Four Pricing Principles

I enjoyed this article, particularly as I've been in a discussion about pricing models not so long ago.

http://insideintercom.io/four-pricing-principals-to-never-forget/

Free users ask for new features and pay users ask for improved features surprises me. But I can sort of see that pattern when I compare large org features I work on (which always have a cost) and some of the threads I read as regards free services on the internet. The idea that uncommitted customers won't commit until there's a new feature, versus committed customers who will continue to pay and push for a change is compelling.

Pet Peeve - Redux

It took exactly 24 hours to find a phrase to add to my list, and I don't add them lightly (although I thank Shawn for his recommendations). Long pole. As in, what's the long pole? There are a bunch of small issues, but what's the long pole? The long pole is the hardware as there's a six month wait. The long pole is the power consumption, as we might never make it to the floor. The long pole is Scooter. He's going to hold everything up. He always does. I'm not sure why, all I asked him was what he felt was the long pole. The long pole is we keep using the phrase long pole and it's pissing people off to the point they're leaving the project.

Amended phrases I will never use:
1.) The Perfect Storm

2.) Special Sauce

3.) Long Pole

Managerial Style Advice

Again, I paraphrase. But this is very close...

Brady (developer): "Were you at Target last week?"

Me (manager): "I'm not sure. Usually my wife goes to Target. But I do end up there sometimes."

Brady: "The Eagan Target?"

Me: "That's the one I go to. I live near it."

Brady: "I thought I saw you there."

Me: "It might have been me."

Brady: "No. I thought it was you. But this guy was wearing a green sort of pull over."

Me: "Like a Mexican pullover?"

Brady: "Yeah. That wouldn't have been you."

Me: "I own a green pullover. My friend bought it for me because I couldn't find one in Mexico that fit me."

Brady: Uncomfortable silence. "Oh. That was you."

Apparently I need to put on my manager clothes even when I'm shopping.

Managerial Lesson

I made the mistake of using the phrase "more technical manager" in front of other managers yesterday. No doubt this will amuse French Dip. It took less than a second for another manager to jump in with "What do you mean? We're all technology managers!" Sigh. Serves me right. I should know better. I dissembled a bit and moved on with achieving my objective in other ways.

But I suspect that manager knew what I meant. I mean someone who could literally sit down at their desk and code up a Java or C# app without having to dust off a book, possibly in multiple IDEs, and might be able to tell you about the semantic similarities and differences between those languages and others, like Ruby (et al.) and give you a best case for each of them and when they actually wrote something in each one. I mean an individual who knows how to create WSDLs and REST interfaces in more than theory and can, with little effort, create stylesheets and web pages, all tricked out with CSS, XHTML, javascript and, just because it was fun, have worked with Silverlight or AIR. Someone who has a virtual machine on their desktop, or access to one for personal use they've squirreled away on the network. Someone who can read SQL, knows how to optimize it, and has used a few of the latest bells and whistles in the more recent incarnations of database products. Someone who not only knows that Inversion of Control is a software term, but has implemented it in some capacity. Ditto for at least a handful of patterns and anti-patterns. There's a lot more to it then that. So much more, and I'm not even going to get into CI, source control, and unit testing. But that's what I meant and I suspect the question wasn't meant to get that response but to send a message, despite that I didn't mean it in any way that implied a non-technical individual was lacking. They just didn't exhibit the particular strength set I was after in order to resolve a situation. Live and learn, eh?

Echo Boomers?

According to this ReadWriteWeb article about "Do regular people really read blogs?", GenY can also be referred to as "echo boomers". If I were a Millennial I might find this offensive. It seems to imply that you're only an echo of the Baby Boomers, although I'm sure the intent is to relate that Millennials are a big generation because they're children of the Boomers.

World Wide Words does a better job of detailing the phrase "echo boomers". Wikipedia also recognizes echo boomers, and goes on to detail several other generational terms I wasn't familiar with:

• Generation C, where no one can quite agree on what the C stands for.
• Generation Z, after Y and no memory before the War on Terror. I suspect, given their letter, they'll be the generation that fights the Zombie Wars.
• Generation V, basically everyone who's been on the web or had to worry about hamster eating aliens.
  
