Going to Harvard means I have the very unique opportunity to be around a lot of smart people. Now, when I say “smart people,” I don’t mean that guy who always wins trivia night. I mean, blazingly intelligent individuals who are regarded as the pre-eminent scholars in their field. It’s pretty amazing to pass by Turing Award winners and leading political science scholars grabbing a sandwich.

Before I go anywhere, let me make one thing clear: I am not one of these smart people. This is perhaps the biggest lesson I’ve learned after 3 years here. There is an absolutely incredible number of smart people in the world, and I can name a whole bunch of students and professors alike who I know for a fact I will never ever ever be as smart as, no matter how hard I try. But honestly, that’s okay—-I don’t need to be (and perhaps that’s a story for another day). What that does mean, though, is that I would be doing a disservice to the ever-so-generous Financial Aid Office if I didn’t learn from them. I don’t mean learning in a lecture hall, but I refer to a more personal sense of learning. What is it that separates a “smart” person from me? How do they conduct themselves? What drives them?

I can of course make no authoritative claims here, but I have noticed one overarching theme among smart people: they ask questions. When someone explains something new to me, I’ll usually just nod my head like I know what they’re talking about. If I don’t understand something, I’ll just Google it later. After all, I don’t want this person to think I’m a moron. Smart people are different. If they don’t understand something, or even if they think they understand something, they’ll ask questions. I distinctly remember, as an immature and perhaps arrogant freshman, a guest lecture in one of my classes. After explaining what I thought was a straightforward concept, the guest lecturer asked if anyone had any questions. Looking around the room, every student simply nodded, indicating everything was clear. A question, however, came from a tenured professor who had undoubtedly been exposed to the material before. At the time, I thought nothing of it, and perhaps even thought that I was smarter than the professor because I understood a concept he/she didn’t. Now, I am confident that this professor did not ask the question just to make the guest lecturer feel better, to start a discussion, or anything else. The intonation of the question and the intensity with which the professor listened to the response definitively suggested that the professor’s question was genuine, and that the answer was of great importance.

Based on the research and findings of so many of the students and professors here, it’s clear that this trend is no accident. Not only do smart people ask questions when they don’t understand something, but they also ask questions when the world thinks it understands something. Smart people challenge the very limit of human understanding, and push the envelope of what’s possible farther than many people would argue it’s meant to be pushed. Smart people don’t take claims at face value, and smart people don’t rest until they find an explanation they’re comfortable accepting and understanding.

Smart people challenge everything. (You know who taught me that? A smart person.)

Maybe someday, people will call me a smart person. For now, I’m going to keep asking them questions.

The only three true job interview questions are:

1.  Can you do the job?
2.  Will you love the job?
3.  Can we tolerate working with you?

That’s it.  Those three.  Think back, every question you’ve ever posed to others or had asked of you in a job interview is a subset of a deeper in-depth follow-up to one of these three key questions.  Each question potentially may be asked using different words, but every question, however it is phrased, is just a variation on one of these topics: Strengths, Motivation, and Fit.

Can You Do the Job? – Strengths

Executive Search firm Heidrick & Struggles CEO, Kevin Kelly explained to me that it’s not just about the technical skills, but also about leadership and interpersonal strengths.  Technical skills help you climb the ladder.  As you get there, managing up, down and across become more important.

You can’t tell by looking at a piece of paper what some of the strengths and weaknesses really are…We ask for specific examples of not only what’s been successful but what they’ve done that hasn’t gone well or a task they they’ve, quite frankly, failed at and how they learned from that experience and what they’d do different in a new scenario.

Not only is it important to look at the technical skill set they have…but also the strengths on what I call the EQ side of the equation in terms of getting along and dealing or interacting with people.

Click here for more on interviewing and being interviewed for strengths

Will You Love the Job? -Motivation

Cornerstone International Group CEO, Bill Guy emphasizes the changing nature of motivation,

…younger employees do not wish to get paid merely for working hard—just the reverse: they will work hard because they enjoy their environment and the challenges associated with their work…. Executiveswho embrace this new management style are attracting and retaining better employees.

Click here for more on interviewing and being interviewed for motivation

Can We Tolerate Working With You? – Fit

Continuing on with our conversation, Heidrick’s Kelly went on to explain the importance of cultural fit:

A lot of it is cultural fit and whether they are going to fit well into the organization…  The perception is that when (senior leaders) come into the firm, a totally new environment, they know everything.  And they could do little things such as send emails in a voicemail culture that tend to negatively snowball over time.  Feedback or onboarding is critical.  If you don’t get that feedback, you will get turnover later on.

He made the same point earlier in an interview with  Smart Business, referencing Heidrick’s internal study of 20,000 searches.

40 percent of senior executives leave organizations or are fired or pushed out within 18 months. It’s not because they’re dumb; it’s because a lot of times culturally they may not fit in with the organization or it’s not clearly articulated to them as they joined.

Click here for more on interviewing and being interviewed for fit

Preparing for Interviews

If you’re the one doing the interviewing, get clear on what strengths, motivational and fit insights you’re looking for before you go into your interviews.

If you’re the one being interviewed, prepare by thinking through examples that illustrate your strengths, what motivates you about the organization and role you’re interviewing for, and the fit between your own preferences and the organization’s Behaviors, Relationships, Attitudes, Values, and Environment (BRAVE).  But remember that interviews are exercises in solution selling.  They are not about you.

Think of the interview process as a chance for you to show your ability to solve the organization and interviewer’s problem. That’s why you need to highlight strengths in the areas most important to the interviewers, talk about how you would be motivated by the role’s challenges, and discuss why you would be a BRAVE fit with the organization’s culture.

This is a big part of step 1 of The New Leader’s Playbook: Position Yourself for Success

There are several components of this including positioning yourself for a leadership role, selling before you buy, mapping and avoiding the most common land mines, uncovering hidden risks in the organization, role, and fit, and choosing the right approach for your transition type.

Click here to read about each step in the playbook

Click here for YouTube videos highlighting each step

————————————————————-

The New Leader’s Playbook includes the 10 steps that executive onboarding group PrimeGenesis uses to help new leaders and their teams get done in 100-days what would normally take six to twelve months. George Bradt is PrimeGenesis’ managing director, and co-author of The New Leader’s 100-Day Action Plan (Wiley, 2009). Follow him at @georgebradt or on YouTube.

In our latest edition of the “Revenge of the Nerds” white paper research series, Identified has discovered that a growing number of company founders and CEOs today are far more likely to hold advanced engineering degrees than MBAs and that the overall age of business leaders is steadily trending downward. We see this shift as a significant impact on corporate culture with younger, more technically inclined entrepreneurs at the helm.

We culled through 36 million professional profiles in the Identified database and found 3,337 founder/CEOs have an advanced engineering background compared with 1,016 MBAs. The ratio of undergrad business and engineering founders/ CEOs is about even (9,461 versus 9,334), a significant shift occurs in the number of leaders who have advanced degrees.

Founders are also getting younger, with the average age dropping to around 33 years old from 36 in 2008, based on an analysis of Facebook profile data, 90 percent of which is US based.

The ‘nerd-inspiring’ success story of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is a possible foundation for more engineers launching new endeavors, particularly in the IT, social and mobile industries.

Our study tracked the Identified Scores of engineers to discover where some of the top talent could be found studying. International programs such as the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Canada’s University of Waterloo and China’s Tsinghua University joined the list of usual suspects like Stanford, MIT, UC Berkeley, CalTech and Carnegie Mellon.

To Download the full report, please click here.

The recent Department of Justice decision to indict Megaupload for copyright infringement and related offenses raises some very thorny questions from a criminal law perspective. A few preliminaries: I’m responsible for the musings below, but I thank Robert Weisberg of Stanford Law School for taking the time to talk through the issues and giving me pointers to some relevant cases. Also, an indictment contains unproven allegations, and the facts may well turn out to be different, or to imply different things in full context.

