t play it safe—you do something that scares you, that’s at the edge of your capabilities, where you might fail. That’s what gets you up in the morning.”

Read more

Aug

25

Inbox Zero

Filed Under execution, geeky, goal setting, google, hacks, time management | Leave a Comment

Merlin Mann of 43folders fame presented a talk at Google titled Inbox Zero, a productivity hack/treatment for people who live out of their inboxes. The talk is about an hour long, so I’ve written up here some of the points I feel are important and works for me.

Disclaimer: This is _obvious_ stuff, but sometimes we forget, and a reminder is always nice.

Respect yourself, spend time and attention wisely

For knowledge workers like myself, we don’t create value by the number of bricks we can carry with our arms. We process knowledge/information, and that’s how we create value for our companies. The two things that knowledge workers must understand and appreciate is time and attention. Both of which we only have a finite amount of, and both of which are our constraints to our productivity. The goal is to separate the wheat from the chaff, saying NO to the low value work so that we can say YES to the high value work. Procrastination and frittering time away in email, surfing the web and flipping TV channels aimlessly would be “low value” work (more like almost no value work).

Email is a communication medium, just like the telephone. Don’t focus on email itself, focus on the information in the email and process it. Hitting the send/receive button all day is “busy work”, made to think that you are doing work, but you’re not actually doing any real work.

Process information in email
Don’t read the email and do nothing! Do something about it. Process it when you check it. Mine the gold from your inbox, and throw away the empty husk.

Processing actions:

  • Delete (consume) or archive it (save for historical records)
  • Delegate or forward it to someone else (stuff that don’t apply to you, or better handled by someone else)
  • Respond now, or do that work now!
  • Defer (perhaps replying requires more time, or requires some work first)

Having a productivity system in place is important (and so is sticking to it)

We are what we frequently do
– Aristotle

Don’t leave email open the entire time, with distracting pop-up notifications. Check once every hour or few hours, live outside of email. *This doesn’t apply to customer service reps

Use a tool/system that just stops short of being fun to use, so that you don’t end up fiddling with it. Remember that the tool/system has to be good at capturing information, and recalling information.

Aug

23

Google Maps fun!

Filed Under google, howto | Leave a Comment

Cool stuff, Google has just lowered the barrier even further to mashing up Google Maps with any web page you have. All you do is go to Google Maps, pick your address, click on “Link to this page”, and cut-paste the HTML iframe code they provide you. Can it get any easier? Previously you had to register and get a Google developer API key and what not, and they were fussy about where the Maps could be placed, and so forth.

But now, you can cut and paste hassle free anywhere you wish! So here’s my first Google Maps mash into my blog. Here’s my favorite hangout place: Panera Bread. Why? Because it has a flat-rate coffee charge, and free electricity and wifi!


View Larger Map

Aug

13

A smooth sea never made a skilled mariner

Filed Under failure, fear, google, quotes | Leave a Comment

A smooth sea never made a skilled mariner
–English Proverb

Eric Schmidt wasn’t selected to be CEO of Google because of his string of accomplishments, which he didn’t have. But he had fought and lost battles with many of Google’s potential matches. If anything, he was selected specifically because of his unique experience in failure; for the valuable lessons gained from those battles lost.

Jul

19

Password protect zip files

Filed Under google, uncategorized | Leave a Comment

I don’t know why I never thought of doing this before, but a great way to get around GMail rejecting your file attachments is to password protect your zip file. GMail is actually smart enough to peek into your zip files and check its contents — provided you don’t password protect it, which most people don’t. Now don’t get me wrong, but that’s a great thing for most people. However, it’s just downright annoying to me when it rejects a file that I know is safe.

I discovered this by accident. I was browsing through some malicious code samples for research, and needed to get the sample from one machine to the other. So I just emailed the sample to my GMail account. It’s not uncommon for security researchers to share malcode samples among each other by means of zipping up the code and then password protecting it.

So imagine my delight when I saw this:

Why yes, dear GMail, I’m glad you cannot scan the file for viruses. Because it _is_ a virus :)

Maybe Google will roll out a security-researcher’s edition of GMail? Nah. Probably not.

Apr

29

Why limit your own thinking?

Filed Under goal setting, google, innovation, passion, people i like, quotes, self improvement, startup, things to ponder about, things to remind myself | 1 Comment

Paul Buchheit brings up a very valid point about visionary super-achievers, that when it comes to possibilities–it’s not about belief but disbelief.

If you think about it, a vision is by definition, something that is a little farther ahead than the current state of things. It wouldn’t be a vision if it was already achieved, would it? By the same token, if a vision is too far fetched, would we label the person championing it as a psychopath who doesn’t understand reality?

I think the important lesson to be learned here is that when imagining the world of possibilities, as long as you ground yourself in reality, do not fear society disbelieving you. Let’s look at the opposite case: If everyone absolutely believes your vision in its entirety — wouldn’t that just really indicate that your vision isn’t really that visionary after all? At the very minimum, a vision would require a small leap of faith. Leap of faith equals risk, and we all know risk is proportional to reward.

