How Many Emails Does It Take To Make You Call It Spam?

So I was looking at my email inbox the other day when something struck me -- on any given day, I get two to four emails from wine vendors. That's not a total count, that's a per-vendor count. Each wine vendor I've given my email address to likes to celebrate our relationship by sending me multiple offers each day.

And yet for the most part, I don't block these emails. I don't grumble in the same disgusted tone that I use for bulk emails from Consumer Reports or other companies that drip market to me on a weekly or monthly basis.

So my question to you is simply this -- are there vendors or markets that you participate in where you get more than one email a day from the vendor? Are they things that you have signed up for? Have you blocked any of them?

Why Are People Shocked About Flip?

Earlier this week, Cisco announced a restructuring that basically eliminated the Flip camera group, a company that they bought for $590 million a few years ago. Following that announcement, I've seen a number of posts that reflect a sense of shock surrounding the death of the product. Me, I'm more surprised that people seem surprised.

When the iPhone 3GS was launched and included video capabilities, there were numerous articles and posts about how iPhone video would be the death of the Flip. Since that time, there's been a lot of innovation in mobile video on the smartphone platform -- Apple even added iMovie and basic video editing to the platform with the iPhone 4. Meanwhile, the Flip platform hasn't evolved. This leads to several questions:

• Was the acquisition simply a strategic blunder on Cisco's part?
• Was this a technology or other resource acquisition?
• Was this the result of a large organization being unable to provide the fertile environment needed by a start-up to prosper?
• Would a start-up version of Flip been able to innovate enough to remain competitive?

In the end though, this shift in the market has been going on for two years. I'm not really sure how that constitutes a surprise.

Reflections on Freakanomics Radio Podcasts

Recently, I've been listening my way through the series of podcasts from the Freakanomics Radio team. If you aren't familiar with them, this is from the same guys that wrote Freakanomics and Superfreakanomics. The catchphrase that they use a lot is "exploring the hidden side of everything."

One of the themes that runs through most of the things that they explore is that, often, when we think about incentives that drive behavior, we underestimate some hidden incentives that actually have a powerful effect on behavior.

One example of this is highlighted in their episode on World Cup soccer. As part of their exploration of soccer, they talk about penalty shots and how the results correlate closely to game theory. At the same time, they point out that, statistically, penalty kicking players under-utilize a kick to the center that should result in more goals if they kicked the ball there. However, players are driven by the hidden incentive of not looking like an idiot if they kick the ball straight and the goalie just stands there and catches it.

What struck me with this is, in our daily lives, how often we are affected by people who are driven by the hidden incentive of not looking like an idiot. This incentive is drilled into us as we grow up. It's something that we learn when we answer questions in front of our class. It's something we are reminded of when we speak in meetings. It's something we participate in when we hide behind consensus.

Creativity, on the other hand, often flies in the face of the not looking like an idiot incentive. It's exploring an under-utilized, under-exploited path. Creativity is a high-wire act where a successful effort results in a goal but everything else falls short.

So the question you might ask yourself is, how many of your successes came as a result of ignoring the incentive of not looking like an idiot? How would you measure those accomplishments in the overall scope of your history? Is there a theme there?

Design: The Essential Element

Often when people think about "design", they narrowly focus on external visual aspects of an object, like looking at the exterior of a car. To these people, design is this practice of taking a functional object with a set of features, then wrapping an elegant wrapper around the object. In that way, the functionality lives in one dimension, and the design, the artistically styled wrapper, exists in another. Offering one in pink, for the ladies, is what constitutes design for people with this mindset.

Design as an add-on is one reason why so many products suck. Design as an add-on means that you don't have an understanding of what and why. It means that users will have to penetrate a layer of wrapper to access the functionality that they need. But it's worse than gift wrap, because the lack of design means that what's inside the wrapper is a mismatched collection of cool stuff and useless garbage, neatly bundled in a colorful garbage bag.