DMCA SAFE HARBOR: BELIEVE IT AND IT WILL BECOME REAL: As a matter of criminal law, the discussion of whether Megaupload did what it needed to do to qualify for the DMCA Safe Harbor misses the point. Did they register an agent? Did they have a repeat infringer policy? These are all interesting CIVIL questions. But from a criminal law perspective, the important question is did Defendants BELIEVE they were covered by the Safe Harbor? This is because criminal infringement requires a showing of willfulness. The view of the majority of Federal Courts is that “willfulness” means a desire to violate a known legal duty, not merely the will to make copies.

In other words, for criminal liability, it doesn’t really matter whether the service qualifies, so long as Defendants believed it qualified. If so, they were not intentionally violating a known legal duty, and so their conduct would not satisfy the willfulness element of the offense. For criminal liability after the DMCA safe harbor, as in horseshoes, close may be good enough.

SECONDARY COPYRIGHT LIABILITY AND CRIMINAL LAW:

The heart of this case is whether and when an enterprise can be held criminally liable for the conduct of its users. (For example, both copyright infringement claims (Counts 4 and 5) identify aiding and abetting as a basis for the charge.)

Aiding and abetting is something like the civil liability inducement theory the U.S. Supreme Court created in the 2005 Grokster case. Experts opine that the indictment makes out a pretty good inducement case against Megaupload. But the first question from a defense perspective has to be “Can the Grokster theory of CIVIL liability even be the basis for CRIMINAL copyright claims?” This has never been decided by any Court.

However, the pending Second Circuit case of Puerto 80 Projects v. USA (“Rojadirecta“), raises the issue squarely. There, the plaintiff is challenging the ICE seizure of its Rojadirecta domain names based on an allegation of criminal copyright infringement. For background on the case, and on the ICE domain seizures, check out Techdirt’s coverage.

Rojadirecta’s lawyers at Durie Tangri have challenged the U.S. Government’s assertion that criminal liability arises from linking to infringing content. The lawyers argue that judge-made secondary infringement liability theories, including Grokster style inducement, cannot be the basis for a criminal copyright violation because the criminal copyright statute doesn’t mention secondary liability. Congress considered and rejected statutes that would have created such liability, in COICA and PROTECT IP. In sum, due process doesn’t allow incarceration under a civil legal theory that the Supreme Court dreamed up in 2005. The issues yet to be decided in Rojadirecta apply to the Megaupload case as well.

AGREEMENT + CIVIL VIOLATION = PRISON?: Count 2 is a conspiracy to commit copyright infringement claim, and references unknown parties as members of the conspiracy. Conspiracy entails an agreement to commit an offense and an overt act in furtherance of that agreement. The act in furtherance need not itself be illegal, but there must be an agreement to do an illegal act. The list of overt acts show that the object of the conspiracy was infringement by Mega users. If Defendants agreed with each other to induce others to infringe, and Rojadirecta’s lawyers are correct that inducement is not a crime, there’s a conspiracy only to violate a CIVIL law. If the idea is that Mega conspired with its users to infringe, those users may or may not have been criminally infringing copyright. They were located all over the world, and may or may not have acted willfully, i.e. intended to violate U.S. law. Again, the government would basically have alleged an agreement to violate a U.S. CIVIL law, including by many people who are not subject to U.S. rules.

Is it a federal crime to conspire to induce others to violate a U.S. civil law?

The answer to that is an obvious “no”. The conspiracy statute itself makes clear that the object of the conspiracy must be an offense or fraud against the United States, in other words, a federal crime. 18 U.S.C. 371. It is true that Oliver North and John Poindexter were prosecuted for conspiracy to violate Boland Amendment, which prohibited Defense Department spending on the Nicaraguan Contras, but was not itself a crime. And there is a 1979 case (U.S. v. Ruffin, 613 F.2d 408 (2nd cir. 1979), where the defendant was convicted of conspiracy when he convinced an unwitting person to divert federal funds to the defendant’s personal benefit. But both cases constituted fraud involving U.S.taxpayer dollars, which is also a basis for conspiracy liability. Civil violations simply are not.

For these reasons, prosecuting this case against Mega, especially if Defendants get good criminal lawyers who also understand copyright law, is going to be an uphill battle for the government.

A few other points. Some direct infringement convictions look easy, but COUNT 4 IS WEIRDLY INCOMPLETE: I agree with the copyright law experts interviewed by Ars Technica that the most damning allegations in the indictment are the claims of direct infringement, particularly for the prerelease movies. Interestingly, the indictment identifies four films that the defendants supposedly distributed before release: The Green Hornet, Thor, Bad Teacher, Twilight–Breaking Dawn Part 1. But Count 4 only charges one such act of prerelease infringement, the movie Taken. What about the other films? Why were those not also charged?

Finally, this case is extremely interesting from a JURISDICTIONAL standpoint. One of the very first issue to be litigated will be extradition to the United States. Does the United States have jurisdiction over anyone who uses a hosting provider in the Eastern District of Virginia? What about over any company that uses PayPal? That’s a very broad claim of power, and I expect it will be vigorously contested.

via blog.sriramk.com

One of the occupational hazards of working at Microsoft was attending offsites. These were 2-3 day affairs, typically cloistered watching endless sessions of Powerpoint in a out-of-the-way Washington resort with a bunch of execs. At one such shindig I was attending a few years ago, one of the attractions was a talk from a couple of external speakers, both of them local VCs. The talk was covering certain things Microsoft could be doing better in particular areas (being deliberately obtuse here to honor confidentiality and besides, the details aren’t pertinent here).

This VC threw up a slide at the end of his slide to summarize most of his talk. It had the following sentence in bold which made the room break into applause.

Don’t be so f-king strategic

All large companies (and I do mean all - this is not a post about Microsoft) tend to be in love with finding the right ‘strategy’ in place before doing anything. There are reams and reams of text written on what exactly strategy is and how to go about having a good one. Some of them are actually quite good (for example, Porter’s work on the five forces). You could often get rapped on the knuckles (or worse) for being ‘off-strategy’.

Don’t get me wrong. Good strategy combined with good execution is a joy to watch (case in point - Apple over the last decade). The last thing you would want is people off doing their own thing and being all ‘off-strategy’ and rebellious.

But here’s the problem.

You’re not Steve Jobs and your organization is not Apple. And your well-thought out strategy is probably terrible.

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt in the corporate world, it is that a staggering amount of ‘strategic analysis’ is nonsense and guesswork. There’s nothing wrong in admitting that. Figuring out the market, what the future looks like, what users want or heck, even what your own company can do is hard. Bloody hard. Eric Reis says that all startups are experiments and the same can be said for any company in a fast changing industry too.

Most times, you don’t even know what the right thing to do is until you have actually gone out and tried a bunch. Experimenting might be hard if you’re launching spacecraft (and even that doesn’t stop Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos). But if you’re in the software world, there is no excuse for not building a bunch. For not trying a bunch.

Building stuff and getting people to use it will always lead to better results than sitting in a bunch of meetings with over-paid consultants and trying to extrapolate from various signals and trends on what people might want and what you should be doing. Even if you had the right strategy in place at one point in time, that isn’t good enough. The world changes so quickly that you might need to do a 180-degree turn in a matter of months to react to changing user behavior or market trends. Top-down strategic planning doesn’t deal well with this.

What you need are many experiments in parallel. Not all of them need the same amount of resources and not all needs to be released to the public. But you absolutely do need people working on crazy, random things. It doesn’t matter whether you call it 20% time, whether you call it a research department or it is just what all your employees do on weekends. But it needs to happen in some form.

This only works if your corporate structure is built with the flexibility to do random things. Especially things which are ‘off-strategy’.

If you’re a mining corporation in Minnesota, allowing an employee to experiment with adhesives might wind up with you revolutionizing the stationery industry (this happened).

If you’re the world’s largest software company in 2005 and your strategy is to sell phones to enterprises, going off-strategy to understand/build what normal consumers want, might save you years later (this didn’t happen).

