Kelly Johnson In Skunk Works
I still have 80 pages to go on Skunk Works, but this book has been one of the best I’ve ever read.
The story revolves around an elite group within Lockheed Martin called Skunk Works, who worked on top secret projects and engineered some of the most famous aircraft in the history of aviation. The book was authored by Ben Rich, Skunk Works second director, and central to the story was Clarence ‘Kelly’ Johnson, the founder of Skunk Works who was a genius on both technical and management fronts.
There were many gems scattered throughout the pages, but my personal favourites were these words of wisdom during conversations between Kelly Johnson and Ben Rich.
The first one was when Ben told Kelly about his plan to attend a 13-week advance program at Harvard Business School, which was only available to 150 carefully selected executives. Kelly wrote Ben a glowing recommendation, but still insisted that it would be a complete waste of Ben’s time.
I’ll teach you all you need to know about running a company in one afternoon, and we’ll both go home early to boot. You don’t need Harvard to teach you that it’s more important to listen than to talk. You can get straight As from all your Harvard profs, but you’ll never make the grade unless you’re decisive: even a timely wrong decision is better than no decision. The final thing you need to know is don’t half-heartedly wound problems – kill them dead. That’s all there is to it. Now you can run this goddamn place. Now, go home and pour yourself a drink.
After Ben completed the program and returned to Skunk Works, Kelly asked him for his appraisal of the Harvard Business School. Ben wrote the equation: 2/3 of HBS = BS .
The second one was when Ben revealed that he had been approached by Northrop, a rival company, and was offered a significant salary raise along with the opportunity to build a Skunk Works-style group within Northrop. Here’s part of Kelly’s response…
Hell, in the main plant they give raises on the basis of the more people being supervised; I give raises to the guy who supervises least. That means he’s doing more and taking more responsibility. But most executives don’t think like that at all. Northrop’s senior guys are no different from all of the rest in this busines: they’re all empire builders, because that’s how they’ve been trained and conditioned. Those guys are all experts at covering their asses by taking votes on what to do next. They will never sit still for a secret operation that cuts them out entirely. Control is the name of the game, and if a Skunk Works really operates right, control is exactly what they won’t get.
And the most inspiring of them all was Kelly’s can-do attitude which he used to improve the people around him. Here’s what he said after Ben told him that there was no practical application to liquid hydrogen because it was so dangerous to store and handle, based on Mark’s Mechanical Engineering Handbook, the engineer’s bible…
Goddam it, Rich, I don’t care what in hell that book says what you happen to think. Liquid hydrogen is the same as steam. What is steam? Condensed water. Hydrogen plus oxygen produces water. That’s all that liquid hydrogen really is. Now, get out there and do the job for me.
A must read, even if you’re not an engineer, even if you’re not running a company, specially if you like pushing the limit of what’s possible in whatever field you’re doing.
Watching TV Needs To Be A More Social Experience
Disclaimer: the title is just a disguise for feature request/suggestion to the fine folks at Apps Perhaps. But I do really think that watching TV should be more social over the web, and Apps Perhaps’ OzTV iPhone app hopefully has the opportunity to turn this into reality.
Four hours ago I started watching the gran finale of Iron Chef series run on SBS, Hiroyuki Sakai vs Alain Passard (it was awesome!), and the first thing I did after the show finished an hour later was to search for “Iron Chef” on Twitter, I wanted to find out other people’s comments regarding the episode. Sure I found many related tweets, but the search result was polluted by some other tweets about Iron Chef in general and had nothing to do with that particular episode.
That led me to think, wouldn’t it be nice if OzTV app is able to filter those tweets? What about knowing how many people are planning to watch the show before it airs? And to push it further into the realtime realm, how about finding out who else is watching a show when it airs? Think location check-in a la Facebook Places and Foursquare, but this one is for TV shows, click the “I’m watching Iron Chef” button and have a conversation with other Iron Chef fans using Twitter via OzTV app (purely just my imagination at this stage).
I first realised that us Australians do like to tweet about popular TV shows when Masterchef became a global Twitter trend for the first time. That’s when I started thinking that watching a TV show is actually (A) a gathering of people (B) with a common interest (C) at distributed locations. There got to be a way to turn those tweets (and any other form of online conversations about a TV show) into valuable statistics. What’s the most popular TV show today? this week? this month? Which TV show has the most number of people planning to watch it? or commenting about it when it airs? or liking it when the show is finished?
