Michael Lopp's Blog, page 27

The Most Reliable Phone Ever Made

Nokia will re-launch the 3310, perhaps the best-loved and most resilient phone in history.

I had one of these. I think I still do.

It’s still possible to buy the 3310 on Amazon, though only through its marketplace and not directly from the company itself. The Amazon listing describes a range of features, including a clock, calculator, the ability to store up to ten reminders and four games: Snake II, Pairs II, Space Impact, and Bantumi.

Snake II was the bomb.

(Via The Independent)

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Unbelievable Turmoil

One month.

The president has angrily canceled a summit meeting with the Mexican president, hung up on Australia’s prime minister, authorized a commando raid that resulted in the death of a Navy SEAL member, repeatedly lied about the existence of millions of fraudulent votes cast in the 2016 election and engaged in Twitter wars with senators, a sports team owner, a Hollywood actor and a major department store chain. His words and actions have generated almost daily protests around the country.

(Via the New York Times)

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Rands Response Hierarchy

The arrival of Slack1 changed my communication regimen. On top of Slack being the primary means of communicating at Slack, the Leadership Slack at 3000+ members represents a daily part of how I communicate.

There are a great many ways to get in touch with me. With the establishment of Slack as a primary means of communication, I realized that I had updated the prioritized hierarchy to how likely I will respond to a piece of communication. From least likely to most likely, this is the hierarchy:

Spam < LinkedIn < Facebook < Twitter < Email < Slack < Phone < SMS < Face to Face

Let’s talk about each one:

Spam: I never respond. Spam is a solved problem in that I don’t even see it anymore, but even when I did, I never responded. The most work I perform here is removing myself from spam-like mailing lists resulting from online purchases.

LinkedIn: I respond slowly… maybe. There is no doubt there is value in my LinkedIn network, but the design choices that LinkedIn has made over the years makes the site both difficult to use and distinctly pay to play. My “inbox” is full of strangers making even stranger offers. The signal to noise is so bad that when an actual friend or a credible inquiry arrives, I will miss the message because I’m busily ignoring the rest of LinkedIn.

Facebook: I’ll respond… eventually. I’m in the minority here, but I don’t use Facebook for messaging. There’s a very short list of humans who only have my Facebook account, so that’s where they’ll start to reach out, but it’s infrequent. The quality of my network on Facebook is higher than LinkedIn plus there is less pay to play opportunities so when someone does message me, it’s usually relevant.

Twitter: I’ll respond. Twitter is more a broadcast medium for me than a 1:1 communication tool. I’ve taken the time to curate the humans I follow so my network is more valuable than Facebook. Given I’m configured such that mutual following is a necessity to directly message, the flow of messages is low, but the signal is high. However, I’ll almost always redirect a direct message to a different medium.

Email: I’ll respond in a timely fashion. I have two inboxes: work and personal. Both of these are empty at the end of each working day. Work inbox zero used to be a challenge pre-Slack but is now an inbox I’ll forget to check for days on end because of the low volume of messages. My personal inbox is higher volume than work and each message from a human is a message I’ll respond to promptly.2

Slack: I’ll respond immediately. All of work communication happens within Slack. As I’ve written about before, I have a system using starring that effectively transforms my sidebar a dynamic inbox. Urgent conversations are handled in real time, less urgent usually in 24 hours. The same approach applies to the Leadership Slack. Within Slack, it’s guaranteed that you’re a human and we have shared interests which mean if you message me and I’m sitting there, the response is instantaneous.

Phone: I’ll answer immediately… if I know you. In the last year, the number of spam calls on my private number has skyrocketed. The result is that if you’re not in my contact list, I will never ever ever answer the phone. However, I will eagerly check my voicemail because there’s a decent chance it’s important news since someone bothered to call.

SMS: I’ll answer immediately… if I know you. Same familiarity protocol as the phone. For friends and family, this is the primary means of communication these days and has almost completely replaced the role of phone calls from just a few years ago. My parents were the last to get on this bandwagon in the last year.

Face to Face: Yeah, I’ll respond immediately. You’re sitting right there.

To summarize the last year: there are fewer phone calls thanks to the prevalence of texting, email is giving way to Slack, and it’s a bit of crap shoot on most social networks.

My introversion is fine with all of these developments.