So go out there. Try random things. Don’t be so f*king strategic.

via jpuopolo.com

1.     Minimal Viable Product thinking can be a trap – there has recently been a huge movement toward creating a “minimum viable product” and then going out to market as quickly as possible. I would argue it is important to temper this trend. This has turned into a tendency to quickly roll out half-baked functionality because developers believe they are following the MVP mantra.  Well thought out features that deliver value, even if they take a bit longer to come to market, will (in my opinion) deliver more ultimate value to the product and to the user experience. I am all for iterating something early on once it is in the hands of the customer, but I would argue that some companies have misconstrued this and roll out an untested, half written piece of functionality

2.       Keep an eye on what really matters – Many good product managers fight with this all the time. How many times do people from different lines of business ask questions like “wouldn’t it be cool if it could do this?”. When I really boil it down, there are only 3 reasons why you should build any given feature in an early-stage start-up. Here they are:

• It will help make money – If you are a start-up working towards break-even, then this needs to be ever present in every decision you make. If it won’t help move the needle and get you closer to profitability, you may want to reconsider it. I come from a school of thought in which you want straightforward business models with a straightforward path to cash. There are few out there with unlimited runways and you always need to be concerned with this in your approach.
• It will improve the user experience – User experience has become such a core function to any product manager. Is this easy to use? Do people get pissed off when they have to use key features on the site? Will it cause people to abandon your site?  UX can be a core competency and key differentiator. Always focus on this! Even if it is as simple as a nicely done pop-up or a cleanly design button, it all matters when it comes to UX.
• It will improve efficiency and scalability – Will this feature allow you to do more with less, does it allow you to hold off hiring more people to do the same function, or does it make the people you have more effective? You should always consider this to stay lean and mean as possible

3.       Create a vision for the product – it is important to not limp forward from one feature to the next. This can be an easy trap to fall into. Having a tight 6-week development cycle is important, but having a grasp on what you want this thing to look like in a year or 18 months is important. This isn’t to say that you should wireframe the thing to death and do work for something that may or may not be built. Rather, have a feeling for what you want the experience to evolve into.

4.       Beware the “Frankenstein” product - Every product manager should ask them this question on a regular basis.   This ties in with the above point about product vision, but I generally find this can be more of a tactical problem. Does each feature compliment the next, is it tied together in a comprehensive UX flow or does it feel tacked on? “Frankensteining” new features into a product can be fraught with danger for the long-term health of a product. A good product manager needs to fight the urge to quickly throw a button into the UI to satisfy a line of business, but rather should look for a way to re-orient the UI. Sometimes you have to go a step further and actually yank or pull old functionality out to keep things clean. Pulling the bolts out of Frank’s neck can be painful but is sometimes necessary. It forces you to step back and refocus on your goals for the UX.

5.       Know your customer, and then start to segment – it is very difficult to create a one size fits all approach. As you get new and different user groups you need to make a critical decision. Either try to serve all people with a reduced product or split the product up into different lines. Each are faced with their own set of products, you begin to fragment your offering. There is an argument to be made creating upgrade paths are a logical and allows power users progress to a rich feature set of products.

In summary, the role of a product manager is never easy. They are constantly getting pulled in 50 directions by constant and evolving requests. That said, if you keep these 5 core principles in mind it will make it easier next time you embark on building a killer product.

Self-educate to survive

By Ryan Downie on August 22, 2011

If you lack a formal design education, you’ll need to self-educate before you can progress in your career, says Ryan Downie. Here's a checklist of the subjects he studied to help him to understand more about web design

Many website designers (and designers in other areas) do not come to the job through a formal process of training and education. They just sort of fall into it. The problem with this is that you start out with no knowledge of basic design principles or what makes a design good.

I started off this way, as did a lot of my online friends. I left my job and ended up designing because I had a computer and there was not much work around in the village where I lived. I just looked around on the internet, found some ideas of what I thought was good design at the time and then created a design. I was not armed with any knowledge about grids, typography, colour, hierarchy and so on that an education would have given me. Even though my design could have been called a success (it got featured in all the galleries and noted as a trend setter for 2008 with its handwritten fonts), I felt I was missing something.

Fast-forward a year or so and I was designing more of the same – browsing around the internet for inspiration and jumping into Photoshop and putting out a layout. It was only when I started to get to know other designers via Twitter and IM that I became aware of what I was missing. I needed to educate myself, and do it fast, if I was to survive in this world of design.

Self-education

New designers need to learn and become self- educated if they want to progress. This means learning design principles, digesting them and coming to understand them over time, just as you would if you were still in education.

The best advice given to me was to question everything. Why this colour? What emotion does it provoke? What else has it been used for? Why does it work? I find that the key to design is to question every element’s purpose. If it is not needed, remove it.

What I learned

Here’s a sort of checklist of the subjects I studied to help me to understand more about design. I hope it will help you.

Grid and layout

The grid helps with the alignment, balance and flow of the design. Mark Boulton has a fantastic book called A Practical Guide to Designing Grid Systems for the Web on this matter. Check out www.designinggridsystems.com for further details.

Colour theory

What makes colour important? Does it provoke an emotional response from the audience and, if so, why? Is there enough contrast? Sites such as www.colourlovers.com and kuler.adobe.com are great tools.

Fonts

With improved web technology, fonts have come in to the limelight and it has never been easier to find information on them. But don’t just pick a font because you like it. Do some research on it. Most foundries have a description of the font and what its purpose is. Use sites such as typedia.com for research. Smashing Magazine also has a great post on principles for readable typography. See www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/03/18/10- principles-for-readable-web-typography/.

White Balance, hierarchy and contrast

These three things are hugely important as they move the eye around the design. Without these aspects, a user cannot be guided. Take a look at what Six Revisions says about this and more by going to: sixrevisions.com/web_design/using-power-structure-and-gestalt-for-visual-hierarchy/.

Design history

Have a look back at design movements from the past and learn what made them great. Look at designs from the great art movements such as Dada, Art Deco, Bauhaus and Pop Art. See how they used design principles, played with them or deliberately ignored them and move on from there.

Design inspiration

Inspiration hits us all in different ways. If you’re planning to design a website, try not to browse around the web. Instead try and get out of the house, go for a walk and clear your head. Look at magazines, the packaging on a product, a film poster or even movie credits from the 60s ... anything to get that spark.

This article originally appeared in issue 216 of .net magazine - the world's best-selling magazine for web designers and developers.

Steve Jobs's resignation from Apple has sparked plenty of commentary on his achievements, his personality, and his vision. He deserves the attention: This is a man who transformed the technology world and helped build Apple into what was, at least for a few hours earlier this month, the world's most valuable publicly traded company.

But the idea, so common in this week's media coverage, that Jobs was an inspired savant who succeeded by taking big risks on personal hunches, is way off the mark. Rather than worship at the altar of inspiration and "going with your gut," the rest of us should use this moment to consider the fundamental strategies that drove Apple's success.

We've all heard the old saying about the balance between inspiration and perspiration. As well-known as this saying is, we often tend to forget it when we come upon things that really look effortless. Take Apple. The past decade has seen what appears to be an almost inevitable ascent of the company and its products to the pinnacle of success. Each iteration is better than the last; each new product is a hit from day one; and the lines outside the Apple stores remain full of customers who don't just like the products — they love them.

With each launch of another device or application, Apple seems to pull exquisite new products, fully formed, from the minds of a few geniuses in turtlenecks. From the outside, Apple's secret sauce would seem to be inspired design (read, "think different"); and inspired marketing of that design. In other words, 90% inspiration and 10% perspiration (mostly experienced by eager customers scrambling to get the latest iPod or iPad). iPhone 5? "Eureka!"

The truth is really a lot different.

Apple would love us to believe it's all "Eureka." But Apple produces 10 pixel-perfect prototypes for each feature. They compete — and are winnowed down to three, then one, resulting in a highly evolved winner. Because Apple knows the more you compete inside, the less you'll have to compete outside.

We are all mesmerized by Apple's beautiful design, from device to screen, to the packaging itself. We see what the magicians want us to see. What we don't see is the 18 months of negotiating with the music companies. Nor the three years of teaching the supply chain that the Macbook Air had to be really thin, really light, and really enduring (10-hour battery). When those improvements intersected with the iPhone's great screen technology, the iPad (that glorious Air/iPhone hybrid) exploded.

The device without the backstory is like a Ferrari with no engine inside: beautiful, but going nowhere. Just ask Sansa, eReader, Zune, or dozens of others who've gone up against Apple products without success.

