What Steve Jobs Taught Me

Let me say at the outset that I didn’t know Steve Jobs, or ever work with him.  In fact I haven’t even read the book that EVERYONE seems to be reading at the moment – his biography by Walter Isaacson.  And I don’t intend to anytime soon.  Which I guess makes me supremely unqualified to write about any lessons he taught anyone. 

But Steve Jobs did, apparently, teach me one thing. 

It doesn’t involve any form of computing, is completely unconnected to tablets or smart phones, and is so ordinary that it doesn’t even begin to give away its power. 

What is it?  It is planning in analog. 

Unusually for me, I didn’t even need to read a book to get the idea; it came in a freely downloadable pdf.  Plan in analog.  So simple, so obvious, but so, so powerful.

I happened to be working on a presentation and tried the idea out.  I replaced my much loved but very broken fountain pen with a sleek, inexpensive silver number and invested in a nice notebook (without a power pack).  And I started to write.  And draw bubbles.  And more bubbles.  Turned the page and did it again.  For hours on end. 

It is notable how the brain is free to think creatively when it doesn’t get caught up worrying about point sizes, or whether boxes are lined up.  I thought about my BIG IDEAS.  I criticized them, turned the page and started again.  I have pages and pages of mind maps, notes, crossings out and ideas that run off the edge of the page.  Pen and paper isn’t nearly as flexible or forgiving of mistakes as my Office software, but it is superb at freeing the mind.

I hope I produced a better presentation with my inspiration from Steve Jobs.  I know I created it more quickly than if I hadn’t done my pen and paper planning.  I guess I won’t know until it closes a sale or makes an entire audience stand up to applaud. 

The process has taught me an important lesson – pre-planning on paper should be given plenty of time.  It produces better structure, better ideas, and hopefully a better end result.  It certainly saves time. 

I shall credit Steve Jobs with the lesson.  It’s not as earth-shattering as the iPhone or iPad, but looking at his presentations I can well believe he devoted considerable time to worrying about big ideas before worrying about how it might look on the screen.

Watch “The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs” by Camine Gallo here:  http://www.slideshare.net/cvgallo/the-presentation-secrets-of-steve-jobs-2609477.  His book “The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience” is also well worth a read.  OK – I’ll admit to having read that one!

Leadership - the Toastmasters' way

“If you cheat yourself in the preparation, it will show up in your presentation.”

Jonas Gadson, DTM

Toastmasters International is an organisation for developing public speaking and leadership capabilities. Different from the red coat Master of Ceremonies Toastmasters, it started in the USA and is now in 106 countries with over 12,000 active clubs and more than 250,000 members.

I have been a member of my local club for over 4 years now and the longer I work with Toastmasters, the more I get out of it. We have a meeting tonight and I have been assigned the role of General Evaluator. I have to find evaluators for the prepared speeches and give an overall summary of the meeting. My preparation work is just about done so I am all set for tonight.

However, I already have a few things that I know I will say in my summing up. That’s because a Toastmasters meeting is no different from many other organised presentations or work meetings. The preparation starts long before the meeting – and it is the preparation that determines how well the meeting goes.

The person responsible for the overall meeting is called the Toastmaster for the Evening. The Toastmaster tonight is a very experienced speaker and a good organiser, so I know the meeting will be run well. However, he has had to cope with quite a lot of behind the scenes confusion: uncertainty about who will speak, changes of roles, etc. Not particularly unusual, but nor does it reflect particularly well on those involved.

Toastmasters have always had a strong focus on leadership – and this is their checklist on how to be a good leader. I think it is a solid checklist.

• Give more than you expect others to give.
• Combine optimism and perseverance.
• See everyone as a diamond in the rough.
• Express appreciation; accept responsibility.
• Keep your ego in check.
• Show respect for the people around you.
• Treat team members as family.
• Be a source of inspiration.
• Stress cooperation, not competition.
• Maintain a sense of humour.

It is a useful reminder for me tonight in accepting change as inevitable, whilst striving for high standards in a club that is already renowned for its leadership abilities.

It is highly likely that in a meeting involving 15 or more different roles there will be changes to the original plan and last minute drop outs. But the two-pronged approach of Preparation and Positive Leadership help all meetings run well – not just Toastmasters’ evenings.

Valuable reminders for participants as well as leaders.

Energy rhetoric, but little data

The Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Ed Milliband, argued in The Times yesterday that “we must try every option to shift to a low-carbon world”. He reasoned that energy security and climate change commitments were sufficient incentive to back the government’s policy of building new nuclear power plants.

I, for one, would like to see more data.

