Category: Opinion

Reader Love for Amazon Books

Posted on Posted in Opinion, Reviews

I am sitting under a neat row of industrial light bulbs, glowing loops of exposed filament in wire-framed shades providing no real shade.  Coffee and cookie and Whole Foods sushi are making peace in my belly.  I’m wearing a surf cafe T-shirt and a blue hoodie and a beard.  The hipster serving coffee for Peets ends our brief relationship with a “hey…take care man” with decaffeinated sincerity.

Amazon Books is full of books…and curious people exploring and reading.  Helpful people work here.  This is a place fueled by data and designed by someone who loves to read.  The books…oh the books…are grouped by category but curated by people not publishers.

Two zaftig women sit across from me talking, drinking coffee, paging through a stack for grandchildren.  National Geographic, Guinness Book of World Records, “How Things Work.”

I wandered the stacks here for 45 minutes before sitting down for coffee and cookie.  The Whole Foods sushi doesn’t seem to object.  The New Hardcover Nonfiction was “selected using customer ratings, pre-orders, sales, and popularity on Goodreads – plus books we love.”  No lawyer requires this disclosure.  But clearly some data geek wants you to know that all basis were covered…no stone left unturned…to bring you the best possible selection known to man or machine.

People are wandering the aisles carrying small stacks of books and smiling.  Young people and older people, parents and grandparents.  Amazon Books is a place for curiosity.  It is not a small independent bookstore for the literary intelligentsia.

I spent the 90’s reading in Harvard Square…a lost Mecca for independent bookstores.  I am comfortable here.  And those four words speak volumes.

 

 

Do Ice Cubicles Freeze Innovation?

Posted on Posted in .. All Posts .., Business, Design, Opinion

IKEA meets Office CubeThe fastest way to freeze innovation is to stick your employees in an ice cube tray.  “Clean, very white, and efficient” rarely describe the creative workspace.

In “A Capitalist’s Dilemma, Whoever Wins this Tuesday,” Clayton M. Christensen describes three types of innovations: Empowering, Sustaining and Efficiency.  Christensen argues that the US has under-invested in Empowering innovation that “transform complicated and costly products available to a few into simpler, cheaper products available to the many.”  I argue that large-scale irony happens when the workforce building Empowering innovation shows up to an office built for Efficiency.

“How do you like your new space?”

The truth is that I like the aesthetics of my new workspace, pictured above.  I live in a contemporary house, and I enjoy modernist design.  But I don’t think it’s the right design Al Gore's Officefor a team tasked with Empowering innovation. By comparison, take a look at this photo of Al Gore’s office space.  Countless stacks of research piled across a broad workspace. A triptych of flat-panel monitors serve a smorgasbord of information to the former Vice President.  We don’t need to know exactly what he’s staring at.  This is the portrait of an Information Artist delivering  Empowering innovation on a global scale.

In contrast, take a look at this photo of a garment factory in the 1970s.  Workers are organized for efficiency and provided just enough space for the tools of their trade and for temporary storage of the end product.1970s Textile Factory  And this is the industrial workspace we expect to see when Efficient innovation is the primary driver.  Assuming that this factory was operated in accordance with the fair labor laws of the time, there is nothing wrong with this use of space. We can assume that workers and management were in agreement about the purpose of the space.  This was a playground for Efficient innovation.  You can almost imagine the man standing at center with a clipboard and stopwatch, trying to figure out how to best organize workers, space, equipment and time to maximize production.

So what’s the problem with my clean, very white, efficient cube pictured above?

The issue is that the space is clean, very white, and efficient.  It was designed to support a factory of Information Workers.  One argument for the new design was that it increases collaboration.  The cube walls are only half-height.  Look at the picture of the textile factory again.  While there is no physical barrier to collaboration, we don’t see any hobnobbing either.  And why should we?  The purpose of the space is to get the craft done efficiently.  I haven’t seen any new collaboration since occupying my cube.  In fact, voices have dropped to a whisper.Holliston Mills Art Studio

But the real problem with my clean, very white, efficient cube is that my team does not identify with the Information Workforce.  We are creative professionals, Information Artists who prefer massive amounts of data served raw, messy and spilling across the monitors and tables.

A workspace needs to support more than the number of workers.  A workspace is an asset shared by management and staff towards a common innovative purpose.

Zombie Analytics: Data Hungry vs. Data Driven

Posted on Posted in .. All Posts .., Analytics, Humor, Opinion, Web

The Walking Dead Want HorseAll is well…in the beginning.  Your leadership team attended schools like MIT and Wharton.  The latest issue of the McKinsey Quarterly lies dog-eared and defeated on the coffee table.  During the interview, you were in awe of a quantitative religion and by-the-numbers decision process.

And then it happens…

You realize that most meetings are requests for data…and more data.  Email scrape your nerves, hinting that horrible things may happen if data isn’t available by Friday.  Your mind-blowing A/B Testing plan is greeted with vacant stares and growls for more measurement of the status quo…Testing is too risky right now…maybe later when Sales improve.

Zombie Analytics feed an insatiable hunger for data.

