Creative Reaction

Possibly before some of us were using e-mail, Edward M. Hallowell, M.D. was writing about the importance of face-to-face communication and the drawbacks of e-mail and even telephone calls. He speaks of the “human moment”, ”an authentic psychological encounter that can happen only when two people share the same physical space.” The Human Moment has, according to Hallowell, two prerequisites, “people’s physical presence and their emotional and intellectual attention.”

His theory, explained in a 1999 Harvard Business Review article, The Human Moment at Work, (the first page of which is available for free here) was later expanded into a book, though one aimed at a much broader audience.

Boston.com features a great article with Hallowell’s ideas in a business setting in its jobs section, specifically as it applies for young workers entering the job market, and with some excellent insights. Worth reading.

It would be hard to argue against the theory that Human Moments, featuring face-to-face interaction, are essential to human well-being.

Being intrigued by the above articles, I just checked out Hallowell’s Human Moments: How to Find Meaning and Love in Your Everyday Life from the Library. Look for additional mentions of this book in future posts.

Following up on an earlier post on Business Productivity, taking into consideration the often unmeasured and therefore under-accounted benefits of productivity. The first point was to buy Macs. The next was buying employees larger monitors or second monitors.

In the post that eventually led to this post, Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo.com does some math for us:

“(each employee) will save at least 30 minutes a day, which is 100 hours a year… which is at least $2,000 a year…. which is $6,000 over three years. A second monitor cost $300-500 depending on which one you get. That means you’re getting 10-20x return on your investment… and you’ve got a happy team member”

Also worth mentioning are studies by monitor manufacturer NEC (.pdf summary here) and Pfeiffer Consulting for Apple (.pdf summary here) which indicate even larger returns on investment.

NEC’s study has two findings which I find very interesting. First, if your employees are using a single 19″  (or smaller) monitor, you are adversely affecting productivity and “worker well-being”. Second, equipping employees who are less technically savvy with second or larger monitors, gives them an ever greater productivity boost than their co-workers.

As for the “best” size, it varies slightly according to the tasks, though for most, a single monitor of 24″ - 26″, or a dual monitor set-up with a pair of 20″ monitors is what the study finds offering the greatest productivity gains for typical office tasks; word processing and spreadsheets.

In my experience, for video editors and SFX artists, two 23″ monitors is assumed to be the bare minimum, and it’s clear that for other creative tasks, this would be a good starting point as well. So the next time your creatives ask for 30″ Apple Cinema HD Displays, buy them with barely an afterthought; the $1,799 monitors will pay for themselves many times over. In fact, the Pfeiffer Consulting report calculates a ROI of $5,875 - $23,500  within a year (!) depending on the salary of the creative professional.

Another post on the size of a design team and its effect on creativity. In this post on his blog Subtraction, Khoi Vinh, Design Director for NYTimes.com speaks largely from personal experience and makes several excellent points. I’ll summarize by mashing his words:

— Design doesn’t scale well. This craft rests on the efficiency of transferring ideas from the brain to the hand. The perfect design staff is a single designer who can conceive of and execute an idea from start to finish, maintaining the same coherent creative vision throughout. Of course, as an economic matter, this is impractical - it almost always has to scale. The smaller the scale, however, the more efficient the practice of design —

Plenty to think about here. So how can we keep our staff/departments lean and agile enough to provide the best possible work for our clients? You could pay the slackers to quit…

A stunning post on the Mavericks at Work blog on the measures that Zappos (online shoe store) takes to ensure it’s employees are the right people for the company. Zappos is well known for its outstanding customer service, and hiring the best employees is integral to this. So much so, that Zappos will offer cash bonuses to buy (and thereby weed) people out. 

What measures do we have in place to attract and keep only the best talent?

Some interesting thoughts today from Seth Godin. He says, “There’s a huge gap between most how-to books (cookbooks, gardening, magic, etc.) and business books… The gap is motivation.”

“The stakes are a lot higher when it comes to business. Wreck a roast chicken and it’s $12 down the drain. Wreck a product launch and there goes your career…”

Rather than summarize, I’ll just link. It’s pithy and valuable.

An article in RainToday, primarily written for consultants, has an interesting article entitled, The Death of the Business Phone Call, which explains the many the pitfalls of e-mail.

In a few sentences, “If your goal is to communicate clearly and efficiently with prospects and clients, relying too heavily on email can easily lead your digital conversation into the weeds. Even if someone emails you first, often the best way to respond is by picking up the phone.”

