SXSW: Reworking business with Jason Fried
Jason Fried just spoke at SXSWi about his new book, REWORK. He reminds me of the simple reason I enjoy running The Hive entrepreneurial networking group - it is really refreshing to see people talk passionately and authentically about how they do things.
Watch this video:
Jason Fried is somebody I have been following since the days he ran a group that did usability consulting and workshops. Since then they have transformed into a company that has released four major applications and three books while maintaining a popular blog and releasing the popular web framework Ruby on Rails.
The evolution in the way Jason runs 37signals has been really fascinating to watch as it becomes more and more complex, while appearing simpler. Jason questions the way traditional businesses are run and the ideas that people have about business in ‘the real world’ before actually trying new adaptations to see if he can find a better way of doing things. Over time this has compounded and the progression really shows in the books they have published:
- Defensive Design for the web – shows their thought process around web user interfaces and how they consider the various elements on a page in relation to the user.
- Getting Real – a collection of really opinionated ideas on how they run the company very differently to most software groups.
- Rework – shows the distilled version of the most foundational elements of Getting Real.
Some of my favourite concepts are: Meetings are toxic, Start at the epicentre, Focus on what won’t change, Make tiny decisions and Drug dealers get it right.
Once you have seen the video, do yourself a favour and go buy a copy of Rework.
My university commencement speech for 2010
This week is the beginning of university life for thousands of recent high school graduates. There is lots of fun to be had, lots of learning, and time to build the vision of where you want to be in the next few years. I have been asked what I would recommend doing – I don’t have a podium like Derek Sivers or Steve Jobs, but I do have a blog so here is my advice for 2010:
1. Focus is the most important thing to master
This is the difference between getting the right thing done, and procrastinating. You need to figure out what works for you. Here’s one idea: choose the task you want to work on, whether that is reading a chapter of a book or writing a few hundred words on a topic – plug in your headphones and play an album from start to finish. Then when it ends get up and go for a walk or have something to eat, have a break, then play another album and do another task. How do you know what to work on? Learn some sort of productivity system like Getting Things Done or Zen To Done. However you do it – it is vital that you learn how to let yourself focus.
2. Learn to teach yourself
You have the internet. The answer to almost anything is just a few clicks away. You need to know what to ask for to get the results you are looking for, and then how to filter the results to find the answers you need. Be aware of the topics and ideas that interest you and deep dive into them to teach yourself more. You might search google, you might ask your twitter friends, or you might find a local meetup on the topic to broaden your knowledge. Don’t wait for teachers to show you things – follow your intuition and teach yourself.
3. Share what you learn
The best way to consolidate what you learn is to teach it, because every person you teach will ask you to clarify different elements of the topic and in doing so this will lead you to clarify both for them and for yourself exactly what that piece means. You don’t have to know everything to help somebody, in fact you will probably do a better job if you have to learn together. Take your sharing beyond the people you see face to face. It has never been easier to share things online – start a blog at Tumblr or Posterous and share something every day. This will pay off in more ways than you can imagine.
4. Build your mafia
You have been told that your network is important, however what matters is not who you know but who knows you. This means getting into conversations, following up with the people you meet and having coffees every few months to keep in touch. Remember to learn from the stars in your own galaxy. It is easy to look at the people in the top of your industry but you are not there yet – when you are climbing a mountain you don’t look at the snow capped peak, you look at the bottom and you take your first steps. Talk to the locals in your industry. I started an interview blog called Hatchthat which gave me something to reach out with and I interviewed Jason Calacanis, Aaron Fyke, and many others. Then I started The Hive and got to know Pete Williams, Scott Kilmartin, Sahil Merchant and others. If you find the right set of people you will develop an interdependence that means you all win from knowing each other.
5. Do, learn, do, learn.
The most important thing is that you get started with the simplest possible thing that could work. The best lessons come from trying something and seeing what happens. Learning the theory is important but it is worthless until you validate it with your own positive experiences. I hear the phrase fail early and fail often a lot – many people seem to wear it as a badge of honour especially in the entrepreneurial world, but it’s bullshit, because whatever you do will either work, or you will learn something. There is no failure because there is always going to be some little piece that was successful – you need to find that piece and learn why. Then do something new and repeat the cycle. Above all else be consistent – none of these things matter unless you do them consistently. You will build momentum and your projects will evolve. At the end of your degree these projects become your resume and the world is yours.
Do, learn, do learn.
The Tablet / iPad
Apple have revealed the iPad and in doing so shown their vision for their native tablet ecosystem. Touch as standard and web as standard – the device to replace the laptop.
It is important to realise that the iPad is not being aimed at the professional artist or the hardcore tech guy, but for most people. That means that you are not going to need a manual to use it, and it also means that the guys at the spec-oriented end of the commentary spectrum are not going to have much to talk about! Like Dr. Ernest Prabhakar who managed Apple’s Mac OS X open source strategy at Apple wrote – reducing the iPad to a list of features “is like reducing the experience of eating chocolate to a list of chemicals.”