Bias alert. I work at Slack. ↩


Remember hand written letters? I do. ↩

Even More Lava Fire Hose

I can’t stop staring at this lava pouring into the ocean.

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The Lava Fire Hose

Lava pouring out of a cliff on the Big Island. Mesmerizing.

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Leadership Comes From Everywhere

For years I’ve been working on structuring an interview for assessing leadership. How do you figure out if someone has leadership skills in an hour-long interview? The answer is: you don’t. You need multiple humans not only asking a diverse set of questions but also listening to answers and pivoting to follow-up questions as they see fit.

The coordination comes from an agreed upon model for what constitutes good leadership. Let’s start with the three structural facets:

Do they have vision? Can they explain an ambitious and seemingly unattainable goal?

Are they strategic? Can they explain the steps necessary to achieve that vision?

Finally, are they tactical? Can they decompose a strategy into a series of logical actions that will achieve each step?

I have sets of questions that vet each of these facets. I’ve also written supporting material explaining how each leader is different. There are incredibly strong leaders who have an inhuman tactical ability but are average at strategy. There are credible leaders who thrive on building vision, but are awful at strategy and even worse at tactics.

I patted myself on the back when I wrote down the triangle of vision to strategy to tactics. So clean… so elegant.. and so woefully incomplete.

A Complete Leadership Model

Judgment is the ability to make considered decisions or come to sensible conclusions. Vision, strategy, and tactics are all informed by judgment. Wherever your leadership strengths exist, it is your judgment that determines whether your decisions are considered, or your conclusions are sensible.

Your judgment exists as a machine built from the total of learnings extracted from your life’s experiences. These experiences gave you knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. As you pass through your day, you are incessantly presented with situations large and small that make an ask of your judgment. A hypothetical example:

“An employee told me that this was confidential information, but sharing this information with one other trustworthy person will likely give me additional insight and allow me to help them better.”

Judgment calls regarding confidentiality and truth are two huge factors in this scenario. There are versions of the scenario where it is [against the law] as a manager to fail to alert other parties to this situation. Do you know what they are? Maybe you do, maybe you don’t, but at the end of this situation, your judgment will be tested, and with the test, it will become more informed and therefore more refined.

It’s comforting as an engineer to think of judgment as this objective function. The words that define judgment – considered and sensible – imply the predictable comfort of logic, but that is not always the case because I’m still missing the final most important component of this leadership model: values.

What is Important in Life

Your values are your principles or standards of behavior. Like judgment, you’ve built your values throughout your life. You started by internalizing the rules and values of those who raised you. You continued to evolve these values with each struggle, failure, and victory.

Your values are what you believe is important in life; I can’t think of an essential aspect that defines you as a leader. Your values define why you chose that particular vision, and they define how you are willing to achieve it.

While everything I have written so far applies to your manager, everything I’ve written also applies to you. Whether you choose the title or not, you’re a leader. You have a vision of where you want to be, you build strategy and employ tactics to achieve that future place. Along the way, you constantly employ judgment defined by your values to follow a path that is acceptable to you.

Full of Rage

I’ve spent my career considering the craft of leadership for my team and my company. While I write books and create Slack teams focused on the craft of leadership, I’ve done the bare minimum to understand the leadership that shapes the United States of America.

As I’ve sat in disbelief glued to social media, I’ve been thinking about the constituent parts of leadership. You can not suggest that the current administration doesn’t have vision. You can not say there is not a complex strategy in play and daily incessant tactics designed to achieve that vision. You can be full of rage like me, but you can’t argue that there isn’t leadership.

We can, however, judge the quality of that leadership not by the results of its policies, but the values its judgment demonstrates. A leader who gleefully and blatantly lies is a fundamentally flawed leader. This defective core value (which is one of many) infects the entirety the leadership model. How is possible to understand or believe any part of vision, strategy, or tactics when truth is suspect? What is considered or sensible when the facts are optional?

Are you tired of freaking out about this? Good. Me too. It’s time to lead.

Leadership Comes From Everywhere

I’ve sat on the sidelines for most my life as the political landscape has evolved and it is my great shame that it has taken this long for me to act. Now I am full of equal parts rage and fear, and while these emotions get me moving, they do not help define vision nor strategy. Fear and rage provide high energy, but poorly considered tactics.

