Parting words of wisdom

On Thursday morning, I run our weekly R&D meeting. This is our one hour synch up meeting with the entire team. The majority of the team is in our headquarters in Sunnyvale. We also have folks tune in using video conferencing from our development center in Granada, Spain, and several folks working from their home office in Florida, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Virginia, and New York.

In this meeting, we recognize accomplishments and get a big picture overview of the project status of each team. We also share with each other important engineering and product decisions to be aware of, as well as what has been discussed by the executive management team. The meeting typically concludes with a hiring update and an announcement of the upcoming tech brief presentations. It is all about transparently sharing information. There is a lot of information to be communicated. So we typically only hit the summary and where to find the details. Keeping a meeting short and sweet is one of my pet peeves.

Since a few weeks, I felt the meeting is too sterile and too much about the tactical items. We go through all the items from top to bottom, and squeeze it in a single hour. It lacked some food for thought. I added a new parting words of wisdom section. Sure it is preachy, but that’s ok. The worst thing is that the gang gets a chuckle out of it.

Here are a few tidbits from previous meetings.

On focus

“Focus focus focus is the most worthless piece of advice to any company” — Ed Catmull. In his book, Creativity Inc, Ed writes how he was initially lost in his new role of president of Pixar. He therefor starting reading quite a few management and business books. He felt they only provided superficial advise such as focus, focus, focus. Focus on what? Pixar was focused on hardware and got their break when they started focussing on software. What do you think we should focus on?

Fear of not shipping

Quality and doing it right the first time around is important. How do you avoid tweaking and improving forever, multiple redesigns and thus not shipping or delaying shipment? Change your mindset from a fear of shipping (it is not ready, it is not ready) to a fear of not shipping. By shipping you could get great input and feedback. By shipping, customers may buy it. By creating a fear of not shipping you create an urgency and you’ll see that you still will ship with great quality.

On the mess building a product

As I am slowly working through Ed Catmull’s book “Creativity Inc”, there is an interesting story how rarely does something grow as protected as a caterpillar in its cocoon. It is actually better to have something escape the cocoon earlier, and get it into the hands of other people. This engagement process is typically very messy and can be painful. Pixar had one of its special effects software engineers resign because he didn’t like cleaning up many little problems caused by new software and he was disappointed that they weren’t taking more technical risks in movies. Funny thing is however that those little things — the mess he encountered — was due to the complexity of trying to do new things. Building something new, taking a risk, requires a willingness to deal with the mess created by the risk.

On change

Leo Babauta in The power of Less — the fine art of limiting yourself to the essential — discusses focus, break down goals, increase efficiency. On the subject of dealing with change and the uncomfortable feeling of resisting change, he created the Twice, then Quit strategy of becoming comfortable with the fear and resistance to change

When you’re meditating and you feel like getting up, don’t; then when you feel the urge to get up a second time, don’t; and when you feel the urge to get up a third time, then get up. So you sit through the urge, the discomfort, twice before finally giving in the third time. This is a nice balance, so that you’re pushing your comfort zone a little. You can do this in exercise and many other activities — push a little.

On criticism

There is an interesting story in Ed Catmull’s book “Creativity Inc” on how rarely does something grow as protected as a caterpillar in its cocoon. To the contrary, at Pixar, there is lots of input and ways to break the isolation of the cocoon. Stories get better with input. Pixar protection means populating story meetings with idea protectors. These are people who understand the difficult, ephemeral process of developing the new. It is so easy to criticize ideas. It is important to support our people as one should be safe to work through problems. (People are more important than ideas at Pixar). No better Pixar movie illustrates the point about criticism as the scene in Ratatouille where Anton Ego reviews Remy’s cooking:

“In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the *new*. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends. Last night, I experienced something new: an extraordinary meal from a singularly unexpected source. To say that both the meal and its maker have challenged my preconceptions about fine cooking is a gross understatement. They have rocked me to my core. In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau’s famous motto, “Anyone can cook.” But I realize, only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist; but a great artist *can* come from *anywhere*. It is difficult to imagine more humble origins than those of the genius now cooking at Gusteau’s, who is, in this critic’s opinion, nothing less than the finest chef in France. I will be returning to Gusteau’s soon, hungry for more.”

On Process

I came across this great blogpost about the difference between process and culture.

Good process is invisible, because good process gets called culture, instead.

Meetings are process. Transparency, is culture.
Post-mortems are a process. Accountability, is culture.
Deadlines are process. Shipping, is culture.
Quotas are process. “Meritocracy“, is culture.
Slogans are “culture”, without process to back them up.

The secret of leadership

Do unto others what you want others to do onto you.