Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters

On the Intelligence of Our Customers

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 21:10:48 -0800

The other day somebody showed a slide that said "Our customers are not stupid". I objected to this, which led to some laughter. But I was actually serious.

I don't mean that our customers ARE stupid, of course. It's just that with one billion or whatever customers, one must assume that they fall at various points along the intelligence scale, for whatever definition of intelligence you choose.

Although you might feel virtuous in declaring that our customers are not stupid, it's actually dangerous. I suppose it's better than looking down on your customers. But if you say "Our customers are as smart as us, they are just think differently", then you will be tempted to view their lack of understanding about how our software works as a sign that things just haven't been explained well enough. Once they see the model, you expect them to figure it out.

On the contrary, if some of our customers really aren't as smart as us, then you have to design the software so they can understand it. If they can't figure it out, it's not an explanation problem; it's a design problem. Explaining it again may be easier than fixing the software, but it won't help.

Now, I think what the person meant was something like "Our customers needs aren't stupid" or "Our customers' understanding of how our software works isn't stupid." That is certainly correct; you have to know your customers so you can design software that works for them. But if you get to know them and discover they aren't all geniuses like yourself, then that's the way it is.

Client+Cloud > Software+Services

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 16:06:20 -0800

I recently heard somebody use the term "Client+Cloud" to refer to that combination-of-smart-clients-and-the-Internet which is often called "Software+Services". I've decided I like that term much better.

"Software+Services" doesn't differentiate the two parts clearly enough. The Services part clearly has a lot of Software involved in it. And I've realized that a typical "Software" piece really is a Service also. Whether it is sold as packaged software or a download, something that runs on my machine has all the attributes of a service, especially from the viewpoint of a developer: users expect it to be available all the time, they don't like to have to restart it, they want install to be seamless, they expect that problems can be diagnosed and patched remotely. I may not expect 99.999% reliability from Windows, but I basically want it there when I need it (for example, the part I hate about reboots due to Windows Update is not the fact that the computer reboots overnight; it's the five minutes of disk thrashing that happens after I log on, which is effectively "downtime", even though an old-school developer may protest that the machine is up). The fact that developers expected users to patch Windows by hand, to do manual backups, to stop using their machine while we debugged problems, to reproduce bugs on demand--that's all just engineering laziness that we got away with because in the old days we could. All the clever things that developers do to make quote-unquote services highly available and remotely diagnosable can all be rolled back into standalone Windows, and all of them will make it a better product.

Meanwhile "Client+Cloud" really captures the idea much better. You have a piece of software which a rich client of some sort, be it slurped down automatically in the browser or installed standalone, and it runs locally but also communicates with the cloud. So Hotmail, Windows, Xbox, Office, and almost everything else Microsoft is working on fits "Client+Cloud" designation--which means it make much more sense to say that it is the future of Microsoft, since it is also the present of Microsoft.

Hits as Credibility

Tue, 26 May 2009 12:30:15 -0800

I went to a Seattle Storm pre-season game recently, and the national anthem was sung by The EriAm Sisters (whose website proclaims, "The EriAm Sisters have begun to soar and are destined to bling", the first time I have seen "bling" used as a verb). What amused me was how they were introduced. The announcer will say something to establish the credibility of the performer, so we give them the benefit of the doubt and don't start throwing tomatoes until they can't hit the "rockets' red glare" notes (for the record, the Sisters belted out a spirited if slightly overwrought performance, and no airborne vegetables were deserved nor delivered). Normally the introduction will mention having performed here or recorded there, but for the EriAm Sisters, his comment was "they have recorded over a million hits on YouTube!"

The Times They Are A-Changing, Sort Of

Mon, 25 May 2009 21:11:28 -0800

These are the instructions for sending a letter to the South Whidbey Record, a newspaper on Whidbey Island (the southern part, as I understand it):

"The South Whidbey Record welcomes letters from its readers. Letters should be typewritten and not exceed 300 words. They must be signed and include a daytime phone. Send to editor [at symbol] southwhidbeyrecord.com."

