Career
Non-Linear Thought Process and a Message for my Children
I have recently been investigating and visiting universities with my eldest daughter, a Senior in High School. Last week we visited Stanford University (an amazing experience) and spent a week in Northern California on vacation. After being home for a day and a half, I am in Texas for a week of team meetings and training.
On the first night of a trip, I seldom sleep, so I listened to the song “Don’t Let It Bring You Down” by Annie Lennox, a cover of a Neil Young song. That led to a YouTube search for the original Neil Young version, which led to me listening to “Old Man” – a favorite song of mine for over 30 years. That led to some reflection which ultimately led to this post.
I mention this because it is an example of the nonlinear or divergent thought process (generally viewed as a negative trait) that occurs naturally for me. It helps me “connect the dots” faster and more naturally. It is a manner of thinking associated with ADHD (again, something generally viewed as negative). The interesting thing is that to fit in and succeed with ADHD, you tend to develop logical systems for focus and consistency. That has many positive benefits for me – such as systemic thinking, creating repeatable processes, and automation.
The combination of linear and non-linear thinking can really fuel creativity. The downside is that it can take quite a while for others to see the potential of your ideas, which can be extremely frustrating. But, you learn to communicate better and deal with the fact that ideas can be difficult to grasp. The upside is that you tend to create relationships with other innovators because they think like you, making you relatable and interesting to them. The world is a strange place.
It is funny how there are several points in your life when you have an epiphany, and things suddenly make complete sense. That causes you to realize how much time and effort could have been saved if you had only been able to figure something out sooner. As a parent, I always try to identify and create learning shortcuts for my children so they reach those points much sooner than I did.
I started this post thinking that I would document as many of those lessons as possible to serve as a future reminder and possibly help others. Instead, I decided to post a few things I view as foundational truisms in life that could help foster that personal growth process. So, here goes…
- Always work hard to be the best, but never let yourself believe you are the best. Even if you truly are, it will be short-lived, as there are always people doing everything they can to be the best. Ultimately, that is a good thing. You need to have enough of an ego to test the limits and capabilities of things, but not one that is so big that it alienates or marginalizes those around you.
- Learn from everything you do – good and bad. Continuous improvement is so important. By focusing on this, you constantly challenge yourself to try new things and find better (i.e., more effective, more efficient, and more consistent) ways to do things.
- Realize that the difference between a brilliant and a stupid idea is often perspective. Years ago, I taught technical courses, and occasionally someone would describe something they did that seemed strange or wrong. But, if you asked questions and tried to understand why they did what they did, you would often identify the brilliance in that approach. It is something that is both exciting and humbling.
- Incorporating new approaches or the best practices of others into your own proven methods and processes is part of continuous improvement, but it only works if you can set aside your ego and keep an open mind.
- Believe in yourself, even when others don’t share that belief. Remain open to feedback and constructive criticism as a way to learn and improve, but never give up on yourself. There is a huge but sometimes subtle difference between confidence and arrogance, and that line is often drawn at the point where you can accept that you might be wrong or that there might be a better way to do something. Become the person people like working with and not the person they avoid or want to see fail.
- Surround yourself with the best people that you can find. Look for people with diverse backgrounds and complementary skills. The best teams I have ever been involved with consisted of high achievers who constantly raised the bar for each other while simultaneously creating a safety net for their teammates. Those teams grew and did amazing things because everyone was very competitive and supportive of each other.
- Keep notes or a journal because good ideas are often fleeting and hard to recall. Remember, good ideas can come from anywhere, so keep track of the suggestions of others and make sure that you attribute those ideas to the proper source.
- Try to make a difference in the world. Try to leave everything you “touch” (job, relationship, project, whatever) in a better state than before you were there. Helping others improve and leading by example are two simple ways of making a difference.
- Accept that failure is a natural obstacle on your path to success. You are not trying hard enough if you never fail. But you are also not trying hard enough if you fail too often. That is very subjective, and honest introspection is your best gauge. Be accountable, accept responsibility, document the lessons learned, and move on.
- Dream big, and use that as motivation to learn new things. While I funded medical research, I learned about genetics, genomics, and biology. That expanded to interests in nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, machine learning, neural networks, and interfaces such as natural language and non-verbal / emotional. Someday I hope to tie these together to help cure a disease (Arthritis) and improve the quality of life for millions of people. Will that ever happen? I don’t know, but I do know that if I don’t try, it will never happen because of anything I did.
- Focus on the positive, not the negative. Creativity is stifled in environments where fear and blame rule.
- Never hesitate to apologize when you are wrong. This is a sign of strength, not weakness.
- And above all else, honesty and integrity should be the foundation for everything you do and are.
