Posterous theme by Cory Watilo
Marc Holmes

The Unauthorised Autobiography of Marc Holmes

Microsoftie thinking about dialogue with developers. Brit in Seattle. Windswept and Interesting.


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Marked Man

It surely can’t be a coincidence that just as soon as I start reading Robopocalypse then:
  • The auto-feeder at the photocopying/print/scanning station plays up and tries to eat the title deeds to my house. Twice.
  • The Bluetooth stack on my ever reliable Sony Z crashes twice in the same afternoon.
  • The dishwasher left a dirty spoon or two.
It’s surely the tell-tale signs of robot infiltration. Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me. I think I’ll take a leaf out of the book, buy some Mindstorms and crack on either a) learning how to defeat them or b) being of value to our new robot overlords.

On Authenticity

Fun, sound-bite laden NYT article on the overuse of ‘authenticity’:
  • “Facebook is me on my best day”
  • “[you can’t be told] to act authentic and still be authentic”
  • “The best way to sell yourself is not to appear to be selling yourself”
Though the article says “calculated authenticity” I think maybe it’s “aspirational authenticity”.

Question is: if you act like you on your best day, does your best day gradually get better over time?

Big Review: And The Rest (Part 3 of 3)

Besides Ideation and Information, you need some other stuff too.
To maintain the alliteration, but stretch the semantic, then I’d say this is:
  • Itinerary. What are you seeking to accomplish with the review?
  • Implementation. If the idea is good, and the information is valid, what’s the “cost” (in a resource, time, trade-off etc. sense) for approving the itinerary?
  • Indication. How do you know what success looks like? Measures, answered questions etc. all form the scope of success.
So there we have Marc’s 5 Is for the development of exec review material... Ideation, Information, Itinerary, Implementation and Indication.

Big Review: High-Res (Part 2 of 3)

The second source was from some of the things Tufte said at a recent seminar I attended. (Generally I was disappointed with the session – it felt a bit tired: taking an obvious pop at poor use of PowerPoint, whilst not a word on the awfulness of Infauxgraphics... needs a bit of revision I think.)

Anyway, in describing the provenance of Sparklines, he made the point that when an exec says they want simplicity they mean simplicity of the final message, not the underlying data and equally, they don’t want to walk through or wallow in the data in the actual review... In fact, providing the highest resolution data possible (preferably pre-review) is the best thing to do: delivering transparency, improving credibility, enabling focused Q&A and other more efficient activities in the valuable 1:1 review time.

Net: there’s a need to find time for “low resolution” Ideation reviews and to find time for “high resolution” Information reviews. They’re very different animals.

Big Review: Low-Res (Part 1 of 3)

My shotgun-mind saw a pattern from a couple of different sources which I’ll relate to “big review” cycles with exec stakeholders or negotiation or selling your project or whatever.

The first is this excellent article on “Iterationitis” on HBR. Provocative title aside, the point here is that as a leader it’s important to find the space for “low resolution” reviews – raw ideas that haven’t been refined to the point of formal review and probably without the trappings that go with those formal reviews: fixed agendas, slides, fully-sourced data.

Simple article, great points.
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