The Management of Creative Teams

You don’t build a startup with one big gigantic brain on the top, and a bunch of lesser brains obeying orders down below. You try to get everyone to have a gigantic brain in their area, and you provide a minimum amount of administrative support to keep them humming along.
by Joel Spolsky on AVC

Creative teams (dev, design and content) are a unique form of thought in its all and as that, they deserve a different way of managing.

How do you motivate them? - which most of the times is not around money... How do you go about empowering them to create and develop the best of themselves? How do you make them shine?... these are all valid questions for both making your team succeed, as to make your endeavor succeed as well.

It's funny how the self motivational speech of last decade doesn't apply to these subjects anymore, in the moment there is a leader, in that moment there is an inherent responsibility to facilitate and motivate, to embrace the best of everyone and provide the right spaces and tools to make up for the areas that need to be improved. Leaders should manage the skills and resources available through their team to make the most of their mix towards a common goal.

Managing rocks stars shouldn't be that different... they are the ones that excel at making the boat roll, the ones who mentor the ones starting and most importantly, they are ones who keep bringing back their bag of tricks for you to manage. Your goal?... to nurture these tricks and help them create more: with respect, honesty and clear paths to build the road together, as a team effort.

The post above excels on this call: Managers should focus on building and managing great teams of contributors; and the rest... will follow... now go read it.

A Dream: A Person-Oriented Society

We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

by Martin Luther King, Jr.

Thanks Seth for reminding us how much we are forgetting in these digital days.

Making our users succeed... thru ego

One reason that so many of the most popular sites online are those that permit people to express and expose their ideas is that those are the pages we care most about. We go back to see how people responded, how the traffic is, what we can do to improve the page.
- Seth Godin

Social media, crowd-sourcing, build it and they will come... there are so many cliches these days about content generation leads and yet there are not that many players thinking truly in how to empower your contributors to be successful... at the end of the day it's thru their success that you will succeed.

Wondering, what are you doing to make your tribe succeed?

Inspiration to make the impossible... doable!

it's not everyday that I seat infront on a video, lecture or reading that inspires me to a level of just remain speechless and immersed in the afterthoughts for a few minutes.

this video right here is one of those... it starts with a poem... if follows with a great inspirational comment and it ends by making you rethink your now, your past and your future.

it's just about lunch time in my country... so if you are looking for something to accompany your bites, search for it no more and just hit play.

PS: loved it? the domino project just released this great book from the poem. get it.

Entrepreneurs can change the world... just like a kid

I've been reading a few books lately on entrepreneurship and a recurrent topic on them is how important it is to plant the seed of exploration in our kids and nurture that feeling as they get older.

Now more than ever this exploration is needed to move the world forward and even though there is a lot of artificial buzz been created around the myth of becoming a millionaire from one day to the other, the truth is that if we want to advance as a society we need to do so in the collective of great ideas... owned by many.

This little video here represents that and I am thankful to this TED talk from Cameron Harold on how to teach kids to be entrepreneurs. This is not only a call to action for today's parents or soon to be ones, this is a call for the humanity.

LEGO Life of George - A playful use of AR

This morning Helguita sent me a link to the new Lego Life of George experience and got to say it made me smile and more than that it put me mind to fly.

This hybrid game combines the physical task of assembling legos with that of a virtual-checking using an Augmented Reality app for the iPhone.

Wit this app you can go against the clock with the models the app suggests, while you can also start building your own stages as well, saving them, sharing them and exploring new ones.

Now imagine if we could take this experience and apply it to more complex tasks, verification processes in real time and with the tools with have at hand today.

I think we are living in exciting times of innovation and as I noted yesterday on my Google Profile, it is in the exploration of this new experiences, the key eye to forward thinking and the inherent value for the aesthetics in today's toys that we are setting foundations for a creative society that will move the needle forward in very revolutionary ways in just a few years.

Art & Exploration = Passions

Art is form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map. If children are not permitted–not taught–to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?

Because it's in the action of letting me mind flow that most of the great ideas have come from... it's in the disconnect from the virtual and the reconnect with the physical that you can in itself get the most of both and to strive in beauty, form and action.

