Beyond net neutrality - The new battle for the future of the internet

When Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook in his Harvard dorm room, he didn’t need to ask Comcast, Verizon, or other internet service providers to add Facebook to their networks. He also didn’t have to pay these companies extra fees to ensure that Facebook would work as well as the websites of established companies. As soon as he created the Facebook website, it was automatically available from any internet-connected computer in the world.

This aspect of the internet is network neutrality. And a lot of network neutrality supporters fear it's in danger.


Read more at:
http://www.vox.com/2014/5/2/5665890/beyond-net-neutrality-the-new-battle-for-the-future-of-the-internet

Buying Matters More Than Selling

The biggest recent change in the communications industry is not a product or technology. The biggest change is in how products and services get acquired.

The old model was well understood. Prospects were small teams of technical staff that followed a predictable sequence. The selection process went something like exploration, evaluation, and engagement. Sellers tracked this journey in phases such as awareness, consideration, and decision - often depicted as a funnel.

The problem today is buyers no longer adhere to this well defined process. The buying process evolved, and the linear funnel was replaced with a chaotic process. Further, vendor sales teams are involved later in the process, and thus have much less influence over the journey.

These changes are not unique to enterprise communications. Consider car sales which once began when the prospect arrived at the dealer. Now prospects first arrive at the dealer well informed, often only intending to confirm what they already know. Today, the buyer (cars and enterprise communications) gets pretty far along before asking for sales assistance.

Today, enterprise communications get evaluated by cross-functional teams - many representatives are non technical. There’s far less focus on feeds and speeds, and more on experience and ease of use. The selection team explores, evaluates, and engages with vendors in concurrent stages. The teams rely more on their self driven research (via public and premium online portals) than vendor presentations.


Read more at:
http://www.ucstrategies.com/unified-communications-strategies-views/buying-matters-more-than-selling.aspx

Soleio Cuervo, head of design, Dropbox on DESIGN Concepts

Consumer technology has evolved significantly in the last decade alone. When I first started in the business at Facebook, we designed products for one environment—the desktop web browser. Today, we find ourselves fully immersed in the post-PC era, where people use technology throughout the day across a growing combination of laptops, smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices. And the number of devices that people need to access their data will likely only escalate over time. So it’s important for businesses to be design-centric and maintain a deep appreciation for how their products and services fit into the cadence of a user’s daily life across different devices.

At Dropbox, we focus on how to make things reliably simple for our users. People’s stuff is commonly on the brink of disaster—hard drives crash, devices are lost, and phones are accidentally dropped and broken. Safe, reliable online storage is a fundamental building block of our service, but we have ambitions far beyond mere backup. We want to build software that makes people’s lives more productive and memorable. I credit the cofounders of Dropbox with being very design- minded. Even in its earliest form, Dropbox

was an elegant product—a “magic folder” on the desktop computer that was native to the operating system environment people were already familiar with.

The design organizations I’ve worked with understand two things. First, in order for a product to have global appeal, it should be conceptually basic and universally intuitive. Conceptual simplicity comes from a deeply empathic and highly iterative approach to design. Second, world-class experiences require technical experience coupled with an understanding of how a product fits into a person’s day-to-day life. These two concepts continue to grow in importance as we become an increasingly connected society. Managing a user’s attention and transferring context across devices require a multidisciplinary approach to exploration and prototyping.

It is also important for business leaders to understand that great design doesn’t happen on the first try, or even on the tenth try. Designers should get in front of consumers, field-test their prototypes, and relentlessly iterate on their work in order to achieve perfection. As products have increasing amounts of access to personal data about their users—names, locations, interests, the people they work and socialize with—software makers have a powerful opportunity to personalize product experiences in ways that were previously impossible. We

can “roll out the red carpet” and offer a singular experience that makes our customers feel as if the product or service was handmade for them. The true potential of digital engagement is creating experiences rich with empathy and context across multiple touch points—driving customers from being users to loyal advocates.

Simple, elegant, and intuitive design can be a competitive edge for a business, and it begins with executive leadership buy-in, an uncompromising focus on hiring top talent, and a cultural commitment to great design. When designed accordingly, digital engagement can provide seamless, accessible, personalized solutions for customers.

Read more at:
http://dupress.com/articles/2014-tech-trends-digital-engagement/

Networking!?!? Stop Networking!

Here’s the deal. Networking sucks and you’re probably bad at it.