Colorful garbage bags are often spawned in an environment where the push to do something leads any planning or vision. While one group might look at the popularity of the iPhone or the iPad and say "let's add a touch interface to our Windows platform," design weighs the functionality and utility against the cool factor. Design asks, "how does this help" and "does it make it easier".

Design is an editorial process. It's honing and focusing the what and how into it's most simple, straightforward essence. Design is about analyzing the why it is and it's interrelationship to the what. Design isn't just art, design is process -- one that we all follow with various levels of self-awareness.

Design is how we organize our closets or our kitchens. It's how we organize the remote controls for our television and our entertainment center. Imagine all of the places you could designate as 'the place you put the remote control when you watch TV'. Besides the obvious ones like next to you or in front of you, think about reasons you might use to justify some of the really stupid ones.

Too often though, people don't solve problems as designers. Instead of asking, "why do I have to get up and walk over to the remote control storage next to the TV in order to get the remote and change the channel," they ask, "why do I need to change the channel." Few people would consider the remote location as a design problem. And yet, as designers, sometimes our biggest challenge is to overcome people's undying commitment to arbitrary ways of structuring the problem like, "Dad could never find the remote control. He always put it by the television, so I put it there because I can always find it." Design deconstructs and rebuilds in order to explore how the idea is engineered and constructed.

Ultimately, design requires analytical thinking skills. Often, when people 'grow up' in environments where they simply follow processes and mindlessly repeat instruction sets, they don't practice critical analysis nor explore alternate conceptual frameworks. These kinds of environments, be they social, political, educational or workplace, maintain barriers and disincentives to original, analytical thinking.

In the end, the analytical thinking used in design may make you a hero, but it may make you the goat. It may make you an obstacle in the path of someone who doesn't think or understand -- someone who just wants to 'get it done.' There may be no glory in your approach, but trust your instincts -- you'll be glad you did.

Spacesuit: How Playtex Engineered An Iconic Piece of Space Technology

I was listening to NPR's Science Friday during lunch today and they had a great segment on the history of the Spacesuit used for the Apollo missions. It turns out that the suit was made by Playtex, the same company noted for their bras.

The discussion talks about the process of engineering the suit and the amazing technical aspects of the suit. But perhaps equally or more interesting, is the story of the designs that weren't used and how Playtex was not really who the engineers at NASA wanted to work with. Monchaux talks about how NASA engineers wanted to work with engineers, not people who made underwear, to craft this one-person spacecraft. And yet, Playtex's innovation and expertise in designing for humans won out. This looks like a great story about design and engineering.

Here's a link to the Science Friday segment pod cast. For fun, I've also embedded a video that they put together that features many of the suits that were considered but weren't used. Enjoy!

Here's from Amazon's description of the book:

When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface in July of 1969, they wore spacesuits made by Playtex: twenty-one layers of fabric, each with a distinct yet interrelated function, custom-sewn for them by seamstresses whose usual work was fashioning bras and girdles. This book is the story of those spacesuits. It is a story of the Playtex Corporation’s triumph over the military-industrial complex—a victory of elegant softness over engineered hardness, of adaptation over cybernetics.

Playtex’s spacesuit went up against hard armor-like spacesuits designed by military contractors and favored by NASA’s engineers. It was only when those suits failed—when traditional engineering firms could not integrate the body into mission requirements—that Playtex, with its intimate expertise, got the job. In Spacesuit, Nicholas de Monchaux tells the story of the twenty-one-layer spacesuit in twenty-one chapters addressing twenty-one topics relevant to the suit, the body, and the technology of the twentieth century. He touches, among other things, on eighteenth-century androids, Christian Dior’s New Look, Atlas missiles, cybernetics and cyborgs, latex, JFK's carefully cultivated image, the CBS lunar broadcast soundstage, NASA’s Mission Control, and the applications of Apollo-style engineering to city planning. The twenty-one-layer spacesuit, de Monchaux argues, offers an object lesson. It tells us about redundancy and interdependence and about the distinctions between natural and man-made complexity; it teaches us to know the virtues of adaptation and to see the future as a set of possibilities rather than a scripted scenario.

