Are you Neat or Messy workspace person? One of you is more creative

Harvard Business Review blog has a post that will polarize some of you.  Are you one who must have your desk clean and organized before you work?  Or are you one juggles a dozen different things with pieces of paper all over, books stacked randomly, and bunches of browser screens open?  One of you has a higher chance of being creative. According the HBR the messy are the more creative.

Don’t Tidy Up Before You Do Your Creative Thinking

by Andrew O’Connell  |   8:30 AM October 23, 2013

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Research participants in a room where papers were scattered on a table and the floor came up with5 times more highly creative ideas for new uses of ping-pong balls than those in a room where papers and markers were neatly arranged, says a team led by Kathleen D. Vohs of the University of Minnesota. A disorderly environment seems to aid creativity by helping people break from tradition, order, and convention, the researchers say.

Data Centers are not the place for creativity so a messy one is not a good one.  But, the desk of those of who work in the data center is another story.

Office vs. Office-less workers, HP/Yahoo! vs. 37 Signals

One of the biggest daily carbon footprints is the daily commute.  Notice how more and more start-ups are having workers scattered around the world?  I started a company with friends and we are separated by 900 miles, but we are on the same time zone.  Google Hangout is our main method of connecting.  Some may think e-mail is for the old guys.  Well we are a bunch old guys, and at the stage we are in now e-mail works to allow everyone to be in their own mode without an interruptions. This e-mail approach is opposed to a quick collaboration Agile type of solution.

Here is a post by 37 signals on their office setup.

“Everyone in the same office” is less true now than it ever was. People are waking up to the benefits of remote working. From quality of life to quality of talent. It’s a new world, and thus a new set of assumptions.

The interesting, and tricky, part of choosing a work pattern is comparing these different worlds. What’s the value of a group of people who a) can only be picked from amongst those within a 30-mile radius of a specific office, b) who have to deal with the indignity of a hour-long daily commute, c) but who’s Agile with that capital A?

Versus a team composed of a) the best talent you could find, regardless of where they live, and b) who has the freedom to work their own schedule, c) but can’t do the literal daily stand-up meeting or pair in front of the same physical computer?

37 Signals followed the above post with another one focusing on HP/Best Buy/Yahoo!'s call for "all hands on deck" everyone must be in the office.

Neither is the hilarious corporate doublespeak that’s being enlisted to make the case. Here’s a choice bit on just how important employees are to the Vapid Corporate Slogan of The Day.. uhm, I mean HP Way Now:

Belief in the power of our people is a core principle of the HP Way Now. Employees are at the center of what we do, we achieve competitive advantages through our people. HP has amazing employees who are driving great change.

So we have great people, but we can’t trust them to get anything done unless we see butts in seats from 9-5? Who cares whether all these great people have designed a lifestyle around not having to commute long hours or live in a given city. That’s all acceptable collateral damage in the “all hands on deck” playbook for sinking companies.

Having a space where you can do your best work is your goal. Some companies think this way.  Some don't.

What is so often true is management doesn't give you the reasons why they are changing policy.

It’s sad when you see once-great companies reduced to this smoldering mess of mistrust and cargo culting. But hey, at least we know now the pitch of the whistle that says its time to abandon ship. It’s “all hands on deck”.

Reflections on a Video Game Maker, Microsoft's 4th Billionaire - Gabe Newell

Microsoft has three billionaires - Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Steve Ballmer.  Steve Ballmer will soon be leaving day to day operations like Bill and Paul.  Of all the other ex-Microsoft employees there are the wealthy who cashed out - Scott Oki, Charles Simonyi, Nathan Myhrvold, Jim Allchin, Paul Maritz, Mike Maples, and many more millionaires.  There is though one other ex-Microsoft person who is a billionaire, and what is more impressive is he took his Microsoft millions and turned it into over a billion launching another company.

Some may be impressed by the money, but what is more impressive is how Gabe Newell did things different than most.

Gabe is making lots of noise and news lately launching a game platform on Linux.  Gabe knows how to build a game platform as this is what he did at Microsoft 20 years ago.

For 13 years through to the mid-’90s, Gabe Newell was “producer on the first three releases of Windows” at Microsoft. At the time, according to Newell, “it was common wisdom that it wasn’t possible to write a good game in Windows because of, well, unnamed technical reasons.” In 1993 Doom was released, and according to Newell it became the number one most-used program in the entire US, ahead of Windows. When you consider that Id Software was a company of just 12 people, and Microsoft already had hundreds of developers working on Windows, this was quite an achievement.

