Serendipity Book

Google's approach to collaboration and creativity

The Feb '08 issue of Fast Company contains some interesting interviews with Google staff which give an insight into the culture of the company.

One of the more interesting interviews was with Marissa Meyer (pictured right) who shared her "9 principles of innovation at Google":

1. INNOVATION, NOT INSTANT PERFECTION.
2. IDEAS COME FROM EVERYWHERE
3. A LICENSE TO PURSUE YOUR DREAMS
4. MORPH PROJECTS DON'T KILL THEM
5. SHARE AS MUCH INFORMATION AS YOU CAN
6. USERS, USERS, USERS
7. DATA IS APOLITICAL.
8. CREATIVITY LOVES CONSTRAINTS
9. YOU'RE BRILLIANT? WE'RE HIRING

There is much to agree with in there but three things stood out for me as being worthy of comment, some good, some bad:

1. Google use search internally to increase knowledge sharing. Getting people to share their knowledge is a notoriously tricky thing to get right as anyone who has ever used a corporate intranet can atest. Google's answer is to make it really easy for people to submit their knowledge which they they index and make searchable. Google merely asks that "every Monday, all employees write an email that has five to seven bullet points on what they did the previous week." This differs from most attempts at gathering and sharing information in that it is a) likely to be nearly comprehensive because b) it asks so little of employees.
2. Google use data to manage creativity. They actively discourage people from having an opinion and they believe they have the right metrics to use instead: "Some companies think of design as an art. We think of design as a science. It doesn't matter who is the favorite or how much you like this aesthetic versus that aesthetic. It all comes down to data. Run a test and whichever design does best against the user-happiness metrics over a two-week period is the one we launch. We have a very academic environment where we're looking at data all the time." Cynics might argue, however, that Google isn't exactly a leader in the field of design.
3. Google believe that creativity thrives on constraints. Marissa says that "people think of creativity as this sort of unbridled thing, but engineers thrive on constraints. They love to think their way out of that little box." Sure, but like anyone I'm sure that they also take it upon themselves to challenge any constraints placed on them first before trying to work within them.

Apple Mac the Movie

Seeing Leander Kahney (Wired's news editor and chief Mac man) in the trailers for this new documentary about the Apple Macintosh took me right back. I spent a few months of my life making a rather similar film for a client in 2005. Happy days.

Which reminds me. I'm leaving Leo Burnett on Friday after 5 or so happy years for JWT. Expect some changes to this blog.

Advice on plagiarism from Albert Einstein

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources." Albert Einstein

The TfL saga has once again taught us that whilst the internet has made it much easier to plagiarise others, it is also making it far easier to get caught.

Image: my photo of Matt & Graham copying a statue at Cliveden in '05

Apple: "We don't do market research"

Unsurprisingly it appears that Steve Jobs is not an advocate of new product development research. This quote comes from an interview with Apple's 'benevolent dictator' from Fortune earlier this month:

"We do no market research. We don't hire consultants. The only consultants I've ever hired in my 10 years is one firm to analyze Gateway's retail strategy so I would not make some of the same mistakes they made [when launching Apple's retail stores]. But we never hire consultants, per se. We just want to make great products."

However, whilst Jobs clearly likes to give the impression he is flying by the seat of his pants you can be sure that his judgements are founded on some pretty solid knowledge, albeit not the necessarily knowledge that can be bought from a research company. His approach should not be confused with decision-making based solely on intuition, impulse or gut-feel.

Let's not forget how Stephen Colbert addressed George W. Bush after all:

"We're not so different, he and I. We get it. We're not brainiacs on the nerd patrol. We're not members of the factinista. We go straight from the gut, right sir? That's where the truth lies, right down here in the gut."

Image: my photo of the omnipresent Apple ads in San Francisco in 2006

Ideas as chaotic thought mutations

In James Webb Young's classic 'A Technique for Producing Ideas' he recommends that we "turn a problem over to our unconscious mind and let it work while we sleep" and then "out of nowhere an idea will appear".

All very Delphic you might think. But of course we all know that it works. The question is how?