And, oh, the marketing: brilliant marketing. No one is better at creating attention than Apple. But attention without fulfillment is a straw fire. The magicians say "Presto!" and we gasp in delight. But they deflect our attention from the back-breaking labor that goes into assuring a perfect customer experience, hundreds of times a day, at 300 stores around the world, and countless conversations on the phone.

The initial blast of attention is great. But it's the massive word-of-mouth ripples of the great experience that make the market. The glitter you see is not the explanation; look carefully, and the inspiration/perspiration ratio is where it should be. Under Jobs' leadership, Apple has done 10 times the amount of relevant homework of most companies — internal competitions, supply chain training, endless deal-making, endless recruiting, training, and generating and sustaining employee excitement that you just can't fake.

If others emulated that, all of that, their results would be a lot more like Apple's. And our economy would start really humming again.

Apple's CEO is unique, but one lesson we can take from his story is more universal. Corporate boards worship "superstar CEOs". But more often, the first executive makes for the best executive.

REUTERS

via theatlantic.com

This year, dozens of startup company founders will be forced out and replaced by experienced outsider CEOs, often from public companies, brought in by venture capital investors to provide "adult supervision." You can bet that none of these companies will become the next Hewlett-Packard, the original Silicon Valley technology company -- or the next Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, or Apple.* These tech juggernauts span software, hardware, services, and media, but they all have something in common. Their founders served as transformative chief executives.

Still, the conventional wisdom among investors, if not the media, is that founders need to move out of the way for an experienced CEO to take a company "to the next level."** This piece of mythology plays into Steve Jobs' remarkable story. Apple would not be the world's most valuable and powerful technology and media company today without Jobs, its co-founder and its CEO from 1997 until last week, when he resigned because of health issues. But from 1983 to 1997, Apple was run by John Sculley (former president of Pepsi), Michael Spindler (a marketing and sales person from DEC and Intel), and Gilbert Amelio (former CEO of National Semiconductor), during which time it managed to go from inventing the modern personal computer to becoming an irrelevant, money-losing sideshow. Rival Michael Dell said that the company should be shut down. So much for that.

***

Outsider, non-founder CEOs are often overvalued because many corporate boards think the answer to their problems is a superstar CEO with an outsized reputation. This leads them to overpay for people who are good at creating outsized reputations through networking, interviewing, and taking credit for other peoples' achievements--all bad indicators of future success.

Rakesh Khurana has amply shown how this delusion of the charismatic savior creates a dysfunctional market for CEOs, allowing the small number of existing public-company CEOs to demand and receive extravagant compensation. The myth of the generalist CEO is bolstered by the many fawning media portrayals where CEOs say that their key jobs are understanding, hiring, and motivating people--leading board members to believe that you can run a technology company without knowing anything about technology.

WHY FIRST EXECS MAKE BETTER CHIEF EXECS

The list of successful founders-turned-CEOs is daunting. You have Bill Hewlett and David Packard (HP), Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore (Intel), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Steve Jobs (Apple). You could say I've hand-picked these names from among hundreds of founders who turned out to be lousy chief execs. You might be right. That's why we need data.

And the data shows that the first executives really do make better chief execs. That's because they have:

1) Better long-term focus: Rüdiger Fahlenbrach found that large U.S. firms run by founders had excess stock market annual returns of 8.3 percent (4.4 percent after controlling for a variety of factors). Founder-CEO firms invest more in research and development and have higher capital expenditures--things that you would expect to improve long-term performance rather than short-term earnings. 

2) More value: Renée Adams, Heitor Almeida, and Daniel Ferreira found that founder-CEO firms have higher valuations than other firms, even after using instrumental variables to control for the endogenous nature of founder CEO status.**

3) The right incentives: Darius Palia, S. Abraham Ravid, and Chia-Jane Wang also found that founder-led firms were more valuable than other firms. In addition, they found that founders were less sensitive to traditional pay-for-performance incentives, implying that they're not in it just for the money.

This shouldn't be surprising. Founders tend to know their companies better than outsiders. They know their industries better than most outsiders. They are often more motivated than the average hired-gun CEO to improve a company's long-term prospects. They are more likely to be innovators, having taken the step of founding a company. In tech firms, they usually know technology better than a typical outsider CEO, whose specialty skews toward marketing and networking.

But there's one other factor that comes into play. Investors can't count on a founder CEO to do what they want because a founder has her own power base among the company's employees. An outsider CEO, by contrast, comes in as the creature of the board and knows her first job is to keep the board happy. In theory, this should be good because it makes the CEO accountable to the shareholders -- assuming that the board represents the shareholders, which is a big assumption. But in a startup company, the interests of the majority investors and the interests of the company are not always aligned. Most obviously, if the company gets a new round of funding at a low valuation, the current investors can benefit--if they are the ones putting in more money at the low valuation. And so replacing a founder CEO is often simply a question of power.

Obviously, not every founder CEO has the ability to be a good leader of a large public company. On balance, however, the ideology of adult supervision may be doing more harm than good. And as with every ideology, you have to look at who benefits from it to understand why it exists.

---

*Google, arguably, did succeed with adult supervision in the person of Eric Schmidt, CEO from 2001 to 2011. But note that the two founders remained in top positions (outsiders referred to the three as "co-CEOs") and Schmidt was succeeded by one of the founders.

**Full disclosure: I've worked at two start-up technology companies (although I joined one more than three years after it was founded). In both cases, the founder CEO was replaced by an outsider--and in both cases, the board later brought back the founder CEO.

via blog.linkedin.com

What makes entrepreneurs different, and where do they come from? Are they born or taught? Are they unusually mobile in their careers? Does geography play a role? Do mentors and relationships matter?

Numerous studies explore these questions by surveying hundreds of entrepreneurs. At LinkedIn, we take a different approach, on a different scale. By sifting through more than 120 million public profiles, we can analyze tens of thousands of startup founders’ [1] profiles – and find common threads linking their careers.

Our infographic above shows the top over-represented business schools among entrepreneurs – with Stanford, Harvard and MIT Sloan taking the top spots. If that doesn’t come as a surprise to you, take a look at the distribution of the founders’ age at their first startup. While young (and serial) entrepreneurs are often in the spotlight, our data shows that 65% of entrepreneurs are 30 and older – and only 2% are serial entrepreneurs.

The value of a formal education for startup founders is a hotly debated subject. Let’s take a look at the data – in particular, the fields of study that entrepreneurs chose in college. Technical majors (except civil engineering) are over-represented among founders; nursing and administration are under-represented. While computer engineers find it easier to start companies in their areas of expertise, civil engineers and nurses need more infrastructure support.

Some companies are breeding grounds for entrepreneurs – they’re more likely to appear on founders’ profiles than others. They include tech-heavy companies like Adobe  Systems, Apple Inc., eBay (including Paypal, of the Paypal mafia fame), Electronic Arts, Google, Microsoft, SGI and Yahoo! among others.

Are some industries harder to break into than others? Yes, according to our data: founders of semiconductor and pharmaceutical startups usually have previous industry experience, while founders of retail, consumer goods, leisure & travel and professional training companies don’t.

Also, most “academic” startup founders (those listing higher education as their previous industry) are in nanotech, biotech and medical devices.

Relationships and mentors are crucial to entrepreneurs’ success – and this is reflected in the connections they have on LinkedIn. Founders are disproportionately connected to venture capitalists, bloggers and recruiters. Most importantly, LinkedIn and the relationships they build in their career help founders find the capital, publicity and talent they need.

If you’d like to hear more about the entrepreneur DNA, take a look at the presentation I gave at the 2011 Startup Festival.

---

[1] Startup Founders are LinkedIn professionals who identify themselves as founders (or co-founders) of U.S. companies created after 2000, with a LinkedIn company profile, and that currently have between 2 – 200 employees. We have excluded small law, consulting and real estate firms, as well as LLCs (limited liability companies) – and assembled a pool of over 13,000 entrepreneurs. We then compared them with the average LinkedIn member and highlight characteristics that disproportionately appear among startup founders.

via blog.asmartbear.com

I built this software for myself, and then it turned out a million people wanted it exactly how I originally envisioned it.