Let’s not forget that nuclear power is also a threat to the planet. Whilst melting ice is not a popular move with that most potent symbol of our planet – the polar bear - neither is waste that stays radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years. The choices may not be palatable, but surely all the more reason to have good data, presented clearly.

Renewable energy, he said should not be dismissed: wind is producing enough power for 2 million homes. 2,000,000 is indeed a large number – an impressive number even. But it is a meaningless number in the debate about energy and climate change. How many homes and businesses need power? And at what cost?

Milliband rightly pointed to the future with ideas such as “clean coal” which as soon as the technology is ready the government will ensure will be 100% committed to. Whilst he was quick to quantify the potential jobs that will be created through this R&D, he was less keen to share the costs even though they are equally quantifiable.

Neither did he talk of other technology which might provide low-carbon alternatives a great deal more palatable for our polar bears than sitting on radioactive waste for a million years. Yet they do exist.

This whole issue is quantifiable: cost of power, amounts of subsidies, carbon emissions, temperature changes, sea levels, thickness of ice, number of species. I could go on – they are many and varied and all absolutely quantifiable. Yet for some reason we prefer pictures of polar bears to clear data which would help us make good decisions about what mix of power to rely on.

The UK has armies of statisticians paid to collect, collate and present exactly this data. Couldn’t Mr Milliband have included some of their work? He was writing for The Times, after all.

Status codes at Terminal 5

We are all used to status codes – they are not exactly new. En e-mail may be sent, received, read or flagged for follow-up. A training course may be archived, current or planned. I could go on – most business software will use status codes in some form or another. They convey relevant and pre-selected information about whatever it is you are tracking. So far, so unexciting.

I did see some neat status codes over the weekend at a very swish place called Heathrow Terminal 5. It was my first visit to this lovely new terminal which has been in the news for all the wrong reasons.

I was impressed: imposing architecture, systems that appeared to work well, and lots of showers for little people. Actually I think they were fountains but I suspect they will be very popular as showers as the weather gets hotter. It’s the first thing you want to do when you get off a plane, isn’t it?

Back to status codes - vital at the airport. I was in arrivals – the time shown on the board could be: estimated or actual. An additional status code showed when bags were being unloaded – now that's useful.

What really impressed me about these status codes however, was the board next to it. It had helpful information like the amount of time you should expect to wait for someone once the aircraft has landed. How long it takes for someone with or without a bag to get to the arrivals hall – now that’s not just useful, it’s actually helpful. It’s not rocket science, but it is thoughtful and genuinely helpful.
Of course it was a sunny Sunday and the incoming flight was on time. The arrivals hall wasn’t too crowded and I suspect the systems weren’t being stressed too much.

It is when it all goes wrong that people and systems come together to make decisions and ensure boards such as these give genuinely helpful information, and T5 has some making up to do in that department.

However, for the 95% of the time that things go well it’s an improvement on what I’ve seen before. And an interesting way to think about status codes – maybe they are a little too pithy sometimes?

Diamonds are a girl's best friend

I wrote about data mining the other day and got some interesting comments. One was that my analogy of gold wasn’t quite accurate. Analogies are dangerous things.

The comment was quite correct, though, because although data mining can turn up information that is of significant value, it takes work to get there. The new analogy was offered - that of an uncut diamond. A diamond is as unappealing as coal in its raw state – but much sought-after in its cut and polished state.

So it is with data mining – gold coins do not drop into your lap as if you were playing a slot machine, you have to work with the new knowledge to figure out whether you have an uncut diamond or a piece of coal. It could be either – and of course an uncut diamond in the hands of someone who doesn’t know what to do with it might as well be coal.

A business intelligence specialist told me recently that he felt uncovering new knowledge from data was only part of the solution –the remainder being to display the data clearly and to communicate its meaning in an effective way.

Whilst the underlying data mining or statistical skills clearly have to be present, there is an element of polishing and crafting the newly found information to let its brilliance be seen. Perhaps what we need are some rather different skill sets in getting the full message across: communication and visionary skills.

It also goes some way to explain why business intelligence, data mining, performance management, and data visualisation fit together so well.

Stay focused

Our online, connected and socially-networked world has reduced our ability to stay focused. That was the results of Microsoft’s research to find out how long it takes us to return to a task once we have been interrupted.

And don’t we find such rich and varied ways of getting interrupted? Email popping into our inbox which has to be checked straight away. Or checking our inbox even though nothing has popped in, just in case? A colleague (or friend) popping up on instant messaging just to catch up? What should be two minutes turns into half an hour because (a) IM is so slow as a way to communicate and (b) such a funny thing happened to them on the way in to work.

