Serious Simplicity

Techrunch today published excerpts from Ray Ozzie’s strategy memo to employees. Although most of it was somewhat of a “duh-welcome-to-the-club” moment one bit struck a chord.

The Power of “Choice” as business moves to embrace the cloud

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design patterns at both the front- and back-end are transitioning toward being compositions and in some cases loose federations of cooperating systems … [because] … myriad options exist for delivering applications to the user: The web browser, unique in its ubiquity; the PC, unique in how it brings together interactivity/experience, mobility and storage; the phone, unique in its extreme mobility.

It struck a chord because of a coincidentally related breakfast discussion this morning. The Web has brought a previously unparalled power of choice and democratisation to consumers. Global peer-to-peer discussions fulled by user generated content have not only redefined the knowledge base on which consumers make decisions but also “coerced” large corporations’ PR machines to change their traditional modus operandi. It’s becoming harder than ever for companies to hide misdemeanors – from the littlest to the harshest – because the web is both ubiquitous and persistent.

Despite corporations being larger than life, CEOs have found themselves in a situation where  they must engage in direct conversation with their customers, be it via blogs, Twitter or any other social medium. A recent classic example is the lash-back Facebook suffered on its launch of Beacon.

A New Breed of Entrepreneurs

More interesting and to the point however is what a new ‘breed’ of entrepreneurs are doing given this climate of potential insurrection and swift customer disengagement. Companies like 37Signals, Fon and Seesmic are not only participating in the discussion, but initiating and embracing it. Seesmic in particular, being still in alpha (or is it beta now?), is not just listening to users’ feedback, but basing its product design decisions on what users ask for a priori.

Hopefully, as consumers become more and more used to this method of doing business, they will not only love it more, but come to expect it. And from simply reshaping their PR departments, companies the likes of Microsoft, Apple and the horrendously complicated mobile operators, will be pushed toward redesigning the way their product design departments work.

Even worse than procrastination is a bout of negative productivity.

Procrastination can be irritating but at least its somewhat in your hands. Negative productivity comes about from events that happen outside of your control but that conspire to drive you nuts. Typically just when you’ve decided to stop procrastinating and get some work done…

This happened to me yesterday.

Having taken a strong decision to spend a solid afternoon working on the upcoming Billy Connolly website, I made coffee, turned on my laptop and prepared to get down to business, little knowing that Fate was thinking “And now, for something completely different!”

Each time I got started with outlining a work plan I was rudely interrupted by various things ranging from soggy sheets stubbornly entangled in each other, delivery of a large box of clothes and books, delivery of a new microwave oven, failed attempts to get rid of old microwave oven, bad internet connectivity, forgotten passwords, and finally, numerous topplings-over of clothes horse under combined weight of said soggy sheets.

By the end of 5 hours, all I had accomplished was writing down a list of 5 to-do items and in the process of doing so had reached such a level of frustration that it was impossible to settle down to do anything productive by then.

So I went out to have a Gynn ‘N’ Tonnick, safely procrastinating further work to the next day :-)

A philosopher friend recently directed me to the work of one John Perry, a philosopher who writes about structured procrastination. A procrastinating philosopher you might say. Of course, I procrastinated for about 2 days before getting around to looking properly at his stuff. He says:

All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing.

Apart from being an accomplished procrastinator myself, I was recently looking into procrastination as a tool for positive action. A kind of “stick”, or negative driver if you will, that, by being something people want to avoid, acts as a catalyst inspiring positive action.

One can look at this as a sort of mental martial art, i.e. using a negative trait to your advantage. It’s worth reading his essay and browsing his site if you’ve ever thought of yourself as a procrastinator… while you should be doing something else of course…