Morale & Budgets

Brad Bird: In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget—but never shows up in a budget—is morale. If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.

Hayagreeva Rao, Robert Sutton, and Allen P. Webb, "Innovation lessons from Pixar Director Brad Bird," McKinsey Quarterly, April 2008, www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Innovation_lessons_from_Pixar_An_interview_with_Oscar-winning_director_Brad_Bird_2127.

That’s very Googley

For now, Microsoft continues to fight alone, but with more vigor than in years past, analysts said. Less than a month after Bing’s release, Microsoft beat Google and Yahoo to a hot new area in search: It became the first major search engine to index new postings from popular Twitter users almost immediately. The move helped amplify the buzz around Bing.

“I feel like they are a little more daring,” Mr. Sullivan said. “They popped this thing out in a few weeks. That’s very Googley.”

Miguel Helft, "Bing Delivers Credibility to Microsoft," NYTimes.com, 13 July 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/07/14/technology/companies/14bing.html.

Stories for change

We tend to conform to the behavior of the people around us. Which is what makes culture change particularly challenging because everyone is conforming to the current culture. Sometimes though, the problem contains the solution.

'Stories.' I said to the head of the firm.

'Excuse me?' he responded.

'You change a culture with stories. Right now your stories are about how hard you work people. Like the woman you forced to work on her wedding day. You may not be proud of it, but it's the story you tell. That story conveys your culture simply and reliably. And I'm certain you're not the only one who tells it. You can be sure the bride tells it. And all her friends. If you want to change the culture, you have to change the stories.'

Peter Bregman, "A Good Way to Change a Corporate Culture," HarvardBusiness.org, 25 June 2009, blogs.harvardbusiness.org/bregman/2009/06/the-best-way-to-change-a-corpo.html via a tweet by David Armano

good questions

America? What could I possibly teach this esteemed group about America? Then I remembered what one of my mentors, Bill Lazier, told me about effective teaching: Don't try to come up with the right answers; focus on coming up with good questions.

Jim Collins, "How the Mighty Fall: A Primer on the Warning Signs," BusinessWeek, 14 May 2009, www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_21/b4132026786379.htm.

simplicity, accessibility, honesty, and enjoyment

'With technology, the function is much more abstract to users,' Ive, then 32, told us. 'So the product's meaning is almost entirely defined by the designer.' Even then, it was clear that Apple's head of design knew what he was doing. Ive defined his overarching design principles as 'simplicity, accessibility, honesty, and enjoyment.'

"Most Creative People 2009: Jonathan Ive," Fast Company, June 2009, www.fastcompany.com/100/2009/jonathan-ive

If you're terrified to release control, nothing gets made!

I'm not going to run out of creativity or ideas, so I don't hang on to stuff for dear life. If you're terrified to release control, nothing gets made!

"Most Creative People 2009: Dave Stewart," Fast Company, June 2009, www.fastcompany.com/100/2009/dave-stewart

Keep teams small

Marissa Mayer: So if we double and we had 18 engineers, would we want them to do the three things twice as well? Or would we want to do twice as many things? And I said, “Well, obviously we’d want to do twice as many things.” And so you know that’s how we’ve grown. We’ve tried to keep the teams really small which leads to a sense of empowerment, people making decisions around what’s the best feature, what do their users need, how are they going to build the best product, and it allows also for them to be really agile. You know, we try and avoid meetings and like a lot of reasons when you have — one of the great things that happens with a small team is you can put them all in the same office. At Google we usually have three or four people in each office and that works really well because when they wanted to make a decision, people just roll back from their desk and say, “Hey –”

Michael Arrington, "Marissa Mayer On Charlie Rose: The Future Of Google, Future Of Search," TechCrunch, 6 Mar 2009, www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/06/marissa-mayer-on-charlie-rose-the-future-of-google

Set in Our Ways: Why Change Is So Hard: Scientific American

As the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus put it: “Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; but remember that what you now have was once among the things only hoped for.”

Nikolas Westerhoff, "Set in Our Ways: Why Change Is So Hard," Scientific American, Dec 2008www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=set-in-our-ways via a tweet from Scobble and ZDNet

The most important thing for the Kindle to do is to disappear

It gave it a slimmer design and more storage, but there are a lot of things Amazon could have added, but didn't. Things like a color display not only would make the device pricier and give it a shorter battery life, but would also make the gadget uncomfortable to hold.

"One of the great things about Kindle is it doesn't ever get hot," Amazon Vice President Ian Freed said in an interview at Amazon's downtown office here. That's important, Freed said, given that the company has one main goal with the Kindle--making the product as invisible to users as possible when they are reading.

"The most important thing for the Kindle to do is to disappear," Freed said. That was the goal with the first device and was also a key factor in deciding what would go in the sequel, which started shipping on Monday. There are the obvious factors, like the thinner, sleeker design. But there are also things like an improved cellular modem. As a result, Kindle users will find themselves out of range in fewer places to get updates or buy a new book.

Ina Fried, "Designing the Kindle 2," Beyond Binary - CNET News, 24 Feb 2009, news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10170310-56.html.

the where and the who

Stegner certainly had the writerly credentials — Ph.D, a teaching stint at Harvard, short stories published in all the right journals read by all the right people. But he chose to make the cultural elite come to him.

And he grounded himself, spending nearly half his life in the Palo Alto foothills above Stanford.

On his 100th birthday, it’s worth remembering another lesson of his life — to choose authenticity over artifice. “If you don’t know where you are,” he said, paraphrasing the writer Wendell Berry, “you don’t know who you are.”

He knew — the where and the who.

Timothy Egan, "Stegner’s Complaint," Timothy Egan Blog - NYTimes.com, 18 Feb 2009, egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/.