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Christians in Silicon Valley

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A good article by Andy Crouch in Christianity Today on how Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are taking a leap of faith to create technology that makes you more human.

It turns out that there are lots of Christians in Silicon Valley, and it is very encouraging to see how they are thinking about things and what they are doing.

Here’s a key part that gets at the essence of what Crouch has found:

Like the other Christians profiled in this story, Saber and Munro are not in the least interested in starting or running a “Christian company.” And also like the others, they relentlessly ask how their Christian faith shapes the company they have founded and run.

That’s a conjunction that I find very interesting. These Christians have a holistic perspective. They realize that the gospel matters for all of life, and yet also realize that the gospel calls us to avoid being spiritually weird (for example, promoting yourself as a Christian company while doing bad work, and not realizing the mismatch). The gospel is to shape the things we do in real ways, not artificial ways.

This is a much better testimony to the gospel than the guy who hands out tracts at the water cooler but who nobody wants on their team because he doesn’t realize that God wants him to actually care about his job.

Here’s another great quote:

We see business as a powerful instrument for aligning the human experience with its original design….Poverty, sickness, environmental degradation—we think God cares about these things and wants to be involved. So we believe he will be present when we ask.

Well said!

Steve Krug on Usability

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Here’s a great presentation on usability by Steve Krug, the foremost expert on the subject by far. 

The focus of this presentation is on the importance of user testing. Most of the time, user testing never happens; or, when it does, it is done in way more detail that it needs to be, with scientific analysis of the results and a long report, costing about $10,000.

However, you can be just as effective with user testing by just testing three users, watching how they use your site while they think out loud (that’s the key). With just three users you will identify far more problems than you have the resources to fix anyway. Identify the top three, address those, and you will have made a significant impact.

Last: don’t do user testing as an add-on at the end. You need to do it throughout the process. If you do three rounds throughout the development of your product (website or anything else–I think all products should be user tested, even building layouts), fixing the top three problems identified after each time, that would be huge.

If you want to save time, the best way to watch his lecture is actually to click through the slides at the bottom. And, for more detail on what makes for good usability on websites, see his excellent book:

 

(HT: Matt Heerema)

The Wrong Level

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It seems to me that most of our approaches to productivity tend to orient our focus at the wrong level. We end up focusing on the runway level — next actions — and the 10,000 foot level — projects. This makes it hard to prioritize across areas of your life.

For example, if you come into work in the morning and say to yourself “what projects to I have going on?,” you might make some good progress that day. However, your thinking is necessarily narrow — it is focused on what projects already exist, and the focus is to get that loop closed when there might be broader things that are more deserving of your attention that day. Further, these broader things may not be anything captured on another existing list, like a next action list, because in a very real sense it is actually impossible to make any next action list “complete” (perhaps more on that later).

So how do you identify those broader things? I think by going to the 20,000 foot level, which is areas of responsibility. So instead of saying to yourself “what projects do I have on my plate” or “what actions do I have on my plate,” you instead say “what are my main responsibilities? Now, what are the most important things I can do today to advance the responsibilities that most need to be advanced at this time?”

In this way, you aren’t relying on any lists to ultimately show you what to do. Rather, you are relying on reflection. You might refer to your lists to make sure you are considering everything, but by putting the focus on reflecting on “what do I need to do now,” you allow new ideas to arise that are more in tune with current priorities. That is, you can adapt better, focusing on what is important now rather than on what was important two weeks ago, but you couldn’t do then so you put it on a list.

This is how I operated in college, without the assistance of any planning system (or even calendar–ironic, I know!). Every few days, I would simply say to myself “what is coming up in each of my classes?” Then I would identify what was most important, and get it done. The advantage there was that I had a pre-existing syllabus for each class; in the world of ordinary life, you are having to create much of your “syllabus” for your life as you go.

The irony is that, when a planning system inclines you to think mostly from the 10,000 foot level and runway, it can lead to lack of focus because there is simply so much to consider, with the result that you are worse off than not having any planning system at all.

