Book Summary: Tearing Down The Myths of Innovation

Since childhood, we’ve been force fed with false propaganda about creativity and innovation – Edison and his light bulb, Newton and the apple that fell on his head, Archimedes running naked through the streets of ancient Greece shouting Eureka. Now, imagine Pink Floyd playing in the background as Scott Berkun takes a sledgehammer at all that nonsense, starting with the myth of epiphany – the idea that innovation happens out of the blue if you just sit under an apple tree. That’s what The Myths of Innovation is all about.

The best part of the book, however, starts with the epilogue which ends with a brief description of the ‘simple plan’ for innovation – stop thinking/dreaming/reading and start doing something, focus on solving the problem instead of trying to innovate for its own sake, build trust and be willing to stick your neck out for the team, keep the team small, celebrate interesting mistakes and keep going. And then there are the ‘creative thinking hacks’ starting with the mantra that ‘an idea is a combination of other ideas’ and the need to loose inhibitions, find the right environment and stay committed. This is followed up with a crash course on how to pitch your idea. And finally a list of things to help you stay motivated – anger, desperation, pride, death, fun or a crazy friend.

Feels like God

You know that feeling you get when you get a phone call from a close friend or relative that you haven’t talked to in a long time and they call to ask you for a favor. Sure you care about this person. You would gladly do the favor and more. But you just wish at the back of your mind that they would call up more often. Like when they don’t have a favor to ask. Just to check on how you are doing. Just because they thought about you and felt like taking. Just to let you know that they care.

And then you realize how often you have done the same thing. How often you don’t have the time or energy for your friends and family. Just to check on how they are doing. Just because you thought about them and felt like taking. Just to let them know that you care.

And then you realize that's what it must feel like to be God, to be Almighty and yet thirst.

Well, profound isn't it, the thoughts that a telephone can evoke. God certainly has a sense of humor!

Intimidating Awesomeness

A few days back in the office, at about 9pm, the conversation goes something like this:

A: Hey, try to solve this. My friend was asked this in an interview. You have a stream of words coming in. How will you check, in constant time, if you have already received a particular word or an anagram of it?

Now, if you are wondering what’s with the title of this post, I suggest you stop here and try to solve this problem before reading further.

(Don’t look below.)

B: Hmm. (pause) Well. You could maintain a hash table. Hmm. So that reduces your question to what the hash function should be.
C: We could assign a numeric value to each character and add it up.
D: Yeah, but we’ll get a collision when letters repeat in a word.
C: (pause) Wait a minute. Why only add? Why not some other operation?
B: Like Multiply?
D: Prime numbers.
C: Yep, map each letter to one of the first 26 prime numbers and multiply them.
D: That should always give a unique number.
A: Correct answer!
E: (walks by) Dinner?

All in under a few minutes.

If this were a real tech interview, a successful candidate for a high-end product development job would be expected to solve (or come reasonably close to solving) this in around 20 minutes. Ok, granted we ganged up on the poor problem. But I can’t give you a real work example here, so this is all we have. And, more importantly, that fact that we ganged up on the problem does not explain everything. Yes, the folks I work with are smart, some of the best that money can hire. But then, from experience, I know that most other groups of equally smart people can not pull off something like this. I’d say that what you just saw there was more than the sum of our individual abilities.

Collective Intelligence, the measure of a small group’s problem solving ability, depends on more than the intellectual abilities of individual members. A recent study by Woolley et al. published in Science and appropriately titled “Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups” shows there is such a thing as a measurable collective intelligence. That it is not strongly correlated with the average or maximum individual intelligence of group members or the traditional soft factors like group cohesion, motivation, and satisfaction. And that it is correlated with the average social sensitivity of group members, the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking, and the proportion of females in the group.

Social sensitivity was measured using the ‘reading the mind in the eyes’ test, where you are shown photos of the eye region and asked to choose which of two given words best describes what the person in the photo is thinking or feeling. It essentially tests your ability tune in to the other person’s mental state in order to understand or predict their behavior. What is otherwise called empathy, ‘social intelligence’ or ‘theory of mind’. Needless to say, groups of people with higher sores on this test did better when working as a team.

The proportion of females in the group was another factor. While Woolley et al. suggest that this could simply be because women in general score better on the social sensitivity scale; I’ll make a wild assed guess (WAG) and speculate that it has something to do with our neurobiological response to the opposite sex – something perhaps to do with oxytocin in the brain – that causes a gender diverse group to be more socially sensitive.

And not surprisingly, groups where a few people dominated the conversation were less collectively intelligent than those with a more equal distribution of conversational turn-taking. If you look at our sample above, the conversational turn-taking is striking with folks completing each other’s sentences towards the end. Sort of like what Hasson et al. describe as neural coupling, where communication is a single act resulting from brain wave synchronization across participants.

