The irony of much of the book is that the answer to how to motivate is simply “Get out of the way.” Throw in some trust and you’ll have folks truly motivated. Of course, it presumes that the folks you’re hiring are capable. But if you’re in any type of company that requires intellectual effort, motivated people are not that hard to find. Keeping them motivated is the trick. And most firms fail by simply failing to realize that so-called “incentives” are anything but.

The book is filled with tidbits, such as:

• “Careful consideration of reward effects reported in 128 experiments lead to the conclusion that tangible rewards tend to have a substantially negative effect on intrinsic motivation … When institutions … focus on the short-term and opt for controlling people’s behaviour they do considerable long-term damage.” (pg. 39)
• “For artists, scientists, inventors, schoolchildren, and the rest of us, intrinsic motivation … is essential for high levels of creativity.” (pg. 46)
  
• “… researchers at Cornell University studied 320 small businesses, half of which granted workers autonomy, the other half relying on top-down direction. The businesses that offered autonomy grew at four times the rate of the control-oriented firms and had one-third the turnover.” (pg. 91)
• “… satisfaction depends not merely on having goals, but on having the right goals …” (pg. 143)
• “Performance reviews … are about as enjoyable as a toothache and as productive as a train wreck.” (pg. 157)
• “Real challenges are far more invigorating than controlled [ed: read artificial, enforced] leisure.” (pg. 169)

The gist of it all is that creative people crave autonomy. They might need “direction” but it should come in terms of mentoring, not fixed, hard goals that don’t truly motivate. Enforced leisure, goals, deadlines, etc. imply that someone higher up in the hierarchy knows better, that they have a better grasp of the intricacies of the work being performed or what will make a given individual happiness. It’s rarely the case.

I recommend anyone starting a company read this book. I also recommend anyone at a large firm who’s trying to figure out why their publicly traded firm seems “stuck” to read it, too. The portion of the book that discusses how companies that are constantly providing guidance doing worse — much worse — than those who provide occasional guidance is eye-opening. And once you read it it makes perfect sense. I know from my own experience, the constant jumping to quarterly requirements simply resulted in a staccato performance as we tried to get into step with some random goals as opposed to striving to be the best, to focus on the customer, to provide joy to employees and clients so that strong relationships are built where those clients will repeatedly come back because they know they’re getting more than just a bum in a seat. They’re getting a creative person who cares about their problem as much as they do.

You can see entrepreneurs making the right decisions and still losing. You feel the pain of the various entrepreneurs who were forced out of their companies or saw their life work collapse around them. Even some of those that were financially rewarded suffered as they were wrenched from their companies only to watch as the companies became something other than what they had intended. I found it comforting to realize that the emotional roller coaster for start-ups was pretty much universal.

This is one of those books that I wish were written back in 1997.

One thing I noticed courtesy of John Cook’s blog is what amounts to two new additions to Brooks’ Law.

Brooks’ Law is the famous “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” We can now add:

• “Many hands make light work” — Often.
• Corollary: “Many hands make more work” — Always.

And what I’d call Brooks’ Law of Design:

• Most great works have been made by one mind. The exceptions have been made by two minds.

Obviously, I highly recommend anything written by Fred Brooks. His Mythical Man Month is a classic that everyone should read, especially project managers. His new book is the same, a must read.

I’ve always loved the fact that Brooks has little use for the Waterfall Model. I loathe it, and it seems he does too. I like being in good company .

I found it a great read, though there are a number of typos, format errors, and grammatical mistakes. I do also find he should have cleaned up the format a bit. It’s in an interview format, which is fine, but there are places where it could have flowed better. Sometimes there’s a single interjection by either the author or the coder being interviewed. I didn’t quite see the point as those small interjections didn’t offer much, if anything.

However, overall, I really enjoyed the book. There are some nice tidbits, including the overall dislike of C++ — with which I can sympathize.

While reading the book I decided to tag passages I thought were insightful or interesting. Here’s a summary.

• Jamie Zawinski   (7)
• Brad Fitzpatrick  (7)
• Douglas Crockford  (12)
• Brendan Eich  (7)
• Joshua Bloch   (7)
• Joe Armstrong   (9)
• Simon Peyton Jones    (4)
• Peter Norvig   (4)
• Guy Steele   (14)
• Dan Ingalls   (7)
• L Peter Deutsch  (13)
• Ken Thompson   (9)
• Fran Allen   (4)
• Bernie Cosell   (6)
• Donald Knuth  (14)

Obviously I found Douglas Crockford, Guy Steele, L Peter Deutsch, and Donald Knuth the most interesting.