The reason I was reading the SWR is because they had an article about Last Exit, a play my son is in. It's performing in Langley, which is a bit of a hike to get to from the mainland, but the play is well worth it.

Passing

Sun, 24 May 2009 20:56:30 -0800

When I was a kid, my sister and I would go trick-or-treating on Halloween. This wasn't wimpy run-through-the-halls-of-Microsoft-grabbing-giant-chocolate-bars-from-inattentive-engineers trick-or-treating like my kids enjoy today; this was incorporate-a-coat-into-your-costume-and-trudge-from-house-to-house-for-a-single-caramel trick-or-treating. Despite the difficulty of acquiring the sugar, I could not resist snarfing it down in a few days. Unlike my sister, who hoarded hers for who knows how long (there's probably still some left in the closet of her old room).

I was thinking of this when I read the New Yorker article Don't! by Jonah Lehrer. It's a Gladwellian piece about children who are presented with a choice: eat one marshmallow right now, or wait a few minutes (with the marshmallow near at hand) and get two marshmallows. Many children can't delay their gratification and eat the marshmallow right away. The article goes on to explain that the researchers noticed that the "low delayers", who ate the marshmallow right away, didn't do as well in school, and ultimately in life. Typical sentence: "The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds."

I am sure that I would have eaten the marshmallow right away. I'm also sure that nobody scored 210 points higher on the SAT than I did, I'm pretty sure that I didn't have behavioral problems in school, and I'm reasonably sure that I've been successful in life (ignore the part about blogging).

Actually I think I'm a pretty good delayer, I just like candy. There's one situation in particular where I can recall delaying a lot; in elementary school, when the teacher would ask "Does anybody know the answer?", I generally would, but lots of times I wouldn't raise my hand. The reason I didn't do this was because other kids would get annoyed at me for answering too often; I do recall being frustrated at having to wait while they botched the answers, but I was able to keep my hand down.

So, what does this all have to do with itself? Well, it turns out that business coaches will tell you that one of the key was you can get better at working with people is getting feedback from others. And one of the key ways you can get feedback from others is by waiting to hear from them, rather then offering them an opinion for them to agree/disagree with. For example, rather than ask "Do you think this presentation is good or should we change it so it starts with the charts, or should we just do a one-page handout?", you should just ask "What do you think of this presentation?" I have a tendency to do this (offer a choice of solutions instead of just asking for feedback), and I realize that it is because I want to demonstrate that I have thought through some of the choices--I want to get "credit" for that. I thought that keeping quiet in school was just playing dumb, and I suppose in that context it is, but it's good preparation for a world where problems don't have a single right answer.

What I am basically doing is going for the immediate one marshmallow of showing off my skillz, as opposed to waiting for the two marshmallows of more useful feedback that I will receive if I can just delay for a while. So, now the relationship between delay skills and success makes more sense. The people who can't delay turn into the stereotypical loner geniuses who can't tolerate anybody they view as less intelligent than them; as a result they rarely benefit from the wisdom of others. Did those kids raise their hands all the time in school? I bet they did...and we won't even talk about what they did to their Halloween candy. Meanwhile if you can improve your delaying skills you'll get more marshmallows, you Halloween candy will last longer, you won't annoy your classmates, and the answers to all your problems will be delivered to you by others.

The SME Influence Crutch

Mon, 18 May 2009 21:16:17 -0800

For various reasons I've recently been in three different classes dealing with "Influence" in different forms. Influence is a key skill that Microsoft is trying to develop in its employees, in particular that variety known as Influence Without Authority, which has become such a catchphrase that it deserves its own acronym: IWOA.

(The extra "O" in IWOA is to distinguish it from its cousin Influence With Authority, or IWA. It turns out that IWA has more in common with IWOA than you might think. IWOA is about motivating people to do things even though they could be doing something else. If you manage somebody you can IWA by just telling them to do something, but if you overuse that technique they will quickly become disgruntled and unmotivated. So, IWOA is very useful for managers also.)

