Josh Payne's Unstructured Thoughts

I recently read Born to Run by Christopher McDougall. Its spent a good amount of time at the top of best seller lists so I had some high expectations for it. It was a decidedly mixed read though: I absolutely loved some parts of it and others left me disappointed.

The good

The book came across as 5 or so major main discussions, stitched together  I really enjoyed two of the sections: the profile of the Tarahumera people of Mexico and the discourse on human evolutionary biology as it relates to running. Both helped me understand more about myself, why I like to run, how I can find even more enjoyment from running and how to run better. I wished the whole book was focused on those topics. The National Geographic subscriber in me loved reading about things like the unique breathing mechanism humans have relative to other mammals and how it helps us run long distances.

Unfortunately for me, the other elements of the narrative weren’t as valuable.

The bad

The rest of the book was focused on ultramarathoning, profiling some specific figures in the ultamarathonong subculture, and telling the story of a race put together in the home region of the Tarahumera. Frankly, I found these threads of the story less interesting and not compelling. Maybe it was just me, but I just didn’t find myself empathizing with the chaacters or caught up on the excitement of the race at the end.

Net, I’m happy I read the book. It helped me understand myself a little better and that’s really valuable. 150 pages of extraneous uninteresting text is a small price.

I try to run at least 10 miles a week. I’ve been thinking a lot about why I actually do this, likely inspired by reading Born to Run.

When I run, I get time to think about the problems I’m trying to solve. But that’s not why I run.

When I run, I have a chance to work off my frustration. But that’s not why I run.

When I run, I’m getting healthier. But that’s not why I run.

When I run, I sleep more soundly. But that’s not why I run.

When I run, I get the satisfaction of not paying for a gym membership. But that’s not why I run.

When I run, I have fun talking with my running mates. But that’s not why I run.

When I run, I love getting the fresh air and sunshine. But that’s not why I run.

When I run, I discover new places. But that’s not why I run.

When I run, I’m more patient and enthusiastic with my kids. And that’s the best effect. With my super-wife traveling more and more these days, I’m home alone with two pre-schoolers every morning and every night. The days I run, I’m drained physically, but mentally I find I have much more patience with the 23 requests to go to the bathroom after being tucked in, with the 501^st episode of “he hit me, ow”, with the 2 millionth time I’ve been posed the question “How come?”

When I run, I’m a better dad. Corny, but its what gets me out there every day.

You?

And now, for something completely different . . .

Every day at HubSpot, I have a ‘standup’ meeting with my scrum team. We have a team member in Egypt so we typically do it over Skype, video and all. Nothing amuses me more than projecting my colleague in Egypt’s image on the screen and pointing the camera at the screen so that the Skype’s view-finder window shows our colleague recursively, i.e. a picture of my colleague shows a picture of my colleague which shows a picture of my colleague which . . . . I don’t know why, but I find this hilarious.

I was reminded of this today when I read xkcd.com today:

Which reminded me of my favorite post from deadspin.com (before I stopped reading it) and the image of Juan Rivera from the LA Angels looking at himself recursively:

I love the Rivera’s body language there.

Some simple googling led me to learn that this effect is commonly known as the Droste Effect, named after an advertisement from 1903 that employed it:

My earliest recollection of my fascination with this phenomena was with a cookie box from McDonald’s. It showed a picture of Ronald and friends, with Ronald holding a box of cookies which showed a picture of Ronald and friends, with Ronald holding a box of cookies . . . my 7 year old brain was totally fascinated. Unfortunately I couldn’t find an image on the interwebs (shocking, I know!).

Anyone else have a favorite example of this (non MC Escher division)?

Edit: From reddit today: 

A former IBM colleague and role model, Frank McGovern passed away last night. I took a few moments to pull together a few of things I learned from him and will always remember about him:

1) Your personal epic. We should all have at least one epic story we can tell. Every year I knew Frank, we plied him with a cocktail and coaxed his “wedding story” out him. It involved a multi-week vacation, a cross-continental drive, a mix-tape, a wedding (of course) and Colin Powell. It never disappointed.

2) Stay grounded. At IBM, it was easy to get caught up in the machine (i.e. the buraeucracy that seems to be independent of the business of solving customer problems with software).  Frank made a big impression on me at a trade show (must have been ARMA) where he fired up a VMWare with his product on it, to try something out. Mind you, he’s leading a multi-million dollar business, has all sorts of “strategic” responsibilities at IBM and has 10 people in the vicinity that could just as easily find the answer to the question. Always be a user of your product. Every single day. The former Air Force pilot was always grounded in reality.