The above stats are rather meaningless since they apply to my particular read of the book and reflect my interests or where the interviewee is actually stating something that makes me take notice. Others may not be so enamoured with what a given interviewee stated at a given point, but no matter.

Ultimately, the book was a satisfying read. I like reading up on computer history from a personal perspective. I think the lack of computer historians is rather troubling as we’ll lose these first person reflections as folks retire and then pass on. Knowing why things are the way they are is important to understanding how we can fix them, improve upon them, or when it’s time to throw something out.

In fact, I think that last is a big problem. We seem unwilling to walk away from something and simply say that it’s past its best before date. That it’s time to rework a system or solution or redo it entirely. Instead, we patch and patch and fix and extend until we end up with totally unmanageable messes on our hands. It’s totally aggravating. And having been in the computer industry for 30 years now I bemoan how bad its gotten. Seibel is right in asking many of his interviewees whether or not they could be a programmer today. That one question resonated most with me. Today I find computer science rather infuriating, frustrating, and depressing. Instead of getting smaller, better, more efficient, more expressive I see bigger, more cumbersome solutions and languages. I thought by now systems would be much much better. But it just isn’t so.

Thus, I can’t recommend the book highly enough. It’s a great read. You get historical perspective from a variety of people. You can read some fairly blunt assessments of where we are and what some are trying to do about it. And yet you can’t but help hear an underlying lament over what’s become of the field. That somehow we’ve seriously lost our way. That it just isn’t what we all thought it would be 30 years ago and that that is highly depressing for all involved.

For the nerd or geek in your life, this would be a great present. I’d actually recommend it along with Founders at Work.

Although I hope to write a bit of a review once I’m through the book, this post, however, concerns a quote from his book that just struck me on a number of levels.

Strategy makes sense as a project only in the context of uncertainty, or, more generally, in a context where pure reason will not deliver a definitive answer to the question “what is to be done?” But a purely rational framework … leaves no space for such “irrationality.” So the framework solves strategic problems only in a context where there is no possibility that such problems will arise.

A stunning statement. And it reminds me oh so much of Project Management, especially as applied to software projects — which, to be honest, are highly irrational. However, we try to push some form of framework atop a project only to watch projects flounder the more tightly we adhere to a given framework or project management strategy.

Stewart’s book reminds me of deMarco’s recent paper in the IEEE on Project Management and this choice quote:

My early metrics book, Controlling Software Projects: Management, Measurement, and Estimates [1986], played a role in the way many budding software engineers quantified work and planned their projects. In my reflective mood, I’m wondering, was its advice correct at the time, is it still relevant, and do I still believe that metrics are a must for any successful software development effort? My answers are no, no, and no.

I’m gradually coming to the conclusion that software engineering is an idea whose time has come and gone.

Software development is and always will be somewhat experimental. The actual software construction isn’t necessarily experimental, but its conception is. And this is where our focus ought to be. It’s where our focus always ought to have been.

As Knuth has repeatedly stated, software development is an art. It’s a craft. It’s not a science. And I, as many of my friends know, have long stated that anything that has to put “science” in its name isn’t a science. And the sooner we realize and behave according to the reality that computer science is more artistic but with a rigorous requirement pertaining to mathematics and that might be why it attracts the eccentric individuals that I spend my days with. And I wouldn’t have it any other way!

The tome is beautiful and well worth it for anyone who enjoys Dilbert and wants to reread some of the older strips or just wants to see what they may have missed — or forgotten — from years gone by.

Of course you can just head over to the Dilbert.com site and see the strips there, now in colour.

My favourite strip remains this one:

which, I’m proud to say, is the day I made Dilbert. I submitted that to Scott Adams years ago and then in 2003 it appeared. I was tickled pink to see a part of my life immortalized.

Note that the book is available for free but not if you’re outside the US. The audio book is free regardless, it seems.

It’s an interesting read, but a quick read as well. I could probably summarize the whole book as follows:

Give away something that’s common or easily created in abundance while selling something that is rare or precious or more fully featured to those who wish a more intimate, more private, or simply more extensive instance of the thing you are selling.

Thus, he’s proposing that that which has become a commodity — too cheap to meter, say — should be given away or provided in an open fashion. That which is rarer, say the statistical analysis of some data, should be sold to those wishing access to it and then at a premium.

He even uses his own book as an example. The audio book is literally free (gratis). You can download it and listen to it. However, the abridged version is somewhere in the neighbourhood of $10us. The reason? Someone had to abridge it, which saves the listener time, which the listener would be willing to pay for — the saved time, that is. Same holds for the book. His attitude is that the book is easily copied once completed but if you want his time to discuss the book, in small or large groups, you’ll pay for the privilege.

