The journey was tinged by a strange sadness, too. A middle-aged woman who had been sitting opposite me on the Piccadilly line for a few minutes, to all outward appearances entirely normal, suddenly surreptitiously slipped a can of Strongbow out of her (smart leather) handbag and swigged a gulp, then slipped it back in – all as discreetly as possible. Fortunately for me, I’ve never been close to anyone who’s been affected by alcoholism, but it began to dawn on me how strange an addiction it must be to need a drink in such a place – and from such a person. I wasn’t sure if I should feel sorry for her.

(even if you don’t work in such a company, take a look anyway; his blog is full of inspiring tips)

I suspect I’m not the only one suffering from this decreased attention span, but the question is – is there anything we should do about it? Insofar as lots of shorter information diverts people from a few bits of longer information (reading 100/articles/week, say, rather than 2 books/week), it probably indicates that we simply don’t get as much value or entertainment from the longer stuff as we thought we did (or should). This is called revealed preference – what you prefer is shown by your actions, not by your words. So I suspect the simple answer is no.

Seth Godin certainly seems to agree with part of this theory – he has a theory that books, in many cases, have now become a ‘takeaway’ for shorter essays and other written pieces. I don’t think it’s fair to go as far as to say that they are simply fluff, but Seth nevertheless makes a good point – that many books simply expand on shorter ideas – and it is questionable, sometimes, what the marginal value of that is over consuming something completely different (everything you do has a time-driven opportunity cost).

The problem, of course, is that building up habits like this may make it harder to concentrate for sustained periods of time on reading/viewing/listening when that is necessary.

I’m interested in what your experiences are – do you suffer from decreased attention span? Is it a result of increased volumes of information, or do you think it’s something different?

Given that I like the economic way of thinking (given my limited training), I thought I’d take a look at dating, something close to my heart as a bachelor. This arguably makes me so far unqualified to discuss the subject – but I’ll give it a go anyway.

Most relationships go through three simply described phases:

1. Establishment – the fun part – getting to know a new person.
2. Established – the sometimes fun, sometimes not part. Most couples are in this phase right now.
3. Break-up – the not-so-fun part – upsetting, perhaps anger-generating. At the very least, not fun.

Successful long-term relationships, one hopes, never reach phase 3.

Most people enter relationships, I would assert, because they want a piece of phase 1 – it sounds like fun. Phase 3 is far away, and hopefully not going to happen anyway, so they downplay its significance. The question is – if phase 3 could be time-adjusted – expressed in the immediacy of today’s hurt rather than 3 years’ time – would people, on average, assess the situation any differently?

In fact, this comes down to a question of rationality. Economists like to assume that everyone is rational (or at least more rational than most people would). This means that people make optimal decisions, given the information they have. Without this, it’s hard to make markets make sense. Commonly expressed sentiments from friends after a break-up include: ‘at least you learnt something; remember the good times; it’s good you went through that relationship’. If cynical, one could dismiss those as simply statements designed to console and soften the blow. But the presumed implication of those words is that your choice was rational – it was worth the emotional upset in phase 3 for the enjoyment in phases 1 and 2.

I’m deliberately not going to come to a conclusion – I find rationality to be one of the hardest parts of economics – whilst I can understand people making rational choices about where to buy cornflakes from, it’s much harder to map it onto emotions. But it’d be nice to think that we do make sensible choices when it comes to dating, and that we do learn from our mistakes. I wonder if that’s so?

(NB: I know I’ve oversimplified the situation. But I think the same principles hold even if you develop dating into a more complex model)

AF: What first interested you about happiness at work? Were you unhappy at your workplace?

AK: I’ve tried being really, really happy at work. And I’ve tried being desperately unhappy. And I think it’s the contrast between the two experiences, the huge differences that draw me to the topic. When I’m happy at work I’m positive, upbeat, creative, supportive, giving, energetic. But during the one year I spent being unhappy at work I found myself becoming despondent, cynical, tired, depressed and negative. I hated the experience – but wasn’t able to change it. Until I quit!

Have you discovered which companies make people happy at work? In particular, is there an international bias: are some countries better at this than others?

The biggest bias is this: Smaller companies are usually better at happiness. If you look at the top-10 list for happy companies here in Denmark, 7 out of 10 have less than 500 people. This is one reason why WL Gore (they make GoreTex) limit plant sizes to 150 people. There’s also a national bias: International studies show that the happiest workers are found in the Scandinavian countries. This is because Scandinavian organizations have a decades long tradition for focusing on happiness at work. We even have a word for it: Arbejdsglæde, a word that exists only in the Nordic languages.

