thedwick

I like to think of myself as a decent photographer, which is why I immediately identified with this post on courageous sucking. If nothing else, it taught me that I’m not really such a great photographer because I still feel like a complete idiot when I get down on the floor to take a picture, even if I know the picture will be good.

But after a few days mulling it, I realized it actually applies even better to my career. Almost without exception, the biggest leaps in my career came when I took promotions I didn’t feel totally qualified for. In most cases I was wrong, but thankfully had a boss who knew better. In one case, I was entirely right, and boy did that suck, even though I learned a ton.

The courageous sucking part of your career, though, is that part where you’ve stepped into this leadership role you don’t feel ready for, you’re making (what feels like) mistake after mistake, and to top it all off you’re doing it in front of people. You’re not a solo coder any more who can go hide in a corner. Instead you feel like a ship’s figurehead, lashed there right on the bow taking every stinging, cold wave right in the jaw. Next to learning to delegate, making mistakes in front of people might be the second most difficult leadership skill to learn.

You many have heard of the concept of “Next Action Lists” which are a part of the Getting Things Done methodology. I don’t really use the methodology, but I do use something that vaguely resembles the Next Action part of it. And I’ve found that a really useful Next Action is just looking up people’s phone numbers and writing them down.

Imagine this item is in your todo list:
–Finish Functional View diagram for Currency Trading system

And for the sake of argument you have that item in a vanilla Outlook Task.

As part of creating that functional view, maybe you need to call three different people and ask them some questions. I’ve found that often just having to look up those people’s phone number is a big enough excuse to make me put off that task. It’s stupid, I know, but it’s just the way it is and I bet there are lots of people out there just like me.

So, I’ve gotten in the habit of making this my Next Action:
–Look up the phone numbers of everyone I have to call and put them in the Outlook Task.

That’s a really small action. It doesn’t have any of the mental baggage involved in preparing yourself to (gasp) actually talk to another human being. You don’t have to think about what you’re going to say or ask, or if that person likes you, or if they’re in town or out on vacation, or where you’re going to write down what they say, or anything. You just have to look up their phone number and put it in the same place where you’ve recorded your task.

That’s it. But here’s the genius: six times out of ten, I’ll look up the phone numbers, write them down, and then immediately pick up the phone and call one of them. There’s something about those numbers staring you in the face that’s just too inviting. Try it out!

One technique I like to use is a concept of a Risk Heap. If you remember from your college days, a heap is a data structure that looks like a tree and efficiently keeps the item with the highest value on top, ready to be removed. The ordering of the heap is kept in real time, and at any given moment you’re guaranteed to have the entire set of values sorted in priority order.

To apply a heap to a project, you approach a project by (mentally) inserting everything you have to do into a heap that is ordered by that item’s risk to the project. Then working your way though your project is simply a matter of coming in in the morning, inserting into your risk heap anything new that’s popped up, and then taking the first item off the top of the heap until you’re blocked and have to pick up another one from the top of the heap.

I’m willing to wager that if you use no other technique but this one, and otherwise just blunder and feel your way through a project, you still have an OK chance for pulling the whole thing off.

The metaphor continues to work even when you stretch it a little. For example, if you take an item off the heap, do a little something to it to significantly reduce its risk (but still don’t totally complete it) and then toss it back on the heap it will settle to the right level in the heap and something else more important will pop to the top. If you constantly complete tasks only partly, they’ll remain stubbornly at the top of the heap waiting for you to pick them up the next day.

Of course, what really separates the men from the boys with this technique is how you calculate “risk”. Personally, I don’t run every item through a computer simulation that uses a five-page formula only a Ph.D would understand. I simply use a formula that looks something like this:

risk(x) = (probability_of_failure(x) * (impact_to_quality(x) + impact_to_timeline(x) + impact_to_business(x))) - how_long_you_have_to_deal_with_it(x)

where x is the task in question.

Don’t spend forever figuring this out. Remember the concept of Decision Algebra because if you take as long building and sorting your risk heap as you would have spent just dealing with its contents, then you’ve failed before you started.

