3 Simple Rules for Better Meetings,
published at 10:01am on 01/15/12, with No Comments
Want to have better meetings? Just follow these three rules: Carry a notebook, Stop thinking, Set goals. That’s all there is to it.
I’ve been in a lot of meetings in my life. I was a management consultant for a year, during which time the primary two outputs of my job were presentation decks and meetings. I was a technology consultant for several years, when half my work was coding and the other half was working with clients to figure out what they wanted coded. And I’ve been leading engineering at a web company for the past seven years. I know a thing or two about meetings.
With all of this experience, I have found the three simple rules you need to follow to having good, productive meetings.
1. Carry a Notebook
This might seem like personal preference, but I will tell you right off the bat that if you bring a computer to your next meeting, your attention will be split pretty evenly between your email and your work, and very little of your brain will actually be focusing on the meeting. This is a waste of your time, and it’s a waste of time for the other people in that meeting. And ultimately, it’s just plain rude to not look at a person who is talking to you.
“But Jesse,” you’ll say, “I type so much faster than I write, and I need to take notes in the meeting!” To this argument I say bollocks, because meetings are not for you, the individual, they are for you, the collective, and for you to spend the collective’s time during the meeting writing full notes for yourself is to deny the use of your brain to the rest of the folks in the room, so you might as well not even be there.
Instead, you should carry a notebook, and you should use it for its intended purpose, which is to capture notes – shorthand reminders for items of note for later – and once you are done with the meeting you should review those notes and, on your own time, turn them into something more useful.
(Incidentally, there’s much more to say on the subject of notebooks that I’ll have to get to some other time, but suffice it to say that the smartest people I know use notebooks, and there’s a reason for that.)
2. Stop Thinking
Seriously. This only applies when someone else is talking, but if you are watching someone’s lips move but are formulating your own thoughts at the same time, then you are doing something very wrong. If you do this, then the outcome can only be one of two things: either you are going to miss their point completely because you were too busy with your own thoughts to actually think about theirs, or you are going to spend time agreeing what your coworker just said because you weren’t paying attention, which is just a waste of everyone’s time.
Instead, when someone else is speaking, listen to them speak. Listen to what they are saying and, for the duration, shut off your thinking cap to give your brain time to truly absorb what they’re saying. And then, take a minute to process, to think, and to respond. You’ll be amazed at how much you can accomplish when you actually take time to use your brain as it was intended.
3. Set Goals
Specifically, every item that is discussed needs to have a goal that can be accomplished to move that item forward. If there is nothing further to discuss then do not bring it up in the first place. If there is nothing that needs to happen next, do not bring it up in the meeting. And if there is something that needs to happen, do not move on to the next point until someone in the meeting has taken responsibility for the action. Even if that responsibility is to delegate the activity on to someone else, someone in the meeting needs to walk out of the room knowing that it is their job to move this item forward. We normally call these goals “Action Items,” but I feel like a real asshole calling them that.
Bonus points if you express the goal before the meeting discussion, rather than after, so the actual discussion can have context, instead of embarking on a meandering, purposeless conversation in the hopes of finally hitting on that intended goal.
Rejoice!
That’s it! You now have all of the tools you need to make your next meeting effective, efficient, and hopefully a little more enjoyable.
Now go get something done!
Filed under: Productivity, with No Comments
The Kindle: Not a Book, but a Massive Portable Library,
published at 4:01am on 01/11/12, with 1 Comment
The most important thing I’ve learned about my Kindle is that it’s not a book; it’s a vast, portable library.
As a lover of physical media (though my dormant Pentax Spotmatic might take issue with that characterization), I was a little upset with myself when I got my Kindle. After all, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what it means that we live in an increasingly digital and intangible world, from creation to consumption, and what this means for future generations. I think a lot about the serendipity that comes from stumbling across physical items that you rediscover in your closet, and I think about the question of the durability of physical items versus their digital counterparts. So the Kindle, though it “reads like real paper,” is certainly no substitute for a physical, bound volume – not for the reading experience, not for the durability, and not for the lending proces (Kindle lending is still roughly closer to pulling teeth than it is to actual lending).