Do you think there’s a conflict between businesses making profits and keeping employees happy?

Quite the contrary. Study after study has shown that happy companies make more money. Why? Because happy employees:

• Are more creative
• Take fewer sickdays
• Are more productive
• Make the customers happy
• Focus more on quality and make fewer mistakes

In my opinion, this is the major factor behind the “Nordic Miracle”, the incredible success of Scandinavian companies like Nokia, Carlsberg, IKEA, Statoil and the Scandinavian economies in general.

You’ve just published your first book: Happy Hour is 9 to 5. Was there any part of the writing process that made you unhappy?

Only one part: Stopping. I could have gone on writing and re-writing but at one point you have to stop and say “It’s finished. Or it’s a finished as it needs to be!” That was difficult. Other than that, writing was a lot of fun. As it should be. Imagine saying “I wrote this book about happiness at work – it was a horrible experience every step of the way” )

You’re now self-employed as a happiness consultant. Do you think self-employment is a good way to be happy with your work?

It is for me!! I’ve been self-employed since 1996 and have probably been spoiled for life. I’m not sure I could ever go back and work in a job. But it depends on your personality. If you like a little more excitement, uncertainty, challenge and self-direction then it’s the way to go. You probably also need to be addicted to low levels of fear )

Should large corporates have vice-presidents of happiness?

Yes! Why have an HR manager, when you can have a Chief Happiness Officer. That would be a great way for a company to show, that they’re committed to their employees’ happiness.

What does the future hold? Are you seeing an improvement in happiness levels among employees? Is there a market for more people like yourself?

The world of work is definitely getting better on the whole. Ask yourself: Would you rather have a job today or in a company in the 1950′s? 1920′s? 1980′s even? Work is becoming more interesting, creative, challenging and the mood at work is (in general) becoming more open, free and flexible. On the negative side, we see more and more workplace stress – probably as a direct consequence of the increased freedom.

But there is no doubt that the future of work is happy. That is my ultimate goal: To change the world of work to the point where happiness is not an exception, but the norm. Where most of us refuse to take jobs that don’t make us happy. Where no one is forced to treat a job as “just a job”. And yes, there is a huge market for this – just look at all the people working in innovation, motivation, communication, teambuilding etc… At the core of this lies one thing: Making people happy at work!

Thanks to Alex for the interview.

Clay Shirky, in his essay A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy (also included in the same volume; the online copy is edited slightly differently from the printed one), notes how online (synchronous) discussions frequently descend into talk about sex – and that sexual banter is much more common in synchronous communication than asynchronous (how often have you flirted with someone over the phone compared to email? – please, no anecdotes in the comments section). I’m not a psychologist, but I assume that this has something to do with it being hard to retain the thrill of adult banter over the course of a (potentially lengthy) asynchronous discussion. The same arguments probably apply in a less dramatic fashion to non-sexual communication.

There’s a related observation to be made about the perceived economics of people’s time. In general, most folks implicitly value synchronous time as higher than asynchronous – if I ask advice of a mentor over a half-hour coffee, I feel more indebted to him than if he spends half an hour hour answering my email. I suspect the reasons are a combination of my having accurate information (I know exactly how long he spent drinking the coffee), the start-up and tear-down time (he actually took 5 minutes to get to the coffee shop), and knowing that I have his undivided attention (he wasn’t multi-tasking). Nevertheless, we still continue to rate synchronous time more highly than its opportunity costs compared to asynchronous time.

To relate the two assertions, wouldn’t you rather spend half an hour in person with your spouse / significant other / other politically correct phrase than an hour writing and exchanging emails with them? Synchronous communication has a strange attraction than its poor cousin doesn’t – despite all of asynchronicity’s time-shifting advantages. This is going to be a big challenge for a multi-time-zone world.

One of the reasons I like working for IBM is that it’s happy to allow me and my IBM colleagues to blog externally. Of course there are guidelines – obviously I can’t give away confidential information. It’s still a brave act for a company like IBM, however, and many others of equivalent size are rightly nervous about allowing the same – what happens if the PR and marketing folks lose control over companies’ images? This may or may not be a good thing, depending on your opinion of PR and marketing as disciplines, but it’s clear that there’s a risk of exposing non-alignment – people have different opinions, after all, right? Sure, yes, there’s that risk. However, although I hope our customers can see that IBMers are working together to produce good quality products and services for them, at least we have the reassurance that we’re being judged on our merits.