3) The Worcester Accent. Frank hadn’t lived in Worcester, MA in probably 35 years when I met him. But he talked like my mother (a Worcester native). It was always fun to speak to an audience right after Frank because there were always easy jokes to be made about his accent, my Worcester heritage and my complete lack of accent. Hopefully my lame jokes about his accent distracted the audiences from the fact that I was half the speaker he was. He was an absolute expert in his domain (records management) and I was just trying to keep up.

I’ll miss you Frank.

Over New Year’s I read Lou Gerstner’s “Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance”, on the suggestion of Yoav “the bestower of nicknames” Shapira. It was a good read, especially interesting to me as I left IBM 6 months earlier. The IBM I joined was already post-Gerstner. So it was really interesting for me to read about the Gerstner era as I could see the long term changes he had imparted (and some of the things that didn’t necessarily change as much as he’d hoped). Three things that stood out:

1) The Mainframe. Gerstner centers much of the narrative around the break from complete reliance on the mainframe business. My first job out of school was at Kenan Systems, a company focused on delivering a UNIX-based billing system to telecommunications carriers. It’s whole business was staked on replacing mainframes. And I never ever interacted with mainframes in school — we had all sorts of UNIX machines filling up our computer labs in school. By the time I joined IBM as part of the acquisition of iPhrase, IBM put us in with the “distributed” software business, in Information Management. We were completely separated from the mainframe business, for the most part. We executed our business with a set of practices and set of salespeople that were completely separate. Honestly, the mainframe business at IBM was like an entirely different planet to me: different salespeople, different licenses, different SKU’s (even for the same product), different release cycles.
So to read that the IBM that greeted Gerstner was 100% mainframe focused was an eye-opener. Really, the IBM I worked at was much much different than the IBM that greeted Gerstner in ’92 — heck, the software group didn’t even exist then.

2) The Focus on Competition. Gerstner, in the book, frequently talks about pushing the company to focus more on the customer and the competition. Gerstner hammered on about focusing on beating the competition — a mindset that apparently was not prevalent at IBM at the time. The piece about the competition really struck me because focusing on the competition was prominent in a lot of the business process templates we needed to follow (DCP’s for you IBMers out there). It almost felt over-emphasized whenever I was going through the investment approval process at IBM — and now it makes sense. Gerstner wanted it there when those business processes were presumably developed.

3) Executive Assistants. The description of executive assistants at IBM cracked me up, in part, because my manager at IBM took a turn as one. Just seems like a concept from another time and place. It wasn’t totally excised.

What did you think?

Recently, Eddie from my office asked me for suggestions for a birthday present for his 4 year old nephew. Rather than simply responding in an email so Eddie can benefit, I figured I’d post here what I wrote so others might benefit too. (Yes, totally off topic from my usual writings. Don’t worry, I’ve got another a few software posts percolating in me).

Here’s an edited version of what I emailed Eddie (edited in that I don’t use my kids’ names or image in social media typically):

Having observed my 4 year old play all day Friday (and having been a 4 year old once), if you want to get new toys for your nephew, here are my suggestions:

1) Hot Wheels cars and tracks. I got my 4 year old a complete Hot Wheels track set from Toys R Us for Hanukah this year and it always pleases when we pull it out. He can play with the cars on his own, he can set up tracks and shoot the cars down the tracks, etc. It kept him busy for 1 hr+ on Friday when we were stuck inside during the snow day. I got him this combo set from Toys R Us in store. And then bought a bunch of cars and some extra lengths of track. I used to have something similar as a kid 30+ years ago.

Why did I get him this present? With my dad hat on, I basically resolved to buy him a present that only requires an understanding of Newtonian physics. No integrated circuits allowed All his aunts and uncles buy him “cool” toys that require batteries and do all sorts of crazy things. I figured I could go retro simple and he’d use his imagination a whole lot more. I shied away from the “monster” car sets or the other hot wheels stuff that puts the classic toy on steroids.

Plus the cars (on their own) only cost ~$1, each. So its easy to show up as the cool uncle with a new car.

Other ideas:
2) He loves to play with Lincoln Logs. Those are a good building toy for this age. He just spent his “nap” time playing with them happily for an hour while I wrote this email/post.

3) You could take him to a Lego store at the mall — they basically have a buffet of legos where you can just buy whatever individual pieces you want. Don’t buy him one of the “cool” Star Wars lego sets — that’s basically a project for you or his father. Trust me, I built the coolest Darth Vader Tie Fighter in December. I just want my kids to have a big bucket of generic legos that they can build cool stuff with using their imagination, not some ridiculous set of directions with custom molded pieces.

4) Magna-Tiles are also an awesome building toy. They break my “Newtonian” Physics rule, but its still high school physics when you’re doing magnets. That’s what we got our nephew for Hanukah this year.

One of the things that bothers me (especially as a degenerate sports fan) is when folks make public predictions, but then never really follow through on assessing those predictions. So as I set out to make a couple of public New Year’s resolutions for 2011, I’ll first look back on my 2010 resolutions.