A smart team that scores high on social sensitivity will beat a team of individualistic superstars hands down any day. So, what can you do if your team is not exactly overflowing with social sensitivity? Fortunately, there are workarounds, like the improv technique for brainstorming that Scott Berkun describes in his classic project management reference Making Things Happen. Based on the principles of improvisational theater, this technique forces equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking in a constructive way and thus compensates for lack of natural social sensitivity. In fact, I’ll take another WAG and say that practicing improv could possibly improve social sensitivity skills.

How to cook the perfect microwave Maggi (instant ramen)

If you love Maggi (or any other kind of instant ramen noodles) but hate cooking and cleaning, here is a simple method to cook instant ramen using a microwave oven with just one plate and no mess.

1. You’ll need a large ceramic dinner plate, a fork, a microwave oven, 2 cups of water and of course Maggi (or any other brand of instant noodles). Note: Using a plate instead of a bowl keeps the liquid from boiling over.
2. Break the Maggi cake along the fold, then break each piece into two.
3. Position the four pieces in the plate in a checkered pattern, an empty square region in the center flanked by one of the four pieces on each side. It is very important that you position the Maggi in this manner. It has to do with microwave physics. The penetration depth of microwaves into food is usually less than an inch.
4. Pour the taste maker into the empty square region in the middle of your plate.
5. Gently pour one cup of water over the taste-maker.
6. Microwave on full power for 3 minutes (I use a basic 800W model).
7. Remove the plate from the microwave. Turn the noodles over and spread it as thin as you can while maintaining the empty space in the middle.
8. Pour the second cup of water along the edge of the plate. The idea is the push the taste-maker away from the edge.
9. Now microwave for another 3 minutes. (Adjust the amount of water and the cooking time to suite your taste and microwave model.)
10. Remove from the microwave. Be careful, the plate will be hot. Use your fork to toss the noodles. Let cool for a minute.

That’s all there is to it. You now have perfect hassle free microwave Maggi.

Book Summary: Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose & Johnny Bunko

Daniel Pink has pretty much won me over as a card carrying fan with all his talk about how we right-brained folks are going to rule the world. I’ve just finished reading his latest book called Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us and thought of writing a summary of the Autonomy-Mastery-Purpose model for future reference. But then, Pink’s talks on TED and RCA pretty much take care of that. So I’ll focus here on some of the little details that struck a chord with me.

In the section on Mastery, Pink talks about what he calls ‘the oxygen of the soul’- flow, that deep sense of engagement in a certain activity. In the early 70s, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi conducted a study where he asked participants to list down all the activities they do, not because they have to for some particular reason but, simply because they enjoy them. The things that lead to flow. And then he asked them to stop doing those things. Participants soon reported “an increased sluggishness about their behaviour” followed by headaches and difficulty concentrating. Some felt sleepy while others could not sleep at all. The study was stopped after just two days because it would have been dangerous to continue.

Csikszentmihalyi also found that people are much more likely to reach a state of flow in work than in leisure. The implication being that if a person’s work does not offer opportunities to do the things he enjoys, if he is deprived of flow, the consequences can be devastating. On the positive side, work that is enjoyable for its own sake can enrich a person’s life and lead to a sense of wellbeing. Such flow giving work is characterized by clear goals, immediate feedback and most importantly, the right level of challenge – not boringly easy, not frustratingly difficult. This kind of work is intrinsically motivating because flow leads to mastery.

This resonates with Pink’s career advice, to choose a job for fundamental reasons rather than for instrumental reasons. Fundamental reasons are those that are related to intrinsic motivation, to the desire for Autonomy, Mastery & Purpose. Does it give you the right level of autonomy that you feel comfortable with? Does it provide the right level of challenge - not boringly easy, not frustratingly difficult? Does it give you a sense of purpose – something larger than yourself or the organization? Instrumental reasons are those that are relate to extrinsic motivators. Does the job, for example, position you for a better opportunity at some later point? To be successful at work, it is necessary to choose a job or role for fundamental reasons and not for instrumental reasons.

And that brings us to Pink’s graphic novel called The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need, which I haven’t read yet. But from what I could gather from reviews, the key themes are:
1. There is no plan – It doesn’t help to plan your career based on instrumental reasons because that is bound to lead to mediocrity and discontent. Instead, when you do what you enjoy and feel passionate about, the resulting flow leads to mastery and achievement.
2. Think strengths, not weaknesses – Play to your strengths.
3. It's not about you – Don’t take things too personally.
4. Persistence trumps talent – It’s all about practice and hard work. Talent alone is never enough.
5. Make excellent mistakes – Something along the lines of fail early, fail often.
6. Leave an imprint – Impact!