I’d encourage any other IBMers who aren’t already doing so to blog externally. You can find more information internally in the usual place (how’s that for keeping a secret, huh?).

• Marc Hull, who talked about his project on Balancing simplicity and efficiency in web applications. Marc’s work focused on improving the development of stateful web applications, and in particular on object-relational mapping in Java, in an attempt to allow more straightforward persistence of objects to databases. This has always seemed to me to be an area lacking in usability and ease (see J2EE for plenty of examples), so anything that moves us closer is welcome.
• Matthew Sackman, who talked about his project Glint: Breeding Mobile Ambients with Actors (which won the IBM Project Prize for the best final year Individual Project). Essentially, Matthew seems to be attacking the area of concurrent and distributed computing, in order to improve its robustness against deadlock (and other concurrency problems). He has chosen to do this by writing a compiler for the GLINT language, which is based on an Actor model and is especially particularly suitable for modelling concurrent systems.
• Francis Russell, who talked about his project Delayed Evaluation and Runtime Code Generation as a means to Producing High Performance Numerical Software. Francis’s infrastructure shifts some code generation and execution to the runtime of a program (lazy evaluation). It does this by building up a DAG to represent expressions that are ‘should’ have been already evaluated. The expression it represents isn’t actually evaluated until it’s needed, which enables certain optimisations to be performed (which is useful, for example, in matrix arithmetic). The framework generates and executes the optimised code at runtime (and it also caches this generated code).

I had the chance to meet these folks briefly (Marc and Matthew had also been here previously, when they were part of the team from Imperial who won the Thinkpad Challenge). It was interesting to see some academic work for a change – whilst I’d never be able to make a career out of that, bringing academia and business together always seems to reap benefits.

I wish Marc, Matthew and Francis luck if they choose to develop their projects further.

I’m already looking forward to this conference, and it’s almost a year away.

I’m not sure I can comment that widely on the state of current SOA projects, and I would agree that SOA may suffer from similar management problems to that of object-orientation: if developers of SOA systems aren’t rewarded for saving time with a reuse strategy, they won’t be enthused to do so. This is an important part of any software project, and encouraging reuse is a best practice that shouldn’t be restricted to object-orientation or SOA.

However, whilst I agree that SOA has other benefits apart from encouraging reuse, I have a fairly high opinion of its potential in that respect. It’s important to understand what we mean by reuse. Reuse rarely means using an object or service as it is. There is often a mismatch between the interface offered by the service (object) being consumed, and the service (object) that needs to call this interface. Expecting anything else is unrealistic (even if future reuse plans are made). This is often solved using something like a façade pattern in object-oriented languages, and some form of mediation with services (such as that offered by WebSphere ESB). The latter is often easier, because there is a lower degree of coupling than inside a single programming language, and because programming code is not often needed, and this is why I believe SOA reuse is simpler – if done well. Of course, some work is still required, but this greater ease of reuse makes it a realistic strategy for more scenarios.

I would agree, however, that, as is often the case, the project management problems here are the greatest ones.