This little excerpt from Manhood for Amateurs reminded me of me been a kid and painting, playing and running; climbing trees and just think in the hugeness of the world... now I realize how much I need that to start happening again.

I need to kick start my passions... and you? What are your passions?

PS. Thanks to Swiss-miss for finding it for me ;)

Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions

A few years back I had the chance to collaborate reviewing the book Reality Check by Startup Legendary, Guy Kawasaki. That book changed the way I looked at startup formation and made it spark the fire of entrepreneur in me... in a lot of ways this book was the reason that made me resign to my status in the industry and head across the world to Korea to restart, and as result Discovr Places was born.

Now, 2 years later, a new book comes from the vault of his ideas and with Enchanted, Guy tries to show us the value of soft skills in practice. Something that, in my personal opinion, is key to succeed as a leader, regardless of your industry, in what you do or have to offer.

I just bought the book today and from the early look at it I believe it will become a most read for explorers, for those early stage startup CEO's, that just as technology savvy, it's expected of them to become enchanters in their practice and as service providers.

The info-graphic below is a guide to the book, something you can print and hang in your wall or just around the office so you and your peers can be reminded of those little things that can make a difference in the way you can be perceived. Take a look.

Enchanted Infografic

I like the way Guy writes, it's just like having a pal over for drinks and tell you stories that work. I hope you guys find as much motiviation in his ideas as I've done, and don't worry, be happy and trust you can do a great change in the world by enchanting others.

Cheers!

XAML + C++ is this Microsoft's UX.next?

There has been a lot of discussion lately about the current status of Microsoft UX strategy and where is it going. Microsoft reps keep on with the same story of "depends" and away from concrete answers, they keep adding their own weight of uncertainty into the whole equation.

My pal, Scott Barnes, has been probably the most vocal among the outsiders (even though he was an insider not long ago) and making use of his position in the community, he has been reviving the waters of an old discussion. Where is Microsoft.UX going next... what is happening with WPF and, for what is worth, where does Silverlight fits in the whole equation?

To no one is a secret that HTML5 + CSS3 + JS are poised to the be the future of the interaction technologies, not only is the true open cross platform equation, their feature set have been gaining more and more power lately, to the point that it is been brought at par with a lot of its plugin counterparts… it might not be there in full right now... but believe me, it is going to get there very quick. 

But the story doesn't end here, there is more to the interaction experience than just web. We need tools and frameworks that let us reap the benefits of the hardware beneath and that of the great user experience that (some) platforms provide, and it's for those scenarios that we wonder: what'd be Microsoft's take?

Enter XAML + C++

Among some slides posted today by Mary-Jo Foley about the new Windows Embedded Compact relase, a few interesting bits where shown… imagine you can take the power of XAML-based UX with the power and reach of native execution. No more performance issues, fat-out frameworks in the middle and as the slides put it no Garbage Collector pauses like in Managed Code.

Now keep in mind these slides are referring to the new Windows Embedded Compact released yesterday and it's not an official announcement of bigger proportions, yet… but it might be what has been missing to bring Windows + Dev units together within Microsoft and help start fresh with a more cohesive story… parallel to HTML5… and for togheter, to build some trust and show us a clearer future.

I know this might not be the best scenario for everyone, but it might be right scenario to move native development further… .NET is one the most ubiquitous development platforms in the Windows world and with Mono doing the dirty work no one at Microsoft have wanted to address… their footprint is pretty much everywhere. But .NET has it's limitations and Microsoft has been aware of them ever since they reset Longhorns from what-is-was-supposed-to-be to what-Vista-ended-up-being. XAML was probably the best outcome from that effort and it has prove to be a great DSL for UX development.

Back to the future, Windows 8 is just around the corner, coming along with its ARM and x86 flavors, it's supposed to be all about tablet support, energy efficiency and for what's worth it will be the tiding bone between a true cloud driven experience across all 3 screens… if anything we will need portability and we will need increased performance… away from all the cluttered bits in the middle and that's what XAML + C++ could bring to the party.

What do you think? Os this too crazy? or is Microsoft lost… still?

One thing is for sure, whatever Microsoft is set to release next I wished it came with a clear proposition of unity, an homogenized strategy and best of all something we, developers and designers (don't forget about those), can really believe in, not for a season or two but for years to come.