Mindlab Rocks and Please Meetup with Customer Development

I went to see Christian Bason talk about his Public Sector Innovation unit called MindLab at UBC in the fall of 2011. He was amazing. His stories of radical change at the Danish Ministry of Taxation and a recent Health Care for Seniors experiment in Frederica, Denmark were very powerful.

I made the effort and read Christian Bason’s book. I really like the detail that he brings to activities required to truly execute on innovation. The key activity is what he calls “Co-Creation” which is “Solutions developed with people, not for them”. To do this one needs to “Find Your Inner Anthropologist” and become one with the citizen to solve their problems. I also like that he states that one can’t outsource the knowing of the problem (page 180), the owners need to get their hands dirty. He also does a great “HowTo” on design thinking in the real world.

I find it interesting that Bason didn’t talk about the The Lean Startup or Customer Development movements. These are so aligned with his thinking and yet they don’t know each other. They could learn a lot from each other.

The choice of words is so entertaining when comparing them to the words of Customer Development Guru Steve Blank who says that you’ve got “Get Out of the Building” because “There are no facts inside your building, so get outside and get some”. Steve Blank also states emphatically that “Startup Founders” do this work. It’s the most important thing a startup does “Searching for its Business Model”. They’re saying very similar things with very different words.

The best chapters are 9 Orchestrating Co-Creation and Chapter 10 Measuring to Learn. These are chapters that all people “Getting Out of Their Building” could use as reference material especially on tactics and strategies for interviewing citizens and customers. For example the detail on “Finding Your Inner Anthropologist” starting on page 161 is great stuff. Good stuff to use when “Getting Out of the Building”.

In these days of polished presentations it was refreshing to hear some support for my belief that early ideas are better presented on a napkin, or white board. Yes, I’m saying no power-point or designer material up front. It get’s in the way.

page 197 our experience at mindlab is that the rougher the draft is, the easier it is to engage citizens or other users in a dialogue about how the solution might look and function. If the mockup looks to polished, people will think it’s nearly finished and there isn’t much room for changing it anyway.

Near the end of the book Bason talks about the relationship between innovation and rules.
“Sometimes the best practice is breaking the rules.” (Page 252) is a great section of the book.

Finally I liked how Bason set the tone right from the get go on page 1

“In the name of doing things for people, traditional and hierarchical organizations end up doing things to people.”

And I’ll add “That’s why they suck”. This is no different in private or public sectors.

More

One of the things that would be a great addition to his book is a glossary of terms from the innovation universe. I liked and find useful

• Co-Creation (Page 8) – “Solutions developed with people, not for them”
• T-Shaped Individual (page 147 ) – “t shaped” vertical to deeply master a skill & horizontal to connect and collaborate
• Service Journey (page 146) – Track the journey of a citizen through the delivery of a service. ( this is similar to Steve Blank’s “Day in the Life of the Customer” and provides another way of looking at it )
• Ethnography – The skills of interviewing and becoming one with the citizen or customer.

Sexy iPhone Apps – Byword Text Editor

I find it ironic that my first iPhone app purchase was Byword. It’s a text editor. How un-sexy is that. In the old days I’d go to the stationary cabinet and get a new pen. Today it seems that I’m getting a new text editor.

My main motivation was to get away from iPhone Notes. I wanted to be able to edit text docs on iPhone and on my Mac. Byword does that very nicely via Dropbox, or iCloud. Byword also supports some very handy features: like “undo” and “arrow keys”.

The extra cool thing is that Byword supports Markdown. This means that I can easily format documents. In the end I also bought the Mac app too. But you don’t need to. MacVim supports Markdown syntax and there are lots of Markdown to html/rtf/pdf/Latex converters. Here is a Markdown Primer from TUAW if you’re interested.

Again I have to thank Rui over at Tao of Mac for his review of iPad/iPhone text editors.

Wow! TubeDAC Revitalizes My Stereo — Sounds Amazing

“OMG the TubeDAC 11 is absolutely amazing!”

In a nutshell the weak link in modern audio is the DAC ( Digital to Analog Conversion ). I knew this. It makes sense that a DAC miniaturized to fit into an iPod has to have some serious compromises, but I kept asking myself, “So what … How much difference does a good DAC really make?”. I found out the answer a few weeks ago visiting my friend Iain T. That answer is “A LOT”. Even with songs ripped at 128k, but the real payoff comes with Lossless.

The difference is so big that every person comments on it. On every song — irregardless of music style. From Miles Davis to Van Halen.

Purchasing Lossless Recordings and using them in iTunes

This then begs the question. Can you buy a Lossless recording? The answer is yes some independent labels are doing that. For example this past week Merge released the new M. Ward album A Wasteland Companion in lossless form (FLAC).

