Max Mednik

Turtles rock. 'Nuff said. (Time for a more "fun" blog post. Too much philosophizing going on around here....)

I'm taking a class at UCLA Anderson this quarter taught by former LA Mayor Richard Riordan. The class topic is Leadership and Ethics. It's quite a treat to be able to meet with a former mayor twice a week and hear some of his closest business and personal contacts speak about their leadership experiences.

Riordan told us he was born in 1930 as 1 of 10 kids. He worked as a lawyer at O'Melveny before becoming a VC in technology and later Mayor of LA. He continues to be involved politically and has focused his efforts recently on teaching, philanthropic causes, and the charter school effort.

In the first class, Riordan laid out for us his 4 Axioms of Leadership:

1. Courage
   
2. Character/giving (treat others equal)
   
3. Empowering others (just give people a job/objective, not all the details)
   
4. Relentless pursuit of goals (which includes the important exercise of setting goals)
   

It's interesting to me how closely these 4 axioms are to an exact prescription for entrepreneurship.

He also joked that when you're not agreeing with someone, always say, "I couldn't agree with you more!" This takes the power away from the other side, is sort of a double entendre, and allows you to continue working in what you want.

Riordan also explained on our first day that perceived power equals real power. When the Northridge earthquake struck, he took charge and completely blew through normal policies and regulations of how things were "supposed to" be done in order to get people rescued and infrastructure rebuilt as quickly as possible. Riordan believes in JFDI: ask for forgiveness, not permission.

He wishes the same philosophy would have been put in force during Katrina and Iraq. He wishes the leaders would have taken action and used the private sector to address problems more quickly.

Another philosophy of Riordan's is "excusez-moi, accusez-moi." This translates to mean that excusing yourself is accusing yourself. When someone accuses you of something horrendous and untrue, your best bet is to ignore it; saying you didn't do it will prompt further harassment and headlines like, "Riordan denies XYZ." This seems like good advice in dealing with blatant slander.

Overall, Riordan has a great sense of humor and leads a fun class, so I'm looking forward to the many guest speakers this quarter (which I will blog about also).

Below are my notes on Guy Kawasaki's Enchantment, which was a really enjoyable read. The author does a great job bringing the general theme of enchantment to life in a variety of different contexts; it's for anyone needing to enchant anyone else at any time.

The book starts with a great personal example of enchantment for the author: the first time he saw a Macintosh. He immediately fell in love with its two killer features: graphical UI and Mac Paint. He got a job at Apple right after that experience.

Enchantment is the process of delighting people. When done right, enchantment creates lasting support.

Ch. 1: Why Enchantment

• Hospitality can enchant.
  
• Converts hostility to civility
  
• When enchantment is required: big decisions, overcoming hesitation, diverging from the crowd
  
• Understand what others feel in order to enchant them.
  
• Figure out: What do they want? Is the change worth the effort? Can they change?

Ch. 2: How to Achieve Likeability

• Smile: think pleasant thoughts, smile with your eyes
  
• Dress: match the audience
  
• Handshake: eye contact, verbal greeting, hold for 2-3 seconds, have dry hands
  
• Words: simple, active voice, short phrases
  
• Attitude: accept others. People are not binary. Everyone is better than you at something. People are more similar than different. People deserve a break (problems at home, etc.).
• Get close physically.
  
• Don't impose your values on others.
  
• Pursue and project your passions.
  
• Find shared interests.
  
• Create win-win outcomes.
  
• Swear: show emotions, only infrequently and for harsh situations, only when audience somewhat already supports you
  
• Default to "yes" attitude.

Ch. 3: How to Achieve Trustworthiness

• Be a mensch: honest, fair, transparent.
  
• Build goodwill.
  
• Civility
  
• Fulfill promises.
  
• Help others who can't help you.
  
• Suspend blame.
  
• Don't dismiss others.
  
• Disclose your interests.
  
• Reciprocity
  
• Show up.
  
• Have a good positioning statement.
  
• Use clear terms.
  
• Use different words.
  
• Be humble.
  
• Be a hero, a man afraid to run away.
  
• Learn to endure controversy.

Ch. 4: How to Prepare

• Do something great.
  