Another Link Worth Checking Out

Here's a post from earlier today on Techcrunch. Jack Dorsey & The Golden Gate Bridge (Exclusive Video) features a video that touches on a theme that I've been crafting a blog post around for some time now. Mine isn't ready to publish, but this really does highlight the importance of design.

Check it out.

Whom you should hire at a Start-up: A Repost and An Obeservation

Earlier this week, there was an interesting post on Techcrunch. I always like these types of posts when I come across them. Whom Should You Hire at a Startup? (Attitude over Aptitude) by Mark Suster is another post from a VC and former entrepreneur on how to look at the problem of building a strong team in a start-up. It's a short, easy read and I recommend going through it before you move through the rest of this post.

The area that I wanted to explore is one that is touched on in his second and fifth recommendations:

2. Find people to “punch above their weight class”
5. Attitude over Aptitude

If you add up some of his statements like

It means that many management teams I know feel the need to hire people who have “done it before” and frankly many VCs encourage this. It’s a mistake. When you hire somebody too early who has already “done it” you often find somebody that is less motivated in tough times, less willing to be scrappy (as many startups need to be), more “needy” and less mentally flexible / willing to change their way of thinking...

You said, “Eff experience. I want to know whether you can deliver. If you can, you’re golden. You’ll go a long way. If you can’t – you’re toast. Are you up for it?” It’s Tristan Walker of FourSquare. They hired him when he was an MBA. He had no right asking for a senior biz dev role at one of the hottest companies in the US. But he was ready to punch above his weight class. And he pushed for it.

You might wind up with the take-away of, "don't hire tired experienced people, hire hungry inexperienced people." If that was your take-away, I recommend that you read his other post from his blog, Who Should you Hire at a Startup? This post presents a more comprehensive look at the role of talent, capability and experience, and provides some additional insights.

The Reality of Experiences That Make You Tired
While it's easy to see students coming out of school with a hunger and a naive sense of excitement, most of us that have struggled in difficult employment environments understand that there are a lot of pressures that can wear you down, weigh on your sense of enthusiasm, and make you a bit cynical. After all, if everything at work was exciting, challenging growth, you probably wouldn't be motivated to do something different. And when you interview, this is one of the challenges you often face in positioning yourself -- you don't want to seem like a grumpy curmudgeon that simply can't get along with the people you work with, but you need to position some clear reasons why you're considering this change. But regardless of how you present it, people want smiles in interviews and you're carrying frustrations.

So here you have the "Attitude / aptitude" issue wrapped up in a microcosm of perception. Perhaps the driver for your frustrations are the bureaucracies of your current employer or tired of being told that you don't know how to do your job because the organization doesn't follow your recommendations. Perhaps it's all driven by your frustrated desires to have a more senior role or more control of the process. It's even possible that you've tried to do more, only to be shot down as 'not getting it', too inexperienced, or not the right fit. In one sense, this might put you in the "punch above your weight class" group, but it also depends on the individual.

People react to adversity in different ways. As a long-distance cyclist, I've seen very tired people face hills near the end of a ride and get angry. I've seen them give up. I've also seen people who dig deep and continue to work, continue to push to get to their goal. In the case of people that you're considering for a start-up, while the environment that you're hiring them from may suck, I think that what you're looking for are the people capable of continuing to turn the pedals when the going gets tough. That doesn't mean someone who is happy to continue turning the pedals in a bureaucracy, but that's really back to the attitude question.


So What Do You Think?
Can somebody who is coming from an environment where they have been beaten down, told that they don't know what their doing or that they are doing it wrong be successful in a start-up? Can they succeed in an interview? Perhaps more to the point, if you're looking for a position where you can "punch outside of your weight class", do you really believe that a company will consider an "underqualified" candidate in today's job market? In other words, are you targeting a market where you have a realistic opportunity?