Having those statistics allows us to reveal more interesting information than the existing one dimensional TV rating system in Australia. Social sites like Twitter enables parts of the data, OzTV app is in a good position to enable the aggregation of those data along with their own data, and turn them into valuable statistics.
To add some substance, here are some ideas on how each feature might be implemented:
- Conversation / filtering tweets about a TV show: generate a hashtag derived from the name of the show plus a prefix, e.g. #ozironchef, or identify the tweets mentioning the name of the show with geolocation of the place where the show airs at the time.
- How many people are planning to watch a TV show: count the number of OzTV reminders against the show, or add an “I want to watch this” button.
- How many people are watching a TV show: have an “I’m watching this” button, or count the number of people tweeting about the show when it airs.
- Most popular TV shows: count the number of likes, conversations, etc, against the shows, rank them over periods of time. Perhaps TV channels would be interested to have their shows featured on OzTV app a la promoted tweets.
Pushing my luck, and this depends on the quality of the data that OzTV app has, it would also be cool if the TV show page on OzTV app also lists the Facebook pages and Twitter accounts of the people involved with the show. E.g. Masterchef page displays the Twitter account of the show hosts and contestants.
Watching TV needs to be a more social experience. The question is whether applications like OzTV app will morph from a content provider into a community of Facebook and Twitter users? I understand that, at the end of the day, it all depends on whether the users will use those theoretical features on OzTV app or not, and whether those users will get some benefit out of using those features. But if we look back at the number of people tweeting about Masterchef combined with the popularity of OzTV app, a social OzTV might just work.
Do one thing and do it well. Taking my thinking hat off, I can understand that OzTV app might want to fully concentrate on being the best TV guide it can be. Instead of worrying about the social aspect of watching TV, there are still so many other things it can do, many platforms to expand to, like iPad, Android, Windows Phone, etc. Let’s see how many years, if ever, social TV can become a reality.
Any chance of getting a VC funding, hiring more people, and making social TV happen sooner?
Update (09/07/2011): Twelevision has solved the conversation part of social TV.
Crank That Beijing
I know it’s old, but it has to be done in Beijing.
On The Great Wall of China.
In front of National Stadium.
In front of National Aquatics Center.
And on the security monitor at the Huixinxijie Nankou station.
I hope that guy staring at me wasn’t the Chinese Secret Service.
For reference, check out the HOWTO, Dwight Howard style, MIT style, Filipino Prison style, more stuffs on YouTube.
Etc: 37signals books business quotes rework
by Cliffano Subagio
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Quotes From 37signals Rework
Pictured above is my copy of Rework. The photo was taken by Latte Girl at the State Library of Victoria.
If there’s ever going to be anyone changing the way we work and the way we run a business, then I’ll bet my money on the 37signals guys. This is one book I’d suggest everyone to read (unless you’re filthy rich and never have to work). I see Rework as the agile movement for the broader working industry. There are so many practices that are just brain-dead-absolute-must pick ups. The challenge out of this will be on the natural fact that people are uncomfortable with change, even when the change is for the better.
I finished reading Rework several months ago, and as usual, I kept a list of my favourite lines from the book. 37signals (via Jason Fried) kindly gave me permission to share those lines on my blog, so here they are:
Cover – What you need to do is stop talking and start working.
Ignore the real world
p14 – The real world isn’t a place, it’s an excuse. It’s a justification for not trying. It has nothing to do with you.
Failure is not a rite of passage
p17 – Success is the experience that actually counts.
Work work work work work
p25 – They (the workaholics) try to make up for intellectual laziness with brute force. This results in inelegant solutions.
Be a starter
p28 – You just need an idea, a touch of confidence, and a push to get started.
Make a dent in the universe
p31 – Don’t sit around and wait for someone else to make the change you want to see.
Scratch of your own itch
p34 – The easiest, most straightforward way to create a great product or service is to make something you want to use.
Start
p38 – The most important thing is to begin.
p38 – The real question is how well you execute.