And yet, as I’ve started to use the device (specifically a Kindle Touch 3G), I’ve come to love it. I’ve specifically come to love it for what it is, rather than what it is not. For starters, it is not a book. Many of the things that make physical books great are notably absent on the Kindle:
- You can not easily loan a book to a friend
- You can not leave behind your library to your children
- You can not flip back and forth between pages
- You can not spill water on it and be fairly certain that it will recover
- You can not be guaranteed that Amazon will not rip your book back out of your Kindle if they want to
- And so on…
But to focus on these issues is to ignore the real value of the Kindle as a reading device, and specifically that it is, in fact, a reading device. It is a device that has been optimized to make it completely seamless for you to consume book-sized content wherever you are in the world (especially the 3G version). The fact that you have to rent a book in order to read it puts Amazon much more in the position of being a private, member-supported lending library than it does as a bookseller, for what they are selling is not product, but access. Note, specifically, that I acknowledge the “purchase” of Kindle content as a rental. There is no guarantee that the DRM could not be revoked, that Amazon may decide to redistribute an edited copy of your book, or that they might decide to rip the book off your device completely. But things become much more palatable when you consider the purchase as a temporal convenience.
After all, if I go to my local library to read a book, I do not get to keep that book forever. I get it for a couple of weeks, and then I have to return it. Now it just so happens that society has determined that libraries are important institutions, and provide some small amount of funding to keep those that are still running stocked with books that I can borrow whenever I want, free of charge. But books take up room, and libraries as book storage facilities are not very efficient, especially when it comes to those books for which the physical structure is not nearly as meaningful as the contents contained within. While nobody would argue that the Gutenberg Bible is an insignificant artifact in its own right, I do have a bible that looks like it came out of a hotel room nightstand, and I’m much more interested in the verse contained within than the actual book itself. In this case, I am perfectly happy to have a copy of the bible linked to my Kindle to have at the ready the next time I decide to embark on the adventure of actually trying to read the Old Testament (the last time I tried to do so was in college and I crapped out somewhere in the middle of Numbers).
In fact, it’s interesting that just this week, Barnes & Noble dropped the price of their Nook Simple Touch reader to zero, as long as you purchase a year-long subscription to the New York Times as well. There have been predictions that Amazon would do this, possibly offering Kindles for free with the purchase of their Amazon Prime program, but do I think that it’s notable that Barnes & Noble started with newspaper content as their gateway to the free reader – that is, content which is designed to be temporal from the start. By joining these two things together, they are actively positioning their reader as a content device, not as a book substitute.
It is true that there are plenty of downsides the Kindle books, mostly having to do with access and portability, but we must remember that digital books are not taking away our ability to lend our books to our friends or pass along our libraries to our children – it’s that they never granted us those abilities in the first place.
So I love my Kindle, but I will continue to purchase books for my physical library. I will just collect those volumes that I want to keep as artifacts as well as knowledge, and these will stick with me long, long after the batteries have died.
Filed under: Technology, with 1 Comment
The Need For an Open Online Identity Infrastructure,
published at 3:01am on 01/09/12, with 4 Comments
Any company can own your own identity online, but no one company should own the entire online identity infrastructure.
Right now on the web, there are a number of different companies that claim to own some part of your identity online (or who might lay claim to your entire online identity). LinkedIn would like to own your professional identity, for example. More specifically, LinkedIn would like to own the professional identity ecosystem. They would like to say that if you want to know something about someone professionally, you will need to know about them on LinkedIn. Socially (whatever that means), the gorilla that would claim to own identity is Facebook. Purchasing habits? I suppose that Amazon would own that one. And for a particular company to own what I give it and try to make use of it is fine. What I take issue with is the idea that one company would like to be the de facto identity provider for everyone, with no option for the market to introduce competition into the picture.
In fact, I take offense at the idea that a company would want to have something as valuable as my identity, and would not be willing to compete on quality to earn it. I have no problem with the idea that a large number of my friends may trust Facebook with controlling their personal information on the web. What I have a problem with is that even though I personally do not trust Facebook with that information, I need to hand it over to them in order to function in this new wonderfully connected world known as “the web.”
We don’t have this problem with communications on the Internet. Take email for example. If I want to start a new email service, I can do so and as long as my email service speaks the same protocol as every other email service out there, I can participate, I can offer my service, and I can participate in the communications ecosystem. All of my friends use Gmail, but I choose not to. I can still email them, and I can participate in this wonderful Internet that I have available to me without having to switch over to the same damn thing everyone else is using. And more importantly, the existence of my email server does not necessitate everyone else going out of business in order to be useful.
So why is it that when it comes to identity, we all get a little bit stupid and start thinking that any one company is going to ultimately “own” the overall concept of identity on the web. Sure, there can be a company that owns your identity. Or my identity. But they shouldn’t have to be the same company.