I made 2 big ones for 2010. I mostly proclaimed these to myself:

1) Run 500 miles in 2010

2) Find a new job inside or outside IBM

I tracked my progress for the running resolution at daytum.com/joshpayne. As you can see (if you check out that link relatively close to the posting day for this entry), I fell short by 131 miles. My modest goal, having never run consistently for an entire year, was to run 10 miles a week, for the entire year. Thus the 500 miles goal.  Though I missed the goal, I was generally pleased with how I did. Tracking my progress publicly on daytum.com helped to motivate me (its linked from my twitter profile). I ran consistently throughout the year, used my new treadmill a bunch but was done in by two relatively unforeseen factors: a flood on my property that left me with a big cleanup project for over a month and time management challenges once I joined HubSpot back in June.  I found that I wanted to make sure I was doing a good job at HubSpot at the cost of running, for the first month or so of employment. Once I got comfortable in the new job, my new routine and my new responsibilities, I worked running back into my life. Those two factors cost me 100 miles or so. And then a slight knee injury in mid-December accounts for the rest of the miss.

Finding a new job? I did that one. Though I didn’t really tell anyone about that one at the outset of the year, for obvious reasons.

So what’s in store for 2011?

1) I’m going to renew the 500 mile pledge and continue to track it publicly on at daytum.com/joshpayne. I would have liked to up the ante a bit, but given that I missed by over 25% in 2010, I’m going to keep my quota at the same level and hope I exceed it this year.

2) No multi-tasking. I recently re-read an article on the HBR blog that accounted for all the negatives around multi-tasking. Basically, my take home from the article was that your brain does one external thing well at a time. Doing two at the same time seriously impacts the quality of execution of one, if not both.

This observation definitely resonated with me, as multi-tasking at IBM was a way of life. Every day was filled with simultaneous execution of conference calls, email responses and instant messaging. I was on 6 hours of conference calls every day. Pulling off this resolution would have been really hard while at IBM. But I’m optimistic that I can pull this off at HubSpot as I have many, many fewer meetings and almost all of them are in person. No more tapping on my laptop in a meeting unless that work is directly related to the meeting.

I want to try to improve the quality of the primary thing I’m doing. And if something is so important as to be my “primary” task, I should give it 100% focus.

But this resolution will also carry over to my personal life. I already stopped talking on the phone while driving. But I’m going to give in less to the temptation of the information available on my phone at any spare moment. So no more checking email while “playing” with the kids. Or checking twitter while “watching the kids bathe”.  I think my engagement in the primary activities (i.e. spending time with my kids) will be better for both me and my family.  And no more reading while watching the game. I either wasn’t enjoying the game or I wasn’t processing the information in the book. Or both.

(and for the record, the following don’t count, by my arbitrary definition, as multi-tasking: listening to music while driving, listening to classical music while working, watching TV while running on a treadmill, singing while in the shower).

Now I’m not sure how I can effectively track my success at this second resolution (any ideas?), but I’ve already found it challenging and fulfilling to attempt to keep.

What are your resolutions? And how are you inspecting your results for those resolutions?

I’ve been particularly introspective recently about my career the past few weeks. October just wrapped up. That means we’ve emerged from user conference season. This is the first time in quite a few years that I wasn’t in Las Vegas for the Information On Demand Conference.

Two years ago at the conference I was frustrated. I commiserated with my colleagues at the conference. And then I went home, talked about being “opportunistic” if the right job came to me. No surprisingly, nothing happened.

A whole year passed. Again, I found myself at the conference.

I was still frustrated, more worried and concerned about my job path. I had been in the same job for 4 years or so at IBM. I had grown a ton, but had serious qualms about my job moving forward. I was at a plateau. But I didn’t end up back at the conference again this year. One year later, I’m at a new job, growing my skills and passionate about my work again. I’m pleased at how things have played out but I’ve been wondering “How did a get here? How did I break that cycle?”

The boiled down explanation is that I took control of the situation. I took action. I was honest. And made change.

Here’s how it played out in hindsight (and I certainly wasn’t clearly planning these steps at the time):

1) Introspection. I thought about what I liked and what I didn’t like. I took stock of my current job. At this point in my career, I’d had a breadth of experience. And my job provided me the flexibility to put efforts in a variety of different areas. In doing so, I realized I enjoyed the process of helping to create a product more than the process of marketing one.

I also realized that my professional development was at a plateau. I wasn’t in over my head. I wasn’t learning rapidly. I needed to go into the deep end a bit more. It also didn’t help that some of the great people I had worked with in the past were no longer around. The negatives of my current job were beginning to outweigh the positives.

