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As a pretty prolific reader, I always wonder what other people read?  I usually ask my friends what they read and this guides me to expand my horizons.   Another question that always comes to me when trying to find my next read is “What do really sucessful people read?”   What is it that people who’s billable hour wage is  a lot higher than mine read?

The answer to this popped up when I was following a random link from one of my blogs I normally read.  I can’t remember which tangent I was off on,  but I sent the link to myself so I would make sure to put it up here on the blog.

US News and World Report has a Special Report on The Best Business Books.   The articles lists the books that the likes of people like Chris Anderson, Carly Fiorina, Mark Cuban, Hector Ruiz, Thomas Donaldson,  etc.  ( I guess if you have your own wikipedia.org page you have made it)

By the way Chris Anderson has a great book I just finished entitled  “The Long Tail” that I highly recommend.

Guy Kawasaki has a great interview with Jeffrey Pfeffer (Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University) related to his book What Were They Thinking?: Unconventional Wisdom About Management. What really struck me as interesting was how true some of sentiments rang with me. I few Questions and Answers that really hit home are quoted below.

Question: What can companies do to get smarter?
Answer: Companies learn just like people learn—by trying new things and seeing what happens. That requires, first, a tolerance for failure, since by definition, learning means doing things you aren’t very good at.Second, it requires structured self-reflection—after-action or after-event reviews so that instead of having one year of experience repeated 20 times, people and companies actually accumulate learning over time.”

Question: What are the characteristics of a good work week and vacation policy?
Answer: We live in a world where ideas and innovation are paramount. But people can’t be creative if they are exhausted. And when people work when they are tired, they make mistakes. If we have learned anything from the quality movement, it is that the cost of finding and fixing mistakes is greater than the cost of preventing them. So, give people time off. And, by the way, the younger generations want a life as well as work. Work-life balance is a great way to attract—and retain—great people.

Question: What are the characteristics of a good incentive plan?
Answer: Incentives should be large enough to provide an occasion for celebrating success but not so large as to distort behavior. And incentives can include recognition and things other than money. Companies get themselves into trouble all the time by being too clever with their incentives.
Stock options did reward leaders for getting the price of the stock up—it’s just that it was often for a short period, and was accomplished by distorting earnings. Be careful what you pay for—you might just get it.

Question: What role should budgets play in the management of an organization?
Answer: Budgets should be general guidelines. As hard and fast rules, they become subject to “gaming.” People delay doing sensible things, push expenses around, hide sales, etc. And also, budgets often just reward the best forecasters and negotiators. It is possible to make “budget” as you lose market share and go broke, as long as the targets are set low enough.

Think about your organization and how these questions and opinions line up with what your company does or does not do? How would some of this advise go over at your company? Is it unconventional or down-right heresy? Have some of the effects mentioned by actions in these questions come true at your organization?

Here a a couple of interesting links.

1. Scientists at NIST show DNA wrapped SWCNT of 200nm or less enter ex-vitro lung cells where longer ones don’t.  Not sure if this is like saying 200nm DNA stands enter lung cells, while longer DNA stands don’t?  Another confusion in the the debate on the safety of “nanomaterials”.  How does your company deal with  EHS and nanotubes?
2. I had a long drive this past weekend and was listening up on Phil McKinney’s Killer Innovations Podcasts from 2006.  This one on “Listening Skills and Rules of Future Forecasting”  was one that I enjoyed.
3. Ditto on the Podcast  “Observation Skills and Contradictions”  deals with a quick exercise for improving observation and the most concise and true-ringing explanation of TRIZ I have seen anywhere.
4. So how do you really test how building behave in an earthquake?  You build one on top of a giant shaker table and deck it out with sensors.  Pretty Amazing.
5. Inkblot Earth has a post about The first person killed by a robot.   Not the science fiction of Asimov, but  interesting.
6. Endless Innovation has a post from Design Sojourn about 7 ways to unleash your creativity  originally from IDEO.   (three level link action).  Those IDEO guys are great,  I got to meet a few through work.
7. Again with IDEO,  The 10 Faces of Innovation changed my outlook on how people work and what drives them.

Hugh MacLeod from GapingVoid fame has a whole series of articles on “How to be creative.”  You really should check them out if you haven’t read them  before.  Although the Hugh was approaching this from a artist point of view, there is some universality to  some of these comments that each person can adapt as needed.   One that happened to strike a cord with me today was:

“6. Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.

Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with books on algebra etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the creative bug is just a wee voice telling you, “I’d like my crayons back, please.”……..”

This really is very qutie striking. The engineer and scientist in me likes the order and rules that we build up to explain the world, control our environment, and make the future.   We  didn’t start out with models, or rules,  or equations, we had to be trained.  All of us started out as uncontrolled little minds that didn’t know or care for the rules.   We dripped of “outside the box” thinking and creativity, but over time had to learn the proper way of things.

S o what does this have to do with you or your career or innovation?   Well a couple of things.   One is the importance of stepping out of your training and experience to imagine what might be possible if you ignored the rules temporarily.   What opportunities do you miss because you use the current paradigm that everyone accepts?  Have you ever had a situation where an answer was simple and elegeant, yet it was counter-intuitive to the “right way”?    What happens when you remove the lens through which you view reality and replace it with someone else’s?

Second is to leverage those fresh perspectives when you have a chance to come across them.  One great example of this is the finding yourself in a situation where you have a fresh employee to your company or a fresh new team member?   Take this blessing and use it.   Give them enough information to see the problem and then step away.  Let them identify the problem details and come up with those solutions that you would never think of due to your “training”.

After reading the article do any of you have a favorite.  “guest author” spot up for grabs.  Just shoot me and email.

Guy Kawasaki has a great Post on his website about the book Founders at Work. I’m gonna have to go buy the book now. If you look at the first three sentences on Amazon you get a quick idea of the book contents:

“Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? “

So Guy puts up some of his favorite passages. My favorite one from Guy’s list is:

James Hong (Hot or Not) on his first beta site. “My dad was the first person that ever saw Hot or Not besides Jim and me, and he got addicted to it! Here’s my dad, a 60-year-old retired Chinese guy who, as my father, is supposed to be asexual, and he’s saying, ‘She’s hot. This one’s not hot at all.’”

The first part of the post was also about how Guy draws inspiration from books like this, notice the picture of all his bookmarks. (I am glad to see that others do that with postits)

It is also amazing that some of these people are houshold names now, but at that stage they were just guys with an idea and the passion to make it happen.