It’s not about the hardware, it’s about the applications – so that is what I will focus on here.
Browsing the web, doing email, photos, video, music, casual games.
It is not about running your iPhone apps on a bigger screen – these activities all look very different when you apply them to the touch environment. Think back to when you were young and you had to choose between using a paint brush and using your fingers when painting a picture. Using your fingers always felt much more natural and that is why we love to zoom, tap and scroll around a screen – free of the limitations a mouse imposes on our movement.
The Apple team demonstrated the touch version of iWork that they have been working on for the past year. These applications look very different to their desktop partners and for good reason – many of the old metaphors don’t make sense now! It is going to be interesting to see what developers build in this space when they too have had a year to work on it.
It would have been easy for Apple to install their regular Mac OSX onto tablet hardware but what really separates the iPad from the other guys is that Apple have been training developers on how to develop their applications for a touch-native environment for the past two years, through the iPhone, and they will launch the iPad with over 140,000 apps.
Designing for touch means completely rethinking the typical user interface widgets that work really well with a mouse – hot spots towards corners, long thin scroll bars, manipulating objects by using buttons at their edges, having buttons at all… these elements don’t make as much sense when you are using your fingers. We are more likely to want to navigate and move around chunks of content by touching and gesturing the blocks. This fundamental conceptual shift will continue to challenge designers to think about the Minority Report situation while giving them a mass-market platform that exists today, to build it on.
But the importance that is placed on applications does not mean that Apple has put themselves at the mercy of developers. Apple build their products to satisfy customers first:
- The operating system was for Macs, not for every computer ever.
- The music store was for iPod owners, not music distributers.
- The phone was for people, not carriers.
- The app platform is for people, not developers.
The constraints that have been placed on developers are really interesting to follow because most people don’t need background processes, most people don’t need a file system and most people don’t mind using a single store to buy everything. Like they have done in other markets, Apple bring their loyal customer base of over 125m credit card enabled iStore accounts to the table and this demand means there is a void to fill – so developers have released over 140,000 apps that have led to a combined 12 billion iStore product downloads so far.
It is interesting that nobody ever complained about the lack of multi-tasking before. Your camera takes photos, and nothing more. Your GPS only gives you directions. Your DVD player only plays movies. Most devices single-task and when they need more they make it a seamless integration. Your oven has a clock in it. Apps can do the same thing. There is a much more technical discussion to be had but the decision to keep apps independent is a strong one.
It says a lot that during the announcement keynote Steve Jobs and his team sat down on the couch to demo the device, because if you can do things from your couch you can do them from almost anywhere. But it is not a phone, it is a tablet.
I am going to try to replace my MacBook Pro laptop with an iPad. I don’t see the constraint of running a single app at once to be a hurdle, because I will always have my iPhone with me and that is already where I run 80% of the things I do – my action list, my calendar, my email, twitter, skype, facebook, train timetables, maps, foursquare, the camera, last.fm and more.
The iPad will hopefully satisfy the remaining 20% of tasks that could be grouped as content and manipulation – the internet, filtering masses of data, writing lengthy emails, watching movies, producing documents. The internet is the main one – I really liked playing with the Google Chrome OS because it reminds you that computers are now largely a window to the web. Right now the iPhone with its touch interface and gestures is the closest you can get to holding the internet in your hands, and the iPad is going to be a much more intimate and natural scale for doing that. The web is most of what I do online.
I am certainly curious about how this combination will work – is enough of my life online to enable it? Will I have enough access to the information and files I need to work with? What new opportunities will it lead to?
I’ll be at SXSWi 2010
SXSW is an annual conference held in March in Austin, Texas that has a massive interactive stream. I’ll be there this year and then heading to San Fran for a week or so afterwards.
The schedule is ridiculous – have a flick through the listings for interactive – it’s going to be difficult to plot a mission to weave through so many interesting sessions.
Paul Boag made a video that has some really awesome sxsw noob tips – if you have any more suggestions or you want to catch up there please let me know.
See you there!
Look to the horizon for your future
If you look to the horizon you will see hints of what is to come. It is already here, you just need to be able to find it and then have the awareness to know what you are seeing in front of you.
William Gibson’s words keep replaying in my mind, when he said: “The future is already here – it is just unevenly distributed.” As a collective we spend a lot of time thinking about the future, about what’s next. We make guesses about what is coming and what it will look like – but with the realisation that it is already here, we can go to the edges and we can find it.
What interesting ideas have you seen on the edges lately? Here are a few interesting things:
- Accessible space flight with Virgin Galactic
- 1000 year old humans with Aubrey De Grey
- Severe information overload, on social networks
- Mobile phones as augmented reality portals
- Spending vast amounts of time in virtual worlds
- Minimalism as a way to transcend consumption habits
- Games as tools to solve humanities problems
- The internet enabling nomadic lifestyles