Anyway, I was in one of these classes and the instructor asked people to list skills that were needed for IWOA. This is the typical list (find out what they like, explain the benefits if they do something, mitigate any concerns they have about their ability to do the work, etc--there are hundreds of books on this topic). But then somebody said that a way to influence people was to become a Subject-Matter Expert (that phrase, and its acronym SME, are in common use at Microsoft). That is, you influence somebody by knowing so much about the subject that you impress them with your awesomeness and they want to follow you.

Now, it's not that being a SME is a bad thing; most people at Microsoft are experts at something. And I predict that what I write next is going to annoy a certain someone with the initials MB (or MC), who will think I am claiming that "A good manager can manage anything" and all that. Nonetheless, the problem with using SMEness for IWOA, besides the fact that it is hard to type that with a straight face, is that becoming a SME takes too long. Sure you can learn just a bit about the area so you don't sound like an idiot, but you likely already have that if you are working with somebody. If you *are* an expert in the area you want to influence somebody, then great; but if you're not, then you very likely don't have time to become an expert in time to move the IWOAmeter by any measurable amount. And if you need to influence different people, you almost certainly can't become an expert in everything they are. In Microsoft parlance, SME IWOA doesn't "scale".

So I thought it was a bit lame when the instructor allowed the SME comment to be added unchallenged to our list of IWOA behaviors. I think influence through SMEness appeals to the dream of a Microsoft as a geekocracy, and it also has the advantage that you can do it without having to, you know, actually talk to anybody (the IWOA fantasy is that people will be so awed by your brilliance that they will bow down before you are obey your wishes before you even state them out loud). Unfortunately this just isn't the way the world works. There are a variety of techniques you can use when called upon to IWOA on short notice, but subject-matter expertise is not one of them.

Canadiens Streak Ends

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 21:28:13 -0800

I didn't see this mentioned in the press, to my surprise. When the Montreal Canadiens (which is pronounced, by the way, exactly as if it was spelled "Canadians", the accent is NOT on the final syllable) got unceremoniously bounced out of the playoffs by the Boston Bruins, it ended a streak in which they had won the Stanley Cup at least once per decade. They only won once in the 1980s and 1990s, but still that was an impressive accomplishment. Which had been sustained by all those great players throughout the years, and now this bunch messed it up, ha! Their best chance to win this decade was last year, but they choked, the details escape me.

Goodbye Company Picnic

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 22:11:04 -0800

Microsoft just announced that there would be no company picnic this year. In fact they took the trouble to announce that there would be no company picnic for the foreseeable future.

I first attended a Microsoft picnic back in 1989, before I even worked there; I came out to Seattle to visit a friend and interview for a job here (my second attempt). It happened to be the first year that the picnic was held at Mountain Meadows Farms (the previous year it had been held at Vasa Park in Bellevue). Back then the company had 3000 people, probably 2500 of which were in Puget Sound; today the company is approaching 100,000 overall. Over the years the picnic was expanded from one day to three (you picked one of those three to attend) and they added more food stands, bouncy rides, and whatnot--but still, the place is much more crowded now. I guess driving got harder too, although in recent years we rode the bus, which worked well (when I first started going you would patiently wait through the traffic jam at exit 31 on Interstate 90, only to realize that the assurances that people would NOT be allowed to sneak in the back way were in fact false, and those who had ignored the rules were being rewarded for doing so; this would frustrate me to no end, mitigated only by the fact that usually reached maximum boil in the vicinity of the Mar-T Diner, featured in "Twin Peaks", which I found diverting enough to calm me down). It also got harder to sneak friends in; back in the day you could claim you had a wife and 8 kids and they would issue you a pass for 10 people, but in recent years they really did check your ID and, I guess, make a determination if your companions' family tree was rooted in you.

