Lo que nos distingue como personas

Ken Robinson es un tipo que conocí hace tiempo viendo su charla TED sobre creatividad y educación – charla que vale mucho la pena.

Mirando la carpeta “Para ver” de Mis Documentos, encontré una charla de él: "Ken Robinson on Passion".

La charla está más bien centrada en El Elemento que en la pasión.

Este es un concepto que él desarrolló hace un tiempo en su libro, que básicamente describe lo que pasa cuando se encuentran la propia habilidad con el gusto por aplicarla.

Algo así como:

Soy bueno en lo que hago y además me encanta hacerlo. 

El tipo es muy entretenido hablando en general. En su ya muy difundida (pero muy buena) charla TED sobre la creatividad, como corre contra el reloj, hay mucho más contenido que en esta otra charla, pero de todas maneras vale la pena.

Richard Feynman, un tipo distinto

Hace unas semanas terminé de leer Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman - que me había recomendado @mminnoni hace tiempo -, que viene con varias anécdotas contadas por el mismo Richard Feynman.

Laboratorio Los Alamos. Feynman es el del medio.
A la izquierda está John von Neumann, un genio impresionante,
y del otro lado, Stan Ulam, un matemático descollante.

El libro es bueno en dar una visión bastante integral del personaje que era: un tipo muy inteligente - a pesar de que su IQ le había dado 125 -, muy curioso, hábil en el manejo de herramientas, y por sobre todo, un aprendedor nato.

Varias partes del libro son muy divertidas, pero me quedo con 2 cosas en particular: el nivel de entendimiento que este tipo conseguía sobre casi cualquier materia, y la importancia que tenía para él el hecho de ser profesor.

¿Cómo vas a medir tu vida?

Clayton Christensen es un tipo bastante conocido en Estados Unidos. Escribió el libro The Innovator's Dilemma, uno de los pocos libros que Steve Jobs incluye en su lista de libros seleccionados.
Hace casi 2 años escribió How Will You Measure Your Life, un artículo para Harvard Business Review.  El artículo está en inglés, pero está muy bien escrito.  Si se bancan el idioma, lean el original en vez de esto.

Lo leí hace 1 año aprox y me pareció increíble.  Lo que más me impactó fue encontrarme con la mirada trascendente en un tipo así de reconocido, profesor de Harvard, autor de libros grossos, etc.

Hoy me lo volví a encontrar, y por eso le hago este espacio.

En el artículo él cuenta cómo su misión como profesor del MBA es darle a sus alumnos elementos para que sepan distinguir cuáles son buenas teorías o estrategias de gestión y cómo ejecutarlas.

En la última clase aparece la magia: les pide que apliquen lo aprendido en su clase a sus propias vidas... que se hagan estas preguntas:

¿Cómo puedo asegurarme de que voy a ser feliz con mi carrera profesional? 

¿Cómo puedo estar seguro de que mi relación con mi familia van a ser una fuente constante de felicidad? 

¿Cómo puedo asegurarme de que no voy a terminar en la cárcel?

The Way I Work - Parte 3

Ultima tanda por ahora.
Tres personajes bastante distintos.
Van:

Paul English | Kayak.com

After that, I eat breakfast and then drive my son to school. He's 14, and my daughter is 17 -- she has her own car. Driving my son to school is really important to me. Sometimes, if I have a business trip, I'll drive him to school, fly to California for the day, and then take the redeye back so I can take him to school the next day. 

The engineers and I handle customer support. When I tell people that, they look at me like I'm smoking crack. They say, "Why would you pay an engineer $150,000 to answer phones when you could pay someone in Arizona $8 an hour?" If you make the engineers answer e-mails and phone calls from the customers, the second or third time they get the same question, they'll actually stop what they're doing and fix the code. Then we don't have those questions anymore. 

We have four monitors in the office where you can see real-time streaming information about the site -- how many visitors, how many click throughs. It also displays the last customer e-mail that came in and the photo of the employee who answered it. So you're walking by and you see, "Oh, Dan just answered a question." We developed our own customer support software. One of the things it does is randomly select an employee response to a customer and send that response out to the entire company and to all of our investors each day. It keeps us on our toes. 

I spend a lot of my time on recruiting. You could ask anyone in my office, "What are Paul's priorities?" and they'll say: "It's team, No. 1. Then customer, then profit." I really want to create the ultimate, most exciting dream team that's ever been created in software, and I focus on that every day. I love to ask people, "Who's the smartest person you ever met? The most creative person? The fastest?" Someone might say, "This guy I met in Ohio 10 years ago, but I think he moved overseas." I'll track him down. 