• Deep
  
• Intelligent
  
• Complete
  
• Empowering
  
• Elegant
  
• Conduct a pre-mortem: figure out all ways a project could fail beforehand.
  
• Create easy paths for people to buy your idea.
  
• Short, simple, swallow-able
  
• Use tricolons: phrases with 3 equal parts ("simple, smart, secure").
  
• Use metaphors.
• Use similes.
• Keep it short: emails @ 5 paragraphs, PowerPoints @ 10 slides, business plans @ 20 pages, videos @ 60 seconds.
  
• Show respect.
  
• People prefer things that are easy to think about.
  
• Use rhyming, clear fonts.
  
• Have an easy name (for your business).
  
• Provide default actions.
  
• Establish goals.
  
• Create a checklist.

Ch. 5: How to Launch

• Tell a story.
  
• Have great aspirations.
  
• David vs. Goliath story
  
• Profiles in courage, perseverance
  
• Personal stories
  
• Make your setting realistic.
  
• Make a great demo.
  
• Anchor and twist: explain cause in familiar terms but with twist.
  
• Differentiate from past experiences, reinforce core beliefs, but help them do that in a better way.
  
• Create an immersive experience.
  
• Promote trial: easy, immediate, inexpensive, concrete, reversible.
  
• Prime the pump: prime your users' environment with subtle cues.
  
• Plant many seeds: PR, blogs.
  
• Embrace nobodies; anyone can be your evangelist.
  
• Give up the illusion of control.
  
• Ask people what they will do and if they intend to support you.
  
• Reduce the number of choices: paradox of choice.
  
• Increase the number of choices (sometimes this is good): mass customization, self-serve yogurt toppings.
  
• Give pertinent data from users' perspective giving meaning: iPod holds 5,000 songs vs. 4GB memory.
  
• Present the big and the small choice: use the contrast principle.
  
• Get your first follower.

Ch. 6: How to Overcome Resistance

• "To fly, we have to have resistance." --Maya Lin
  
• Early adopters are social proof.
  
• Create perception of scarcity, and your site being overwhelmed.
  
• Invitation-only
  
• Use images.
  
• Use specifics, examples, not stats.
  
• Find commonalities.
  
• Harmonize objections.
  
• Ask what-if.
  
• Find a bright spot.
  
• Incur a debt, ask for help -- brings people closer (ask to borrow a book).
  
• Enchant all influencers.
  
• Frame your competition: know it, analyze it, frame it. Keep 3 lists: what we both do, what they do and we don't, what we do and they don't.
• Control haptic sensations.

Ch. 7: How to Make Enchantment Endure

• Strive for internalization.
  
• Separate the believers in the team.
  
• Push implementation down.
  
• Use intrinsic rewards: exposing people to money not always best.
  
• Reciprocity
  
• Give with joy, to those who cannot help you; give early; pay it forward, often and generously, unexpectedly; ask for reciprocation.
• When someone says thank you to you, say, "I know you'd do the same."
  
• Make commitments public.
  
• Build an ecosystem: user groups, sites and blogs, consultants, developers, resellers, conferences about your cause.
  
• Create something worthy of an ecosystem.
  
• Give people something meaningful to do; use an open architecture.
  
• Publish about the cause.
  
• Welcome criticism.
  
• Foster discourse.
  
• Create a reward system.

Ch. 8: How to Use Push Technology

• Engage fast, respond fast.
  
• Engage many.
  
• Engage often.
  
• Use multiple media.
  
• Provide value.
  
• Give credit, leave positive comments.
  
• Give people the benefit of the doubt.
  
• Accept diversity.
  
• Don't take any crap; criticize the message, not the person.
  
• Limit promotion.
  
• Disclose your conflicts.
  
• Presentations: Customize the intro. Take pictures of audience (company, city, etc.) and put in your intro. Screenplay, not speech. Check out Duarte. Shorten. 10 slides, 20 minutes, 30 point font. Practice often.
• Email: Use business domain email address. Get an intro. Keep it to 6 sentences. Minimize attachments. Ask for something concrete.
• Twitter: Informational links. Promote your content. Smart, brief. Make it personal.

