Atlas · Details
Innovation 101
Author’s note
This one didn't do it for me on re-read 20 years later.
My thinking on metacognition got a huge boost from reading Thinking, Fast and Slow a few years later.
AI Notes
A 4 a.m. rant, written by candlelight on the living-room couch, that demonstrates its own method while explaining it: Steve narrates the essay's composition from inside the essay, reporting a cruising speed of about 90 words per minute and flagging the exact moment the piece nearly forks into three separate topics. The brain science is strictly a programmer's — garbage collectors and blown stacks standing in for citations — and the best evidence on offer is a dinner-table scene in which a waiter bellowing "Who ordered the PORK LOIN?" wipes out a conversation beyond recovery.
Halfway through, the piece changes species: the theory of thinking turns into a real-estate question (where does the best work actually get done?), and Steve answers it with a venue so specific, and so unlike an office, that he goes on to cost it out per engineer per year, invoking the Manhattan Project as precedent. There is also a frank shot at his then-employer: Amazon's facilities, he reports, offered fewer creature comforts than the office in Office Space. Steve conceded in the comments that everything past the thinking-tools material was idle fantasy, but the underlying claim has had a long afterlife: that where knowledge workers sit is a first-order input to what they produce is a proposition the industry has spent the years since testing, offsite by offsite.
Related listings
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2006
Good Agile, Bad Agile
The following year. Innovation 101 is about the personal conditions for thought; Good Agile is about the organisational conditions for shipping. Together they describe most of what's broken about modern engineering culture.
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2005
Not Managing Software Developers
Same year, same author, the manager-side companion. Not Managing is the case that the manager's job is to remove distractions; Innovation 101 is the inside view of what those distractions actually cost.
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2005
My Save Excursion
Companion piece on the writing-as-thinking habit Innovation 101 is grounded in. Save Excursion is the writer's-room view of the same engine.
From the peanut gallery
Read the rest of the thread · 2 more
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>>> In Heaven, also known as a Four-Star Hotel in a good city,
It's hard to fault your logic, but I've always found the rooms and lobbies of even expensive hotels to be pretty sterile and often noisy (lobbies, and hallways outside rooms).
Wouldn't you rather have the tranquility of a room in a quiet country inn, in say the Cotswolds, or Shropshire? I've stayed with friends in a small cottage just outside this village: http://www.leintwardine.info and I got a lot of thinking done, _and_ came away relaxed and happy.
You probably won't get broadband yet, but I'd trade bandwidth for quality-without-a-name beauty any day. If you're really lucky, there won't be a TV either.
That would be my ideal for deep thinking on a known problem. But what about pure innovation? Surely the most important factor there is who is working nearby, and what they are working on? e.g.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/0887309895
And from http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/384/weiser.pdf...
We placed a ParcTab on the CSL coffeepot. Whenever anyone made a new pot of coffee we pushed the reset button on the ParcTab, which sent an infrared signal to the computer network. A message popped up on our computer screens letting everyone know that there was a fresh brew. This caused an instantaneous gathering around the coffeepot, and as a result generated lots of fresh hallway discussion which is one of the best ways to create new research ideas.
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Beach houses, country homes -- I can certainly see those venues, as long as (a) the surrounding entertainment (hikes, kayaking, etc.) isn't too distracting, and (b) you can actually get errands done when you need to. Being in some downtown area in a hotel seemed like the best solution to all the constraints I had in mind. But there are all kinds of places that could work, and I agree with the Quality Without a Name (QWAN) being really important.
I worked for about 18 months on a project at HP Singapore, and they flew us out frequently to work with the engineers there. They always put us up in the Westin or in the Shangri-La. Both hotels were amazing, more like resorts than hotels. We used to think HP were total fools for spending all that money, but we eventually realized that it made us *want* to go out there and help. We didn't mind staying for 2 or 3 months at a time, although after that even the Shangri-La could wear on you. But in retrospect, HP was pretty smart to put us in 5-star hotels; we would have been leaving after the first week or two if we'd been in anything but heavenly conditions. I doubt we'd have launched the projects on time (and we did) if they hadn't been able to lure us out there for so many weeks and months at a time.
Shangri-La Singapore has QWAN.
I hope everyone realizes this blog entry (other than the paper-as-RAM part) is just idle fantasizing, and it would probably never happen in real life. But it can be fun to imagine!
"Peopleware" talks about a manager sending the entire dev team to a beach house for a week, to create the architechture and design for a new product. The manager stayed at the office to handle phone calls.
— Derek U · December 11, 2004 01:00 AM
John Carmack is known to take a sabbatical right around when the latest id software shooter comes out. He hunkers down in a hotel far away, laptop in hand, and just hacks and tinkers and research/prototypes new ideas.
— Andrew W · January 19, 2005 10:50 PM