All that makes perfect sense. And Anderson provides a vast number of examples of each type of “Free” that he defines:

1. Direct Cross-Subsidies. What’s free is any product that entices you to pay for something else. Free to everyone willing to pay eventually, one way or another.
2. Three Party Market. What’s free is content, services, software, and more. Free to everyone.
3. Freemium. What’s free is anything that’s matched with a premium paid version. Free to basic users only.
4. Nonmonetary Markets. What free is anything people choose to give away with no expectation of payment. Free to everyone.  (Anderson claims this takes several forms: Gift Economy, Labour Exchange, and Piracy).

You can argue or not with him, and Gladwell has. But it is well argued.

I didn’t find any surprises here. It’s all pretty obvious if you’ve been in high tech. He doesn’t explain how some of the free offerings will ever make enough money to actually cover their costs — like say YouTube. But he does point out various methods that do work.

My question re: free in general is whether there is a viable economic model for anything of substantive size. I agree that free on a small and medium scale works well, but I’ve not really seen it work on a large scale. I know some would point out Google, but Google is an advertising firm — or more accurately, a search engine that happens to also be the world’s biggest classifieds. Then again, maybe Google is the perfect example.

No matter, my issue is that there’s this little bit inside of me that screams “Dot Com” every time I turned a page of his book. The “new economics” and the notion that somehow all this would pan out to our benefit. It’s an interesting concept, but the economy is a lot more complicated and moving bits around is more than a creation ex nihilo so that there is no initial cost in said bits.  The way I look at it is thusly: Linux is free, but people put their time in there for free while having a real job that paid the bills — or they were students hacking away on the side between classes. The model of free works if you can give something away and make money on other pieces, but what if you’re not so lucky? How do you make money then? And how do you build up that initial package of “free bits” to give away that will entice others to give you money?

I don’t know. As I said, I can see it working for a lot of cases but it’s just not something that works for everyone. I just can’t see how the media can ultimately give away all their reporting, for example. Who’s going to pay the journalists, editors, etc. to put the information into useful packages? If the stuff is just given away how are these people to earn enough money? The crisis in the newspaper industry seems to highlight the fact that free isn’t a panacea.

Or maybe I’m just not bright enough to see how this can work for information. As it must. No exceptions. Because information, once “out there” is hard to contain.

But read the book. It’s well worth it from the perspective of trying to see if this will truly work beyond the small subset of instances it’s currently worked in in the world. Besides it’s free online so it’ll only cost you time, assuming you have time to spare. Then you can answer whether it is a new way of doing things or not. Personally, I don’t know but it is worth pondering.

Geeks Bearing Gifts

I’m re-reading a book by Ted Nelson, the guy who created the notion of hypertext back in 67, and fully documented it. You can read about his creation, called Xanadu, on Wikipedia.

His new book is more of a rant about the computer industry. It’s a telling book.

First for the oddities of the book. It’s self-published via Lulu Press. It’s full of typographical and grammatical errors. It seems to have been written as one long diatribe, in historic form, about how we got into the predicament we’re currently in. And he numbers his chapters from the beginning to end using Unix as the central epoch thereby requiring the pre-Unix history to be provided in chapters denoted by a negative number. Unique, to say the least. Each chapter is short, a few pages at most, and full of personal opinion and historical detail. In a way, the book is partially biographical, at least in terms of his life and opinions and dealings with computers and the computer industry.

You can quite literally pick any chapter and find nuggets. One of my favourite chapters is the one on databases, Chapter -20 (yes, minus 20). He goes on about the desire of corporations to unify everything, especially their data, processes, etc. He wonders about the sanity of such an endeavor. How can one structure be defined that is universal for all the data within a firm — or with the Semantic Web effort, universal for all data now and forever more?

His discussion on ontologies and the semantic web and other things he dislikes is fascinating not because it’s a diatribe or rant but because he actually states what he thinks is better. He finds it insane that we’re trying to create ontologies wherein “… we have to agree on the categories and terminology for all time.” This attempt to shove everything into a single structure is crazy and doomed to failure, and yet the industry persists. He provides ample examples.

The book is simply full of such observations. It’s bare writing. But that is preferable as the text is more fluid.

And not only does he discuss things in a fluid manner — it reads sort of like an interview — but nearly every page has a nugget of pure gold. An idea so profound that you can only shake your head in wonderment that it’s not been done yet. And if it’s not an idea that should already have seen the light of day he provides examples of how poorly something we currently use has been done. And again, you shake your head.