The common thread throughout all this and what resonates most with me is how absolutely important it is to career sucess to seek out a role that lets you do what you enjoy and feel passionate about.

The Zen of Debugging

There was this senior engineer who once used to sit in the cubicle next to mine. He had an anecdote pasted on the wall of his cubicle. His purpose in putting it there was to educate newbies like me. Thought I’d share the wisdom. Story goes like this.

General Motors once received a complaint from a customer who claimed that his new Pontiac was allergic to vanilla ice-cream. The customer wrote, “This is the second time I have written you, and I don't blame you for not answering me, because I kind of sounded crazy, but it is a fact that we have a tradition in our family of ice cream for dessert after dinner each night. But the kind of ice cream varies so, every night, after we've eaten the whole family votes on which kind of ice cream we should have and I drive down to the store to get it. It's also a fact that I recently purchased a new Pontiac and since then my trips to the store have created a problem. You see, every time I buy vanilla ice cream, when I start back from the store my car won't start. If I get any other kind of ice cream, the car starts just fine.” So GM sent an engineer from the product team to check it out.

The engineer was surprised to be greeted by a successful, obviously well-educated man in a fine neighbourhood. He had arranged to meet the man just after dinner time, so the two hopped into the car and drove to the ice cream store. It was vanilla ice cream that night and, sure enough, after they came back to the car, it wouldn't start. The engineer returned for three more nights. The first night, the man got chocolate. The car started. The second night, he got strawberry. The car started. The third night he ordered vanilla. The car again failed to start.

All the while the engineer was taking down all sorts of data - time of day, type of gas used, time spent at the store before restarting etc. He noticed a correlation - on the days when the customer bought vanilla ice-cream and the car failed to start, the time spent at the store was much less. So the engineer rephrased the problem – why is it that the car will not restarted within a short period of time after the engine is turned off?

Once the problem was defined in terms of restart interval, and not ice cream flavour, the experienced engineer immediately realized vapour lock was causing the issue. (The engineer later learned that Vanilla, being the most popular flavour, was in a separate case at the front of the store for quick pick up. All the other flavours were kept in the back of the store at a different counter where it took considerably longer to find the flavour and get checked out.)

So how did this engineer analyse the root cause of a seemingly impossible bug? To start with, he did not dismiss the issue as being impossible or the customer as being a jerk. He diligently took data without jumping to conclusions or offering a quick fix work around. He knew what parameters to look for. He saw a pattern in the data. Finally he defined the problem – restart interval. The rest was trivial.

Defining the problem, asking the right question, that is the key to problem solving, the Zen of Debugging.


PS: In my first year at work, I remember being in the office at about 3am trying to debug a particularly tricky issue that had been around for a week and was threatening to kill my maiden feature. That’s when I first noticed this anecdote pasted in my neighbours cubicle. It helped me to step back, relax, see the facts and rephrase the problem. The issue was fixed before sunrise. Hope others find this useful too.

Five years on

Five years ago, on a rainy Friday afternoon, I was just coming out of an internet café in Thiruvella when the mobile rang. There had been no new mail in my inbox, so I wasn’t really expecting a phone call from Bangalore. The interesting thing about a CUSAT M.Tech is that you get to spend one full year doing research, either in academia or in industry. The dot-com gloom had lifted and after five years of classrooms, I couldn’t wait to get into a cubicle. So I answer the phone, wishing that it would be an interview invite.

The lady on the other end introduced herself as a HR person from Motorola. Asked if I could be in Bangalore by Monday. Motorola office, C.V. Raman Nagar. At nine in the morning. To join.

Wait…What! Join! No interview? I was confused, not sure if this was for real. Even after I got an email a few hours later with joining instructions, I wasn’t really convinced.

Sunday evening, I packed my trusty old travel bag and took a bus to Bangalore. Monday morning, Motorola office. Few of my classmates were already in the lobby. Sometime later, we got our joining letters. There was a collective sigh of relief. We were now officially in the corporate world. By lunch time, we were introduced to the hiring manager, who bought us lunch. And then we spent the rest of the day exploring the coffee machine.

That was my first day at work. It was a strange feeling. The thought of earning a salary. Of free coffee and urinals that flushed automatically. A feeling of having arrived and yet not having reached.

As I look back at the last five years, I can’t help but be grateful, for the opportunity to touch a million lives, for the excitement of a product release, for friendships that will last a lifetime, for hope and despair, for success and failure alike, for every single day of this exciting journey. Hallelujah!