Creating a culture of creativity

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In a Fast Company article, the founder of KAYAK, Paul English talks about he created a culture of creativity in his company:

Creativity is a constant stream of new–new ideas, new solutions, new product, new processes. I love to surround myself with childlike creative people, leaving the brilliant doubters and naysayers to work for my competitors.
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Everything we do encourages fast decision-making and risk-taking. We don’t do design by committee, and we disable large meetings here. We reward risk-taking and speed, even when it fails!

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Don’t do indoctrination, where you pummel each employee to think like the Borg. … Encourage your employees to be individuals, and get them to try new things.

IT at NSW SES for SOS :)

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ZDNet has an article about the information technology (IT) for the New South Wales (NSW) State Emergency Service (SES), and how it uses technology to handle emergencies, with mainly volunteer staff. Amazing stuff.

The SES is powered by 1200 desktops, laptops and netbook devices; 20 servers; 450 mobile broadband cards from Telstra and Optus; 250 network sites, complete with routers, switches, printers and UPS units; 4000 radios; 2000 fixed phones; 1000 mobile phones; 2000 pagers; and 170 satellite phones.
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The service’s busiest day came on 9 June 2007, when the SES was hit by 10,701 website visits and 550 requests for assistance every hour (one every 7.2 seconds), and one web-contact email every 36 minutes.

Read the article for more details of this service, and how they use technology to help the State cope with emergencies. That now includes hosting their website on Amazon cloud services, to enable them to be elastic under varying conditions.

“Great leaders listen loudly” and other ideas to get you thinking

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One blog I always read is that of Naomi Simson, founder of RedBalloon. I love the way that she values people, is innovative, leads with a sense of fun, valuing relationships. Her blogs are short and to the point, practical ideas to get you thinking, inspirational.

The latest article is about listening:

… as leaders we don’t have all the answers – sometimes we are just so much better off to not say anything. I was recently in a planning meeting and because I am the founder of RedBalloon and have been hanging around for 11 years – I found that if I spoke in the planning meeting then a disproportional amount of attention may have been attached to my thoughts.

As a leader my job was to listen, both inside and outside the business.

Silence works.

From White House on Flickr

Staying focussed on one thing

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Photo from toolstop


Agile methodology calls it “Limiting Work in Progress” (LWIP), or it could be called “Doing one thing at a time”, but whatever you call it, the concept is that if you’re too scattered, doing too many things at once, stress increases and productivity goes down.

The Harvard Business Review has an article with some tips on how to stay focussed, because “because when you switch away from a primary task to do something else, you’re increasing the time it takes to finish that task by an average of 25 per cent”.

The article has tips for managers, which includes “Stop demanding or expecting instant responsiveness at every moment of the day. It forces your people into reactive mode, fractures their attention, and makes it difficult for them to sustain attention on their priorities.”

The summary is “When you’re engaged at work, fully engage, for defined periods of time. When you’re renewing, truly renew.”

Read the article for more ideas.

Watch the ex-Facebook entrepreneurs’ next moves

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It’s going to be interesting watching the next moves of a batch of 20-somethings who have left Facebook, and are now onto other projects. They know what works, and have lots of cash, or soon will, so what next? The LA Times article about them has thought-provoking things to say:

Innovation, researchers have found, is an inherently social act, owing as much to these tightknit networks as the garage tinkering of individual entrepreneurs.

“The basic unit of innovation in Silicon Valley is the team,” Silicon Valley futurist Paul Saffo said. “Innovation is an irrational act, and the only way to get through that irrationality is to surround yourself with other people as crazy and obsessed with changing the world as you are.”
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Like others in the Facebook network, D’Angelo and Cheever seem to read each other’s thoughts and finish each other’s sentences. The depth of these friendships is unusual even in Silicon Valley. These Facebook pals don’t just call on one another for money and advice, start companies together and sit on each other’s boards. They also hook up to celebrate life’s big moments.