Over the years I usually attended the picnic, and looking back I could mark the stages of my westward journey by how my picnic day changed: from playing volleyball and eating, to supervising children in the toddler area, to relaxing under a tree while the kids ran around under their own recognizance.

I agree that canceling the picnic seems like a prudent fiscal move, and it also fixes an imbalance between Puget Sound and other Microsoft sites. Some of the cut benefits can be mitigated just by spending some money, such as free admission with the Prime card (or, I suppose, free soda, although there is a convenience factor there that would be missed), but the picnic is a hard-to-duplicate experience, like the long-ago-lamented holiday party (the REAL holiday party, I mean, that included all of Microsoft and ended in the early 1990s). When one of my colleagues left Microsoft the first things his kids asked was, "You mean we can't go to the picnic anymore?". I admit that when I left in 2000 I also felt a slight pang of guilt about that, although not enough to keep me around. Seen in that light, canceling the picnic removes one more difference between working at Microsoft and not working at Microsoft, which is unfortunate.

Somebody Has a New Toy!

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 19:50:45 -0800

Somebody at work (not me!) just got a new set of wheels:

The windshield has this sticker which we thought was amusing:

Quoted in "Planet Google"

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 22:07:34 -0800

Somebody at work was listening to the audio version of the book Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan To Organize Everything We Know and they heard my name mentioned. The author, Randall Stross, was quoting the third paragraph of this blog entry about how it is silly to demand that employees use your own products; if they use your competitor's products, it's a sign you should work harder on your own. He also quoted the first commenter from that same post.

The person who lent me the audio book has his name featured in this video (you have to look carefully to see it). I assumed that he was somehow involved in working on that product, but he said he wasn't. I guess his name appears on the "approved name list". I thought I had blogged about this but I couldn't find it...Microsoft maintains a list of "approved names" which you can use if you want to, say, want to create an ad that show a screen shot of a bunch of database rows. The names are all employees who have agreed to have their names used this way; you can request to be added to the list if you want. One time I arrived at the airport with my family and was greeted by a giant Windows Mobile poster that had my name included in a contact list. I know it was me (not the other guy with the same name) because right after it was the name of somebody else I worked with on a project in 1995, when our name were presumably harvested. I actually don't recall giving permission, but I assume I did (the kids were amused seeing my name up there, so I'm perfectly happy to be included).

GCKSS, Jr. Is In!!

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 12:56:21 -0800

I realize this isn't quite momentous enough to end a 3-week blog gap, but yesterday Alabama State beat Jackson State 65-58 to win the Southwestern Athletic Conference tournament and an automatic bid in the NCAA men's basketball championship.

This means that the awesomely named Grlenntys Chief Kickingstallionsims, Jr., their starting center, will be playing in the tournament. Even better, the Chattahoocheeans (actually the Hornets) may be in the Tuesday play-in game, which means a national audience would be treated to announcers saying things like "And Kickingstallionsims grabs the rebound!"

Kickingstallionsims, who goes by "Chief", is 7 foot 1, so let me emphasize that I am not making fun of his name. He also wears size 18.5 shoes and can touch the net flat-footed. Here's some discussion of his first name; it's Navajo and means means "strength of falling rock". Sports Illustrated evidently called it the best name in college basketball, although it seems like this is a bit of an exaggeration of an offhand comment on this page. That page has an expired link to his bio at Stetson University, where he played before Alabama State; I was amused to note that presumably for technical reasons, involving their IT department failing to consider the scenario of a player with more than 12 letters in his last name, the page was called "kickingstall.php".

Kindle 2 OOBE

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 22:50:59 -0800

My wife ordered me a Kindle for the holidays, but it was back-ordered. Then when the Kindle 2 was announced they said that my order would automatically be upgraded, and would be among the first batch shipped. Sure enough, today there was a package waiting for me when I got home.