Then there is checking someone’s updated profile on LinkedIn, Plaxo, Facebook and the rest. And of course we have to make sure our own profiles are up to date. Thanks for our friends at Twitter we now have the mother of all distractions – a whole room full of people Tweeting about what’s caught their attention. Fascinating, but so distracting – links to follow, people to follow, time to twitter away.

Each time we get interrupted from our original work task it takes anywhere from 15 minutes to 2 hours to get back to what we were doing. 2 hours!!!

Now once in a while it’s not going to harm, but the problem with these distractions is that they are not occasional, they are daily, hourly, minute by minute. They are a constant pull away from what we should be focusing on.

The solutions are not rocket science:

1. Turn email off and only check it periodically. I try this from time to time but find I need information that is stored in my email, so it can get turned on again quite soon. For the short periods I manage to keep it turned off, though, it does help.

2. Turn off instant messaging while working on a task. Or only turn it on in the afternoon. This one has no downsides and lots of productivity upsides.

3. Note down start and stop times when working on a task. I use this a lot and find it effective and wrote about it in Boosting Personal Productivity. This makes me super-aware of the time I spend on a work task or the time I take out to check a favourite blog. I use my trusty stopwatch but know its a little eccentric.

4. Work on a clear desk. My sister once bought me some post-it notes that said “My desk may be cluttered, but my mind is empty”. Enough said.

The wonderful, wonderful book Life’s a Pitch by Stephen Bayley & Roger Mavity tells the story of pitching for the Volvo account. They had 8 weeks to put together a winning presentation and after 6 weeks had got nowhere. Rather than redouble efforts for the last 2 weeks, they took the first week to make everyone clear their desks of anything other than Volvo work. For the second week they went to a hotel and did nothing but Volvo work. Of course – because it’s in the book, they won the account. But what a clever and brave strategy.

What's your favourite tip for staying focused and improving performance - either personally or as a team?

Manage your message with conditional formatting

30 years ago Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston developed VisiCalc - the world’s first electronic spreadsheet. The basic idea of a spreadsheet hasn’t changed much since, but the functionality has improved enormously. From SuperCalc to Lotus 1-2-3 and then Excel, the spreadsheet has been an immoveable favourite on our desktops.

But as revolutionary as VisiCalc was, it was only when the spreadsheet started to get visual that it went mainstream. Charting, graphing, plotting and showing data as pictures moved the spreadsheet out of the accountant’s office and into the marketing department, and indeed most other departments.

Numbers were talking a language that people could understand.

Conditional formatting

Microsoft Excel 2007 is the latest in a long and increasingly useful line of wonder-spreadsheets. The oh-so-easy-to-use Conditional Formatting in Excel does a great deal more than Microsoft could ever fit on the box.

It is no exaggeration to say that Excel is the world’s leading Business Intelligence tool.

Anyone faced with a screen full of figures can now quickly and intelligently make sense of them. And I mean quickly. Conditional formatting is perhaps more useful as a personal sense-making tool. With a click and a sweep coloured bars show you how big the big things are and how small the small things are. I could have said that the coloured bars show you how big the big NUMBERS are and how small the small NUMBERS are, but numbers represent things: sales, people, widgets, cases, key words.

So what these graphical bars are really telling us is where the problems and opportunities are: where we should direct our energies, or who we should pick the phone up to first.
Conditional formatting tells us what’s important and where we can leave well alone.

Conditional formatting is also a great presentation tool. It enables figures and graphics to be reported in one hit – a weakness of the traditional graph. Although graphs and charts are worth a thousand words, they also needed a table below it to enable the full story to be communicated. Conditional formatting allows both actual numbers, and the visual representation, to be reported together in a very compact space. Ideal for busy managers, complex reports, and for simply getting an important message across.

Key word visualisation

Consider the key words for this blog. Each time I do a posting the numbers increment on the key words, and new ones get added. After a few postings the numbers start to build. Put conditional formatting against those numbers and they look totally different.

I begin to see areas that perhaps should be more central to my blogging, and are presently being ignored. I’m not particularly surprised by some, but importantly I start to look at the key words differently.

Visualisation is not neutral

Interestingly, the two types of conditional formatting in this example also make me look at the numbers in a different way. With the yellow bars I see a continuum – more of some and less of others. With the traffic light flags I see “high performing” key words and “poorly performing” keywords. They are the same key words, the same numbers, and it’s the same person looking at the data – I just draw different conclusions. If I were using this to explain performance, I would need to think carefully about the presentation.

What we measure gets attention, and what we show visually gets us thinking in new ways about what we are doing. As the power of visuals improves in spreadsheets, so does our ability to demonstrate a particular angle of what we want the reader to understand. It’s something to think about when presenting information, and when consuming it.