Ch. 9: How to Use Pull Technology

• Websites and blogs: Refresh often. Skip Flash. Make it fast. Graphics and videos. FAQ. About page. Search. Optimize for devices.
• Facebook: Add a landing tab to fan page. Use friend lists.
• LinkedIn: Optimize your profile. Groups. Answers. Search by company. Integrate into a new job.
• YouTube: Provide intrinsic value. Short videos.

Ch. 10: How to Enchant Your Employees

• MAP: Mastery, Autonomy, Purpose.
• Address your shortcomings first.
  
• Rocking the boat is ok.
  
• Express appreciation and wanting of employees.
  
• Provide free stuff.

Ch. 11: How to Enchant Your Boss

• Make your boss look good.
  
• Do what your boss asks you first, not what you think is the priority.
  
• Under-promise and over-deliver.
  
• Prototype your work.
  
• Deliver bad news early.

Ch. 12: How to Resist Enchantment

• Avoid tempting situations.
  
• Delay decisions.
  
• Look far into the future.
  
• Watch out for bad data.
  
• Don't just rely on anecdotes.

The book ends with a nice message: the truest enchantment is love.

It's been a while since my last post. Sorry, guys. Been super busy with "life." :-)

I attended a talk a while ago by Janice Fraser called, "Kill Your Darlings." It was at a LeanLA Meetup. The full slides are at the bottom of this post, and below are my takeaways from the presentation. Janice was really fun and showed she has a lot of great experience helping start-ups really focus on getting UX right from a lean angle.

Janice is the founder of Adaptive Path, a product design firm. She coined the terms "blog" and "AJAX" and started the field of lean UI design.

Her main claim is that a start-up is like a garden, not a cute bunny. You have to remove weeds and be ready to replant it, not nurture it like a pet.

She mentioned the main heroes of the lean movement: Eric Ries and Steve Blank (and my friend Patrick, the organizer of the event, is quite its hero too). Lean encompasses customer development (make products people actually want) with agile development (incremental releases).

She went through a great example of split testing of home page conversions and how a start-up learned some non-intuitive lessons of how to significantly boost conversions with small changes. Even when you feel strongly about something, it still pays to do experiments.

Lean also refers to the Toyota Production System, which emphasizes reducing inventory, risk, and waste. In this context, waste is time spent between making a decision and knowing if it works. In order to reduce waste, she recommends following three types of cycles:

• Build, Measure, Learn
  
• Think, Make, Check
  
• Prove, Improve. Prove what you know by testing. Improve on your software with what you learned.

Lean means getting comfortable throwing things away (killing your darlings).

She also went through certain main facets of lean UX design:

• Cross functional teams. No one "owner" of a project who has final responsibility. Joint responsibility.
  
• Principle-driven process
  
• Rituals, wireframe checks. Ask someone in a stand-up meeting: 1. Is this an accurate reflection of the system? 2. What here is hard? 3. What alternatives are there? 4. Is it worth the effort?
  
• Wireframe using Omnigraffle, Balsamiq, etc.
  
• Organize every iteration around a user quote.
  
• Flair and focus, generative and decisive, brainstorm and decide.
  
• Develop deep sense of empathy for the user. Have them tell you a story.
  

Janice also spoke about some quick and dirty experiments you can run with usertesting.com for split tests, analytics, and to follow actual people through your site.

Finally, she referenced several texts she recommends:

• User Centered Agile Methods by Hugh Beyer
• Mental Models by Indi Young
• Observing the User Experience by Mike Kuniavsky

At the recommendation of several people, I read The Millionaire Next Door, a book debunking a lot of myths around who millionaires are and how they live their lives.

I found the book interesting, and a lot of the data the authors gathered definitely surprised me (they surveyed over 11,000 millionaires). I thought, however, the the book was too focused on data and statistics; listening to the audio version made it painfully clear how many numbers and statistics were in the text.

I also was disappointed that the authors didn't spend much (if any) time in their text going into the question of the purpose of wealth accumulation. A lot of focus was on how people accumulate wealth and how not to get carried away consuming, but there was little or no discussion of the happiness that results from consumption and how short-term happiness can or should be traded off against long-term financial security and wealth accumulation. I understand this is something very personal that everyone decides, but it would've been nice for the authors to talk about how such a decision can be made.

Finally, it would be nice if the book were updated for any changes that might have happened in recent years in buying habits, incomes, etc.

Below are some of my main takeaways/notes on the book.