But used right, a productivity system puts you way ahead. If, instead of using it to substitute for thinking (that is, instead of simply saying “what’s on my project lists and action lists; OK, I think I’ll do this), you use it as a support to keep some of the heavy lifting of remembering important ongoing things off your mind, it can be helpful. Then, what you do is operate from a stance of reflection at the 20,000 foot level of responsibilities, and refer to the lists to help fill out your options on what each area might needs, rather than relying on the lists as an exhaustive catalog of all your options.

How Smart Phones Will Revolutionize the Future of Medicine

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Wow.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Here’s the intro:

One of the world’s top physicians, Dr. Eric Topol, has a prescription that could improve your family’s health and make medical care cheaper. The cardiologist claims that the key is the smartphone. Topol has become the foremost expert in the exploding field of wireless medicine.

Here’s a link to the video in case it doesn’t show up for you.

And here’s his book, The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care:

(HT: Matt Heerema)

The 5 Most Dangerous Creativity Killers

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A great article from the 99%.The 5 most dangerous creativity killers are:

  1. Role mismatch
  2. External end goal restriction
  3. Strict ration of resources
  4. Lack of social diversity
  5. Discouragement/no positive feedback

Here’s one of the most important highlights of the article. There is truth to the fact that constraints often add to our creativity by creating the “entrepreneurial gap” that requires novel solutions (and thus creativity) to cross when resources are scarce.

Sometimes, however, that reality is used to justify strict rationing of resources in an organization and a caviler imposition of restraints on creatives. That is a complete misunderstanding and misapplication of the entrepreneurial gap. As the article points out:

Although self-restriction can often boost creativity, the Harvard study shows that external restrictions are almost always a bad thing for creative thinking. This includes subtle language use that deters creativity, such as bosses claiming “We do things by the book around here,” or group members implicitly communicating that new ideas are not welcome.

Here’s one other important point: a shortage of time is not good for creativity!

While money and physical resources are important to creativity, the Harvard study revealed that mental resources were most important, including having enough time.

Creative people re-conceptualize problems more often than a non-creative. This means they look at a variety of solutions from a number of different angles, and this extensive observation of a project requires time. This is one of the many reasons you should do your best to avoid unnecessary near-deadline work that requires novel thinking. Also, when we are faced with too many external restrictions we spend more time acquiring more resources than actually, you know, creating.

Is There a Christian Way to be a Bus Driver?

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Justin Taylor gives a great answer to this question, which helps us all understand how any area of life or occupation we have — whether bus driver, marketing director, CEO, web designer, programmer, custodian, or anything else — relates to our faith.

Justin shows that the single question of whether there is a “Christian” way to do seemingly “secular” things actually breaks down into several questions. These are the questions he answers, using a bus driver as the example:

  • Does the Bible teach how to be a bus driver?
  • Does the Bible teach how to be a Christian bus driver?
  • Can a non-Christian be a good bus driver?
  • Can a non-Christian be a better bus driver than a Christian?
  • Is there a distinctively Christian way to think about the particulars of each vocation?

Here’s what it comes down to: the gospel changes three chief things concerning the way we go about work that is chiefly in the arena of common grace:

  1. Our motive
  2. Our standards
  3. Our foundation (source of strength)

That is a slightly different way of stating it than Justin, but it is based on the same principles and comes down to the same thing.

As Justin points out, the gospel does not chiefly change our methods. For example, the Christian bus driver doesn’t have to put on special glasses before hopping into the drivers seat, still stops at red lights rather than green lights (let’s hope), and turns left by steering the wheel to the left and not right.

Read the whole thing.

Three Rules for Making Any Company Great

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Michael Raynor and Mumtaz Amhed nail it in their article in the April Harvard Business Review:

  1. Better before cheaper—in other words, compete on differentiators other than price.
  2. Revenue before cost—that is, prioritize increasing revenue over reducing costs.
  3. There are no other rules—so change anything you must to follow Rules 1 and 2.

I disagree with their critique of Jim Collins’ Good to Great and Tom Peters’ In Search of Excellence, but it’s noteworthy that their conclusions are essentially the same. That is, the findings of Collins and Tom Peters can be boiled down to these three things. Or, perhaps better, these three rules are derivatives of the even deeper and more foundational realities that Collins and Peters show.

The extent to which these three rules are violated is truly breathtaking!