The Zombie Apocalypse spreads quickly in corporate environments, driving waves of shock and terror into the few analysts that manage to survive.  Here are a few tips inspired by the The Walking Dead to avoid becoming a cranial cookie for your co-workers:

Ditch the Horse and Hide in a Tank

Ride into your next meeting carrying a thick, juicy report with every conceivable metric.  Once the smell of fresh data triggers the Zombie reflex, run to a secure location where you can plan your next move.  Note that this strategy will help you live another day, but will do nothing to cure the Zombie Apocalypse ravaging your office.

Sacrifice Your Sidekick

Blame your consultants.  Curse at the data.  Basically give the Zombies someone else to chew on while you run for safety.  You might live another day, but you just fed your strongest allies to a mindless eating machine.  And that will raise a few eyebrows among your remaining friends after you catch your breath.

Shoot ’em in the Head

Don’t bother aiming for a rancid arm or leg.  The fastest way to put down a Zombie is right between the eyes with a “double-tap” decapitation just to be safe.  “Here’s your Page Views report…you want fries with that?”  This strategy might get you out of a tight spot, and nothing feels better than offing the undead, but you will get exhausted or run out of bullets at some point.  And there never seems to be a shortage of Zombies…

Find a Cure

Lock yourself in your secret, high-tech lab (good follow-up to “Ditch the Horse and Hide in a Tank” from above).  Setup your defenses (read: Out of Office Assistant) and focus on saving humankind.  Using your analytical blood and scientific skill, find a cure.  Run a high volume of tests and iterate on promising therapies.  It only takes a small dose to start reversing the Zombie plague.  Encouraging signs include:

  1. Creative Review meetings that end half-way with an executive saying “shouldn’t we just test that?”
  2. Demands for a holdout population on any major redesign decision
  3. Clamoring to quantify the financial value analytics brings to the organization

The only real cure for The Zombie Apocalypse is a steady dose of quantifiable results that build faith in the analytical process.  One shot never does it.  Reversing the plague takes time and persistence.  Never forget that the staggering hoard of undead outside your cube are brilliant people trying to find meaning in data.

Now get going…find that cure and stop throwing meat at data hungry Zombies.  The world depends on data-driven survivors like you.

Adobe Summit 2012: The Kouing Aman of Conferences

Posted on Posted in .. All Posts .., Analytics, Events, Opinion

About two hours after enjoying a Kouing Aman, you ask yourself “whoa…what did I just eat?  It was crunchy and sweet on the outside, thick and moist and the inside, and I think it will stick with me for another eight hours.”  I just returned from Adobe (Omniture) Summit, the Kouing Aman of all Conferences.

It’s a big event that descends on Salt Lake City every year…and it got a lot bigger this year.  The venue was larger (Salt Palace), there were twice the number of attendees (~4000), the band was big (Foster the People), and  even the breakout sessions had a pastry-puffed quality.

I also attended the Adobe Un-Summit at the University of Utah the day before.  Although the balance of participants was tilted a little too far towards consultants and academics (and MBA students), the spirit was there.  And I’m not sure that the 10 min rocket pitch approach supports discussions.  But it is an effort to get back to the roots of analytics without the Adobe uber sales engine.  And they served a box of Kouing Aman at break.

It’s a few days later and I’m not sure what I ate.

At the Adobe Summit I attended presentations in the Personalization track.  Most were brief, heavy on images, and tried to split time between a client case study and spiel on the supporting Adobe technology.  I left wanting to learn more about integrating Test & Target with Insight, and about CQ5.  And in general I left early.  But that may have also been because the weather was fantastic and Salt Lake is a very walkable city.

Adobe (Omniture) Summit was great because of the amazing people who attended.

In the hotel lobby and over dinners I spoke with brilliant analysts from REI, The Home Depot, L.L. Bean and American Express.  We talked shop and agreed to keep talking after Summit.  I hung out with the Keystone gang, ate too much sushi, and enjoyed a back-seat view of getting lost in Salt Lake despite 4 smartphones, a lot of digital analytics smarts, and a grid city with super-sized lanes.

Despite all of our Social Media tools and incarnations of “The Digital Self” there is nothing like face-to-face time to accelerate an industry.  So while the Adobe Summit was thick in sales sugar & crust, it was pretty rich on the inside.  And I’m not sure how the right ingredients might have otherwise mixed together.

 

A Tale of Two eCommerce Companies

Posted on Posted in .. All Posts .., Opinion, Web

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…”

There were two major eCommerce companies who sold the same wares.  One company was based in an expensive city, outsourced IT and paid its local architects in coal.  Any change to the Web site was met with layers of fear, process, and expensive consultants.

The other company was smaller and grew a team of Software Architects in an area of the US deemed barren of any technical talent.  It never needed to offshore or downsize.  Any change to the Web site was met as an opportunity to build something new.

Five years and a few recessions passed.  Along comes Web Analytics with the ability to identify, quantify and exploit opportunity faster than anything eCommerce has ever seen before…as long as your Web site can be quickly modified for a/b and mulitvariate testing.

Which eCommerce company do you think is chasing tail today?