This is not a brand new concept. OpenID tried to do this with authentication but it never really got the traction that I really wish it did. But it was a good start. For the 99% of you who don’t actually use and love OpenID, it’s the idea that your username and password are stored independently from the service that you’re actually trying to log in to. If I want to log into a photo sharing service that supports OpenID, that service would ask my personal login server whether I am really who I said I am, and assuming I am authenticated with my own login server, the photo sharing service would log me in. But the key concept here is that I get to choose my own OpenID provider. If I don’t like the service I’m getting with a particular provider, I can change it easily (especially if I set it up properly). The same goes for email, as noted before, especially if my email address is tied to a domain that I own, and not one that my ISP or email provider owns.
Similarly, then, we should move towards using an identity protocol that can identify us as individuals without tying us to a particular service. If I trust Twitter with my identity, and Twitter speaks this identity protocol, then it should be perfectly happy giving any supporting service information about me. Similarly, if I believe that Facebook is going to be the best provider for my identity, then I should have a Facebook account, and as long as Facebook also speaks this same protocol, the host service shouldn’t need to do anything differently to support either identity. Most importantly however, if I decide that none of these services is serving me well, I should feel confident that I can switch as long as I can find an identity service that speaks this general identity protocol.
Companies today try to provide identity on top of existing data that they already own (your social network, your professional profile, etc). Over time, these services will be made irrelevant as new, better services come online and replace them in the market. If we build on top of an open identity infrastructure, we future-proof the entire system. While service lock-in can provide security for a business temporarily, eventually your customers will get bored, and they will leave for the next shiny new service. In our current system of tying identity to existing services, once a new business gains significant market share, eventually all new services that require identity will start to use this new identity provider. But if everyone is speaking a common identity protocol from the get-go, older identity providers will never lose their utility in that regard. After all, I can still use my old email server now, even though everyone has moved on to Gmail, or Shortmail, or whatever new email service is coming next.
I think this move is inevitable, it’s just a matter of whether the existing identity providers are going to realize that they have to play nicely together and develop this open infrastructure, or if they’re all going to have to go out of business first and let the next crop of identity providers figure this out.
Filed under: Technology, with 4 Comments
How SOPA Will Break the Internet,
published at 12:12pm on 12/22/11, with No Comments
Update: As of January 20th, 2012, PIPA and SOPA have been postponed. That said, please read the rest of this piece to understand why mucking with the DNS system is a terrible, terrible idea and why any similar legislation in the future should not be allowed to pass.
“Well that didn’t take long…” emailed my coworker. “SOPA already doesn’t matter at all.”
He included a link to a Firefox plugin that would bypass the DNS blocking that could be used to enforce SOPA or similar legislation.
The interesting thing about the sentiment that “SOPA already doesn’t matter at all” is that it suggests that once there is a technological workaround to bad legislation then the legislation itself is nothing to be concerned about. Yet the exact opposite is true, especially when it comes to the very narrow piece of legislation that dictates that the mechanism for restricting access to offending sites is to compel US-based DNS providers to drop the offending sites off of the Internet.
You see, DNS is a pretty straight-forward mechanism by which a domain name like “youtube.com” is converted into an IP address like “74.125.226.199.” This works like a big game of telephone, where your computer first asks the name server it knows about whether or not it knows where “youtube.com” lives on the Internet. If it does, it tells you. If it doesn’t, it asks another server up the chain for the answer, and so on until an authorized server returns a response.
The text of SOPA that affects the DNS mechanism reads as follows:
A service provider shall take technically feasible and reasonable measures designed to prevent access by its subscribers located within the United States to the foreign infringing site (or portion thereof) that is subject to the order, including measures designed to prevent the domain name of the foreign infringing site (or portion thereof) from resolving to that domain name’s Internet Protocol address.
This means that when you try to go to a website that the US Attorney General has decided should be blocked, your ISP will respond with a notice that tells you that the site is no longer available (like that page you get when you go to a Starbucks and they tell you that the Internet is being provided free by AT&T). But there’s a catch. The catch is that the website is still online. SOPA (and PROTECT IP) don’t actually have any provisions for taking the sites down. Instead, they just make it so your ISP can’t tell you where they are on the Internet.
I know what you’re wondering now – you’re wondering whether you could just tell your computer to use DNS servers that are outside of the US (where the law can’t dictate what they do) and have the system work exactly the same as it does now.
The answer, my friends, is yes. That is exactly what you can do.
If SOPA is passed, and if the DNS blocking that SOPA legislates starts being put into place, there are going to be numerous blog posts published telling users how to change their DNS servers to ones that are not restricted by the US government.
So why is this so bad?
