The Agile Scaleup

Antifragile Children; Avoid Doctors; IBM's Tech Predictions; Google Future

"...keeping you great"

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It is not work that kills men, it is worry. Work is healthy; you can hardly put more on a man than he can bear. But worry is rust upon the blade. It is not movement that destroys the machinery, but friction.
	Henry Ward Beecher

Antifragile Children -- give your high school student a differential advantage - a year abroad -- see below, but first:

Antifragile, Fortune's Review -- notes the magazine "What sometimes goes unsaid about (Nassim) Taleb is that he's a very funny writer. Taleb has a finely tuned BS detector, which he wields throughout the book to debunk pervasive yet pernicious ideas. . . . Antifragility isn't just sound economic and political doctrine. It's also the key to a good life." Here's a link to Fortune’s clever summary of this breakthrough book I'm continuing to enjoy over the holidays (and he is very funny!). It is absolutely a MUST read - you won't see the world the same after reading.

Why Switzerland? -- the strength of their currency and stability of their country is owed to the fact that there is not much of a central government, highlights Fortune in their review of Antifragile. Instead, quotes Fortune "dozens of sovereign mini-states squabble and fight constantly. This turmoil actually makes the country stronger because the Swiss get small problems out of the way before they can metastasize into something bigger like, say, a fiscal cliff." Small is beautiful; big is bad - and why ALL the healthy economies are small. My wish for the US is we become 50 truly sovereign economies as our founders intended.

Avoid the Doctors/Stock Options -- what frustrates Taleb is how we've taken naturally antifragile things, like our immune systems, and destroyed them with over-medication; or our naturally antifragile economy and made it fragile through insane centralized policies; or the challenges to our companies posed by stock options. Again, Taleb provides all of us a unique lens through which to view many of the everyday decisions we make.

IBM's 5 year Forecast -- each year IBM outlines their '5 in 5' predictions for the future of technology - and this year it's that computers will acquire five human senses (touch, see, hear, smell, see) within the next five years and experience the world as humans do - only more precisely. This means computers will replace many of the professional jobs handled by people - like reading x-rays or analyzing geological data - within this time frame. Here's Money magazine's look at the impact of each sense on the future.

Google Future -- a couple weeks ago I struggled to discern anything meaningful from Fortune's exclusive interview of Larry Page, Google's co-founder/CEO. Several of you came to my rescue. My favorite response came from Ron Nakamoto with Bountiful, UT-based Empowered Wealth who summarized: "Page's vision is of an 'augmented reality' that anticipates the information that you'll need and want before you do, based upon your past behavioral patterns (derived from accessible data about you) and your current context (i.e., physical location, what you're doing, etc.). Think Google Glass with exponential improvements." Excellent insight! Thanks Ron.

Antifragile Children -- immersion in Spanish (a great second language); international exposure to students from 41 countries; yet quality American education with a highly acclaimed International Baccalaureate (IB) offering - a way to differentiate your student from all the others competing to get into college. And if you're an entrepreneur, you'll get more accomplished working "on" your business if you're a few thousand miles away from the business - just ask David Rich, CEO of ICC/Decisions services who recently moved his family from NYC to Barcelona for a year. Here's a link to his blog where he describes the decision as the third best in his life.

Ben Franklin International School (BFIS)  -- David, I, and a bunch of expat entrepreneurs from the US (mainly Silicon Valley) have our children attending this international school in Barcelona. Given the globalization of the planet, and the future our children will face, BFIS provides our children a great small school experience with students from over 40 countries - and at tuitions far less than schools in the US. And research is clear the impact second language acquisition has on brain development. Our children learned Spanish more quickly in one year in Barcelona than taking several years of Spanish classes in the US. Think about the power of exposing your children to a year abroad in one of the most dynamic cities in the world - plus the power and richness of the expat community we've met. "Plan your escape" for 2013-2014 school year. Your children might complain at first (like ours) but will thank you later. It's a positive stressor like this that makes your children and family antifragile!

Sleepless Nights; Midnight Lunch; Sheer Innovation; Edison's Rules

"...out-learning the competition"

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When you honor me, you are also honoring the vast army of workers but for whom my work would have gone for nothing.
                        Thomas Alva Edison, inventor (1093 patents), founder of GE

How many sleepless nights should you have?
                                 Henry McGovern, Founder/CEO Amrest

Sleepless Nights -- are you really pushing the envelope and living life if you've not had a few sleepless nights in 2012? Henry McGovern, founder/CEO of $1 billion Poland-based Amrest, posed this question to several hundred CEOs of growth firms at the 20th anniversary of the MIT "Birthing of Giants" program I launched. Whether out all night for the sheer joy of living; or engaged so deeply in something with which (or whom!) you're passionate that night passes into day; what is the right number of sleepless nights in 2013? I vow to have more, will you?