After hiring a few people, being the CEO became a lot easier, and I was able to focus on high-level strategic plans instead of fighting fires.

I wish we had spent less time talking to prospective customers before designing interfaces and writing code.

The decision of whether to form an LLC, S-Corp, or C-Corp made a significant difference in my startup’s success.

Selling the company was an easy decision, and everyone in the company was on the same page.

We were so good at acting that our first few customers never knew we were a new company with no employees and buggy software.

Thanks to a software patent we filed, we never had a serious competitor.

Our most effective marketing campaigns where the ones filled with buzzwords and non-specific claims.

My lack of an MBA degree made building a company from scratch harder for me than for others.

I wish I had spent more time reading and weighing the pros and cons of various philosophies instead of just jumping in and doing what I thought was morally and financially sensible.

via beust.com

There, I said it.

I know it’s fashionable to mock PHP for its antiquated syntax and semantic quirks, but I just like it. Here is why.

PHP is like C

This is really the main point of this post, and it’s a realization so simple that I’m surprised not more people made it. I have often observed that developers mocking PHP tend to be much more positive when I ask them about C.

“C is alright, it’s not OO but it was designed with a simple goal in mind and it does that very well. It’s straightforward and very well documented”.

Does that remind you of another language? That’s right, PHP! PHP is exactly like C. Either you like both or you don’t like either, there is no claim you can make about PHP that can’t be made about C as well, and vice versa. PHP was created with one very simple goal in mind: enabling the insertion of programming logic in web pages. And it does this fantastically well.

The absence of OO functionalities in both languages is a bit of a bummer (PHP 5 tried to address that with mixed success), but with some discipline, it’s really not hard to reach a reasonable architecture for your programs.

PHP never let me down

I write PHP code very sporadically, whenever I need to update one of my web sites or when I need to put together a small piece of web functionality that requires some programming. I am familiar with the PHP syntax but I don’t know much of its API, because I use it so rarely, so I pretty much need to relearn it from scratch each time. Whenever I need to get something done, I spend a decent amount of that time looking up docs on Google. And PHP absolutely shines in this area. It’s not just that looking up a function name will give you its API documentation as a first hit, but you can literally type what you need in English (e.g “most recent file in PHP”) and it’s very likely that you will find how to do it in just a few clicks.

You can even misspell function names (see for example the result of my incorrect query for strtime) and you will still land in the right place.

PHP is robust

I know it sounds silly considering how primitive and old the language is, but the bottom line is that code that I wrote more than ten years ago has been working absolutely flawlessly and without any changes for all that time. I don’t even bother writing tests for most of the PHP I write (obviously, I would be a bit more thorough if this code were destined to be used in a more mission critical web site). Not writing tests is not the only software taboo that I break when I write PHP: I happily mix up presentation and logic all the time. That’s just how PHP is supposed to work, and when the site you are working on is low volume and only of interest to a very tiny fraction of users, you probably don’t want to spend too much time on tasks that look overkill.

PHP’s documentation is great

It’s hard to pinpoint what exactly makes PHP’s online documentation so useful. It’s probably a mix of the content, the syntactically colored code samples, the CSS and most of all, the examples at the bottom. These are absolutely priceless and I don’t understand why not all API documentations do this.

Whether you are looking up an API function or a UNIX command, the first thing you want to see is examples, not a laundry list of its options and switches or a formal definition of its parameters. Very often, reading the example is all you need to carry on with your work and you can always read the more formal documentation if you want to use the function in a more advanced manner.

Universal support

Most Internet providers offer PHP support out of the box, so you don’t need to resort to more expensive VPS providers. I have yet to see this kind of universal support for any other language than PHP. Not even Ruby on Rails, let alone Java, is available on mainstream providers, thereby validating the claim I made five years ago that Ruby on Rails won’t become mainstream (I regularly receive emails about this article asking me this question, and I keep responding “Nope, still not mainstream”).

High reward

There is nothing more exciting than modifying a file, hitting Refresh on your browser and seeing the result right away. This brings me back to the very first days that I started experimenting with a web browser, more than fifteen years ago. Modifying an HTML file and seeing the result almost instantly hasn’t lost its appeal, and PHP is certainly continuing the tradition.

Sometimes, I don’t even bother editing the files locally and then transferring them: I ssh to my server and modify the files live. If something goes wrong, git makes sure that I can always back up my changes very easily. By the way, the combination of git’s branches and PHP is very powerful, allowing you to switch between entire web sites with just one command.

Conclusion

Even though writing in PHP always feels like going back in time, I’m never reluctant to doing it because I know that it will be rewarding and relatively easy. PHP has by far the highest “Get in, code, get out” factor that I have found in a language, and until another language comes around that can do better on this scale, I will be using PHP for many more years to come.

Update: Discussion on Hacker News and Google+

A sophisticated personalization algorithm--combined with ever-savvier editors--has helped boost the Today box on Yahoo's home page to the tune of a 270% increase in clicks since 2009. Here’s what they're doing right.

If you’ve flitted across the Yahoo home page recently, you know how addictive its Today module can be. That’s the little box at the top of the page (as in the image above) containing four news stories, including at least one you usually can’t help but click on.

And Yahoo says that’s entirely intentional, the result of a lot of hard work spent trying to figure out how to serve up news that you, yes you, will find irresistible.

The company started work on a powerful personalization algorithm four years ago. Now it’s paying dividends. The system generates 45,000 totally unique versions of the Today module every five minutes. (All five screenshots in this post were taken within minutes of each other, using different Yahoo accounts.)

And in the two years since the algorithm went live, Yahoo says clicks on the stories in the Today box among U.S. users have increased 270%. This year, the module is averaging a whopping 1 billion clicks per month in the U.S.

Yahoo is now in the process of rolling out the algorithm--it's nicknamed CORE (for Content Optimization and Relevance Engine)--to its other media properties. It hopes CORE's results will entice visitors to gobble up ever-more content in the Yahoo ecosystem, and in the process, turn it into the "premier media company" that its executives like to claim it already is.

They might be on to something. The Yahoo home page is the most visited of any page in the U.S. containing programmed content. Every day, 35 million unique visitors give it a look-see, and 110 million stop by every month. The increase in number of clicks in the Today box between this year and last--167 million--is the equivalent of adding an entire LATimes.com to Yahoo’s content ecosystem.

So how does the personalization strategy work? Yahoo gave Fast Company a peek behind the curtain, and it turns out that the secret sauce is only partially due to the work the algorithm does on its own. The other impact it's having is on Yahoo's Front Page editors, who are getting savvier about what will appeal to readers, in large part due to the insights they're gaining from the algorithm.

Here’s how it works.

The Algorithm

CORE’s job is to figure out which stories, which come from Yahoo's own content producers and external sites and publications, are going to play well with which specific audiences. Yahoo generates a profile for each user based on information they've entered about themselves, like gender and age (if they're a registered Yahoo user), the places they've visited when they've come to Yahoo in the past, and the stories they've already seen during that particular visit. Based on that information, it's up to CORE to figure out which of the 50-100 "packages" the editors have going at any one time will be most interesting to that particular visitor.

"Package” refers to those combinations of photos, headlines, text, and links that get dropped into the Today box. In the image at left, for example, the story about Speaker Boehner along with the three little links to the "Senate Dems," "Treasury," and "Debt fear" stories constitute a "package."

To test the packages, CORE grabs a portion of Yahoo visitors as they arrive on the site and uses them as a guinea pigs, tossing some of the new packages at them and seeing what attracts their interest. (Who gets lumped into that bucket is determined by a virtual "flip of the coin," so that the pool is not always populated by the same people.)

CORE then uses the results of those tests to rank every package according to how well it will do with each visitor, based on their particular targeting attributes. So, for example, it might decide to serve up a particular package to women in the 35-44 age range in Peoria, for example, but not to men in that same age range in Peoria, or women in the 21-24 age range in Seattle.

"What we’re doing here is matchmaking," Raghu Ramakrishnan, chief scientist for search and cloud platforms, tells Fast Company. "We know something about the user, about their context, and about the pool of articles we have. At the end of the day, it’s a matchmaking task."