When I am hiring, I try to get people to accept the job before I tell them about salary or title. I promise to make that person dramatically more productive, and that working for Kayak will be the most fun job he's ever had. I need two things in return: a promise to strive to be the absolute best you can be. And that you will be an energy amplifier -- someone people are excited to work with. 

The only way 100 people can ever build a larger company than one that has more than 8,000 people -- that's what Expedia has -- is by hiring Olympic-quality, unbelievable all stars of technology. My favorite metric is revenue per employee.

Kathy Ireland | Kathy Ireland Worldwide

I usually wake up anytime between 4 and 6:30 a.m. My first meeting of the day is with God. I have my prayer time, my reading time. Sometimes I'll go in the other room if my husband is still sleeping. I like to start out my day with the Lord, basically. It really sets my day off in a good place, so I can be more patient with people and better handle whatever comes up.

Caterina Fake | Hunch

My schedule is completely random. I work on whatever instinctively feels like the right thing at that moment. I don't do things at set times unless I'm trying to coordinate with someone. But I'm one of the most productive people I know. When you work on stuff you want to work on, when you have the energy to work on it, productivity becomes kind of effortless. 

For me, a productive day is when my colleagues and I have built something or sketched something or created a prototype. We've thrown down ideas for what could be a successful product. Even if we've just walked it through as a thought experiment, that's very gratifying. There's too much emphasis on productivity in the factory, Ford-assembly-line sense of cranking something out and not enough emphasis on having ideas. 

I think it's a sickness in business to always try to do more things in less time. I try to spend more time. People read all this information and think they've accomplished something, but what have they really taken in? 

Sometimes I feel like checking off all the little things. Mail this letter. Respond to this e-mail. Sometimes I want to figure out the entire strategy for 2010. 

Interaction should be constant, not crammed into meetings once a week. You just turn around in your chair and bounce an idea off one of the other 10 people in your office. Keep the floor plan open so people can talk to each other. 

At Hunch, we don't have meetings unless absolutely necessary. When I used to have meetings, though, this is how I would do it: There would be an agenda distributed before the meeting. Everybody would stand. At the beginning of the meeting, everyone would drink 16 ounces of water. We would discuss everything on the agenda, make all the decisions that needed to be made, and the meeting would be over when the first person had to go to the bathroom.

The Way I Work - Parte 2

Va la segunda parte con 4 personajes más.
Buena selección de textos, algunos relacionados con el laburo de Producto, pero otros más filosóficos:

Jason Fried | 37Signals

I don't use an alarm clock. Lately, I've been naturally waking up at 6:38 every morning. I used to wake up at 7:31 every morning, which is actually when I was born. So that was kind of creepy.  

I try not to grab my phone and check e-mails first thing. I used to do that, and it's just not good for you. 

I have no idea how many hours my employees work -- I just know they get the work done. 

I spend most of my day writing. I write everything on our website. Communicating clearly is my top priority. Web writing is terrible, and corporate sites are the worst. You don't know what they do, who they are, or what they stand for. I spend a lot of time taking a sentence and reworking it until it's perfect. I love the editing process. 

I spend another good portion of my day thinking about how to make things less complicated. In the software world, the first, second, and third versions of any product are really pretty good, because everyone can use them. Then companies start adding more and more stuff to keep their existing customers happy. But you end up dying with your customer base, because the software is too complicated for a newcomer. We keep our products simple. I'd rather have people grow out of our products, as long as more people are growing into them. 

I used to handle all the customer service e-mails, but now we have two people dedicated to that. 

That's our philosophy: Build what we like, and other people will like it, too. 

Twitter has become an outlet for anger, because the short format is perfect for negativity. It can hurt sometimes. You have to grow some thick skin. 

We don't have big, long-term plans, because they're scary -- and they're usually wrong. Making massive decisions keeps people up at night -- I don't like to make those. The closer you can get to understanding what that next moment might be, the less worried you are. Most of the decisions we make are in the moment, on the fly, as we go. 

I have a garden, and I like to go out back and just look at my plants. I might weed or prune. I like to get my hands a little dirty after being in front of my computer all day. 

I bought a stone farmhouse built in the 1850s. It's in rural Wisconsin. The closest neighbor is half a mile away. I spend almost every weekend out there. I love it. I just bought a tractor. I am really excited about mowing fields. Next year, I want to plant an acre of corn. Or an acre of something, just to see if I can do it.

David Karp | Tumblr

I try hard not to check e-mails until I get to the office, which is usually between 9:30 and 10 a.m. Reading e-mails at home never feels good or productive. 