So, before you click on “Reply”, think, “what is the best way to respond to this?”. 

“Rarely does any dialogue end with the prospect’s question and my answer. The response to any query is usually followed by a clarifying question or two of my own, which can make email cumbersome. The most effective way to accomplish ongoing dialogue is via live conversation – the kind where lips move.”

Wow. An excellent post by Seth Godin. He posits, almost rants, that in light of more expensive and difficult commutes and travel, expectations are higher, and you had better make an impact when communicating in person! Worth reading.

Following up on an earlier post on Business Productivity, taking into consideration the often unmeasured and therefore under-accounted benefits of productivity. The first point was to buy Macs.

Being an Apple consultant myself, I’m almost blind to how much Macs improve productivity. I use Macs in practically every waking moment of my day, and my clients are Mac-only environments. It’s a no-brainer.

This article in CIO magazine lists a number of financial reasons why Macs cost about half as much to operate as similarly-equipped PCs, though it barely factors in the productivity gains, which are akin to the iceberg below the water’s surface.

It’s easy enough to find evidence of Macs requiring one-fifth to one-third of the man-hours compared with supporting Windows boxes. What few people notice is the downtime involved for the Windows users and the 2x - 4x more uptime for Macs!

Another study summarized here points out additional advantages in using Macs:

Mac OS X offers less “user interface friction” than Windows.

Mac OS X simply is faster when performing specific tasks compared to Windows.

The Mac OS X interface is more logical and intuitive.

It’s crazy to focus on the costs of hardware, software, support & training and not consider the value of ease of use and reliability (productivity) per creative times the creative’s salary per hour/day/week/month/year!

Signal vs. Noise had a very interesting post last month on the size of groups, giving a number of examples of how things simply break down once the size of a group grows beyond ten or twelve people.

At the heart of the post is an interesting essay by George Walford, which comments on a book, The Corporation Man, by Antony Jay and published in 1975.

Quoting the essay, “A committee works best with about ten members; if it grows much beyond that size the extra people do not take a fully active part. Nearly all team games use a group of about ten on each side. Juries have 12 members… In an army, organization often decides life and death, and under this pressure armies, too, adopt a basic unit of about ten… in fact every long-standing successful army, has built up its larger formations from squads or sections of about this size.”

In this concept, called a “ten-group”, the group is “small enough for the contribution of each member to make a noticeable contribution”.

“This (ten-) group is bound together by a common objective, and that the bond of trust and loyalty thus formed can become an extremely powerful uniting force; that the group needs to decide on (or at least take part in deciding on) its own objective, and to work out for itself how that objective shall be achieved.”

“In order to function it needs mutual dependence, a common objective and a single criterion of success for them all; as the hunting band fed or went hungry together so members of the modern ten-group must receive praise, blame and material rewards collectively for the unit to function at its best.”

There are numerous applications of this; committee size, group size, meeting size, company size, team size… Any others? Leave a comment!

Harvard Business School Working Knowledge has an article today on creativity within business, featuring HBS professor Teresa Amabile, whose research we mentioned in September 2006.

The article largely focuses on the environment created by managers, and its effect on employees’ “inner work lives” - “thoughts, perceptions, emotions, and motivations”. This inner work life “directly influences creativity and other aspects of performance.”

Quoting professor Amabile, ”managers are not in tune with the inner work lives of their employees; nor do they appreciate how pervasive the effects of inner work life can be on performance.” Ouch.

So what should managers do? ”Support employees’ progress in their work every day. Set clear and meaningful goals for them; provide direct help, versus hindrance; offer adequate resources and time; respond to successes and failures by drawing on the experience as a learning opportunity, not just a moment to praise or reprimand; and establish a culture where people are treated with respect.”

There’s quite a list there; perhaps one thing to work on each day or week or month. Clearly, sharpening these skills is well worth the effort, as this kind of culture provides what may be the best work incentive available, “the desire to do something because (the employee) find(s) it deeply satisfying and personally challenging” which “inspires the highest levels of creativity, whether it’s in the arts, sciences, or business”

Lots of meat here. Digest it slowly.

An Adweek article way back in March (and found online here) details the architectural design decisions involved in three well-known ad agencies; Mother (London), JWT, and TBWA/Chiat/Day, as well as Google. The common themes include collaboration, private v. public space, and “openness” - fewer walls/transparent walls.

Quoting the article, “Assembly-line cubicles and closed-door offices have decreasing relevance in a workplace changed by mobile technology and new business priorities that demand greater collaboration.”