But the algorithm doesn’t work in a vacuum. It is also helping the editors who run the Front Page become smarter about how to put the packages together in the first place.

The editors

CORE can’t go hunting independently through the thousands of stories among Yahoo partners' content, or the stories generated in-house, to find the pieces that might most interest Yahoo visitors. It totally relies on the Front Page editors to tell it what to look at, and that’s where some of the art comes in.

The Front Page team is staffed by a group of online journalists, including its chief, Liz Lufkin, a former deputy managing editor at both the San Francisco Chronicle and USA Today. Lufkin tells Fast Company that the insights the team is gaining from CORE are adding nuance to their traditional understandings about what various audiences might be interested in.

Some of the findings buck conventional wisdom. CORE has shown the team that boomers don’t just care about health and retirement; they also like music. Teens will click on parenting stories, as well as science and weather. And men actually are sometimes interested in fashion (which Lufkin chalks up, at least in part, to their trying to make sense of what their wives and daughters are wearing).

And while the average woman might not spend a lot of time following the ins and outs of football or baseball, some sports stories do capture their attention. The day that Fast Company visited the Front Page team, CORE predicted that a story about Derek Boogaard, the hockey player who died unexpectedly this spring, would do well with women--and indeed, according to the dashboard that Front Page editors monitor continuously, it did, perhaps because of the tragic nature of his death.

CORE is also helping Yahoo’s editors get a jump on upcoming stories. Months before the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, the Front Page team noticed a rising interest in the bride's sister, Pippa. So while it took the rest of the media a few days after the event to catch up to the frenzy surrounding the maid of honor (and her headline-grabbing bum), Yahoo’s editors were ready from the beginning.

"When the Royal Wedding happened--and [Pippa’s] dress [hit]—we knew it was going to be big," Lufkin says. "All weekend long we went Pippa-crazy. The data let us know to be on the lookout for that."

But it’s not all fluff. The algorithm is also turbo-charging the team’s ability to tackle hard news. When Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in January, for example, the editors tested a variety of angles to determine which one would grab the most interest. The winner, according to CORE? A story about the aide who tried to save her. It might not be what the New York Times would lead with, but it was the story that resonated most with the millions of people who landed on the Yahoo homepage that day.

"Our readers have a much wider range of interest than we've traditionally given them credit for," Lufkin says. "If we can present them content that is compelling, there’s a really big opportunity" to grab their interest.

Having the editors at the wheel also means they can override the algorithm when important news is at stake. On the day Fast Company visited, President Obama was slated to give an important speech that evening on the draw down of troops in Afghanistan.

The algorithm predicted that the story on the speech would do miserably with Yahoo visitors. And indeed, according to the dashboard, it wasn’t getting many takers. But the editors still flipped the override switch, ruling that the story would be shown to all visitors to the home page at least once, irrespective of what the algorithm said. It was, and Yahoo willingly took the hit on clicks. Some stories, the editors say, everyone simply needs to see.

But, still, they monitored the story’s performance for any insights about what was resonating. "We want to learn how to do it better the next time," Lufkin says, "not to sensationalize it, but to make it more relevant."

As CORE moves out to other parts of the Yahoo network such as Yahoo News, where it’s headed next, the company hopes to reap a similar performance boost as it’s seen with the Today module.

Meanwhile, the company’s scientists are working on making the algorithm even smarter, determining what you’ll like not just based on simple variables, like your age and gender, but based on specific things you’ve expressed an interest in before, like "golf" or "Warren Buffet."

And the human touch will conintue to play a part. 

"From the beginning, we made the decision that we weren’t going to make everything entirely algorithmic," Ramakrishnan says. "We need to leverage the editors and let them [use] the data we have to make smarter decisions in real time."

E.B. Boyd is FastCompany.com's Silicon Valley reporter. Twitter. Google+. Email.

A recent study links intelligence test results with browser usage — and the results don’t look good for users of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, especially its older versions.

The study, titled “Intelligence Quotient (IQ) and Browser Usage” by Canadian company AptiQuant, compiled IQ test scores of 101,326 individuals older than the age of 16 and divided them into groups according to the browser they use.

The results are fascinating. Users of Internet Explorer 6 have an average IQ score barely more than 80; Firefox and Chrome users fare much better, with average IQ scores of around 110, while Opera and Camino users have an average IQ score more than 120.

It’s also interesting to note that average IQ scores of IE6 users were significantly higher in 2006, and that the IQ scores get better with newer versions of IE.

Internet Explorer 6 has long been a thorn in the side of developers who hated it for its non-compliance with web standards, while users struggled with its many security flaws. This new study will probably induce more mockery of the ancient (but still sometimes found on older computers) browser and its users, but it’s probably not telling us that much about the browser itself — it’s about unwillingness to upgrade to a new version of any software.

The study concludes that “individuals on the lower side of the IQ scale tend to resist a change/upgrade of their browsers.” It’s only logical that users with a higher IQ are more likely to experiment, choose a different software version or variant (notice that users of IE with Chrome frame score very high on IQ tests) or listen to upgrade suggestions and security advice.

In March, Microsoft started a campaign to get users to stop using Internet Explorer 6. But did it take into account the fact that many IE6 users tend to have lower than average IQ scores? Maybe that’s the key to finally getting rid of the world’s most hated web browser.

“Individuals on the lower side of the IQ scale tend to resist a change/upgrade of their browsers. … Now that we have a statistical pattern on the continuous usage of incompatible browsers, better steps can be taken to eradicate this nuisance,” the study concludes.

via uie.com

[While Luke Wroblewski was writing his well-received book, Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks, he asked if I could think of an example where a change in a form's design made a noticeable difference in business. "You mean like $300 million of new revenue?" I responded. "Yes, like that." said Luke. So I wrote this article, which he published in his book.]

How Changing a Button Increased a Site's Annual Revenues by $300 Million

It's hard to imagine a form that could be simpler: two fields, two buttons, and one link. Yet, it turns out this form was preventing customers from purchasing products from a major e-commerce site, to the tune of $300,000,000 a year. What was even worse: the designers of the site had no clue there was even a problem.

The form was simple. The fields were Email Address and Password. The buttons were Login and Register. The link was Forgot Password. It was the login form for the site. It's a form users encounter all the time. How could they have problems with it?

The problem wasn't as much about the form's layout as it was where the form lived. Users would encounter it after they filled their shopping cart with products they wanted to purchase and pressed the Checkout button. It came before they could actually enter the information to pay for the product.

The team saw the form as enabling repeat customers to purchase faster. First-time purchasers wouldn't mind the extra effort of registering because, after all, they will come back for more and they'll appreciate the expediency in subsequent purchases. Everybody wins, right?

"I'm Not Here To Be In a Relationship"

We conducted usability tests with people who needed to buy products from the site. We asked them to bring their shopping lists and we gave them the money to make the purchases. All they needed to do was complete the purchase.

We were wrong about the first-time shoppers. They did mind registering. They resented having to register when they encountered the page. As one shopper told us, "I'm not here to enter into a relationship. I just want to buy something."

Some first-time shoppers couldn't remember if it was their first time, becoming frustrated as each common email and password combination failed. We were surprised how much they resisted registering.

Without even knowing what was involved in registration, all the users that clicked on the button did so with a sense of despair. Many vocalized how the retailer only wanted their information to pester them with marketing messages they didn't want. Some imagined other nefarious purposes of the obvious attempt to invade privacy. (In reality, the site asked nothing during registration that it didn't need to complete the purchase: name, shipping address, billing address, and payment information.)

Not So Good For Repeat Customers Either

Repeat customers weren't any happier. Except for a very few who remembered their login information, most stumbled on the form. They couldn't remember the email address or password they used. Remembering which email address they registered with was problematic - many had multiple email addresses or had changed them over the years.

When a shopper couldn't remember the email address and password, they'd attempt at guessing what it could be multiple times. These guesses rarely succeeded. Some would eventually ask the site to send the password to their email address, which is a problem if you can't remember which email address you initially registered with.

(Later, we did an analysis of the retailer's database, only to discover 45% of all customers had multiple registrations in the system, some as many as 10. We also analyzed how many people requested passwords, to find out it reached about 160,000 per day. 75% of these people never tried to complete the purchase once requested.)