• Generation Jones, between boomers and Gen X - a breed of cusper. Not the group that went to the movies over the last few weeks.
  
• iGeneration, which seems pretty lame, though it's self explanatory. If you're going to go that far, you might as well coin the term Generation 2.0 or Generation^2.0 to indicate anyone who's used a blog, tagging system or social network. Alternatively, anyone who's ever uttered the phrase "folksonomy".
  

I'm not sure if all of that is necessary. Traditional (Greatest + Silent), Boomer, GenX, Millennial and the inbetween "cusper" seem sufficient to address current generation gap needs. But if you need finer gradations to work with, there's a nice chart here and here.

An interesting piece of trivia, according to Lynne Lancaster and David Stillman in When Generations Collide, what generation does everyone, including Generation Xers, think is the most difficult generation to manage? Generation Xers of course. You have to hate that innate distrust of authority and institution and drive for autonomy. Without good managers, it plays very poorly with a cube farm.

A funny quote, according to Taylor on his tumblr account, his intern asked, “Is he a Baby Boomer? Because I’ve noticed they have bad ideas and don’t listen to other people.” I hope he took a moment to educate after laughing.

Johnny Bunko

After I went to see Daniel Pink, sponsored by the U of MN, he left me a message on my blog asking if I'd be interested in having a few copies of his book to distribute. Hell yes. He was interesting. I'm all about interesting people. Life's a sad place without mental evangelists - it's why I'm mopey about Erik and Klund leaving my workplace - they made it fun with all their generalized interest in everything. So Mr. Pink sent me ten copies of his book, Johnny Bunko: The Last Carrer Guide You'll Ever Need, which is manga that relates several career points (in comic book form), the illustrations done by Rob Ten Pas, who's from MCAD, right here in my own home town (yeah, yeah, I'm from Eagan and it's not even really a first tier burb - but close enough for cheese, as our Sconie neighbors like to say).

Dan's book takes all of 17 minutes to read according to my friend Erik. I think I took about 20 minutes. My old manager who works for a corporate tax affiliate assured me she would take longer because she likes to study the pictures. And I'm not sure how long Ming took, but he declared it excellent, which is seriously high praise from him, so however long it took was worth his while. Point being, it's a quick read. And it's great. In the first part, if you're not someone used to manga (and I thought I was, having a pretty in depth graphic novel background, but I wasn't), you'll wonder, "Why the hell am I reading this?" But if you stick with it into the second point, you'll realize it's actually somewhat inspired. Read 12 or Growing Great Employees, and you'll scarf down thousands of words and many hours, all the time believing they could get to the point in far less time. Daniel Pink gets to the point immediately, particularly if you're a millennial. He illustrates half a dozen points, including "don't go around your boss" (one of my favorites), in a fraction of the time, and in a format so easily accessible that if you don't apprehend the points the first time, you can just go back and reread it six more times and still not be as bored as you would be comparing employees to flowers and weeds.

I'm not sure about the whole Cameron Diaz/Barbara Eden as the managerial wizard comparison, but his protaganist's mentor definitely has more appeal than anyone you'd read about in the Harvard Business Review. I pushed copies out to my director, my manager (who was leaving for different pastures), my friend with a troublesome Millennial, a friend in the PMO who was reading about generational differences, a friend heading to a nonprofit downtown, a manager in another division, and the corporate library. I look forward to seeing someone wondering around with a loaner.

Revenge of the Right Brainers

Status: drinking Crooked Tree I.P.A., listening to I Kissed a Girl by Katy Perry and Tube Snake Boogie by ZZ Top, thinking that everyone who knows my wife should ask her what her nickname is because of the 5-letter code that put on all the bills in her name and worrying that when Erik leaves I will fall into a deep depression marked by a cessation of coffee drinking.

