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28 September 2006
"A sense of the value of time -- that is, of the best way to divide one's time into one's various activities -- is an essential preliminary to efficient work; it is the only method of avoiding hurry."
-- Arnold Bennett
Have you ever wondered what makes good corporate executives worth so much money? Have you ever thought about whether you could stand in for Steve Jobs? What are some of the fundamental things that set executives and senior managers apart from junior accountants, salesmen, and engineers?
One of the key executive skills, especially in the context of the Macintosh user on the Internet, is the calibration of our inputs and outputs.
Basically, what this amounts to is estimating the effectiveness of the tasks that we engage in -- those that are driven by Internet products (inputs) and our own actions (outputs).
This is important because we are all candidate targets for input. While the Internet originally connected us to Websites that were intended to distribute scientific information, in the sense of Tim Berners-Lee's original design, the commercial Internet is a two way street. We seek information (Websites) and inter-personal-contact (iChat, MyPlace.com). In turn, we are exposed to advertisements and opportunities to entertain ourselves.
Each one of us is like a transistor in a CPU. A current or voltage arrives, we act as a gate, and the output is modified in some way and sent back into the system. But if we spend all of our time being just a gate, then the next input comes all too fast, and we have a sense that we are hurried and diminished. Some of that input should be absorbed in a way that benefits us in some desirable fashion. Otherwise, we're just Borg components, not human beings.
Stop and think with me for a second. How many people do you know in the workplace who are genuinely respected and indeed revered? How many of your friends tell you that they get to work, sip on some green tea, organize and plan their day, learn something new, make contributions that are valuable and respected, end up solving a problem or two, and had a really relaxing and fun lunchtime with a colleague?
It's rare, isn't it?
In the workplace, human beings are pushed to the limits of their sensibilities, patience, and energies by companies deep in the throes of competitive pressure, regulations, rolling the money upwards in the management chain, and technically clueless executives. It's no wonder that the agenda of the PC placed on your desk coincides with the agenda of the management. For example, Microsoft is working on a system that will take each e-mail you receive, intelligently handle it, and transform it into a sequenced task list. Each day, you will hop to the agenda created by this system and have only so many minutes to complete a task before the next ToDo item pops up on your screen. Executives eat this stuff up, and Microsoft knows it.
From Gate to OrganismWhile Macintoshes are used in the corporate world, the primary customer of the Macintosh is the home user. When Apple engineers decide on the design of a feature or function in Mac OS X, they think about how you are going to react to each input. Remember the nasty little Microsoft paperclip " Clippy," that badgered you, offering help? This is more corporate agenda. First, detect if the user isn't doing anything, then prompt them into action. Perhaps the user doesn't know what to do next. In contrast, the Macintosh user almost always knows what they want to do. It's just that they may be reflecting, absorbing, internalizing something valuable.
The result of this design philosophy is that Apple users aren't treated as transistor gates but rather organisms that benefit from the input and, in turn, create something valuable to output. Steve Jobs has emphasized this in past Keynote presentations when he demonstrated how easy it is to make a home movie of your kids with iMovie. Steve shows us how the Mac assists with value being created in the mind of the user: their imagination and story telling skills. This is also a primary message of the "Angel/Devil" and "Work vs. Home" Get A Mac commercials with John Hodgman and Justin Long.
So when you're victimized by the routine of the Internet, jostled by its ads, seduced into water-cooler bickering in article comments, not learning, and not generating anything of value, you are basically mimicking a business person slaving away at some humdrum job. As a result, you'll be ill-prepared to move up the corporate ladder -- indeed the ladder of your own life which I'll get to in a minute.
This is why, when you get home from work, it's very important that you be working on a Macintosh. This is why the arguments that since the business world lives primarily MS Windows that school children should grow up using Windows is an empty and dangerous assumption. What is the goal for every parent? To have their children become a cog in the machinery of a company that chews them up and spits them out? Or is it to have their children learn problem solving, self-confidence, and how to learn? Which is more important? Having a specific business skill or having the ability to teach yourself any skill?
Calibrating Inputs, Valuable OutputsEvery time you are exposed to an input on the Internet, whether it be a cute YouTube video, a Podcast, an opinion piece, an iTunes hit, a video blog, a reader comment or an e-mail, you must make a decision about what the value of the input is and how it's going to improve you. Your job is to select the right tools to structure your activities so that you are the beneficiary in the best sense of that word.
Tom Peters advises that you are the CEO of your own company, you. You brand yourself, you run your life in ways that you think will benefit you, and you volunteer your skills to a company that, hopefully, compensates you well for your time and energies. In that sense, you must also learn to regulate your private Internet activities the same way the senior executive of a business would.
For example, viruses, malware, and spam are like whiny employees who pester managers and fritter their time away. If you had an employee that sapped your time and energies with personal issues, you'd probably get them some help and then isolate yourself. Why? There are bigger issues to attend to. In the military and in business, this is handled via delegation. Since we as individuals at home don't have anyone to delegate to, we have to be fairly concise in removing the time wasters.A PC with Windows is a time waster. Downloading endless patches, a task fit for a corporate IT weenie, is not fit for you. Malware induced pop-up ads are like marketing calls. They steal your time. Excessive computer game playing pacifies you so you won't have time or energy to question what's going on in the halls of power. Trying to master MS Word, unless you're a professional writer, is a waste of your time because it has such a confusing array of features and functions that you won't ever be able to master it in your lifetime. That's why Apple created Pages. Life is too short to read MS manuals.
In turn, every action you take has an impact on the rest of your communication circle. Unfortunately, there's a rabbit hollow just waiting to consume you and bounce you from event to event, consume your credit card, and seduce you into believing that you may know something about computers when, in fact, you haven't learned anything at all. The result is that instead of making valuable contributions (outputs) to your communications circle, you end up even more isolated. It's like a bear trap. Once trapped, the only logical course of action is to chew your own leg off.
There is a lot of leg chewing on the Internet. Spend too much time joining in and you'll become the CEO of your own, failed Internet career.
The Apple LifeThe Apple community is very good at absorbing and analyzing the events in the computer industry. That's because they cast what's happening against the magnifying glass of the intelligent, self-realized user. The values of Apple percolate into the mind-set of the Apple news and commentary sites. Some of them do a very good job of keeping us alert, informed, and illuminated. No such sites exist in the PC community because they don't have Apple's core values with which to assess their own industry.
Even so, as the CEO of your own life, you'll have to make even more draconian decisions about what pays off for you and what distracts you from the big picture. One way to do this is to take an evening, make a list of all the things you've done on the Internet for the past few days, and assess what the benefit was to you. Then make a list of your outputs. Who did you communicate with and what value did they, in turn, receive? When you get really good at this, it'll affect how you respond to e-mail, what software you download and experiment with, what Websites you visit, which commentaries you read, and most importantly, how you partition your time between entertainment, communication, and skill building.
As you build skills, start to ignore the noise, and begin to make positive contributions through inter-personal networking and real relationships, you'll reach CEO status in your Internet life. Maybe in your career as well.
You already have a Macintosh. It's a great way to start.
This is Warp Core column #78. The Warp Core archives are here:
* Your humble author also writes a column for TMO.
John Martellaro is a senior scientist and author. A former U.S. Air Force officer, he has worked for NASA, White Sands Missile Range, Lockheed Martin Astronautics, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Apple Computer. During his five years at Apple, he worked as a Senior Marketing Manager for science and technology, Federal Account Executive, and High Performance Computing Manager. His interests include alpine skiing, SciFi, astronomy, and Perl. John lives in Colorado. He can be contacted via his Website or the Applelinks Contact link.
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