Getting FLAC into iTunes Lossless format takes some work. Here is a good “HowTo” set up the xld FLAC to ALAC software.

How Do You Connect the DAC?

I connected it via USB port from my computer and the Tube output is connected to the CD inputs on my old amplifier. ( You can use the auxillary or the CD player inputs. ) Here is the full setup diagram.
Note that one needs specialized equipment to by-pass the iPod DAC. After some searching I feel that the only real solution is to commit to playing music from a computer. This did hold me back, but once I heard it. I was convinced.

Bottom Line

If you like to listen. Just buy one. It is amazing. The only negative is that I’ve now got some re-ripping to do.

Reading – Inside Apple

A big “Thank You” to @alanchiu for providing me with a signed copy.

“Wow. It is amazing how little is known about the inner workings of Apple” –This was the overwhelming point that kept coming back to me while reading this book.

There is plenty on Steve Jobs & “bullying”. The review by Bob Sutton ( mr. no asshole rule ) spends a lot of time on this. Sutton points out that this information may be inspiring and supporting “bullying”. Sad.

It may be that Jobs “bullying” actions are being misinterpreted. This discussion of “bullying” makes me want speak on my experience with Buddhism and monks. The writings on “dealing with Steve” seem similar to dealing with a monk. Monks can be extremely hard on their students. It is very easy to “perceive” that a monk is being “mean”. But the reality is that monks have an immense amount of training in compassion in order to support this “hardness”. Thus I think that emulating Jobs “abrasiveness” without “training” will backfire. But emulating Jobs with training in “compassion” may be very effective. This may be a reason for the interpretation of Steve Jobs “bullying”. Just thinking out loud.

There are plenty of detailed reviews of the book. I particularly like Bob Sutton’s. He really digs in.

• http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2012/01/inside-apple-adam-lashinsky-revealing-and-well-crafted-book.html thx @alanchiu
• http://innovatorinside.com/2012/01/30/book-review-inside-apple/
• http://www.cultofmac.com/143093/inside-apple-will-challenge-your-view-of-the-worlds-most-valuable-tech-company-review/
• http://gigaom.com/apple/want-to-go-inside-apple-read-this-book/

Here are the points that I tagged while reading the book

• Page 60. “Strategy is figuring out what not to do” Steve Jobs
• Page 62. Winnowing ideas from 25 to 4 is horrifyingly scary.
  “The power of restraint probably gets instilled into you as much as anything else, the minimalist approach of not overreaching on deals, not overreaching with PR, not overreaching in your conversations, not overreaching on anything,” the executive said.

• Page 64. “Apple obsesses over the user experience, not revenue optimization”
• Page 67. DRI “Directly responsible individual”
• Page 70. You’re hired and appreciated for your ability on the field, not your ability has a coach or manager. Jonathan Ive, widely admired for his design ideas, is considered to have little grasp of finance.
• Page 79. In fact, there is a popular expression at Apple: everybody at apple wants out, and everybody outside Apple wants in.
• Page 88. We believe that we are on the face of the earth to make great products, and that’s not changing. More …
• Page 95. Wrt cook. “his ability to go forty thousand feet to nose-against-the-windshield is amazing”
• Page 100. More Cook. “you think, it’s highly likely this guy is telling the truth”
• Page 117 marketing. Best messaging is clear, concise, and repeated.
  
  … Where you get into trouble is is where you start to mix it up because you’re getting bored.

• Page 162. Apple doesn’t multi-task.
• Page 169 Avie Tevanian “When Steve is gone, the competition still will not have Steve Jobs”
• Page 170. Jobs reflects on big companies settling into their ways.
• Page 200. His (Jobs) uncanny insight into trends in business and technology weren’t a fluke. Jobs worked hard for his market intelligence.

More Startup & Entrepreneurship Reading Lists

Here is a new “HowTo Startup” reading list that Tom Eisenmann has developed for his “Launching Tech Ventures” class at Harvard. The good news is that it is very comprehensive, the bad news is that it is very comprehensive. It is huge.

The headings are as follows:

• Lean Startup Concepts
  
• Business Model Analysis

• Product Management
• Customer Conversion Funnel Analysis/Optimization
• B2B Selling
• Public Relations
• Business Development
• Recruiting/Organizational Issues
  

More Lists

• Steve Blank’s Blog has an enormous list Books For Startups
• My very short list – I’ve tried to keep mine to must reads.

Gratitude

Thanks to @alanchiu for the pointer.

Must Read, Walter Isaacson Follows Up With Management Lessons of Steve Jobs @HBR

Walter Isaacson has a great summary of the management lessons he believes Steve Jobs has provided us “The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs” Here are all the main headings. Enjoy.

