kip/bot/blog

HBR has another good article breathing new life into stale concepts (the first one is blogged here).  Right now, it feels like that the “MFA is the new MBA” is stuck in a squishy or puddle-thin space.  For some, it’s a call to be a right-brained thinker — take a drawing class, learn an instrument, write a short story!  A little more intelligent, but kind of thin, is the argument that the MBA teaches you decision-making, the MFA teaches you synthesis.  Not bad, but it doesn’t unpack into actionable ideas.
Katherine Bell, who got an MBA, worked in business, and then got an MFA at the highly selective Iowa Writer’s Workshop, has a “conversation starter” that gets deeper into the skills and attitudes that MFAs can acquire.  It goes deep enough, in fact, that it feels actionable.  Her points, which are also covered in the ideacast, are:

• the workshop is an important management tool and cultural goal in a business that thrives on ideas — Bell’s MFA is in writing, and one of the biggest adjustments she had to make was to the workshop:  a class where your fellow students look at your work and critique it along with your professor.  Everyone has to develop skills for an effective workshop:
• the author needs to learn to accept criticism about very personal things, how to sift good feedback from bad, and how to incorporate it into her work;
• the students need to learn how to give useful feedback.  This one is particularly interesting because it goes beyond “don’t be negative” into “don’t give executional feedback.”  This is something a lot of design shops, clients, and companies trying to be more design-focused have trouble with.  Comments should be “the colors are feeling kind of flat to me, not as energetic as this”, rather than “can you make it more red?”
• the professor needs to set the right tone for the workshop, facilitate the critiquing, and give measured, but strong comments. 
  

• by writing fiction, you learn empathy — Bell spends a lot of time talking about how writing fiction forces her into her characters’ heads and out of hers.  Being able to get so far into a character that it acts in ways that surprise you is one of her litmus tests for empathy.  But she highlights that management is all about understanding who you’re talking to and feeling empathy with them.  (It’s also important for design, and Adaptive Path’s Subject to Change has a terrific chapter about what empathy is and isn’t and how to focus your work on building empathy).

Even if you can’t go to a workshop or don’t bother writing fiction, it’s a useful read and think as it highlights parts of work and types of thinking that MFA==MBA inclined managers should dig into.

The idea that leading a guild in an MMORPG like World of Warcraft could result in some important skills has been around for a while. Joi Ito has done a couple pieces on it, including one in his blog and one in WIRED. But HBR’s got a “conversation starter” that puts some teeth into the idea, or the idea behind it.

The literal idea — that you should pay serious attention to candidates who run a game guild — still seems kind of silly to me, but this article highlighted some points about these folks:

• they are adept at email, IMing, and forum conversations as vehicles for making decisions, resolving/preventing conflicts, persuasion, etc. This one is near and dear to my heart. I’ve been in companies that consider walking to someone’s desk for answer to be a simple-minded waste of time, and where relying on emails for even the simplest question is considered to fraught with peril.
• they manage complex workstreams. It’s almost embarrassing to talk about it, but organizing and strategizing for a raid (a mission to kill a baddie which requires 20 or more people), is pretty complex and requires a lot of coordination and communication.
• they create or imaginatively use communication tools. A lot of organization needs to happen when players can’t all be on the game at the same time, so most guilds have a website, a bank, email lists, auto-alerts, etc. I’ve heard one person say he uses 37Signals tools for his guild.
• they are good at handling difficult personalities. Let’s face it, nerds and game geeks are big pains in the ass, frequently over-reliant on logic, and often the most effective but most difficult person on our teams (even non-tech, non-web teams).
• they understand temporary leadership. They know how and when to step into something and how and when to have or let someone else step up.

This last one is the most interesting to me. My industry (advertising and marketing services) has some very stale notions of leadership: the singular leader who owns it all; the creative genius who calls every shot; the moving lead between disciplines (IA -> Visual -> Copy -> technology) that leads to waterfall. Attempts to model leaders above a waterfall process can get you into tedious, theological discussions about delegation, abdication or back to the “everything bubbles up to me.” Temporary leadership implies ongoing judgment, continual shifts in primacy of thought, constant responsiveness and self-re-organization.

Worth a look (or a listen on HBR Ideacast #92).

The book Just Enough Anxiety argues that effective companies can have both too little and too much anxiety.  It also argues that there are other things that need to be balanced:  confidence and humility, optimism and hard-headednes.  The chart below describes five virtues that organizations have and that leaders should strive to balance.

1.  open heart
2.  confident humility
3.  realistic optimism
4.  open mind
5.  constructive impatience

I’ve been in shops where ‘big swinging dicks’ are all confidence and energy and have no openness or humility and shops where any kind of criticism is seen as emasculating or anxiety producing.  I love the way the (press about the) book tries to find a balance.  Good creative shops need their people to have some level of anxiety:  am I doing the best work possible?  is this work good?  But they need to do so without crippling themselves.  They also need to be capable of believing and convincing others that their work is the best work possible, while still being open to new ideas or post-release improvements.

In the spirit of openness, I am struggling with keeping my impatience constructive.