Hopefully, this will help my children become the best people possible, ideally early on in their lives. I was 30 years old before I had a clue about many of these things. Until that point, I was somewhat selfish and focused on winning. Winning and success are good things, but are better when accomplished the right way.
Ideas are sometimes Slippery and Hard to Grasp
I started this blog with the goal of becoming an “idea exchange,” as well as a way to pass along lessons learned to help others. Typical guidance for a blog is to focus on one thing and do it well to develop a following. That is especially important if you want to monetize the blog, but that is not and has not been my goal.
One of the things that has surprised me is how different the comments and likes are for each post. Feedback from the last post was even more diverse and surprising than usual. It ranged from comments about “Siri vs Google” to feedback about Sci-Fi books and movies to Artificial Intelligence.
I asked a few friends for feedback and received something very insightful (Thanks Jim). He stated that he found the blog interesting but wasn’t sure of the objective. He went on to identify several possible goals for the last post. Strangely enough (or maybe not), his comments mirrored the type of feedback that I received. That pointed out an area for improvement, and I appreciated that as well as the wisdom of focusing on one thing. Who knows, maybe in the future…
This also reminded me of a white paper written 12-13 years ago by someone I used to work with. It was about how Bluetooth would be the “next big thing.” He had read an IEEE paper or something and saw potential for this new technology. His paper provided the example of your toaster and coffee maker communicating so that your breakfast would be ready when you walk into the kitchen in the morning.
At that time, I had a couple of thoughts. Who cared about something that only had a 20-30-foot range when WiFi had become popular and had a much greater range? In addition, a couple of years earlier, I had a tour of the Microsoft “House of the Future,” in which everything was automated and key components communicated. But everything in the house was all hardwired or used WiFi – not Bluetooth. It was easy to dismiss his assertion because it seemed to lack pragmatism. The value of the idea was difficult to quantify, given the use case provided.
Looking back now, I view that white paper as having insight. If it was visionary, he would have come out with the first Bluetooth speakers, car interface, or even phone earpiece and gotten rich, but it failed to present practical use cases that were easy enough to understand yet different enough from what was available at the time to demonstrate the real value of the idea. His expression of idea was not tangible enough and, therefore, too slippery to be easily grasped and valued.
I believe that good ideas sometimes originate where you least expect them. Those ideas are often incremental – seemingly simple and sometimes borderline obvious, often building on another idea or concept. An idea does not need to be unique to be important or valuable, but it needs to be presented in a way that makes it easy to understand the benefits, differentiation, and value. That is just good communication.
One of the things I miss most from when my consulting company was active was the interaction between a couple of key people (Jason and Peter) and myself. Those guys were very good at taking an idea and helping build it out. This worked well because we had some overlapping expertise and experiences as well as skills and perspectives that were more complementary. That diversity increased the depth and breadth of our efforts to develop and extend those ideas by asking the tough questions early and ensuring we could convince each other of the value.
Our discussions were creative, highly collaborative, and a lot of fun. We improved from them, and the outcome was usually viable from a commercial perspective. As a growing and profitable small business, you must constantly innovate to differentiate yourself. Our discussions were driven as much by necessity as intellectual curiosity, and I believe this was part of the magic.
So, back to the last post. I view various technologies as building blocks. Some are foundational, and others are complementary. To me, the key is not viewing those various technologies as competing with each other. Instead, I look for potential value created by integrating them with each other. That may not always be possible and does not always lead to something better, but occasionally it does, so to me, it is a worthwhile exercise. With regard to voice technology, I believe we will see more, better, and smarter applications of it – especially as real-time and AI systems become more complex due to the use of an increasing number of specialized chips, component systems, geospatial technology, and sensors.
While today’s smartphone interfaces would not pass the Turing Test or proposed alternatives, they are an improvement over more simplistic voice translation tools available just a few years ago. Advancement requires the tools to understand context in order to make inferences. This brings you closer to machine learning, and big data (when done right) significantly increases that potential.
Ultimately, this all leads back to Artificial Intelligence (at least in my mind). It’s a big leap from a simple voice translation tool to AI, but it is not such a stretch when viewed as building blocks.
Now think about creating an interface (API) that allows one smart device to communicate with another, like the collaborative efforts described above with my old team. It’s not simply having a front-end device exchanging keywords or queries with a back-end device. Instead, it is two or more devices and/or systems having a “discussion” about what is being requested, looking at what each component “knows,” making inferences based on location and speed, asking clarifying questions and making suggestions, and then finally taking that multi-dimensional understanding of the problem to determine what is really needed.
So, possibly not true AI (yet), but a giant leap forward from what we have today. That would help turn the science fiction of the past into science fact in the near future. The better the understanding and inferences by the smart system, the better the results.