Well it’s bad because it breaks the technical promise that all DNS servers now make that they will do their best to resolve a name into an IP address for you. You see, most of the Internet is made up of these promises. Nobody passed a law that said that DNS servers should work this way. This is just the mechanism that was developed, and that everyone decided would be a good idea for the good of the network as a whole. In fact, over the years there have been pushes for people to provide alternative DNS systems than the main one that we use today, but they never really caught on because the Internet does not work unless everyone does the same thing. Once people stop trusting that their DNS servers are going to return the same address as someone else’s DNS servers, then the trust in the underlying system breaks down. As a user, I already have the right to change the name servers that my computers use, but I will only do so if I know what I’m doing.
But if a site I’m going to is being blocked, and I know that the information I am looking for is still on the Internet, and I know I can easily get to it by plugging some foreign DNS servers into my computer, I will probably do so. In doing so, however, I have done two things. First, I have opened myself up to potential harm by using DNS servers that may or may not adhere to the original promise I was made in the first place. While my ISP’s name server might have been blocking the foreign blocked entity I was trying to get to, this new server might be blocking other sites and redirecting me to phishing sites without my knowing it. But even more than that, it establishes a world where the underlying DNS service can become fractured. Where service providers can choose what names to resolve and what names not to, because there has been precedent set for this behavior.
The Internet only works because everyone who participates in it agrees on the way things work. You can not break that agreement and still have a functioning Internet.
Filed under: Technology, with No Comments
Writing the Perfect Job Description,
published at 11:12pm on 12/15/11, with No Comments
My company is hiring, and though we’ve been through this process before, this time, I took a step back to look at the hiring landscape in NYC and to figure out how we were going to attract talent. See, Indaba Music has been around for over five years, having launched at the beginning of 2007, but unless you’re in the music industry, you’ve likely not heard of us. But if you’re a musician who has wanted to work with the music of Yo-Yo Ma, Linkin Park, Metric, T-Pain, Peter Gabriel and Snoop Dogg, among countless others, or if you’ve gotten your music licensed for Mercedes-Benz or Grooveshark radio, then you probably have.
So, how do you write a job listing for a company that is not primarily a consumer product with hockey stick growth, does not have the “ooh shiny” appeal of all of the upstart NYC startups, and does not have any of the big name venture capitalists behind it to, uh, do whatever VCs do for a company in that respect? That’s what I was tried to figure out when I sat down to write our most recent jobs page.
See, we had one around for a while, and you can find it in the Wayback Machine if you really want. Like all other startups in New York City, we are always looking for developers, and our last posting very clearly laid out exactly what we were looking for. If you read that job posting, you would know that we were looking for an engineer who “works with team to design user interface, system architecture and database structure” and that we only wanted people who had “3 years Web Development experience.” We had about 12 bullet points in total, and at the end of reading the job description, I’m pretty sure you’d know whether or not you had the skill set we were looking for, but I’m also fairly sure that you wouldn’t know why you’d want the job.
These days, it’s pretty easy to see whether or not someone has the technical chops necessary for a job. Before the interview, you can check out their github page, you can poke around the recesses of the web and dig up all sorts of dirt on your candidate. Or even worse, you can dig around the Internet and find nothing about your candidate, which is probably even worse. And when they set foot in your office, you can have a conversation with them to see whether they speak sufficiently enough nerd to play well with the other nerds in your nerdery.
And once we get people in the door at Indaba, we can sell the company. You can look around the office and see this team of people working hard to change the music industry, working hard to make lives better for musicians, working their butts off to make sure that musicians on the web thrive.
But we need to get them in the door.
And what I realized was that we needed a job description that spent much more time explaining who we are, as a team, and as a company, and by extension, the kind of person you should want to be if you want to join that team and work with us. I wanted to construct a posting that would attract the right kind of people and get them interested in us, that would sell our company as much as the candidates were selling themselves to us.
So this time around, instead of talking about years of ruby experience and a working knowledge of mongodb, we tell people that “Every member of our team is involved in the product development process. We challenge our developers, and we expect people to contribute at every step along the way” and we talk about how “We are a small team, and everyone is expected to exhibit a fair amount of autonomy.” And more than anything else, we lead with our core philosophy, which is that we believe that “the music industry is more alive than ever.” Forget all of those people who think that this industry is in the shitter – we’re just getting started.
In the end, I think that this approach has worked. I think that not only has this posting resonated with the people that we’d like to hire, but I know that it’s also helped our own team to figure out exactly who it is that we’re looking for. Who knows, maybe you know someone who wants to “help change the way that musicians make music in the world.”
Filed under: Technology, with No Comments
RSS Feed