The Out Of Box Experience started with the package it came in, which had a unique phrase printed on the tab you pulled back:

The box was custom-made for shipping Kindles; when you opened it you saw a black interior with some Kindle graphics and the definition of the word "kindle" inside the lid (v.t. 1. set on fire. 2. inspire, stir up. -v.i. 1. catch fire. 2. become animated.):

The package inside the box was black paper with more Kindle graphics, also opened by a zipper that said "Once upon a time...":

Inside this was the cardboard container for the actual Kindle:

Remove the lid and there it is:

Under the Kindle is a quick start guide and the power cord. I initially thought the instructions you can see on the Kindle were on the piece of plastic covering it, but actually they are on the Kindle screen itself; the technology can maintain an image with no power. The text at the bottom says "1. Plug in your Kindle" and at the top says "2. Slide and release the power switch above. Your screen will refresh in a few moments.":

This is the unfolded quick start guide; there's a bunch of legal stuff on the back (the back text is white on black and much denser, so it is apparent which side is the one you want to read):

I plugged mine in to charge and left it. The instructions on the quick start guide said that once I slid and released the power switch it would display the User's Guide; I don't think I actually touched the power, but when I came back the User's Guide was displayed:

When I went away again and came back, it had switched to a screen saver:

The Kindle already has the user's guide, a dictionary, and a welcome message on it. The "Welcome Adam" title is somewhat faked, because the device was originally registered to my wife, since it had been bought on her account, and the welcome message was addressed to her before I re-registered it:

Pre-registering the device to the account that ordered it is a convenience; re-registering it to myself was easy BUT (if any Amazon people are reading this) the warning message I got when I deregistered her was a bit scary; it said "By deregistering, you will not be able to buy or receive content on this Kindle. You may want to transfer subscriptions to another Kindle you own using the Manage Your Kindle page on Amazon.com. Are you sure you want to deregister?" Doesn't that message sound like I'm permanently crippling the device, or at least I'll have to go to the website to get it working again? In fact, as I expected, when I did click "OK" to deregister it immediately gave me a "register" option, which was simple and fast (just give your site logon credentials and it figures out who you are).

I'll mention that she had received email when the device shipped explaining that if it was a gift she could go deregister it from the website, which would have meant the only option I had was to register it (and therefore no need to deregister it and fight past the off-putting message) but I assume some number of people who order it as gifts won't bother to do that. Also, the quick start guide doesn't discuss deregistering, in fact it says "If your Kindle was a gift you will need to register your device", which I guess assumes the gift-giver read the email and followed the instructions (there may be an ordering option that says "don't register it to me, it's a gift", but again some number of people won't do that). At least the quick start guide, in its discussion of registration, tells you how to get to the screen where you register (which is also the screen where you deregister).

Anyway, this is the start of the letter, again customized to me, a nice touch (it ends with Jeff Bezos's signature):

You will notice that the letter is dated tomorrow (February 25). I guess mine got here a bit earlier than expected. It was sent Fed Ex 2-day, the label lists a ship date of Feb. 24 and an expected delivery date of Feb. 26. According to the Fed Ex tracking website it was actually shipped out yesterday, the 23rd, from Indianapolis, at 7:07 pm; and for whatever reason it got here in one day. Am I one of the first people on the planet to get a Kindle 2? The mind boggles.

In terms of actually using the thing, it seems pretty intuitive, the dictionary search is easy to navigate:

I browsed for some titles but didn't find anything I wanted to download (only 3 Jack Vance books, all Lyonesse? No The Soul of a New Machine or Ball Four?). I did download a sample to try out the reading and it seems easy to read; I'll have to try a longer book to see how my eyes feel.

P.S. Yes, that's right folks, I'm talking about the Kindle 2: Amazon's New Wireless Reading Device (Latest Generation)!

Geeks and Anti-Geeks

Sat, 14 Feb 2009 13:59:11 -0800

If you asked somebody for the stereotype of a Microsoft developer, they would probably think of a pasty-faced coder who plays video games, eats a lot of junk food, read science fiction, writes a blog, and so on--your prototypical geek. And of course, you would be somewhat right. But there is actually a second stereotypical developer at Microsoft. This type of person eschews the trappings of normal geekhood in favor of drinking wine, driving sports cars, cooking complicated recipes, reading The New York Times, and the like. We'll call this persona the "anti-geek", because it comes across as a conscious rejection of the geek lifestyle (and to be clear: both types spend their days playing with computers, and are thus, in the greater scheme of things, 100% geeky).