Reading his book is like reading something I’d have written. It nicely captures the disgust I have with the industry of late. It captures my feeling of us going backwards, instead of forwards. The despondency over the fact we seem more inclined to use technology as a hammer as opposed to trying to comprehend a true generic solution, as opposed to the specific solutions we’re inundated with.

I could have picked any chapters, but I selected Chapter -20 because it’s something I deal with regularly. This notion that a single ontology to rule them all is what we need, that hierarchies are the answer to everything, is truly depressing. More depressing are the tidbits he injects from personal communications with various folks in the industry. Truly depressing when you follow the comments to their logical conclusion.

Thus, I can’t recommend this book highly enough. It’s fascinating reading.

You can only get it efficiently through Amazon.com as it’s an “on-demand” print from Lulu Press. I’d say it’s worth the $20us simply because it has so many ideas lurking on every page as he laments the state of the art and how much we’ve not gone forward since the 60s and 70s.

It may not look like a book on entrepreneurship and you may never have heard of Felix Dennis, but trust me this book is definitely on entrepreneurship and you’ve used Mr. Dennis’ products. He founded Dennis Publishing which publishes such titles as MacUser, Computer Shopper, Maxim, and a slew of others extant and defunct.

The book is written in a narrative style, as though he’s sitting with you in the family room full of anecdotes interjected with advice on how to get rich. It’s not hackneyed advice at all but advice taken from failures and successes within Mr. Dennis’ life.   It is written in an easy to read style which makes it a pleasurable read but if you’ve ever run a startup or been party to the excitement centered around one then you’ll be nodding your head at a lot of the sound advice. If you’ve simply interested in starting a company this book will help realize what it takes to get rich. It is not a “get rich quick” book but a book that focuses on the realities of the chore and how difficult it is and what’s required and necessary of the individual pursuing the goal.

Ironically, the title is more a hook than anything else. He points this out in the book. It actually comments on what it means to start up a company with the (hopeful) goal that you’ll succeed monetarily. He points out the long hours required, the strain on relationships, the stress of making payroll, the headiness of the chase and the insanity of attempting to compete with those larger than you. He points out how to do things the right way, the wrong way, and where luck plays a part in all of this. You can read the pain when he writes about those who doubted him and how, often, he had to do things alone as others thought him crazy. He points out that few will understand your compulsion, few will wish to partake of it. And few will be pleased should you succeed.

To be honest I’d not heard of the man. I’ve obviously heard of his magazines. I saw the cover which just screamed at me to take a peek inside. And I was hooked. It’s simply a fantastic book for any aspiring entrepreneur who wants some sage advice on what it’s like to start a company, what happens over time, who to surround yourself with, etc.

After reading the book I wandered the web a bit to find out a bit more about him. He’s quite the character. There are a lot of reviews on the book praising it and  there are a slew of interviews with the man. He has an “I don’t care” attitude in some of them whicih makes for rather entertaining reading. Unlike some who author books on becoming wealthy Mr. Dennis truly doesn’t care if the book makes any money. He’s well off enough. As he points out, he knows his worth within $400M. Thus this book will only result in noise to his bottom line. He truly wrote it to put some advice out there that those amongst us smart enough to comprehend should take. By way of example he provides Felix’s 10 Commandments for Getting Rich:

1. Buy [his] book How to Get Rich.
2. Analyse your need to be wealthy.
3. Cut loose from negative influences.
4. Having a great idea is not enough.
5. Focus.
6. Hire talent smarter than you. Delegate.
7. Ownership is the real “secret”.
8. Sell before you need to, or when bored.
9. Empty your mind when negotiating.
10. Fear nothing and no one.

You can read more about the book at the book’s web site.

You can also check out his site and even read some of his poetry, which he provides samples of in his book as well as commentary on how much he loves to write it — as well as statements to how much sooner he had hoped to start writing but business got in the way.

A new permanent addition to my Entrepreneur bookshelf.

Gladwell takes interesting topics — such as the notion of  a tipping point — and presents them in an accessible manner. Some bemoan him his ability to get these topics, created by academics, out the door in readable prose. However, to me that’s talent. There’s nothing harder than explaining a complex idea in an accessible manner.

It’s why I’ll be picking up a copy of Outlier. I’m sure it’ll explain a lot of different ideas succinctly and provide me with the relevant links to the original science. I can’t see how this is a lose for anyone. I find it a definite win since I can point non-technical folks to Gladwell’s work while leveraging his bibliography to discover where many of these ideas originated and the research behind them, all without having to spend time doing a literature search myself!