• Steve Loughran and Julio Guijarro, HP Labs. This presentation was about Smartfrog, a system deployment framework, which Steve and Julio were working on as part of a strategy for system testing. They demonstrated several examples of how the system might work in practice. Smartfrog looks pretty flexible, and I plan to spend some time looking into it. Frameworks for deployment have an inherent problem in catering to the wide variety of platforms, configuration mechanisms, deployment combinations and so on that are necessary in practice. Anything that gets closer to this is therefore welcome. Smartfrog also has the interesting property that the XHTML it produces as output is sufficiently well-formed that, although it has an embedded CSS stylesheet for presentation in a web browser, it can also be parsed as XML data without much effort, and thus act as a machine-readable data source as well. This might seem obvious to some folks, and I’m willing to bet it’s not the first time it’s been done, but it seemed novel to me.
• Robert Chatley (a fellow alumnus from Imperial College) and Tom White, Kizoom. Tom and Robert were talking about what they called literate functional testing. Essentially this involves creating tests, in this case written in Java, that use plain English for method names, variables, and so on. This means that once punctuation is stripped out, Java code – test assertions – become statements that are readily understandable by non-programmers (such as the business analysts in their organisation). Their framework will shortly be available on Google Code.
• Andreas Leitner, ETH Zurich: Andreas discussed automated testing using contracts. Essentially this means using a language which has pre-conditions and post-conditions on methods, and optionally assertions on objects. He has developed a testing framework called AutoTest, using the Eiffel language, which has these features built in (similar extensions are available for more mainstream languages such as Java). Once these restrictions are placed on a program, generated input can be used to determine whether methods behave as they should. A number of strategies are available for generating this data, and they are pluggable into Andreas’s framework. The simplest is of course to generate the data randomly, but other, more sophisticated strategies are available to improve coverage. Andreas stressed that this type of testing, which is essentially fuzz testing with intelligence, should be used to complement human-created unit tests, not to replace them.
• Goranka Bjedov, Google: Goranka explained some of the background to performance testing, including the differences between performance testing, stress testing, load testing, scalability testing, etc., and how to deploy and manage performance testing systems.
• The conference finished with 10 lightning talks. Subjects covered included jMock (a mock objects framework that complements JUnit), justifying automated tesing in financial terms, testing heresies, Yandex (the largest search engine in Russia, their share ~60%, Google’s ~6%), ‘Automated Testing: Why bother?’, automated tricks for manual testing, and the Perl-inspired Test Anything Protocol. I hadn’t seen lightning talks before, and I thought they were a fantastic idea – similar in some ways to the Straight 8 showings I wrote about a while ago – if you don’t like what you’re seeing, something else is coming along soon. More presentations should be like this.

My thanks to the guys at Google for hosting this conference, particularly for free. The original call for attendees was on their research blog. Some of the conference topics were quite academic and in-depth, but that provided a good constrast to the more practical topics. Google’s offices and facilities are also impressive – definitely worth visiting if you get the chance.

Google LTAC

The theme of the conference is hard to pin down; it is defined as ‘good experience in all its forms’. I’m still struggling to ‘get it’, but it didn’t seem to matter that I didn’t. In practice, this seems to mean a variety of speakers from across the arts and technology, some of them specialising in user experience or customer experience, coming together to share their stories.

This is the first time the conference has been run in Europe (it has been run in New York City since 2003), and current indications are that it will return to both places. The creator of the conference is Mark Hurst, who also leads the sessions at the conference, and who I unfortunately didn’t get to meet. A large number of the speakers are obviously personal friends of his and there is accordingly a sense of community, which is also explored online (see the Gel blog category on goodexperience.com)

The presentations were almost all entertaining, and most informative and passionate. Some of the highlights were:

• Han Bennink – I’m ashamed to admit I’d never heard of Han before. It turns out that he is one of the top Jazz drummers in the world, and his natural exuberance for his work was obvious for all to see – a man who managed to enter the stage, drop a bunch of metal pipes haphazardly on the stage, and make it part of his performance, he obviously has more talent than just a natural sense of rhythm.
• Stephen Bauman – Stephen is a Methodist minister in New York, and in true ministerly style, he told stories. These helped to illustrate what he called ‘Basic Truths’ (on which he has also written a book). I was lucky enough to discuss these and others things with him later on, and he struck me as an extremely perceptive and open-minded religious man: an inspirational American preacher who didn’t hector about Jesus.
• Alison Young – Possessed of a beautiful voice, Alison Young is a supremely talented singer with Southern influences. Why she isn’t more famous is a mystery to me.

I also met some interesting folks:

• Kareem Mayan – Kareem is a returning Gel participant (and volunteer), and obviously enjoys it greatly. His blog has some interesting discussions about emerging technology, including plenty of media and YouTube links (including this ‘How to drive a stick shift’ video – sadly, this doesn’t impress chicks here in the UK, where manual cars are the norm).
• Alexander Kjerulf - Alexander is an irrepressibly bubbly fellow, and describes himself as ‘The Chief Happiness Officer’. He writes and consults on happiness in the workplace, and his passion for his work is obvious. What he says is not rocket science, but it bears repeating. His blog is well worth a read.

I was also lucky enough to win one of the prize draws – for a set of books written by some current and previous Gel speakers, so I now have the following to work my way through:

• Bing Get Dressed by Ted Dewan
• To the Desert and Back by Phil Mirvis and others
• Net.art Per Me by Vuk Cosic
• Bosch & Fjord by Bosch & Fjord
• Simple Truths by Stephen Bauman
• All Marketers are Liars by Seth Godin
• Life Between Buildings by Jan Gehl
• The Power to Heal by Rick Smolan
• From Alice to Outback by Robyn Davidson

Thanks to all the folks who donated books for this – and to Mark Hurst and his team for organising euroGel. I will go again.