We roll out changes to the site every day at 11 a.m. We stagger out small changes, so we can see what works and what doesn't. We chose that time because we want engineers around if there's an issue. Plus, it's early enough that there's not much traffic. Basically, everything that was finished the day before gets pushed the next morning. It could be a bug fix or a new language file—say, a feature that was translated into French. Or it could be a new feature that's dark launched—the public can't see it, but we have the ability to test it. 

For every new feature we add, we take an old one out. A lot of big sites don't do that, and it's a problem. Twitter started as a beautifully simple product, but it's now going the same route as Facebook. The drive to innovate can overencumber and destroy a product. My goal is to keep Tumblr very focused. 

Sleep is precious to me. I'm very disappointed if I don't go to bed before midnight. We have a rule: no laptops in the bedroom. Being on computers all the time makes me feel gross.

David Sacks | Yammer

I try to leave a lot of my time unstructured so that I can drill into whatever I think is most important that day. 

I'm in a perpetual state of frustration over the product. I want it to be perfect, and it's not. At least we can always make changes and progress toward that goal. 

We do something called Yammer Time once a month. The whole company meets in the common area on the third floor. It lasts about an hour. Different department heads give presentations, or I talk about strategy. We also take questions from the crowd. People are usually interested in where the company is headed or what our competitors are doing. We also answer anonymous questions that come in via a third-party website. Those are often about money. We've had a few negative Nellies, but I don't mind criticisms. I believe dissent leads to consensus. I don't want to have a company where employees are afraid to say what they think. This meeting gets everyone on the same page and lets me address things that I didn't even know needed to be addressed. 

Disconnecting is very hard for me. I think about work constantly. I wish I had an On/Off switch. My wife is good at bringing it to my attention. 

Marc Lore | Diapers.com

We have a 24/7 operation, and we empower the reps completely to take care of the mom at whatever cost. Really, the fewer rules, the better. The concept is just if Mom calls and there's an issue, do whatever is necessary to make her happy and really wow her. (We got into the habit of referring to all of our customers as "Mom.") 

Still, I think there's a time to be analytical and there's a time to make decisions based on things that can't necessarily be analyzed. How do you analyze the impact of hand-delivering a car seat to a customer who needs it? How do you assess the negative impact to the business of a mom coming to the site and finding the product she wants out of stock? Selection, price, customer service, speed of delivery, in-stock rates, ease of shopping -- when it comes to any of those areas, I put analytics aside and work backward. I say, "Let's work with the most perfect thing we can do, the best possible consumer experience, and then now, analytically, let's try to figure out how to do that as efficiently as possible."

The Way I Work - Parte 1

En el sitio de la revista Inc. hay una sección titulada "The Way I Work" en la que algunos personajes del mundo de la tecnología cuentan cómo laburan, su rutina diaria, etc.

Va una primer recopilacion de estos que leí:


Matt Mullenweg | Fundador de WordPress

In the morning, I have certain aspirations. One of my goals is to avoid looking at the computer or checking e-mail for at least an hour after I wake up. I also try to avoid alarm clocks as much as possible, because it's just nice to wake up without one... I also avoid morning meetings: The earliest meeting I'll do is 11 a.m. 

When you're coding, you really have to be in the zone. I'll listen to a single song, over and over on repeat, like a hundred times. And I turn off instant message and e-mail. If you are taken out of the flow, if that little toaster pops up that says you've got mail -- and you look at it, you've lost it. You're juggling variables and functions and layouts. The moment you look away, it all falls to the ground, and you spend 10 minutes getting it all back in the air again. 

My management strategy is to find extremely self-motivated and talented people and then let them go. There's no manager looking over your shoulder every day, so you need to be able to completely direct yourself. 

If I'm not blogging for myself, it's not worth it. So I don't post once a day, only when it feels natural. 

Some people don't need sleep. I actually do need sleep. I just sleep all the time. I'll catch naps in the afternoon, or I'll take a 20-minute snooze in the office -- just all the time.

Bob Parsons | Fundador de GoDaddy.com

I'm happiest at sunrise, when it's just me and the birds. 

I manage everything from the 57-inch monitor that hangs from the ceiling in my office, which I can access with a wireless keyboard and mouse. I have it set to Go Daddy's home page, and there's a program we created that tracks our current market share and how many domain names we register each day. We register about one every second. The names show up on that screen in real time, like a ticker tape. It's always on, so I can refer to it throughout the day. I can tell at a glance what's going right or wrong. 

 The hardest time of day for me is at the end of the day, because I hate to see it end. I hate to shut down. And it's hard to shut down, too -- in part, because I am always thinking of ways to improve the business. If you're not getting better, you're getting worse.