• Focus
• Simplify
• Take Responsibility End to End
• When Behind, Leapfrog
• Put Products Before Profits
• Don’t Be a Slave To Focus Groups
• Bend Reality
• Impute — I still don’t really know what this awkward word means
• Push for Perfection
• Tolerate Only “A” Players
• Engage Face-to-Face
• Know Both the Big Picture and the Details
• Combine the Humanities with the Sciences
• Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

Compliments and More

A big “Thank You” to @aschmitt for pointing me to this great article. And at some point I need to post my review of Adam Lashinsky’s “Inside Apple”

On Being “Single-Threaded” — Apple, Jobs, & You

It’s interesting how many “single-tasking” writings I’ve come across in the past year. Here are three that will get you FOCUSSED. The most timely is the one on Steve Jobs, the most personally useful is from the Zen Habits blog, and it’s just interesting to find it on HBR.

1) Adam Lashinsky’s “Inside Apple”. On page 162 there is a description of Steve Jobs in Computer-Scientist lingo

“He ( Steve Jobs ) operates in a single threaded manner…”

Further down the page there is the phrase

“Generally speaking, Apple doesn’t multitask”

{ :aside: Thx to @alanchiu for sending me an author autographed copy of this book }

2) Leo Babauta ( Zen Habits Blog ) “Single-Tasking and Productivity” (or here ) This article is very useful. This blog has lots of great lifestyle/workstyle “HowTo” posts.

3) Tony Schwartz’s HBR Blog “The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time“

Got New Steve Blank Book Today :-)

I received the Startup Owner’s Manual today. I’ve been looking forward to this. Lot’s of reading to do I’m looking forward to using this instead of the older book.

Also Steve Blank has a great blog post today discussing the positioning of Customer Development and traditional entrepreneurship. It’s titled “Search vs Execute” I really like this quote:

we now know that a startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.

Lots to Read on the Web – @achiu, @martinertl, @ericries, and @vancouvergolf

Lotsa good reading in blog/twitter land this past week.

@achiu has two tweets this week that I really liked.

The first tweet links to an FT article discussing how entrepreneurship programs are becoming more important in MBA programs. Innovation and creativity move to the heart of the curriculum. I find this interesting because many people think that MBA programs are about entrepreneurship and are shocked that most MBA students don’t focus on entrepreneurship. I’m still waiting for the press to figure out that a new innovation at MBA schools is to have sales courses. Yes it’s true, very few business schools have sales courses. They always have some slippery words like its “embedded in our other courses”. If they do have sales courses it’s likely they’ve only been introduced in the last five years.

The second tweet is on work/life/balance. Good Dad, Good Entrepreneur, Good Husband. You’ve been here or will be soon. It’s real life.

@martinertl links to Ben Horowitz.

Thanks Martin!

I used to read Marc Andreesen’s pmarca blog with a passion and was sad to him slow his blogging. I’d never really looked at his business partner Ben Horowitz’s blog in the past. Horowitz is not a prolific blogger, but wow does he have some good stuff to say for technical founders. It also feels like he’s got a serious chip on his shoulder. Highly recommend the top posts.

@ericries — on Facebook’s Hacker Way

LeanStartUp guy Eric Ries has a great post The Hacker Way discussing Zuckerberg’s “Hacker Way”. Excellent stuff.

@vancouvergolf — Fraser Mulholland

How Fraser has any time to tweet at all is incomprehensible. His spirit is always contagious. Who else is keen enough to host golf in Mission,BC on Feb 7

Commenting on other “Blank vs Jobs” Comparisons

I’m one of many using Steve Blank’s Four Steps to the Epiphany when teaching entrepreneurship at MBA school. Jeffrey Bussgang has a great post on “Steve Blank vs Steve Jobs“.

The comments stream is like a FAQ of customer development. I like it. Adds stuff like

• Eric Ries view that “We’re not listening to customers, we’re experimenting on customers.”
• Customers can only comment about what they know … doesn’t help with new markets.

My only niggle is that I don’t believe it’s “Steve vs Steve”, I think it’s more like Steve on how to become Steve. An iterative style and learning from ones mistakes is a common theme in the Jobs book. For example at Pixar it wasn’t instant success. The sale of software failed, the sale of hardware failed, it was the third thing, animation solutions, that succeeded. I think that Blank’s “Customer Development Model” and Ries’ extension “the Lean Startup” provides a rigor, and focus on detail, that the Big Zen Steve would have liked. Essentially this is how you can learn to say “This is Shit”, build what the customer desires, and not what the customer asks for.

Tip to Christos ( @c_makiyama ) for tweeting this link