Newell was disappointed that this game ran in MS-DOS, rather than Windows, and thus tasked some of his engineers to create a Windows port. According to an interview back in 2007, he then apparently called John Carmack at Id Software to say that Microsoft would do the port for free, and thus the port was eventually released as Doom 95. It is possible that the success of Doom, and Doom 95, showed developers that it was indeed possible to write top-notch games on Windows. It’s also worth noting that WinG, the precursor to DirectX, was maturing at the same time — perhaps it was a combination of factors that finally made Windows the de facto gaming platform.

Here is a video where Gabe reflects on the industry.

Watching the video there are many lessons to be learned.

I have an interest following Gabe.  Gabe was my first interview at Microsoft.  He took one look at my Apple experience and re-routed my whole days of interviews.  Within 5 days I had an offer and joined in Apr 1992.  My life would be quite a bit different if I had stayed at Apple.  I doubt I would have stayed at Apple for as long as I stayed at Microsoft (until 2006).

Another day at DCD Seattle 2013 talking to guys who know what is going on, a different thought leader

The term thought leader is well known in the industry.

A thought leader is an individual or firm that is recognized as an authority in a specialized field and whose expertise is sought and often rewarded.^[1] The term was coined in 1994 by Joel Kurtzman, editor-in-chief of the Booz Allen Hamilton magazine Strategy & Business, and used to designate interview subjects for that magazine who had business ideas which merited attention.^[2]

But, in the data center industry I would use a different definition of a thought leader.  the above says the individual is recognized as an authority.  One way to interpret the recognized is the person is presenting and covered by the media.  But, just because you are recognized and covered by the media does not mean you are a thought leader.  

While I was at DCD I was catching up with and handful of people who I think of thought leaders.  One is Stephen Worn, CTO of DCD.

Another was Christian Belady

And another is Don Beaty

But, there many more who I consider thought leaders who were not presenting and the media doesn't know about.  These guys know how to operate data centers across the world and build new ones that provide a low TCO while fitting their business models.  They are often all over the world.  These people are not making the presentations and they are quietly out of the attention of the media working on innovative solutions where the client is building a competitive advantage.

Sometimes the so-called thought leaders are the ones who enjoy getting in front of the audience telling people how good they are and what they have done.  This collects a set of people who will follow this leader, believing his words as if they are gospel.  It becomes almost a religious following.  If you try to point out to the followers that their thought leader may be wrong, you will be accused of blasphemy.  It's not as bad as a Jim Jones cult, but it is not often not worth trying to enlighten the followers.  They'll find out eventually what happens if you follow the faux thought leader for too long.

Myself I have made the mistake of believing what people present as true at a data center conference.  With experience though I learned to fact check what people say.  What is fact checking?  Here is an illustration of the Washington Post fact checking the NYTimes post by Vladimir Putin.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has an op-ed in today's New York Times urging President Obama not to strike Syria. It's a fascinating document -- a very Russian perspective translated into American vernacular, an act of public diplomacy aimed at the American public and the latest chess move in the U.S.-Russia standoff over Syria, one in which we the readers are implicated. Putin does make a number of valid and even compelling points, but there is an undeniable hypocrisy and even some moments of dishonesty between the lines.

Below, I've annotated the op-ed, line-by-line, elaborating and translating at some points, fact-checking a bit in others. Putin's writing is set off in italics and bold; my notes are in plain text.

When I see a faux data center thought leader I learn to find the facts that are not quite true.

The Reality of the Data Center, Do you let the people tell the truth?

One of the things I enjoy about the data center industry is talking to smart people in the data center industry.  

So what do the smart people, the intellects do differently than others?  They know the truth.  The difficult part though is whether the organization they work in supports the telling of the truth.  It is easy for us to tell the truth over a few beers when you are amongst friends who support the sharing of ideas and discuss the reality of the data center.

In many companies the politics, the agenda from those who are in power is to stay in power and be viewed as the smart ones.  The CEO needs to look like he is the smartest one in the company. This unfortunately can discourage the telling of the truth which influences perception of leadership.  Not following the agenda can go so far as telling the truth will put you on the list to be fired, in the next round of layoffs, or just passed over for the next promotion. 

An example of the type of behavior that many executives would not tolerate is what Noam Chomsky wrote in Feb 23, 1967 "The Responsibility of the Intellectuals."  

Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions. In the Western world, at least, they have the power that comes from political liberty, from access to information and freedom of expression. For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us. 

Unfortunately, Noam is discussing the ideas of the Intellectuals in the Western World where freedom of speech is the rule in society, not in a corporation.  Freedom of Speech in a corporation is too often used to flush out the trouble makers, those who aren't 100% behind the executive direction, and reduce their influence on others which includes laying them off.

Here is an example of how whistleblowers in the federal gov't are classified as "non-critical sensitive" which removes their ability to appeal personnel actions.

Critics of the court decision have said it allows agencies to retaliate against whistleblowers by placing the “non-critical sensitive” label on their positions and then taking personnel actions that could not be appealed.