Echoes

Google’s Nest acquisition has very little to do with selling thermostats and smoke detectors in particular. Instead, it’s about Google having the ability to do consumer hardware right, in general.

I’ve long had a love affair with Netflix. But perhaps more so than any other service, the relationship has changed over time. Not in a bad way, necessarily — it’s just different. And it’s different, because Netflix is different. It’s a service that keeps re-inventing itself.

That should be obvious to anyone paying attention. But it took this post by Felix Salmon to point out the obvious to me: in its transition to full-on streaming, Netflix is no longer about movies.

Said another way: Netflix has ramped up the “net” and wound down the “flix”.

Four questions to consider before you speak:

1. Is it true?
2. Is it necessary?
3. Is it kind?
4. Does it improve upon the silence?

People think it’s natural to live in a world where everyone is dysfunctional. It’s not. It’s normal for people to be satisfied. All you have to do is remove the barriers that are making you unhappy and you’ll be a lot happier.

Knowledge may be priceless, but a higher education is clearly not. University administrators keep hiking tuition, the wages of graduates keep falling, and a whole generation of Americans is struggling under the crushing burden of debt as they postpone their dreams for a tomorrow that may never come.

Berkshire Hathaway, despite a market value now approaching one quarter of a trillion dollars, is managed from a tiny office with a staff smaller than a soccer team’s starting roster. Buffett is not the slave to a corporate calendar jammed with the humdrum inanities of business life like performance assessments, facilities planning, analyst meetings, compliance training, budget reviews and travel. This leaves him time to read and think so that for Buffett the only real difference between a weekday and the weekend is that for two days the markets are closed. Buffett is no fan of spreadsheets or reams of analytical mumbo-jumbo. Facts, a pen, a sheet of paper and an agile mind are his tools.

During the 4-hour meeting, Hsieh talked about how Zappos’ traditional organizational structure is being replaced with Holacracy, a radical “self-governing” operating system where there are no job titles and no managers. The term Holacracy is derived from the Greek word holon, which means a whole that’s part of a greater whole. Instead of a top-down hierarchy, there’s a flatter “holarchy” that distributes power more evenly. The company will be made up of different circles—there will be around 400 circles at Zappos once the rollout is complete in December 2014—and employees can have any number of roles within those circles. This way, there’s no hiding under titles; radical transparency is the goal.

The only path to amazing runs directly through not-yet-amazing. But not-yet-amazing is a great place to start, because that’s where you are. For now.

The tax that comes with introducing any new feature into your product is high. I cannot stress this enough. Sure, maybe the new feature isn’t hard to build, maybe it only takes a couple days and a handful of people, maybe it can be shipped and delivered by next week. And maybe the additional cognitive load for a user isn’t high — it’s just an extra icon here, after all, or an extra slot in a menu there. But once your new feature is out there, it’s out there. A real thing used by real people.

This is what the long game looks like.

via ventureswell

A biz monkey is a replaceable, Powerpoint toting, suit wearing, acronym-spewing middle manager business dude drone. They are quick to comment and sneer, slow to actually ship.

People who understand technology and are willing to bend it to their will, on the other hand, are scarce. They can’t be found with a classified ad on Craigslist or in a blind project ad on eLance.

At 37signals, however, we have a different position on ambition. We’re not big fans of what I consider “vertical” ambition—that is, the usual career-path trajectory, in which a newbie moves up the ladder from associate to manager to vice president over a number of years of service. On the other hand, we revere “horizontal” ambition—in which employees who love what they do are encouraged to dig deeper, expand their knowledge, and become better at it. We always try to hire people who yearn to be master craftspeople, that is, designers who want to be great designers, not managers of designers; developers who want to master the art of programming, not management.