Not an excuse!
p40 – The truth is most people just don’t want it bad enough.
Startup
p57 – Actual businesses worry about profit from day one.
You need a commitment strategy not an exit strategy
p59 – You should be thinking about how to make your project grow and succeed, not how you’re going to jump ship.
Less is a good thing
p68 – So before you sing the “not enough” blues, see how far you can get with what you have.
Basics
p74 – Nail the basics first and worry about the specifics later.
p75 – Details just don’t buy you anything in the early stages.
Decisions are progress
p77 – Commit to making decisions. Don’t wait for the perfect solution. Decide and move forward.
p78 – Don’t make things worse by overanalysing and delaying before you even get going.
Get it out there
p93-94 – So we used the time before launch to solve more urgent problems that actually mattered on day one. Day 30 could wait.
p94 – … the best way to get there is through iterations. Stop imagining what’s going to work. Find out for real.
Pour yourself into your product
p139 – Pour yourself into your product and everything around your product too: how you sell it, how you support it, how you explain it, and how you deliver it. Competitors can never copy the you in your product.
Focus on you instead of they
p149 – It’s not a win-or-lose battle. Their profits and costs are their. Yours are yours.
Let your customers outgrow you
p157 – Scaring away new customers is worse than losing old customers.
Don’t out-spend, out-teach
p173 – Buying people’s attention with a magazine or online banner ad is one thing. Earning their loyalty by teaching them forms a whole different connection. They’ll trust you more. They’ll respect you more.
Fake fake fake
p183 – It’s OK if it’s not perfect. You might not seem as professional, but you will seem a lot more genuine.
Everything is marketing
p193 – Accounting is a department. Marketing isn’t. Marketing is something everyone in your company is doing 24/7/365.
Pass on great people
p206 – Great has nothing to do with it. If you don’t need someone, you don’t need someone.
What does 5 years experience mean anyway?
p213 – How long someone’s been doing it is overrated. What matters is how well they’ve been doing it.
Hire managers of 1
p220 – Managers of one are people who come up with their own goals and execute them. … How can you spot these people? … They’ve run something on their own or launched some kind of project.
Hire the better writer
p222 – Writing is today’s currency for good ideas.
Everyone on the front lines
p242 – It’s feeling the hurt that really motivates people to fix the problem. And the flip side is true too: The joy of happy customers or ones who have had a problem solved can also be wildly motivating.
Culture is the by-product of consistent behaviour
p249 – You can’t install a culture. Like a fine scotch, you’ve got to give it time to develop.
Decisions are temporary
p251 – Optimize for now and worry about the future later.
Build a rockstar environment
p253 – Cut the crap and you’ll find that people are waiting to do great work.
Send people home at five
p 258 – You want busy people. People who have a life outside of work. People who care about more than one thing. You shouldn’t expect the job to be someone’s entire life – at least not if you want to keep them around for a long time.
Inspiration expires now
p271 – Inspiration is a magical thing, a productivity multiplier, a motivator. But it won’t wait for you.
As I read through the book, I couldn’t stop relating each chapter with my own experience working in the industry for the past 9 years. And here’s hoping the next 9 years will be more rework-able.
Etc: google marketing mobile marketing watch mobile phone qr code tech crunch
by Cliffano Subagio
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My Take On People’s Takes On Google’s QR Code Push
So Google made a big push for QR Code usage in the US by sending window decals containing QR Code links to their top 100,000 business listings (via Favorite Places). This effort was covered by TechCrunch (TC) and Mobile Marketing Watch (MMW) among many other tech blogs / news sites out there. For the most part of the articles, they were only a rehash of Google’s original blog post, while the rest contained some original opinions from the authors, and this, along with some short sighted comments, was the part that bugged me.
Let’s start with a paragraph from TC article
Local businesses can also set up coupon offers through their Google directory page, which would turn the QR code into a mobile coupon, and help entice someone standing outside a store to come in: “If you found us on Google, you get 20% off.”
MMW not only copied exactly the same paragraph, but also added
This is where the true benefit lies.