What I find odd, though, is that in all the openness, people have to work quietly alongside others, trying to concentrate on their own work. The very atmosphere that is meant to foster collaboration and face-to-face communication is at the same time very distracting, disturbing creative reaction.

Quoting Clive Wilkinson, whose firm designed all the offices featured in the article, “The more mobile our tools become… the more people will be doing their concentrated work away from the office and their collaborative work in the office.” Wait. Isn’t work the one place we are supposed to be able to, um, work? Are creatives supposed to go to a coffee shop or head home every time they need to concentrate? This, too, is an office design requirement.

The article isn’t the most cohesive I’ve seen, though it offers some interesting, if not completely compatible insights.

I mentioned this post, though from a very different perspective back on March 9th - (Fire the Workaholics). Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo.com offers some excellent tips on how to save money running a startup, which could be applied to any frugal business.  It is full of practical advice about spending money what really matters; for example, not spending money on desks/tables, but happily paying $600 for a good office chair.

What I appreciate most is that it takes into consideration the often unmeasured and therefore under-accounted benefits of productivity. Few businesses calculate productivity gains (and losses), and without dollar signs attached to these measurements, they often go unnoticed. A business’ largest expenditure is talent (labor), yet without an emphasis on training, and without providing employees the proper tools and an environment conducive to getting work done, we might as well be grabbing fistfuls of petty cash and throwing them into a bonfire every few minutes!

I’ll just highlight a few items, then go into detail on each of them in later posts:

• Buying Macs (Apple hardware, Mac OS, Apple software)

• Second or larger Monitors for everyone!

• Providing Meals, snacks, espresso

(Keep in mind, we already touched upon hiring workaholics and why that’s actually a bad idea)

Something for us all to think about!

Why, it was just a few days ago when I mentioned a company which had adopted a four-day workweek, and today I read in eWeek (print) magazine about Google’s version of this.

(Interestingly, eWeek’s own  - always frustrating  - search engine could not find the online version of the article, even though I typed three very specific phrase in quotes; It was the top result using Google. I always feel lucky.)

Google’s version, as you may already know, is “20 per cent time” - Google’s technical employees are encouraged to spend 20% of their time on projects that interest them. (Yes, they measure it. Google measures everything.)

What I did not know was that cash prizes can be involved. Now some of us might be able to imagine a $10,000 bonus for making some sort of amazing increase to a company’s bottom line. Well how about a $350,000 bonus?! For someone low on the totem pole! As Keanu Reeves is fond of saying, “WHOA!”

Of course, Google has a bigger bottom line; everything is proportional. And, as I’ve mentioned before, Google’s “crazy ideas” make good business sense. This is how they came up with Google News, Gmail, and Adsense.

On our scale, at our companies, what are we doing to encourage BIG thinking? Cash prizes as a tool for creativity? Why not? It’s actually not so crazy.

I know, I know - I just wrote about 37Signals yesterday. Yet their business philosophy continues to challenge and provoke. Yesterday I mentioned their recent move to a four-day workweek and its good results. Today I’d like to commend them for their other “Workplace Experiments“.

Creating a work environment where the employees are “allowed” to have lives, and yes, even encouraged to do so, is a recurring theme here at Creative Reaction, and so 37Signal’s experiment to “fund people’s passions” resonates with me. If their employees want to attend flight school or learn to cook, the company encourages its employees to do so by subsidizing or paying for the lessons.

Another recurring theme here at CR is that of educating and training employees. 37Signals encourages this by giving its employees company credit cards and discretionary spending accounts for books, software, or conferences.

As far as I’m concerned, I think these guys have a shot at replacing Pixar as the coolest-place-to-work-EVER! Bravo 37Signals!

Of course, many of you, dear readers, are in a position to make your own companies just as great. Will you one day unseat Pixar or 37Signals, earning my accolades? You can’t afford not to!

There’s a “green” angle to this Fast Company article, entitled All in a Day’s work, yet there’s no mistaking its message that overworking will also have a negative impact on productivity and long-term health/happiness/social life/family life of employees.

“It’s a myth of modern hypercapitalism that an overworked, sleep-deprived, stressed-out workforce is a necessity. Studies have consistently shown that longer workweeks increase productivity only in the very short term.”

This article connects nicely with this “Urgency is Poisonous” (Signal vs. Noise) post (which I blogged about here) where Jason of 37Signals briefly describes the productivity gains from the company’s four-day work week experiment. The best ideas are often counter-intuitive.