I went to Great Conversations at the U of MN tonight to listen to Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind and Johnny Bunko (a manga career guide for Millennials with advice about how to fail and that if you have a plan for your career, following A to B to C, you might as well discard it, it won't matter by the time you get somewhere between A and B. They should probably hand out a copy to each kid under about 28 that walks in the door at work), talk about what he sees as the changing nature of work. To sum it up, I think he sees us all becoming more like Millennials, where we no longer focus on a job, or on a career, but on a breadth of skills that encompasses the ability to tackle several careers. His assertion that if you're trying to create modern spaces for students or workers, you should tell them the budget and just give them free reign to redesign, falls right into the Millennial habit of wanting to contribute (meaningfully) to everything they touch in ways that cut across traditional work boundaries.

In some respects, it was more motivational speaking than business, but he addressed some of the ways different generations learn and what should be common to them as far as what they get out of work to feel engaged. Namely that you should give your employees the ability command some sort of autonomy (read Drucker circa 1950 - he makes the same assertion in his chapters about how repetitive motion jobs of the hands or brain actually decrease productivity), encourage/allow them to achieve mastery (don't do the same thing if you can help it, focus on getting rid of all re-iteration), and give them purpose (also Drucker, if you equate it to knowing your objectives and line of sight. Very Millennial in the sense that they want purpose. Very dawning-retirement age Boomer as they struggle to make sure they leave a legacy as individuals). He had a nice quote about the last point, commenting that your work should not be unhinged from the real world. And he appended that it was important to model these ideals in yourself if you wanted to see them show up in others. I think Drucker would point to that as a sign of the ethical manager.

Pink also gave a few good anecdotes about education and innovation, noting that if you walked into a school now, you might not notice any difference from the school you attended 20, 30 or 40 years ago. I think it's a valid point that lack of change doesn't mean we long ago reached the nadir of school design, but that we're modeling schools to prepare kids for our past, not their future. Overall, it was a good reiteration of some of the very same themes I was hearing and pondering during the MN High Tech Association Innovation Conference.

For My Business Reading Group

Mediation put me on to this HBR online article, Ten Reasons Why the Relationship Between Corporations and Gen X is Strained. Amusing comments as well. Here's the post she references in the article, The Baby Boomer - Generation Y Love Fest.

MBA-Lite

I've been working lately on trying to pull together some MBA-like skills. Specifically, I have an urge to be a technical manager, at least somewhere down the line, after I finish up my new position working with the Japanese affiliate (for which I traded the Hong Kong affiliate and Australia/New Zealand affiliates. Don't assume it's a bad trade - Australia/New Zealand is currently a zero hour project, and Hong Kong not much more. Japan is high profile and 30-40% of my work week, and I support around ten-twelve projects, so it's big) and covering for a coworker who's leaving on maternity leave, doing her inhouse (and outhouse) training. Toward that end I've been looking at MBA programs in the Twin Cities. I had already been to the Carlson School of Management orientation, which seemed very reminiscent of my years at the U of MN. Recently, I went to the new MBA program at Hamline orientation. Their program is just getting off the ground and is the baby of a single, motivated man, "Poppa Bob". When Poppa Bob mentioned that his wife works in skin over at the U of MN (complexion skin, not pornography studies), I asked my mother if she knew him. She replied, "Talkative, kind of quirky Ukranian?" Yep. Spot on. But I'm not going to do that program either. Primarily because school just does not appeal to me, even with 80% coverage by my employer. It particularly doesn't appeal to me as a means to promotion.

I'll clarify that last point and do a bit of self-promotion by stating my belief that I'm already promotion worthy. I have good tech skills, an understanding of my field (tech, otherwise), an ongoing interest in my field, and what seem to be solid interpersonal habits (despite being a bit forward/confrontational at times - but that's a skill). I've had direct reports - seven at one time - done raises, done reviews, complained about the review skills of others, and run a project as both tech lead and team lead, on more than one occassion. My new position has been important to me as I picked it precisely because it would put me in front of aspects/groups in the company I did not previously interact with (the main product line, international groups, enterprise layers) and in front of job types I didn't previously interact extensively with: managers, directors, architects, project managers, business analysts, content experts. Given that I've spent an inordinate amount of time making sure I have experience (if not an understanding of) with all aspects of the company, if I don't feel like going back to school is the right decision, at least on a viceral level, why do it?