Update 2006-09-12: Alison Young’s website can be found here.

(Note: I made most of those up – only one of those titles is real – guess which? However, they all use widespread vocabulary, so hopefully they seem familiar.)

Specialisation is good. However, these job titles don’t describe what people do, or even what they are supposed to do. They are vague, and hence they’re dangerous, because they obfsucate the intended structure of their organisation. One of the key tasks for a business is to continually identify mismatches between what people are supposed to be doing, are actually doing, and what needs to be done. This is critical to remain efficient. However, it’s hard when everyone sounds important, and key to the organisation (because, let’s face it, some probably aren’t). So organisations that are self-indulgent with their job titles (perhaps as a retention technique?) aren’t doing themselves any favours strategically.

Please let’s try to move to a world where we can tell what each other does.

I’d propose the following rule of thumb:

Take the number of valid review comments you receive from a particular person, and call that a. Take the number of times you recieve comments that require you to point someone at a part of the document they’ve missed (let’s assume it is well organised), and call that b.

Divide a by b – this is the review quotient.

As this number tends towards zero, you know that the document is becoming ready. For most purposes, 0.1 is probably a good threshold for determining when to stop making further changes. It’s close enough to zero that the S/N ratio is now overwhelming you, and your time is better spent on something else.

His prose convinced me, and I am encouraging myself not to put things I don’t like down to ‘politics’ but instead to try and understand them at a deeper level. I think there is a great temptation to put problems and shortcomings down to politics, without realising that it’s part of the way human beings interact and not something that’s disposable, however ‘nice’ everyone is. Ignoring it is intellectual laziness. I think the reason I found it hard to face up to this truth before was that I thought I didn’t understand politics, but Scott makes it easy – with descriptions of different types of power, where it comes from, and how to influence those who have it. Practicing politics is still hard, but it’s worth trying to improve one’s skill.

(Note: I’m talking mostly about office politics here, but some of the lessons carry outside that domain – that’s just where I have most experience).

As a work for a commercial company, I resolved to give up using this word a few years ago, and call these entities ‘customers’ instead. I figured this would encourage me to be more customer-centric (duh). I’ve been relatively successful at giving up my addiction to ‘user’, and use of ‘customer’ reminds me that a feature / bug / product that isn’t important to one of our customers, although it might be important to a ‘user’, isn’t important to me either. After all, we’re here to make money, right?

But a recent article of Don Norman’s has convinced me that this approach, too, is damaging. Not as harmful as ‘user’, but still wrong. ‘Customer’ works fine for the business. But customers don’t want to be customers. They want to be people, and they want you to care about them and their needs. Thinking of them as people is a reminder that they have human values and failings, and should be recognised in a human way rather than as entities who exchange money for goods and services. Of course you want that exchange, but you don’t want them to feel like that’s the sole purpose of your relationship – otherwise you exclude yet another way for you to differentiate yourself from your competitors (others of which include producing good quality products, cheap products, faster-to-market products, and all the others we know and love).

As such, I plan to try and wean myself off ‘customer’, and onto ‘people’. Please let me know if I lapse.

Scott Berkun understands processes well. He makes an accurate analogy between a good process and the white lines separating lanes on a highway: they restrict the (intended) movement of vehicles, but help everyone to travel faster and more safely. They don’t intrude, they help. Perhaps a slightly more tenuous extension of this analogy to bad processes would be where the lines are constantly shifting about or the lane schemes being re-arranged, in an attempt to improve matters, but actually confusing everyone and slowing them down.

So the important thing to understand is that more process is not necessarily bad, more bad processes are bad (for example, in software products of any significant size, some level of source control is a good thing – but awkward source control will annoy people and encourage them to find ways round it). Over lunch I was listening to some colleagues talking about process, and I came to an important conclusion:

• People whose sole job is to invent and maintain processes will almost certainly come up with bad ones.

This is because they have no motivation to help, only a motivation to keep their job going, and that means more process (and probably ill-thought-through process). Processes should, with some minor exceptions, be invented with participation from those they affect, as they have a motivation to get it right. If there isn’t a strong enough motivation for them to help come up with a process, they obviously aren’t being bothered enough by the status quo and the process probably isn’t necessary.