Open-mindedness

The human brain is pretty cool

My lovely bride and I were blessed with our first child about six months ago. The journey of a new father has been extraordinary so far and it has been fascinating to watch our little guy grow and change every week.

Back in drama school we had a great Alexander/Feldenkrais instructor who spent a number of weeks with us learning to crawl. I am sure that sounds strange for a bunch of grad students to be stretched out on the floor learning to roll-over, sit up and crawl 20+ years after the fact, but it was a remarkable project.

Now, 16 odd years later, I am watching my little boy go thru the same wants/needs and flexing/stretching of the same muscles to look around or accidentally roll-over as he tries to reach something. After that semester of work, I am completely enraptured by every move he makes, and I can see his little brain working out those issues that we studied so long ago.

I was reading something the other day that talked about the innate reflexes in babies. Apparently, if you hold a baby up as if it is standing on its own two feet, immediately after birth, the baby will walk. Obviously, he cannot support his own weight, but the reflex is there in the brain to put one foot in front of the other and walk. If you do the same test again, 4 months later, the baby no longer shows that same reflex, he will just stand still, rather than start the walking reflex. What shocked me about this little experiment was that if you stand that same 4 month old baby in a bathtub with water up to his waist, the walking reflex returns!

My latest addition to the dictionary of bizarre corporate-speak

I was on a call the other day with some very smart people. There was a team from a large bank and another team from IBM. During the call we were discussing the normal delays that happen during a large software roll out, and someone said:

"The tech guys have been solutioning this issue for the past week, and hope to have it resolved soon."

Solutioning? Really?!?!

Is there a better way to fund theatre?

I stumbled on an article from Bloomburg this morning that is talking about a significant decline in corporate and family philanthropy for the arts.

A few nuggets from the article:

• 45% of companies, in a recent poll, are cutting their philanthropy budget
  
• Another 16% are considering cuts
  
• High net-worth family contributions to the arts are down 71%
  
• During the same time charitable giving to health-related causes has grown by 51.2%
  

I am a firm believer in the value that the arts bring to the world and see theatre as one of the underpinnings of our rich culture. However, are we doing this the right way? Is charitable giving the only way to support and foster the arts in our society? If it is, then are we not hanging our cultural hat on the hooks of the Dow or the whims of the wealthy?

Solving the starvation of the arts in our society may take a bigger view than just searching for wealthy benefactors. Are the arts organizations in our communities doing enough to foster and grow a theatre-going public? Should we be looking at solutions that build a true arts economy?

I've got some ideas on how our struggling theatre community can leverage new ideas and new economic models that have been proven in other industries. Over the coming months I hope we can discuss it more. In the meantime, go see a play.

Rewarding good decisions, rather than good outcomes

Let's start with the premise that we learn more from risk taking and failure than we do from the easy success. For most companies, they have to invest in potential failure in order to succeed. Taking risks, where other companies may not, is the surest way to break through the competition.

Much like Thomas Edison, a good proportion of you innovations should fail.

Now, most companies reward individuals and teams based on the outcomes of their actions. So, if a person is rewarded for just "making their numbers" or for successfully executing on the common plan, the company runs the risk of becoming stagnant in their field.

What if this were turned on its head? How about rewarding people for their decisions, rather than the outcomes? If a person is making smart decisions, regardless of the outcome, they should be rewarded. And the flip side is if a person is making bad decisions, they should not be rewarded.

This twist in logic has been useful for me in building an innovation fueled company. By letting people risk failure, so long as they are making smart decisions, we have been able to grab large chunks of the messaging market where other companies fear to tread.

One of the interesting side effects of building this type of culture has been that every employee has a deeper understanding and commitment to the overall success of the company. Engineers and product managers are encouraged to make decisions and try new ideas that may seem crazy on the surface. If they work, great! if they don't? Even better.

From a founders perspective, we are the ones who dream up the big idea/gamble/risk. As the team grows and is executing on that communal company vision, it is the small risks and innovations that keep a company successful.

Separating the interesting from the important

Back in my drama school days, I had an acting teacher who had a knack for the unexpected metaphor.

We were working on monologues from Shakespeare, each actor would take their turn in front of the class and our prof would then give notes. Pretty standard stuff. One of the guys got up to do his bit, and positioned a chair in the middle of the stage. As our professor lit another cigarette, the monologue began.

Over the course of the next 5 minutes and throughout the speech, my actor friend did the following:

1. Stood on the chair
   
2. Flipped over the chair
   
3. Held the chair over his head
   
4. Did a cartwheel over the chair
   
5. Balanced on top of the chair
   
6. Rinse & repeat until the speech ended...
   

When he had finished, there was an unusually long and uncomfortable pause. The prof took a long slow drag of his Marlboro Light 100 and said: "There is difference between milking a cow, and fondling the teets. You were fondling the teets."

Now, many years later, I tell this story a couple times a year to my engineers.

It is often fun to add features or spend time on those parts of a project that are easy, sexy or fun. But are we really focused on what is important? All of us have a tendency to gravitate toward the exciting parts of what we do, or invest time and energy into the bits on the surface to the neglect of the core issue at hand. If we turn this natural behavior on its ear, and focus on the core problems, we can learn to separate the interesting from the important.

This story has turned into a fundamental engineering philosophy over my time leading and growing technology teams. Are we solving the real problem? Or are we just fondling the teets?