Ming said that you do it to meet people, particularly other MBAs - the people you forge connections with so that you can garner best practices (he didn't phrase it exactly that way - but he meant it). I asked him if he felt the other people in the room with us at Hamline were the sort of MBAs he wanted to meet and with whom he wanted to form lifelong professional friendships. He sheepishly admitted they were not.

So, in the interest of being able to talk and think like management, and in the interest of acquiring all the skills of a manager, even if I know that not all of them in my company have been through professional training (like an MBA/etc), I've decided to embark upon a self-directed study course, courtesy of The Personal MBA and a few add ons I feel are important, like a firm grounding in Agile and alternatives (yes...alternatives), tech, offshoring, ITIL, and whatever I find on the shelves of Directors and VPs. In order for me to retain something of what I learn out that huge mass of books (must read accounting, must read accounting), I'm going to be posting a few reviews now and then to help me clarify what I've been reading, relate it back to the other books I've read, and provide my insights for one or two others at my company who are pondering a similar course. Mac, already MBA-ed, and apparently in agreement about my decision not to use an MBA as a way to a promotion, can also chime in and correct my erroneous assumptions.

By the way, Mac. I am incredibly jealous that you're even hinting at getting published. I have a great big notebook full of about 50 short stories and 6 book ideas from the past year. You have inspired me to do something about those ideas other than leave them stubbed out for posterity.

Onward...the plan. I'll review a few of the books, generally in twos and threes so I can draw parallels. But I'm going to add the odd quote broken out here and there, not to draw attention to a particularly pithy observation, but to point out something I think is stupid or humorous. If you feel you're an expert on something business related, then at some point during your observations, you're going to say something horrible. It's just a given. I feel that you can't self-educate without maintaining your sense of humor - you've got to be watching for the surreal so that you're not taking everything you read too seriously.

"If I had learned what your book taught me sooner, I wouldn't be stuck inside
these walls today." - from an women's correctional facility inmate.

The first two books I read were self-discovery books, courtesy of the inter-library loan program. That means, I couldn't take the tests, because the goal is to make everyone buy a book and take the test. But I found that to be helpful. I really had to focus on how I felt about dropping myself into various personality buckets. The Personality Code focused on DISC, a yes/no examination of whether you were Dominant or Steady, and Interpersonal or Conscientious. The goal is to determine if your focus is on people or tasks, and active or reactive. Your preferences drop you into one of fourteen categories which are then expounded upon, for their own merits, as well as for how they interact with their anti-type. I have issues with a book that posits there are four dimensions to personality in the beginning, and then self-references within the rest of the book as though the original hypothesis is fact. Particularly given that Bradberry admits there are 123,000 possible configurations (p. 151) and he narrows it down to fourteen broad types. It doesn't seem like the issue is pinpointing your personality, but putting yourself in a generalized bucket so that you know how to react consistently in a situation, and given a particular type of foil. There's this unwritten (in the book) idea that leadership isn't bucketing yourself or others, but brushing yourself with broad strokes so that your reactions can be interpreted correctly and consistently, by you and by others. I find some value in that idea. If your motives and actions aren't transparent to subordinates and management, no matter how valid or altruistic, that can be an issue.