However, I can’t ignore the tremendous gaping vacuum that represents my strategic thinking and limits my ability to define a compelling vision beyond the obvious, so I’m starting beginning at the bottom with sensible and considered tactics.

Each day for as long as it takes, I am doing one thing to move forward. Three days ago, I set-up a recurring donation to the ACLU, two days ago I created the #mobilize channel on the Leadership slack to bring together humans interested in coordinated action, yesterday I learned everything I could regarding executive orders, and today I wrote this piece to frame my rage.

A little bit forward, every day. Over time – as it always does – my tactical progress will reveal strategic insight and with time that strategy will reveal a vision. I’m starting late, I don’t know where I’m going, but I trust my judgment, and I’m clear about what I value. More importantly, when I want to see how my strategy and vision are developing, I can check it. I can compare it to the principles and values of this country because…

We wrote it down.

The One About Destiny

[image error]

With each episode of The Important Thing, I find a smart person on the planet and we talk about one thing… usually.

In the second episode, I am excited to be joined by my fellow Guardian John Siracusa to discuss the video game Destiny. Proudest moments, total time wasted, and the reality of the Hunter handicap – it’s all there.1

Enjoy it now or download for later. Here’s a handy feed or subscribe via Overcast or iTunes.

http://traffic.libsyn.com/rands/theimportantthing0002.mp3




There’s a Destiny Slack – this is different than the Leadership Slack. If you want an invite, drop me a note. ↩

Rainbows and Unicorns

Peggle is a casual game developed by Popcap. Originally released in 2007, the game is memorable because of it’s absolutely over the top level finishing sequence.

In an explosion of rainbows, fireworks, unicorns, and Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, you are generously emotionally rewarded when you finish a level. As a friend commented at the time, “It is likely the most consistent and unadulterated source of positive feedback you’ll get in your life.”

The gaming industry has spent billions of dollars successfully figuring out how to design and build products that provide Peggle moments – that tap into the parts of your brain that reward specific behavior. They’ve figured out when to reward you in order to keep you entertained and engaged. There are companies and products which do this well, and there are those who are total douche bags about how they choose to re-enforce behavior, but the rules are tried and true and deeply wired into your brain.

And there is absolutely no way they can’t be used for good (or evil) in a product, team or company

Moments of Disproportionate Satisfaction

I’ve been thinking about games for a long time, and I believe there are three rules that define a good game:

Do I have a continual healthy sense of progression?
Am I learning and mastering the game via timely and effective feedback?
Do I have the impression that I can win?

Let that soak in a moment because I’ve been working on that list for a long time. While I’ve made a name for myself writing off-the-cuff remarks on Twitter, this list is considered. It explains why a Rubik’s cube isn’t a good game (but a great puzzle), but Minecraft is an amazing one.

True story. I’ve been writing versions of this piece for a good two years. The vast gaming surface area described by this list paralyzes me each time I attempt to finish, but as I’ve edited, I’ve realized that these rules also apply to building a healthy team. Specifically one, “Am I learning and mastering the game – the system – via timely and effective feedback?”

What a horribly dry rule. I need my wisdom with a dose of poetry, so how about a more specific version, “Compliments work.”

Duh

I’ll write about the two other rules and how they relate to good leadership and a healthy team another time. This article is about the power of a compliment. A compliment is a selfless, timely, and well-articulated recognition of achievement. To start to understand the value of a compliment, let’s go back to that Peggle video. Play it again.

It’s a visual and auditory feast full of familiar sights and sounds designed to give you joy.

When it comes to the motivation of humans, we’ve designed all sorts of communications tools and interesting cultural artifacts to help us move forward. Here’s a deadline that clearly tells us when we should be done. Here’s a Gantt chart to explain where we as a team and how we collectively get us from here to there. I am tell assertive which means folks who like to be told what to do will appreciate my communicative style. All of these structures, articles, communication styles, and threats can motivate, but game makers have learned the elegant motivational properties of a compliment. Allow me to demonstrate:

Thank you for reading this article. I spend hours on these articles. I fret over them, I love them, and then I hate them. Eventually, I toss them into the world wondering what you’ll think. If you’re still here, I don’t know if you liked this piece or not, but I do know that you’ve spent just under five minutes of your life reading something I wrote which means I held your interest, so thank you. I appreciate every single one of my readers.

Are you feeling it? You should because I mean it.