One established theory in cognitive science that might go some way to explaining how we come up with ideas was put forward by Skarda & Freeman. It has been their long standing claim that our brains are random and ruled by chaos:

"Chaos constitutes the basic form of collective neural activity for all perceptual processes and functions as a controlled source of noise, as a means to ensure continual access to previously learned sensory patterns, and as the means for learning new sensory patterns. Without such a mechanism the system cannot avoid reproducing previously learned activity patterns and can only converge to behavior it has already learned."

It is this chaos which perhaps helps us to invent, create and surprise. Applying the language of evolutionary biology, it might be appropriate to think of ideas as thought mutations which provide us with an evolutionary advantage.

"Chaos has a role to play that sets brains apart from all other information processing systems. Chaos is not just an inevitable consequence of a highly interconnected complex system, it is essential for the creation of information. The brain, unlike machine systems, is selective, i.e., it does not process whatever information is received at the receptor level."

The fact that creating new combinations becomes easier when we are not consciously thinking about a problem is no great surprise if you believe that the selection of of the information that we attend to is random if we are not explicitly directing it.

The rise of the Commuter Marriage

PSFK pointed to an interesting article on the rise of the 'commuter marriage' in Forbes which states that in the most recent U.S. Census there were 3.8 million Americans in commuter marriages, a 30% increase over the previous six years.

Demographers define commuter marriages as couples who spend at least three nights apart each week for a minimum of three months.

Commuter marriages are interesting because they represent the extreme form of the modern work life balance dilemma that many families face as a function of the trends towards more women in the workplace and more dual-income familes. Whilst families in this situation are not representative of the experience of the majority, they are nonetheless illustrative of the problems that modern families face in getting time to really connect with each other.

The perception that technology can reduce the emotional separation of distance may be another  driver of the trend towards commuter marriages. However, as one of the inventors interviewed for the Forbes piece admits: "Technology is already bringing people closer together but we haven't figured out how to design these experiences so that they're something meaningful, with an intimate effect. That's where the next era of innovation will be."

And as Gregory Guldner, director of the Center for the Study of Long Distance Relationships, says "While innovations like e-mail, video chatting, instant messaging, Twitter and Second Life have increased the volume of Internet chatter, they haven’t necessarily made long-distance relationships any more successful. Communication’s quality has always meant more than its frequency. Information technology has definitely led people to believe that long-distance relationships will work more than in the past. Whether that’s true is the big question we’re dealing with right now.”

A 2006 article in CNN Money called "Two Cities, Two Careers, Too Much?" also discusses the issues faced by families suffering from similar stresses. They quote a therapist who recommends that families who spend a lot of time apart have "a formal sit-down no less than once a month to discuss short- and long-term goals" because given their situation "it won't happen spontaneously."

This subject has been under discussion by sociologists since the late 1970's. For a full list of academic references go here.

Berkeley Search Engine lectures on YouTube

UC Berkeley have started to post all of their lectures on YouTube.

Hidden amongst all the physics and biology lectures is the course SIMS 141: Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business which includes this guest speaker slot from Sergey Brin of Google ...

Other topics in the course include search advertising and auctions, search and privacy, search ranking, internationalization, anti-spam efforts, local search, peer-to-peer search, and search of blogs and online communities. The rest of the SIMS 141 lecture videos are here.

Personal Servers

These things appear to have tipped. When I whopped my LaCie drives out at the end of 2004 nobody knew what they were. Now, everyone seems to have them, even celebrated luddites.

Some buy them as back ups for music and photos; others because they travel a lot and need their server with them; others simply don't trust their IT department and a sizeable minority first buy one when they leave their employer for pastures new ;-)

That's Progress

On the left we have what it took to store 1GB of data in 1987. On the right, a 1GB memory card in 2007.

Who said technological progress was slowing?

Via Reddit.

My kind of convergence

Is this the end of the "does anyone have a [mobile brand] charger I can borrow?" email?

Boing Boing Gadgets reports that all of the major players in the mobile communications industry (Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, LG, and Nokia) have agreed to standardise around one type of power connector, micro-USB, at least partly due to the introduction of new legislation by the EU which makes the manufacturers responsible for some of the costs of recycling their products.