And my take is… Coupon only benefits if you want to attract potential customers not standing outside a store, e.g. if you do a Google search and you find the Google directory page along with a coupon from the said business. On the other hand, if you do want to attract someone nearby your store, surely a large 20% discount or a SALE sign will do a better job than a garble of black and white dots inside a square.
I think the true benefits of having those QR Codes placed on the door of your restaurant/store are
- To convince the potential customers to use your business by exposing them to positive reviews and ratings.
This is why Google only sent the window decals to their top listings, businesses having negative reviews might not be so keen. - To increase the possibility of those (potential) customers revisiting your business by providing them with the address, map, and contact details.
This replaces the traditional role of business cards.
Both points are nothing new, they already exist all along with print media (brochures, business cards) and human interaction (conversation, words of mouth). Brochures and business cards will eventually run out and there’s a limit to the number of people you can reach by talking directly to the person. So you move those content online, in this case as a Google business listing. And what is the easiest way to link you and those online content? QR Code! QR Code is the simplest mechanism to retrieve those content (point and click) and to keep the content with you (as a url bookmark on your mobile phone).
And next up is a question asked by MMW that’s already answered by the two points above.
… which begs the questions why would someone need the information if they’re already standing in front of the business?
The same reason why businesses often place their brochures containing those information (including address and contact details), right in front of the store itself? To attract passers by, to get them to enter their store.
Moving on to another point from MMW
Still, I think the learning curve associated with QR-codes and the device limitations will hinder the campaign from the beginning.
While I agree with the device limitations argument (considering we’re talking about the US here, and not Japan), I don’t think learning curve would be an issue. When I visited Japan, where QR Codes were everywhere, I saw elderly people scanning those codes with their phone just fine. If pointing and clicking using a mobile phone camera became a hindrance, then I seriously question the future of humanity.
Another point from MMW
iPhones and Android-based phones are the only devices capable of easily obtaining a QR-code reader support.
The definition of ‘easily’ is arguable, but here’s an extensive list of mobile phones with QR Code reader support.
And the last point from MMW
Google better provide extensive and informative call-to-actions with their decals to get people interested and informed about how it all works.
I think the demo video from Google is informative enough. I don’t think Google should emphasize on getting people interested. What’s better for Google to do is to make it easy for people to use this piece of technology. If it’s useful and easy to use, then people will eventually be interested.
Google needs to improve the availability of QR Code reader on more devices, just like what they’ve done with Barcode Scanner and zxing project. Perhaps Google should acquire QuickMark and release the iPhone app for free. I’m not sure whether people will be happy to pay $1.99 just to do something with those decals (considering Google suggested QuickMark app, and assuming the free readers weren’t that good). The Google-sponsored 40,000 downloads is definitely a nice start on their behalf.
Now, moving on to the comments on the TC article…
lewis shepherd said
Google proving it is a “fast follower,” copying Microsoft yet again. http://www.microsoft.com/tag . Not only following the technology,…
and Tim Acheson said
Microsoft had already launched their own barcode solution, Microsoft Tag
and LS sarcastically said
Microsoft once again copying Google’s barcode solution.
<sarcasm>I love it when people disregard the fact that QR Code was created by Denso-Wave in 1994 and it has been a royalty-free technology. These people tend to think that innovation only comes out of either Google, Microsoft, or Apple.</sarcasm>
One of the few comments that I like was from Research who said
Guys did you hear something about geotagging? Why do you need a sticker if you just can be next to the store pull your mobile phone and start the app which shows you whatever info you want to know about the area?
My respond to this is that ‘the sticker’ is useful as an indicator that the store has an online presence on Google directory page and that the store is a place worth checking. Imagine having a day trip and there are 15 stores that you find interesting, are you going to pull your phone each time and hope that the place you’re standing in front of has been geotagged or is listed on Google / other sites?
<tongue-in-cheek>Geotagging will make these window decals (not QR Code itself) obsolete when Apple offers iHuman app implant that connects your offline physical world to online data.</tongue-in-cheek>
Back to the comments… there were also quite a number of people talking about how Google has become too big, a monopoly, and I quote,
It’s one huge shark swallowing it all up.
I think despite how Google is becoming more and more evil, like Microsoft was back in the 90s, I’m glad that they keep pushing technologies that simplify life. And if they make tons of money out of the whole process, they do deserve it.