Peggle rewards you when you perform a simple task. It’s saccharine and over the top, but you can’t say that Peggle doesn’t own the compliment. They want you to celebrate your achievement in the loudest most ludicrous way, and it works.

However, the Peggle compliment does fail to meet my definition. While it is a timely and well-articulated recognition of achievement, it is hardly selfless. It’s fun, but it’s designed to be fun so that you keep playing the game. It’s a timely endorphin boost that is designed to train your brain to crave finishing because… that head-banging unicorn. He’s the best.

Let’s decompose a useful compliment.

The Compliment Breakdown

Once more, my definition of the compliment: A selfless, well articulated, and timely recognition of achievement. Let’s take that apart.

First up, the reason this compliment needs to exists is that of achievement. This human did something notable, and you want to recognize this fact. The magnitude of achievement is a factor, but I find compliments small and large carry the same weight. We want to highlight when the team or team members are at their best; we want to recognize meaningful acts of being human.

Recognition is our next attribute and herein lies improvisation. Is this a compliment you want to land 1:1 at the moment it occurs or is it the type of compliment that you want to tuck away so can you can land it in front of the entire team for maximum recognition? I don’t know. There are so many contextual variables to consider here that it’s hard to give universal advice? Do they hear it? Or do others need to hear it about them? Understand what behavior you want to recognize and why and make a call.

Timeliness is our easiest attribute to understand. My default is to compliment as quickly as possible because I believe it’s the most effective way to reinforce behavior. That’s what we’re doing here, right? The blandest version of what you’re saying is, “This thing you do is important.” The faster that you take the time to compliment, the more they’re going to remember – not your compliment – but the act.

Well articulated is the attribute that is the hardest to define and the most important. Let’s start with what looks like a horrible compliment. The vapid “Good job!” seems like an F, right? Not true. A well-timed “Good job!” can be an effective and timely recognition of achievement. Even better, how about this?

Thank you for taking the time to build the technical overview document for Q&A. The feature you built is great, and we not only better understand how to test it, but support it.

The specificity of this compliment documents the act, the value, and the impact. It is that detail articulation that will make it memorable.

The most nuanced part of compliment is selflessness. This is also entirely context dependent, but a good compliment is one that comes without perceived social cost or dependency. You know what doghouse roses are? It’s when you buy flowers for your significant other because you screwed up. Yes, they are pretty, but all the recipient sees in those roses is the screw-up. It’s a thoughtless empty gift that erodes trust. A good compliment contains nothing about you or what you want. It is entirely about the achievement of the other human.

A Compliment Career Shift

What are the moments that defined your career? Sure, I bet you can rattle off the disasters because the mental magnitude of disasters has staying power. Keep thinking. I suspect you can think of compliments that changed the course of your career.

My first start-up. A senior engineering VP who ran brusk and terse was working with me on compensation adjustments for the team. We were efficiently and quietly working our way through a spreadsheet and comparing notes. Halfway through the spreadsheet, he looked up at me and out of nowhere said the longest sentence of the day, “Understanding people is your super power, Lopp. Don’t forget that.”

A well-constructed compliment has an emotional payload. It is full of rainbows and unicorns. It is this strange, unpredictable payload that makes us nervous about compliments. There is the risk, but when used for good, a compliment is an elegant and lasting way to recognize and reward when we are the best version of ourselves.

The Last Jedi

Star Wars VIII has a name: The Last Jedi.

[image error]

As is custom, we will now endlessly and thoroughly analyze a single image for as much signal as possible. My first thought: the typeface color is red. My second thought: in my head, each of the original trilogy movies is associated with a color.

A New Hope: Blue (like Luke’s sword)
Empire Strikes Back: Red (where Luke and Vader fight)
Return of the Jedi: Green (like… Endor?)

Update: As Dan McClain points out on Twitter, the color matches the lightsaber of Luke, Vader, then Luke again.

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Isaac Asimov wrote 500 books in his lifetime

Asimov wrote a lot:

To match the number of novels, letters, essays, and other scribblings Asimov produced in his lifetime, you would have to write a full-length novel every two weeks for 25 years.

The six tips:

Never stop learning.
Don’t fight getting stuck.
Beware the resistance.
Lower your standards.
Make MORE stuff.
The secret sauce.1

(Via Quartz)

Secret seventh pro-tip: Read the Foundation Trilogy, it’s excellent. ↩

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