I say that because I believe it too: I hate networking, and I’m bad at it. So I don’t do it. But that doesn’t stop me from meeting new people, in a business setting, who sometimes refer projects to Paper Leaf.

Wait a minute… isn’t that networking?

Not in my mind, and I’ll explain to you why. But first a little story.

Read more at:

http://jeffarchibald.ca/stop-networking/

60-Hour Work Week Is Not A Badge Of Honour

Your 60-hour work week is not a badge of honour. It is a problem.

There is a sense of pride over being able to state that we worked an exorbitant amount of hours this week, last week, or last month. I know because I’ve done it in the past, and probably still do it *sigh*. After all, saying you worked a 60 hour week is indirectly telling the listener how busy your design firm is; how successful your product is; how important you are to your employer.

It’s essentially a humblebrag.

Read more at:

http://jeffarchibald.ca/60-hour-work-week-badge-honour/

What Makes a Genius?

Eric Barker writes at TheWeek that while high intelligence has its place, a large-scale study of more than three hundred creative high achievers including Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Beethoven, and Rembrandt has found thatcuriosity, passion, hard work, and persistence bordering on obsession are the hallmarks of genius. 'Successful creative people tend to have two things in abundance, curiosity and drive. They are absolutely fascinated by their subject, and while others may be more brilliant, their sheer desire for accomplishment is the decisive factor,' writes Tom Butler-Bowdon. It's not about formal education. 'The most eminent creators were those who had received a moderate amount of education, equal to about the middle of college. Less education than that — or more — corresponded to reduced eminence for creativity,' says Geoffrey Colvin. Those interested in the 10,000-hour theory of deliberate practice won't be surprised that the vast majority of them are workaholics. 'Sooner or later,' writes V. S. Pritchett, 'the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.' Howard Gardner, who studied geniuses like Picasso, Freud, and Stravinsky, found a similar pattern of analyzing, testing, and feedback used by all of them: 'Creative individuals spend a considerable amount of time reflecting on what they are trying to accomplish, whether or not they are achieving success (and, if not, what they might do differently).'

Read more at:

http://classic.slashdot.org/story/14/01/18/1632208

How Adobe Got Rid of Traditional Performance Reviews

   Today i just spoted this nice insight on changing business/organisational practices from Stanford Professor Bob Sutton, from article:

Renowned American novelist Ernest Hemingway said that the most essential gift for a good writer is “a built-in shock-proof shit detector,” the ability to spot bad or unnecessary text, the skill to fix what is salvageable, and the will to throw away what is beyond repair or unnecessary. Leaders and teams that spread excellence act the same way, ruthlessly spotting and removing crummy or useless rules, traditions, tools, and roles that clog up the works and cloud people’s minds.

One of our favorite examples of such subtraction was implemented by Adobe’s senior leaders in 2012 – a change that affected all 11,000 employees. Most LinkedIn readers know that Adobe produces software including Photoshop, Acrobat, Creative Cloud, and the Digital Marketing Suite. Adobe killed one of the most sacred of corporate cows: traditional yearly performance reviews. Management experts have questioned the value of such reviews for decades. Quality guru W. Edwards Deming blasted away: “It nourishes short-term performance, annihilates long-term planning, builds fear, demolishes teamwork, nourishes rivalry and politics.” UCLA’s Sam Culbert called them bogus and urged companies to abolish them. We sometimes joke that, if the performance review (as usually done) was a drug, it wouldn’t be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration because it is so ineffective and has so many vile side effects (see this related piece on performance evaluations).

Despite such blistering critiques, Adobe has been one of the few companies with the guts and gumption to abandon them: in 2012, they moved from yearly performance rankings to frequent “check-ins” where managers provide employees targeted coaching and advice. There is no prescribed format or frequency for these conversations, and managers don’t complete any forms or use any technologies to guide or document what happens during such conversations. They are simply expected to have regular check-ins to convey what is expected of employees, give and get feedback, and help employees with their growth and development plans. The aim is to give people information when they need it rather than months after teachable moments have passed. Once a year, managers make adjustments in employee compensation. Managers have far more discretion over such decisions than in the past: they have nearly complete authority to allocate their budget among their charges as they see fit. In addition, employees are now compensated based on how well they have met their goals--forced rankings have been abolished. As part of the rollout, managers were trained in the nuances of giving and receiving feedback and other difficult conversations through lectures and role playing, where they practiced challenging scenarios.

Read more at
https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140206114808-15893932-how-adobe-got-rid-of-traditional-performance-reviews