I also believe that the unintended consequence of these new smart systems is that they will likely make errors or have biases like a human as they become more human-like in their approach. Hopefully, those smart systems will be able to automatically back-test recommendations to validate and minimize errors. If they are intelligent enough to monitor results and suggest corrective actions when they determine that the recommendation does not have the optimal desired results, they would become even “smarter.” There won’t be an ego creating a distortion filter about the approach or the results. Or maybe there will…
Many of the building blocks required to create these new systems are available today. But it takes vision and insight to see that potential, translate ideas from slippery and abstract to tangible and purposeful, and then start building something cool and useful. As that happens, we will see a paradigm shift in how we interact with computers and how they interact with us. It will become more interactive and intuitive. That will lead us to the systematic integration that I wrote about in a big data / nanotechnology post.
So, what is the real objective of my blog? To get people thinking about things differently, to foster collaboration and partnerships between businesses and educational institutions to push the limits of technology, and to foster discussion about what others believe the future of computing and smart devices will look like. I’m confident that I will see these types of systems in my lifetime, and I believe in the possibility of this occurring within the next decade.
What are your thoughts?
Genetics, Genomics, Nanotechnology, and more
Science has been interesting to me for most of my lifetime, but it wasn’t until my first child was born that I shifted from “interested” to “involved.” My eldest daughter was diagnosed with Systemic Onset Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (SoJIA – originally called Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis, or JRA) when she was 15 months old, which also happened to be about six months into the start of my old Consulting company and in the middle of a very critical Y2K ERP system upgrade and rehosting project. It was definitely a challenging time in my life.
At that time, there was very little research on JRA because it was estimated there were only 30,000 children affected by the disease, and the implication was that funding research would not have a positive ROI. This was also a few years before the breakthroughs of biological medicines like Enbrel for children.
One of the things that I learned was that this disease could be horribly debilitating. Children often had physical deformities as a result of this disease. Even worse, the systemic type that my daughter has could result in premature death. As a first-time parent, imagining that type of life for your child was extremely difficult.
Luckily, the company I had just started was taking off, so I decided to find ways to make a tangible difference for all children with this disease. We decided to take 50% of our net profits and use them to fund medical research. We aimed to fund $1 million in research and find a cure for Juvenile Arthritis within the next 5-7 years.
As someone new to “major gifts” and philanthropy, I quickly learned that some gifting vehicles were more beneficial than others. While most organizations wanted you to start a fund (which we did), the impact from that tended to be more long-term and less immediate. I met someone passionate, knowledgeable, and successful in her field who showed me a different and better approach (here’s a post that describes that in more detail).
I no longer wanted to blindly give money and hope it was used quickly and properly. Rather, I wanted to treat these donations like investments in a near-term cure. In order to be successful, I needed to understand research from both medical and scientific perspectives in these areas. That began a new research and independent learning journey in completely new areas.
There was a lot going on in Genetics and Genomics at the time (here’s a good explanation of the difference between the two). My interest and efforts in this area led to a position on the Medical and Scientific Advisory Committee with the Arthritis Foundation. With the exception of me, the other members were talented and successful physicians who were also involved with medical research. We met quarterly, and I did ask questions and made suggestions that made a difference. But, unlike everyone else on the committee, I needed to study and prepare for 40+ hours for each call to ensure that I had enough understanding to add value and not be a distraction.
A few years later we did work for a Nanotechnology company (more info here for those interested). The Chief Scientist wasn’t interested in explaining what they did until I described some of our research projects on gene expression. He then went into great detail about what they were doing and how he believed it would change what we do in the future. I saw that and agreed. I also started thinking of the potential for leveraging nanotechnology with medicine.
While driving today, I was listening to the “TED Radio Hour” and heard a segment about entrepreneur Richard Resnick. It was exciting because it got me thinking about this again – a topic I haven’t thought about for the past few years (the last time, I was contemplating how new analytics products could be useful in this space).
There are efforts today with custom, personalized medicines that target only specific genes for a specific outcome. The genetic modifications being performed on plants today will likely be performed on humans in the near future (I would guess within 10-15 years). The body is an incredibly adaptive organism, so it will be very challenging to implement anything that is consistently safe and effective long-term. But that day will come.
It’s not a huge leap from genetically modified “treatment cells” to true nanotechnology (not just extremely small particles). Just think, machines that can be designed to work independently within us to do what they are programmed to do and, more importantly, identify and understand adaptations (i.e., artificial intelligence) as they occur and alter their approach and treatment plan accordingly based on changes and findings. This is extremely exciting. It’s not that I want to live to be 100+ years old – because I don’t. But, being able to do things that positively impact the quality of life for children and their families is a worthy goal from my perspective.