The form, intended to make shopping easier, turned out to only help a small percentage of the customers who encountered it. (Even many of those customers weren't helped, since it took just as much effort to update any incorrect information, such as changed addresses or new credit cards.) Instead, the form just prevented sales - a lot of sales.

The $300,000,000 Fix

The designers fixed the problem simply. They took away the Register button. In its place, they put a Continue button with a simple message: "You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout."

The results: The number of customers purchasing went up by 45%. The extra purchases resulted in an extra $15 million the first month. For the first year, the site saw an additional $300,000,000.

On my answering machine is the message I received from the CEO of the $25 billion retailer, the first week they saw the new sales numbers from the redesigned form. It's a simple message: "Spool! You're the man!" It didn't need to be a complex message. All we did was change a button.

Learn More About Web Form Designs with Luke Wroblewski

One of our most popular speakers at both the User Interface Conferences and the Web App Summit is Luke Wroblewski. If you're looking to make your application's forms deliver a more succinct and crisp user experience, then you don't want to miss out on Luke's session at the Web App Summit on April, 19, 2009 in Newport Beach CA.

via gazehawk.com

Odds are, you will one day build something someone will see. Here are three key findings from people who study how people see to keep in mind for your next project.

Eyes are not cameras

Cameras move slowly, smoothly and continuously. They pan, zoom and tilt. Eyes don’t do any of these things, and the first thing you need to know about the eye is that it is nothing at all like a camera.

The eye has two basic states: it can be in a fixation or a saccade. A fixation lasts between 200 and 400 ms and is characterized by a relative lack of eye movement.  A saccade is the brief, simultaneous movement of both eyes to a new fixation point. Saccades typically last less than 200 ms, in which time the eyes usually rotate less than 20 degrees. Very little information is retained or processed from the eye when in a saccade. (Saccades are pretty cool – if you’re interested, there’s been a lot of research on how the brain tricks itself into believing it receives a continuous feed of information from the alteration of saccades and fixations.)

What this means to you: Readers will navigate your website in a series of short glances followed by short hops. You need to keep related content close together, or it becomes a chore to navigate.

You don’t always see what you’re looking at

At GazeHawk, we refer to this as the ketchup-bottle problem after Brian‘s tendency to spend 10 minutes looking through the fridge for a bottle of ketchup that’s right in front of his face. Here’s the idea: your eyes are always on. But even when you want to be paying attention, your conscious mind cannot process the majority of the information the eyes are sending up. So you pick and choose what you want to pay attention to, and what you simply don’t see.

My favorite demonstration of this is the famous “selective attention test” a.k.a. the Monkey Business Experiment. For those not familiar with this, watch the video first.

The experimenter asked participants in the study to watch a video of two teams dribbling basketballs. The participants were instructed to count the number of times one team passed the ball. Unbeknownst to them, in the middle of the video a man dressed a in a gorilla suit walked into the shot, pounded his chest, and walked off. About half the study participants did not notice this happening.

It’s difficult to measure the extent to which this happens in daily life; after all, how do you know what you’re missing? And how do you design a web page knowing that people tend to miss things that are right in front of them? Keep it simple. If there’s only one thing on the page, it’s hard for them to miss it.

What this means to you: People can only absorb so much information at once. Do not expect them to “get” more than one thing at a time.

Faces, faces, faces

Humans love faces so much, sometimes we see them when they aren't there. Image from Wikipedia.

The brain comes pre-equipped with special processing centers for the detection, recognition, and processing of faces. While these systems develop as people age, infants as young as two months old have exhibited a preference to look at faces as opposed to other objects.

What does this mean for hackers? Human beings have an innate, insatiable urge to look at faces. If you put a picture of someone’s face on a website, almost everyone will look at it. If that face is near the top of the page, it is likely to be the first thing everyone looks at.

Here’s where it gets cool: not only do people love to look at faces, but we often use them as clues as to where else to look. Following a person’s gaze is almost a reflex. James Breeze demonstrated this really well in a blog post called “You look where they look.” His experiment was simple: about 100 people were shown a picture of an advertisement with a baby and some text. Half the time, the baby was facing the reader, while the other time, the baby was looking at the text. Breeze found that not only did the people shown the baby looking at the text pay more attention to the text, but they actually stopped looking at the baby faster in order to follow its gaze.

What this means to you: Be very careful when putting important visual cues or content near pictures of faces.

via techcrunch.com

Google makes a heck of a lot of money from online advertising. In fact, 97 percent of Google’s revenue, which totaled $33.3 billion in the past twelve months, comes from advertising.

WordStream, a venture capital-backed provider of hosted software that automates most of the manual work involved with creating and optimizing both paid and natural search engine marketing campaigns, has done some research to discover which keyword categories fetch the highest costs per click (CPC) in Google’s AdWords solution.

And of course, they made an infographic based on the results of their research (embedded below).

WordStream compiled data from its own, vast keyword database and the Google Keyword Tool to determine the top 10,000 most expensive English-language keywords over a 90-day period.

Subsequently, the list was organized into categories by theme. The largest keyword categories were then determined by weighting the number of keywords within each category, as well as the estimated monthly search volume and average cost per click for each keyword.

For the record, Google AdWords is an auction-based marketplace where advertisers bid on keywords to compete for top ad placement, with a minimum bid of 5 cents per keyword (update: actually, there’s no longer a minimum bid for CPC campaigns).

The top twenty keyword categories that demanded the highest costs per click are:

1. Insurance (example keyword: “auto insurance price quotes”)
2. Loans (example keyword: “consolidate graduate student loans”)
3. Mortgage (example keyword: “refinanced second mortgages”)
4. Attorney (example keyword: “personal injury attorney”)
5. Credit (example keyword: “home equity line of credit”)
6. Lawyer
7. Donate
8. Degree
9. Hosting
10. Claim
11. Conference Call
12. Trading
13. Software
14. Recovery
15. Transfer
16. Gas/Electricity
17. Classes
18. Rehab
19. Treatment
20. Cord Blood

Unsurprisingly, the list of most expensive keyword categories is clearly a result from people who, en masse, turn to the Web in search for help, whether it’s for financial, educational, professional services or medical aid. WordStream concludes that the keyword categories with the highest volumes and costs represent industries with very high lifetime customer value: in other words, companies that can afford to pay a lot to acquire a new customer because of the nature of their business.

But I would have personally never imagined that ‘insurance’ would be netting Google up to almost $55 per click. Think about that for a minute.

via zdnet.com

Late yesterday an ITC judge ruled that smartphone maker HTC has infringed two Apple patents, and it seems likely that every single Android device out there infringes the same patents.

The two Apple patents that HTC is infringing are as follows:

• U.S. Patent No. 5,946,647 on a “system and method for performing an action on a structure in computer-generated data.”
• U.S. Patent No. 6,343,263 on a “real-time signal processing system for serially transmitted data.”

This is a very significant development since these two patents are also in dispute between Apple and Motorola and Apple and Nokia. This decision is also landmark in that it is the first legal judgement that finds Android in infringement of third-party intellectual property rights.

Just how serious is this ruling for HTC? Very serious. The worst-case scenario is that the ITC imposes an US import ban against all of HTC’s Android products. That’s how serious this is for HTC.

According to intellectual property activist Florian Mueller, Apple is unlikely to grant HTC a license for these patents and might make a damages claim.

But it gets worse. This also has severe implications for all Android products on the market, irrespective of the maker, as Mueller also pointed out:

It’s hard to see how any Android device could not infringe them, or how companies could work around them.

Mueller has put together a chart showing how all Android devices infringe the same patents that HTC has been found infringe.

HTC claims that is has found ‘alternate solutions‘ to these patents, but Mueller isn’t optimistic:

But can those patents really be worked around? Standing in front of the Great Wall of China, you can also vow to walk around it. That doesn’t mean it’s a viable option.

And it seems that it is going to get worse as Android is at the center of 49 federal and ITC infringement suits.