Midnight Lunch -- This is the title of Sarah Miller Caldicott's new book on Thomas Edison. Subtitled The 4 Phases of Team Collaboration Success from Thomas Edison's Lab, Edison's great grandniece has written a highly enjoyable and truly insightful book on team collaboration. Midnight Lunch references the affectionate slang Menlo Park employees gave to after-hours gatherings Edison sponsored for workers staying well into the night to complete their project efforts (reminiscent of Atlassian's FedEx days - now called ShipIt Days -- where teams are given 24 hours to deliver on an innovation, overnight, to their collaborative software product).

Sheer Innovation (Fun Facts for Holiday Parties) -- to quote Caldicott "Edison's vast innovation empire commanded an estimated $6.7 billion in market value by 1910 - or roughly $100 billion today. Pioneering iconic products and service which we view today as central to the infrastructure of modern life - like lighting, power, recorded sound, and storage batteries - the value of the markets and industries built on the shoulders of Edison's contributions now exceeds an estimated $1 trillion globally. Edison ultimately founded more than 200 domestic and international companies during his lifetime, many specifically designed to manufacture his inventions." Wow!!

4 Phases of Collaboration -- How to innovate like Edison? As Caldicott outlines, Edison's true collaboration process is composed of four phases - Capacity, Context, Coherence, and Complexity, as follows: 

Phase 1 - Capacity: select small, diverse teams of 2 to 8 people where discovery learning and collegiality can thrive (Amazon calls them "two-pizza teams" - the ideal size of a project team). Phase 2 - Context: reframe the problem at hand, driving the greatest range of creativity and new, breakthrough solutions - Caldicott explains how Edison did this. Phase 3 - Coherence: maintain momentum by communicating progress toward shared goals and purpose - especially when the going gets tough. Phase 4 - Complexity: develop "smart layers" and a footprint of your team's Collective Intelligence - without this phase, massive amounts of your own intellectual capital goes wasted.

Notes Greg Cox, "Collaboration is not the same thing as teamwork. Teamwork is simply doing your part. Collaboration involves leveraging the power of every individual to bring out each other's strengths and differences."

Edison's Rules -- after a massive first commercial failure (legislative voting machine), Edison formulated some rules to guide future innovations:

• I will broadly prepare my mind for a journey of collaborative discovery rather than strictly adhering to my own ideas and assumptions
• Experimentation is an efficient way to probe assumptions and discover outcomes which create new learning
• I desire creative freedom in designing my experiments and my research
• I seek to develop radical new solutions to big problems
• The products and services I launch must have 'utility' and fulfill a need
• I am open to the discovery of new phenomena

Many of these are the same that underpin Eric Ries' huge bestseller The Lean Startup.

Edison Loved to Read -- additional fun (and important) fact, to quote Caldicott "An ardent lover of books and newspapers, by 1887 - when Edison was 40 - his personal collection at the West Orange laboratory exceeded 10,000 volumes, making it one of the top five largest libraries in the world."

Most Important Sentence in Book -- "Organizations would now need to begin seeking new combinations of skills in their employees, valuing most those people who could anticipate and create rather than those requiring constant direction or oversight." How true.

Lumbering Planning Cycles -- and this sentence ended a very profound paragraph. To quote Caldicott, "The late CK Prahalad stressed that new, collaborative structures would be needed to embrace networks of digital technologies rather than more lumbering annual planning cycles which operate too slowly to meet rapidly shifting customer demands. Reducing dependence on "what a lone vice president would sanction rather than what a collaborative team could devise, "Prahalad declared collaboration must become a central part of what makes an organization's culture tick. By connecting more employees directly to the value creation process itself, he prophesied that customer insights could be generated more rapidly and more effectively than ever before. In turn, by newly focusing workers toward value creation and collaboration, a full reshaping of their skill sets would be essential." BTW, this is what Atlassian's software helps companies do.

Google CEO Interview; Antifragile Businesses; Kaggle.com; Brain Hurt

"...keeping you great"

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WARNING: maybe I've been drinking too much spiked eggnog this holiday season, but this insight is full of a lot of stuff that hurt my brain just trying to digest the ideas - but I sense it's important stuff.

Google CEO Exclusive Interview -- Larry Page, co-founder of Google, and CEO since April 2011, granted only his second wide-ranging print publication interview since taking over the reins. Therefore, I was excited to see what he had to say. Sadly, unless I missed something (re-read the interview three times - first brain hurt), I learned nothing. Was he hiding all the good stuff? If so, why give the interview. If there's nothing more, should we worry about Google? Here's a link to the Fortune interview - seven minute read.

Simplicity? -- Or is it the case that Page's brilliance is in the ultra-simplicity of his thinking/focus (he has better focused the teams within Google). Take his response to the question about the future of search "The perfect search engine would really understand whatever your need is. It would understand everything in the world deeply, give you back kind of exactly what you need." Huh? I could use some help here from my insight readers - if you have the inkling, please read the interview and help me see what I missed! I'll reprint the best insights.

$10k Prize Saves Company Millions -- Get the crowd solving your problems using prizes. And with prizes you only pay the winners vs. funding a bunch of losers (why don't governments take this approach!). Peter Diamandis's latest blog outlines how you can use the competition platform Kaggle.com, like Allstate did, to improve the algorithm they use to set your rates. Take 2 minutes to peruse Kaggle.com to see some of the competitions hosted by GE ($3 million prize), Facebook (prize -- you get hired!), and the Colorado Department of Education ($5000 prize) - OK, a government agency did host a prize. Then read Diamandis's blog outlining the 4 steps for creating your own competition.