You notice this if you listen to the chatter before a meeting. Half the time people are talking about World of Warcraft; those are the geeks. The other half they are talking about pinot noir; those are the anti-geeks. In either case, the group then proceeds to discuss a pattern-based approach to refactoring your C# class design in order to increase cohesion and leverage mock objects to achieve high code coverage while minimizing your unit test execution time.

I was thinking of this as I read this Princeton Alumni Weekly profile of Nathan Myrhvold. Myhrvold, who I have only met once (during a fancy recruiting dinner where he ordered caviar for the table), seems like a perfectly nice guy, devoted father, etc. But he is also the prototypical Microsoft anti-geek. As the article states, "He doesn’t merely like to cook: He’s a master chef (and has worked in one of Seattle’s best restaurants) who once won a barbecue contest in Memphis. He doesn’t just take pictures: He’s an award-winning wildlife photographer. As for his well-known interest in paleontology, he’s no ordinary bone collector. He has enough fossils to stock a small museum."

OK, so Nathan is an uber-anti-geek. Why does this matter? The part of the interview I would like to draw attention to is the following, which starts out quoting Myhrvold:

"'I wrote a memo in 1991 about a personal communication device,' he says, and then relates how the drawing of this hypothetical gadget, when recently unearthed from his files, showed something amazingly similar to an iPhone. He quickly adds, 'I’m not saying I invented the iPhone. I didn’t.'"

Myrhvold is modest enough to realize that sketching out a device is different from bringing it to market. But what comes across is the sense that if he had merely productized his doodle, it would have been the iPhone--that the important part of the iPhone was thinking of the technology, not the entire experience that Apple has created.

The reason this matters is because Microsoft has recently been pushing engineers to realize that they are not the customer, the customers are not geeks, and therefore engineers can't design properly for our customers. What I think happens, however, is that the anti-geeks hear this and think, "They're not talking about me; I know that those beer-swilling geeks don't understand the customer, but I'm a cultured sort, not a geek--I'm just like our customers!" And so they go out and design software for themselves...and of course they mess it up...because our customers may not spend their spare time playing Dungeons & Dragons, but neither do they spend it tramping across the Burgess Shale.

Our Hermetic Future

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 21:56:21 -0800

Last week I went to Chicago for a short meeting, spread over 2 days. My flight landed around 2:30 pm on Thursday, and my return flight left at 7:30 pm on Friday.

The forecast was for pretty cold weather, but I wouldn't know--because the entire time I was in Chicago, I never went outside. If you look at the airport map below:

you can see Concourse L of Terminal 3, where Alaska Airlines has its gate, and the Hilton Hotel (the dark grey arc below Terminal 2), where the meeting was held. You can walk from the gate to the airport entirely indoors; no need for even momentary exposure while boarding a shuttle bus or light rail. I had a room at the Hilton for the night; on Thursday night we were going to take taxis to a restaurant downtown but decided to eat at the hotel restaurant instead. And the other meals were catered to the meeting room. I took a breath of fresh air at 7:15 am on Thursday, just before I entered the doors connecting the parking garage to Skyway 5 at Sea-Tac Airport; and until 10:45 pm on Friday, when I exited those same doors, I did not breathe any air that had not been processed.