This is serious stuff.

via Rands in Repose

Much has been written about employee motivation and retention. It’s written by folks who actively use words like motivation and retention and generally don’t have a clue about the daily necessity of keeping your team professionally content because they’ve either never done the work or have forgotten how it’s done. These are the people who show up when your single best engineer casually and unexpectedly announces, “I’m quitting. I’m joining my good friend to found a start-up. This is my two weeks’ notice.”

You call on the motivation and retention police because you believe they can perform the legendary “diving save”. Whether it’s HR or a well-intentioned manager with a distinguished title, these people scurry impressively. Meetings that go long into the evening are instantly scheduled with the disenfranchised employee.

It’s an impressive show of force, and it sometimes works, but even if they stay, the damage has been done. They’ve quit, and when someone quits they are effectively saying, “I no longer believe in this company”. What’s worse is that what they were originally thinking was, “I’m bored”.

Boredom is easier to fix than an absence of belief.

Detecting Boredom

There are many reasons other than boredom that someone will quit. Your company might suck or be headed towards suck. This person might randomly get an offer that fulfills their life’s dream. There is a bevy of unpredictable reasons that someone will leave, but boredom is an aspect of their daily professional life you can not only easily assess, but also fix. More importantly, boredom is not initially catastrophic. Boredom shows up quietly and appears to pose no immediate threat. This makes it both easy to address and easy to ignore.

My three techniques for detecting boredom:

1. Any noticeable change in daily routine. A decrease in productivity is a great early sign that something’s up, but what you are looking for is any change in their routine. Increased snark? Unexpected vacations? Later arrivals? Earlier departures? Anything that strikes you as out of the ordinary for someone whose day you are familiar with is worth considering. The root cause of this change may have nothing to do with boredom, and the best way is figure that out is…

 

You ask, “Are you bored?” Even if you don’t have a gut feeling, it’s a good question to randomly ask your team. When I ask, I look you straight in the eyes and if you can’t stare me in the face and answer, I’m going to keep digging until you look me in the eye. Remember, the goal here is to discover boredom before they know it, and the act of a simple question might be just the mental impetus they need to see the early signs in themselves.

 

 

They tell you. And you listen. You’d think that someone walking into your office and stating that they’re bored would set off all sorts of alarms in your head, but that’s because you’re halfway through this article wondering when I’m going to cut to the chase and explain how to fix bored people. The reality is that someone is going to tell you they’re bored quietly and when you least expect it. They’ll tell you halfway through your 1:1 and they won’t use the word bored. They’ll say something innocuous like, “…and I really don’t know what to do next,” and you’re going to blow right by the most important thing they’ve said in a while because you’re worried about your next meeting.

 

As I’ve reflected on the regrettable departures of folks I’ve managed, hindsight allows me to point to the moment the person changed. Whether it was a detected subtle change or an outright declaration of their boredom, there was a clear sign that the work sitting in front of them was no longer interesting. And I ignored my observation. I assumed it was insignificant. He’s having a bad day. I assumed things would just get better. In reality, the boredom was a seed. What was “I’m bored” grew roots and became “I’m bored and why isn’t anyone doing anything about it?” and sprouted “I’m bored, I told my boss, and he… did nothing,” and finally bloomed into “I don’t want to work at a place where they don’t care if I’m bored.”

I think of boredom as a clock. Every second that someone on my team is bored, a second passes on this clock. After some aggregated amount of seconds that varies for every person, they look at the time, throw up their arms, and quit.

A Boredom Plan of Action

Whether someone is bored or not, you always need to be able to answer two questions regarding each person on your team:

1. Where are they going?
2. What are you currently doing to get them there?

In your head, answers sound like this:

• Francis wants to be a senior engineer and we’re getting him there by giving him increasingly more responsibility.
• Ronald wants to build his own company, so I’m going out of my way to include him the meetings where he can learn how the sausage is really made.
• Brooke has no idea what she wants to do, so I’m throwing curveballs at her until she hits a home run.

Knowing the answers to these questions makes the rest easier, but if you don’t have answers, you can start figuring them out by:

• Keeping an interesting problem squarely in front of them. Walk through your team right now and tell me the project they are working on that floats their boat. It doesn’t need to always be their main project, but there must be a piece of work on their plates that when they talk about it, their eyes light up. If their eyes aren’t lighting up, if there is no project in mind that will get them rambling endlessly, you…

 

Let them experiment. Let them obsess. Let them scratch that itch. If there is no project on their plate that you know is engaging them, create time for them to explore whatever they want to obsess about. I absolutely guarantee there is an investigation somehow related to their work that they are dying to tinker with. The business justification for this wild-ass effort is likely not obvious, so I’ll define it: the act of exploration is as valuable as the act of building.

 

Exploration is hard to justify because it’s hard to measure. When exploration is complete, you often have nothing to hold up to your project manager to explain or justify the expenditure of time. Here’s what you tell them, “My job isn’t just building product; I also build people.”

 

 

They can only ‘take one for the team’ for so long. There are legitimate and frequent situations where someone needs to suck it up and dig into crap work for longer than they’d like. This is an inevitable function of teams of people working together — work becomes stratified by perceived importance. There’s no shit work when the work is all yours, there’s just work you like to do and work you have to do.

 

Occasional stints on the latter are a good perspective reset for everyone on the team, but being left too long on “have to” work is a guarantee of eventual boredom. What isn’t obvious is that there are folks who aren’t going to complain because they believe the right thing to do is to take one for the team. They worry that that the act of complaining is tantamount to saying, “I don’t believe I should do shit work” or they’re simply wary of being accused of not being a team player.

We all get shit work, but it’s the responsibility of the guy or gal in charge to dole this work out fairly and consistently. That means they’re constantly aware and communicating to the person who is currently taking one for them, knowing how long they’ve been taking it, and when they’re going to be done.

 

 

Protect their time. Embrace the ambiguity of their experiment. Agreeing to let them experiment and obsess about a fascinating project is only half the game. The business day is full of previously undiscovered “things to do”, and your knee-jerk response when you find this new, urgent piece of work is to saddle it on the guy who is working on… something. You don’t know what it is because he can barely describe it himself, so please handle this urgent task. I swear when you’re done you can get back to… whatever it is you’re doing.

 

A terrific way to accelerate the boredom clock is a promise of productive and creative time that is then taken away. In the heat of the moment, the ambiguous nature of their experiment makes the decision easy: Get this urgent, unplanned task done or make progress on the unmeasurable? The only thing this decision teaches your team is how little you value the cultivation of your people.

 

 

Aggressively remove noise. In addition to previously undiscovered work, a daily set of distractions courtesy of exhausting people will pull your engineer away from their work. Random meetings, phone calls, interviews. These 30- to 60-minute tasks feel transactional and brief and there is no way you can fully remove a team member from them, but you manage them. Similar to crap work, it’s your job to evenly spread the load of daily noise across the team. More importantly, it’s your job to remember that productivity costs surrounding these micro-tasks aren’t just the 30 minutes necessary to get them done, it’s the context-switching tax involved in stopping their work, preparing for the task, doing the task, and then rebuilding the context regarding the work that floats their boat.

 

There are two aspects of interesting work that equally fire up the nerd brain: the identification of interesting work and making progress on that work. And progress is not measured in interrupt-driven minutes, it’s blocks of delicious, uninterrupted hours.

 

 

Tell them what the hell is going on. Much of the above activity implies that you’re paying attention, but your attention is only half the solution. The other half is regularly keeping folks in the loop regarding your thoughts. In terms of a low-cost means of keeping your team content, the simple act of saying, “I know where you want to be and I’m thinking about how to get you there” is a way to demonstrate you care about the growth of your team.

 

Don’t Forget What It’s Like to Build a Thing

This piece might read like I believe that engineering is some privileged artisan class and that I’m overly protective, and that is exactly what I believe. My gig is the care and feeding of engineers, and their productivity is my productivity. If they all leave, I have exactly no job.

Part of your credibility as a leader is your public and repeated declaration that it’s your job to help your team succeed, but you have another task: you need to keep building stuff.

I’ve gone back and forth on whether managers should code and my opinion is: don’t stop coding. Each week that passes where you don’t share the joy, despair, and discovery of software development is a week when you slowly forget what it means to be a software developer. Over time it means you’ll have a harder time talking to engineers because you’ll forget how they think and how they become bored.