There are also a variety of ways you can get the risk formula just plain wrong, like these for example:

risk(x) = impact_to_business(x) - how_much_I_dont_feel_like_dealing_with_it(x)

risk(x) = how_interesting_solving_the_problem_is_to_me(x)

risk(x) = (impact_to_timeline(x) + impact_to_business(x) ) * how_annoying_the_person_asking_is(x)

So there you go. Try it out for a few weeks and let me know how it goes.

Ok, for the nit-picky out there you may have realized that what I’m calling a Risk Heap is, strictly speaking, a Risk Priority Queue. But a heap is close enough and, after all, most priority queues are implemented under the covers with a heap anyway. That, plus, Risk Priority Queue just doesn’t roll off the tongue the same way.

I spent most of yesterday evening helping out at the California Clean Tech Open. Each of the six category winners got a “Start-up in a box”, which is $25k plus another $25k worth of pro-bono legal, marketing, and accounting services. The room at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco was packed wall-to-wall with venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and hangers-on like me. If there’s anywhere else to be in the clean tech scene I’d sure love to see it; the whole thing felt like ground zero of the New New Economy.

The entire world at any given moment consumes 14TW of power (yes, trillionwatts every second). By 2050, the world will be consuming twice that much. Even with conventional energy sources that demand is nearly impossible to meet. Without terrible wars, rampant poverty and complete environmental meltdown, meeting that demand cleanly is an outright fantasy unless we have something like a Clean Industrial Revolution. Seeing the brainpower in that room last night gave me new hope that revolution might actually happen.

I finally broke down and set up a macro to let me sort through my morning email without actually touching a mouse. It’s not exactly rocket science, but it does require a quick Google search, which I hope to save you here:

Step 1: Copy and paste a macro off the Internet like this one for moving an Outlook email to a different folder:

Step 2: Set up a custom Outlook tool bar and name it so it has a keyboard shortcut

Step 3 (possibly optional): Digitally sign your Outlook macro. I didn’t actually have to do this step, though it seems like I should have had to.

I got a good start on these steps from this post about creating Outlook email shortcuts, but its link to a macro is broken.

I saw this on my home page “quote of the day” widget and thought it was worth sharing:

“There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.
- Richard Feynman”

Our debt was already a big monster in the closet; what will it turn into now with the events of the last 10 days?

It seems like it’s x-ray day on the Make blog. Here are two links from a guy who takes beautiful x-ray photographs and from someone who leaves a hidden treat for airport screeners in his baggage.

The more observant among you may have noticed the little SiteMeter icon in the lower right corner. That’s what I use to track visitors to this blog and is the reason I know that 99% of the traffic to my humble blog is to see my post on backing up Mac to Linkstation. Because of that, I thought it necessary to clarify: this is not a Mac blog and I promise I write about other stuff, too.

I take two lessons from this:
1) Apple really needs to get its act together on backing up to something other than TimeCapsule, and
2) If you want to drive traffic to your blog, then write a detailed technical article about something arcane but needed.

I have a long, skinny house. It’s so long that one wireless access point doesn’t quite reach from one end to the other. It doesn’t help that all my neighbors have their own in one great storm of EM radiation.

So, I have to have two wireless routers. The problem is that most consumer routers are set up by default to assume they’re the only one on your network and that they are the ones connecting to your ISP. After much struggling, I found some directions on how to add a second wireless access point to your network.

The one thing that I have to add is if you have a switch or hub between your two wireless routers (as I do) then you need to make sure your “Internet side” router is connected to your switch with a cross-over cable to the “uplink” port and your other router is connected to your switch with a normal cable to a normal port.

I just went to a volunteer event for the California Cleantech Open last night and I’ve got to say, I’m impressed. Often these kinds of things are filled with about 30% people who are sharp and will make a difference and 70% hangers-on who just want to be a part of the action. But this organization is different.

In 3 years, they’ve managed to match startups with $200 million in funding. Every person I talked to last night seemed sharp and impressive and really knew their stuff. They just signed on a half-dozen national labs to partner with their startups. If we’re really going to make a difference attacking climate change, I’m sure the solution(s) will pass through their doors in one way or another. I just hope in such an impressive crowd I can find a way to help out.