I actually could have ducked outside on a couple of occasions--I had two hours free before my flight, for one thing--but of course by that time I wanted to keep my streak alive. I find there to be something infinitely cool about visiting another city and never going outside. It reminds me of the science fiction stock setting of a planet which has been entirely covered by buildings (like Trantor in the Foundation series, or Capitol in Orson Scott Card's neglected Worthing books), with fresh air reserved for the very privileged. Or, short of that, I like (perhaps "like" is the wrong word; substitute "am intrigued by") the fact that it completely genericizes the city, so that I really could have been anywhere, a harbinger of a world where all jarring differences have been removed from the environment you interact with (or possibly a harbinger of people who live in movable shipping containers, but I digress). There were some hints that I was in Chicago--you could buy Illinois lottery tickets, the clocks were on Central time, the food that was being palely imitated at an airport restaurant was deep dish pizza--but it was hard to tell if it was real or fake. Was that the real city I could see out my window, or just a video projection? It was like flying to Paris in France, but getting the experience of Paris Las Vegas.

In fact the meeting was among people who had traveled from various cities to be there, and we all (as far as I know) had similar indoor-only experiences. The group is supposed to meet once a year; it looks like there are other cities, such as Dallas and Detroit (or Miami or Orlando or Vancouver or Boston--seems to be a modern trend), that have hotels inside their airports, so maybe next year I'll have a visit-without-really-visiting of a different city.

Glass Houses

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 22:08:37 -0800

Somebody recommended the book The Opposable Mind, by Roger Martin, so I've been looking through it. His thesis is that people tend to trap themselves in "either-or" decisions (for example, building a small hotel with few amenities or a large hotel with lots of amenities), but people with "opposable" minds (like opposable thumbs, you see?) can hold both ideas in their mind at the same time and come up with a solution that avoids the tradeoff (a small hotel with lots of amenities). If this strikes you as overly simplistic than I agree with you, since I'm sure every variety of hotel size, amenity, and the other factors that he conveniently ignores in his example (like, say, the price you charge) has been tried at one point. The book could be summarized as "think outside the box", which is nothing new but wouldn't fill 200 pages (barely, with the index included), so Martin heaps on a bunch of examples to pad it out. To be fair, 1) however fuzzy his arguments, at the core he has a good point, and 2) he does offer some advice on how to train yourself to think this way.

Most business books are guilty of cherry-picking their examples, and Martin is no different; he highlights Isadore Sharp of the Four Seasons hotel chain (small hotels with lots of amenities) as having an opposable mind, without mentioning what happened to other hoteliers who tried the same business model. If you read Malcolm Gladwell's new book Outliers, what emerges from his latest collection of counter-intuitive tales is the fact that the most important factor behind many successful people is...well, it's not really clear what it is, since Gladwell--continuing the trend that began with the crisply single-minded The Tipping Point and continued with the less actionable Blink--veers between attributing it to your ancestry, when you were born, how hard you work, and who knows what else; luckily (unlike Roger Martin) he's a good enough writer that the whole thing is still quite enjoyable, and you come away with a realization that a lot of success is related to luck of some sort. History is written by the winners, and business books are written by interviewing the winners.

Martin takes some time at the beginning of his book to bag on a couple of other business books, specifically on the book Execution for choosing, among the paragons it interviews, a couple of executives (Dick Brown of EDS and Henry Schacht of Lucent) who would later be fired for poor performance. Naturally, Martin then presents his own chosen coterie of integrative thinkers (the kind of thinkers that an opposable mind produces). One of them is a guy named Ramalinga Raju, who founded a company called Satyam Computer Services. Raju explains how he has learned to be patient and wait for his opposable mind to sort through the various opposables, and reveal the answer. Quoth Mr. Raju: "If you are swimming on the surface, then you are very unlikely to find pearls, because they are deep underneath and you have to dive down; you have to go into a fair amount of depth on any particular issue that you take up."

Which is why I was amused to see the following in the Wall Street Journal the other day: "Satyam's founder and chairman, B. Ramalinga Raju, resigned after admitting he had fudged the books for several years, including creating a fictitious cash balance of more than $1 billion." I have to bow down before his awesome integrativeness; when running a business I never would have been able to reconcile the choice between coming up with a successful business model or else not making a lot of money, but this guy obviously dove down deep enough to see the integrated third way that had eluded me.