Holding back when imagining the world of possibilities while in search for a solution to a problem is counter-productive, you’re just fighting this internal battle — and the only person that really loses is yourself. I have felt like that at times, and now when I notice myself running in such loops, I quickly disengage from such irrational fears.

In his presentation at Startup School 2007, Paul reminded us that when someone tells you, “That’s impossible” it should be translated as “According to my very limed experience and narrow understanding of reality, that’s very unlikely.” Everyone continuously builds a different set of experiences in their respective lives, and therefore everyone’s understanding of reality is fundamentally different.

Reality is larger than we can possibly comprehend. Are you certain of something? If so, is it possible that you aren’t seeing the big picture? Perhaps you would change your mind if your understanding were a little broader. Maybe invention is a simple matter of observing what has always existed, and change happens when you notice parts of your self that were there all along.

I met Paul last year at Stanford. Paul is Google employee #23, and among other things, creator of Gmail, and the “Don’t be evil” motto.

Maybe big ideas are only impractical for those who lack vision and imagination.

Oct

15

Discourage politics, use data

Filed Under google, product management, project management | Leave a Comment

BusinessWeek has this excellent article about how Google (more specifically Marissa Mayer) runs meetings. What stood out to me the most is #5: Discourage politics, use data

This idea can and should apply to meetings in organizations in which people feel as though the boss will give the green light to a design created by the person he or she likes the best, showing favoritism for the individual instead of the idea.

Mayer believes this mindset can demoralize employees, so she goes out of her way to make the approval process a science. Google chooses designs on a clearly defined set of metrics and how well they perform against those metrics. Designs are chosen based on merit and evidence, not personal relationships.

Mayer discourages using the phrase “I like” in design meetings, such as “I like the way the screen looks.” Instead, she encourages such comments as “The experimentation on the site shows that his design performed 10% better.” This works for Google, because it builds a culture driven by customer feedback data, not the internal politics that pervade so many of today’s corporations.

Well said. Too many times have I seen favouritism/politics trump true merit, inconvenient hard-facts that are just “shrugged” off (and left at that). Or just be given some lame excuse (so shoddy and shady that it wouldn’t stand fact-based scrutiny) of why the idea “wouldn’t fly”.

By definition, sheer hard work and determination won’t help since merit isn’t appreciated. The solution? Cut your losses and get the hell out.

May

16

Get a job for the right reason

Filed Under business, career, google, self improvement | Leave a Comment

There’s an awesome blog post here on Business Pundit by rob. It touches many important points about work and life (and business). The line between work life and personal life is a rather blurry one and I seriously doubt you can entirely separate both. You will probably spend most of your hours awake, working anyway. So rather than lie about it, just be honest and admit that ( work = life ) and ( life = work ).

Work sucks. It sucks because at its core it has become impure. Business used to be about providing value to the customer. Entrepreneurs captured a portion of that value creation as profit. The more value they created, the more profit they could make. But then along came Wall Street. Obsessed with quarterly profit increases and seeing them as disconnected from value creation, Wall Street encouraged businesses to think short-term. The things that led to value creation - things like innovation, continued learning, employee development, long-term focus - were replaced by pump-and-dump management styles. What can we do to hit the target next quarter regardless of the long term consequences? After all, we just want to pump this baby up and sell it off.

Google offers no guidance on its stock for investors. They definitely saw this coming. Some called Google arrogant. I say they’re in it for the long haul.

Once people gave up on the idea of greatness for business, work changed. Now most people are working out of necessity, not desire. Few companies provide good working environments, because employees have come to be viewed as expenses, not assets.

The irony of a job, is that although you get a job because you need money to obtain basic necessities, you should get a job because you absolutely love that job (you’re passionate and genuinely interested with what you do at work), and not because you just need to pay off your car loan, cell phone bills, etc.

A simple test is to ask if you view your job as a burden that you just need to get it over with (because of your bills) or do you look forward to Monday mornings to tackle that next milestone. I strongly believe that if you constantly strive to be better at what you are passionate about, the money will follow. (I know, that sounds similar to Google’s “build it first, figure out how to monetize later”, but I promise I didn’t copy).

Business is like a game, and like any other game, I hate to see people cheat. Nothing is more exciting than the ongoing battle for profit between two companies that are waging market wars using real tactics like innovation, productivity increases, better marketing, sounder strategy, solid business models, and flawless execution. It’s much more exciting than watching them win by lobbying the government for protection from competitors or pushing money around financial statements until it looks good.

It’s a shame that most businesses don’t compete the true capitalistic way. Even Google is guilty of that. The law provides too many ways for businesses to *cough* exploit *cough*, just to get ahead.

May

1

Gmail

Filed Under google, photos | 1 Comment

If you use Gmail, then you should probably meet Paul Buchheit, the person behind Gmail and Google employee #23.

I ran into Paul, while wandering the halls of Stanford.

Paul Buchheit

(I’m the one with the dorky name sticker on my coat and a laptop sling on my shoulder, incase you haven’t figured out)