My advice is to always continue learning, keep an open mind, and see what you can personally do to make a difference. You will never know unless you try.
Note: Updated to fix and remove dead links.
It’s not Rocket Science – What you Measure Defines how People Behave
I previously wrote a post titled “To Measure is to Know.”
The other side of the coin is that what you measure defines how people behave. This is an often forgotten aspect of Business Intelligence, Compensation Plans, Performance reviews, and other key areas in business. While many people view this topic as “common sense,” based on the numerous incentive plans you run across as a consultant and compensation plans you submit as a Manager, that is not the case.
Is it wrong to have people respond by focusing on specific aspects of their job that they are being measured on? That is a tricky question. This simple answer is “sometimes.” This is ultimately the desired outcome of implementing specific KPIs (key performance indicators), OKRs (objectives and key results), MBOs (Management by Objectives), and CSAT (Customer Satisfaction), but it doesn’t always work. Let’s dig into this a bit deeper.
One prime example is something seemingly easy yet often anything but – Compensation Plans. When properly implemented, these plans drive organic business growth through increased sales, revenue, and profits (three related items that should be measured). This can also drive steady cash flow by closing deals faster and within specific periods (usually months or quarters) and focusing on models that create the desired revenue stream (e.g., perpetual license sales versus subscription license sales versus SaaS subscription sales). What could be better than that?
Successful salespeople focus on the areas of their comp plan where they have the greatest opportunity to make money. Presumably, they are selling the products or services that you want them to based on that plan. MBO and OKR goals can be incorporated into plans to drive toward positive outcomes that are important to the business, such as bringing on new reference accounts. Those are forward-looking goals that increase future (as opposed to immediate) revenue. In a perfect world, with perfect comp plans, these business goals are codified and supported by motivational financial incentives.
Some of the most successful salespeople are the ones who primarily care only about themselves (although not at the expense of their company or customers). They are in the game for one reason—to make money. Give them a well-constructed plan that allows them to win, and they will do so in a predictable manner. Paying large commission checks should be a goal for every business because properly constructed compensation plans mean their own business is prospering. It needs to be a win-win design.
However, suppose a salesperson has a poorly constructed plan. In that case, they will likely find ways to personally win with deals inconsistent with company growth goals (e.g., paying a commission based on deal size but not factoring in profitability and discounts). Even worse, give them a plan that doesn’t provide a chance to win, and the results will be uncertain at best.
Just as most tasks tend to expand to use all the time available, salespeople tend to book most of their deals at the end of whatever period is used. With quarterly payment cycles, most of the business tends to book in the final week or two of the quarter, which is not ideal from a cash flow perspective. Using shorter monthly periods may increase business overhead. Still, the potential to level out the flow of booked deals (and associated cash flow) from salespeople working harder for that immediate benefit will likely be a worthwhile tradeoff. I pushed for this change while running a business unit, and we began seeing positive results within the first two months.
What about motiving Services teams? What I did with my company was to provide quarterly bonuses based on overall company profitability and each individual’s contribution to our success that quarter. Most of our projects used task-oriented billing, where we billed 50% up-front and 50% at the time of the final deliverables. You needed to both start and complete a task within a quarter to maximize your personal financial contribution, so there was plenty of incentive to deliver and quickly move to the next task. As long as quality remains high, this is a good thing.
We also factored in salary costs (i.e., if you make more than you should be bringing in more value to the company), the cost of re-work, and non-financial items that were beneficial to the company. For example, writing a white paper, giving a presentation, helping others, or even providing formal documentation on lessons learned added business value and would be rewarded. Everyone was motivated to deliver quality work products in a timely manner, help each other, and do things that promoted the growth of the company. My company prospered, and my team made good money to make that happen. Another win-win scenario.
This approach worked very well for me and was continually validated over several years. It also fostered innovation because the team was always looking for ways to increase their value and earn more money. Many tools, processes, and procedures emerged from what would otherwise be routine engagements. Those tools and procedures increased efficiency, consistency, and quality. They also made it easier to onboard new employees and incorporate an outsourced team for larger projects.
Mistakes with comp plans can be costly – due to excessive payouts and/or because they are not generating the expected results. Backtesting is one form of validation as you build a plan. Short-term incentive programs are another. Remember, without some risk, there is usually little reward, so accept that some risk must be taken to find the point where the optimal behavior is fostered and then make plan adjustments accordingly.
It can be challenging and time-consuming to identify the right things to measure, the proper number of things (measuring too many or too few will likely fall short of goals), and provide the incentives to motivate people to do what you want and need. But, if you want your business to grow and be healthy, it must be done well.
This type of work isn’t rocket science and is well within everyone’s reach.
Where Ideas, Experiences, and Lessons Learned Intersect 