Hire 600 Scientists for $10,000 -- notes Diamandis "In that (Allstate) competition, 600 data scientists, composing 300 teams, sought to improve Allstate's internally developed vehicle-risk assessment algorithm (brain hurt #2) -- what it uses to set your rates based on your probability of having an accident. The winners of the $10k prize demonstrated a 340 percent improvement in predictive accuracy over Allstate's best internal algorithm!" Continues Diamandis," I can't imagine how much such an improvement is worth, but I have little doubt that this $10k purse will eventually drive hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars of additional profits." Do you have a bunch of data that needs crunched to identify new patterns/opportunities? Create a competition on Kaggle.

Antifragile (BIG BRAIN HURT) -- this is the title of genius Nassim Nicholas Taleb's latest book (27th Nov). Subtitled "Things that Gain from Disorder", I just started reading it this past weekend and it is another brilliant and game-changing piece of thinking/writing on par with my favorite book of his last decade, The Black Swan. In essence, anything that is antifragile is more than resilient; it actually gets better when stressed or shocked or exposed to risk and uncertainty - like our bodies, the economy, and our businesses.

Overprotective -- A key premise of the book is that naturally occurring antifragile (and complex) systems that have survived for eons are weakened, even killed, when deprived of stressors, the same way muscles atrophy if you spend a month in bed. So in our attempt to take all the risk out of situations, like neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most - in education, healthcare, the economy, our businesses, etc.

Skin in the Game -- and my favorite line in the book so far, which summarizes another key premise of the book "...the largest fragilizer of society, and the greatest generator of crises (is the) absence of 'skin in the game.'" Continues Taleb "we are witnessing the rise of a new class of inverse heroes, that is bureaucrats, bankers, Davos-attending members of the I.A.N.D. (International Association of Name Droppers), and academics with too much power and no real downside and/or accountability. They game the system while citizens pay the price. At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control." That's why it's so important to create systems where everyone has some skin in the game - in our societies and our businesses ala Jack Stack's classic book "The Great Game of Business."

Holiday Biz Gifts -- What a perfect time to thank customers for making a great decision to do business with you. And what better gift over this month of holidays than a book (put a box in your trunk and pass out at biz luncheons and customer visits with a personal note in each) - maybe The Greatest Business Decisions of All Time - something quick to read that will spur ideas for their own business and provide important historical information on 18 of the greatest business decisions ever made. Bulk discounts available.

Exciting Employees; Swooshing Employees; Core Value Icons; Detroit and Des Moines

"...keeping you great"

HEADLINES:

Coming to Barcelona for the Holidays -- or next Summer? See below.

Please Vote for Reading -- today, Dec 4, is last day to vote to support WorldReader winning $1 million to give e-books to children all over the world (did I mention I love books). If a young Pakistani girl is willing to risk her life in support of education, we can all take 60 seconds to vote - costs you nothing. WorldReader (David and Colin are the co-founders) and I thank you.

5 Ways to Keep Employees Excited -- my latest Venture column in Fortune is on the newsstands and online. Take 3 minutes to click through five ideas for upping the engagement of your team (which is directly tied to performance) - and then please share with your networks. Thanks to Chip Conley, Kim Lawton, and John Ratliff for contributing interviews - and to Jim Collins for his always impactful ideas.

Swooshing Employees -- using Core Values to show gratitude, Matt Kutler, co-founder of ReStockIt (if your business needs supplies, they have great prices) notes "At ReStockIt.com, our weekly company-wide Huddle ends with something we call 'Swooshes'. Anyone in the company can Swoosh another employee by recognizing them for demonstrating one of our Core Values in the prior week."

Core Value Icons -- continues Kutler, "We have identified an icon that represents each of our Core Values (a Shovel for "Dig", a Dart for "Keep Score", etc...) and in addition to the verbal recognition, they give out a small icon. Each employee has a plastic bucket on their desk with all of the Swooshes they have received. It has worked really well for encouraging employees to thank others for going above and beyond." Here's a link to a picture of the large icons on their wall and a picture of the buckets holding the small icons that are handed out.

Gratitude for the Bus Driver -- and this act of gratitude from Paul Dunn, co-founder and Chairman of Singapore-based B1G1 -- his blog post highlighting the importance of showing everyone gratitude. And check out his organization - they provide a super easy way for companies to support charities linked to their performance. Called Buy1Give1, every time you sell something you might support a family receiving water for a day; or a child receiving education. Here's a link to a quick slide show -- worth seeing how they constructed it to tell their story.

Detroit, Des Moines -- finishing out 2012, one-day Rockefeller Habits workshops (perfect for nailing down the 2013 plan) Detroit Dec 5; Des Moines, IA Dec 13.

Vacationing in Barcelona? -- need a place for a family? Our five-bedroom flat is available Dec 20 - Jan 6 over the holidays and July 14 - Aug 11.