"Never threaten this person unless you are 100% ready to follow through." -
Strengthsfinder 2.0, p. 64

I found the appendix to The Personality Code to be much more interesting. It spelled out 26 emotional quotient (EQ) values and provided some research and ranking behind them. These are the things that, unlike basic personality traits, you can learn, change, and improve. Self-awareness, self-managment, social awareness, relationship management, credibility, courage, et al. Strengthsfinder 2.0 tackled these same EQ values, but with different names. I found less value in trying to peg myself to any one, or more, bucket (I believe I'm ideation, input or intellection, and responsbility, coupled with opportunist/expert) than in considering the themes and the value in recognizing all the EQ themes are abilities you should be able to access in an appropriate context. Which means, in the end, I walk away with, in addition to an annoyance about the focus on Rudy in Strengthsfinder 2.0, a very limited list of items that I feel were essential and common to both books:

1.) Know yourself. Know yourself well enough to act consistently and transparently.
2.) Know the personal and emotional tools at your disposal well enough to apply them situationally.

That last one. I think it almost spelled the end of a manager I know. That manager focused on the hard manager skills (tech, etc) to the exclusion of the people who were implementing the project. The rats-abandoning-the-ship that followed (not an accurate metaphor - perhaps, rats discovering nearby cheese with fewer traps is more accurate?) nearly shut that manager down.

"...cradle to cubicle..." - Strengthsfinder 2.0 (seriously, is there a more
horrifying phrase?)

Whoof. Were you expecting that much typing? I'm going to go one step further. Between these two books, my recent MBTI course, and a pile of developer/agile reading lately, I've been pondering a particular correspondence. Given Clay Shirkey's discussion about developers, software, and Bion, I wouldn't be the first to draw connections between psychology and software. What I've been pondering is whether what's considered great about agile development might not just be personality in the macro. What? I'll step back. I don't consider anything I've read about personality, or any class I've taken, to be useful in picking a team. You pick a team by interviewing and hiring good programmers and getting to know the people you hired and how to smooth out the bumps in making them work well together. Sounds like personality, but it's not an issue of looking at fourteen types and three dozen EQ themes. It's an issue of looking at all 123,000 possible permutations. Microanalyzing is no good. You have to look at MBTI in the large, situational leadership, and within your own judgement to create a matrix...a matrix that's no good unless you talk to your team and understand each of them as individual people (or hiring someone who's capable of fulfilling that role for you).

But in the macro, in a Hari Seldon fashion, I think there's something to be gained. Posit your business unit as a person. Posit your development group, as a whole, as a person. Developers seem to be intuitive rather than sensing. While it might seem like they should be sense-centric, all the facts ma'am, tell me all the discrete steps, I find that better developers, exactly the kind agile says are necessary for their process, are more intuition. They're focused on patterns, the future, and a big picture. They read books about patterns and objects and consider grandiose new ways to work with, and present data. A business unit, on the other hand, while professing to be about the big picture, is very sense-focused when scoped at a project level. Developer assurances about a new technology: css, themes, AJAX, agile itself, silverlight/flex - those don't mean much. It's too much. But a concrete, touchable, clickable prototype. That's gold. Those are the trees in the forest. And if you look at the groups that way, agile seems to be solidly entrenched in MBTI and information processing. We (and here I set myself as a developer, although the start of this post noted I want to be the business unit/management) get to tell stories. We pander to what could be and revel in inspiration. Inspiration. No one tells an agile story with an unhappy ending. That's fucked. It's not done. If you can't see the utopia at the end of your code: the Shangri-la or Keanu-resolved matrix - if you can't revel in the inspiration you feel your sprints and spikes will force upon people who don't even understand the underlying code - if you can't throw away that nasty technical documentation becuase it only fits one personality type, not the other thirteen, and certainly not your business unit - if you can't give your business unit the sensual information that best first their perceptual preference - than what the hell are you coding for. They're not the storytellers. You are. They're the readers. Real developers, agile developers, focus on what could be, and their business unit focuses on the touch and the taste. If they can touch it, sense it, feel it, then they can have a reaction to it and explain that reaction to the developers. A mutual need is fulfilled. And that's the focus of almost every personality exploration out there. At some point you and your foil have to meet on common ground. In the micro, that's a matter of two people talking it out, because there are so many personality points to consider. In the macro...in the macro maybe you can make some assumptions.