2) Aspirations. As a logical next step, I thought about the kind of roles I wanted to work towards in the future. More specifically, I thought about the environment in which I wanted to work. In sum, it was “software,” “small” over “large”, “more entrepreneurial”. I intend on trending smaller and smaller with each next step in my career.

3) Brutal Honesty. The next step was occasionally unpleasant, but I began to be honest with those around me (my peers, my management chain, my family) about my analysis of the situation and my aspirations. And the more I talked, the more the next steps I needed to take came into clarity. I spoke to a variety of folks. Sometimes it was on my volition. Sometimes folks came to me based on “rumors”. But I was honest with each person and that helped send me down a path of aggressively pursuing the next step.

I came to firmly believe I needed to change by being honest with those around me – and broke out of any sense of inertia and complacency and fear of the unknown. By being transparent with those around me, I careened towards being motivated to take the right actions for my career. I think this was the most important (and painful) step. I had some scary, painful (and unplanned) conversations. They all helped me do the right thing for my career in hindsight.

4) Activate your network. Once I had made a firm decision that I needed a change, I reached out to as many folks I could think of, who could help me take the next step in my career, based on my parameters (product management, software, Boston area, small company, room for significant personal development). I pursued every lead and was persistent. You never know which lead will bear fruit – it only takes one. It turned out my next-door neighbor was the lead that brought me to my current job.

I’m hoping this retrospective is helpful to other people who need to break out of their rut.

Follow me on twitter here.

I recently gave a talk at HubSpot about the product development process at IBM. I figured that there were lessons the engineers and product managers at HubSpot could learn from the way IBM makes decisions about what to work on and the process IBM follows to ensure those decisions are properly followed through upon. The talk itself went ok (I won’t recount it here) and I think I effectively conveyed my message.

One of the quotes I stumbled upon just as I was preparing the talk was from my former colleague Sean Johnson on his blog:

Working at the individual product or product group level at a company like IBM resembles a startup more than you’d think. It’s just a startup that’s got one hand and one foot tied behind its back in a not unreasonable effort not to be sued for the billions in cash they have.

The Processes that were enforced certainly had elements that were designed to stanch these fears of getting sued. But Sean’s point is largely true and the process of writing the talk helped to crystalize that the IBM way (through formal process and otherwise) held some similarity to life at a small company. Here are some of them:

1. Geek culture. At its heart, IBM has an empowered geek culture. Sure there is a centralized IT organization managing mission critical email systems and virus protection. But our machines were unlocked and we were empowered to install whatever we wanted, wherever. The systems were open and we were given the tools to explore new technologies. One night I was hanging out with a friend of mine and I was trying to show him how he too could have apps running on his blackberry. But he couldn’t! His IT organization had locked his blackberry down to prevent him from doing so. It helped me appreciate the trust IBM gave us.

My favorite discovery early in my tenure at IBM was the Global Storage Array (GSA). 10 GB of disk available for any employee to save files upon. But it wasn’t just dumb disk for backing up your files. It had Apache running on it, with a sample html file so anyone could start building their own pages for the IBM intranet. The message was clear. Hack away. (and my horrible html followed)

2. Trust and Openness. This idea of trust extended to social media. HubSpot, like IBM, has approaches to social media that amounts to “we trust you, don’t be stupid”. There are hundreds if not thousands of IBM bloggers, especially covering deep technical niches. IBM’s advocacy for open standards extended to transparency in communication and discussion in public. This turned out to be a great gift to me — I felt comfortable embracing blogging and later twitter on behalf of my products at IBM, which eventually helped usher me down a path to HubSpot.

3. The Importance of a Founding Myth. When iPhrase (where I worked) was acquired by IBM, Big Blue sent an old-HR hand named Frank to act as our liaison. Frank spent weeks regaling us with lessons learned from IBM’s near death experience in the 90′s and the key changes put into place by Lou Gerstner. The rebirth of IBM was constantly referred to, and provided the new employees a common sense of direction and purpose. We were joining a narrative and could help direct how this epic entered the history books.

Startup culture perpetuates the same sense of a communal narrative. The founders have a special title (founder!) and HubSpot even tracks the (mostly funny) parts of the narrative for later generations on our wiki. Its an effective tact for providing a safeguard against poor decision making – the common narrative provides a  framework for distributed decisions making. Empowered employees still can use guiding principles and a founding myth is one tool for doing so.

What elements of big company life aren’t so different from startups?

With a new job, I now have a commute. I traded my 5 second work-from-home commute for a 50 minute train ride every morning.  50 minutes on the trains mean lots of reading time. I read more books this summer than he last five years combined.

One of those books I recently read was Free by Chris Anderson. I usually only remember one or two things from each book I read. So continuing with my nascent “three things” theme, here are three things I learned from free.

1) Dunbar’s number. Anderson writes about the Dunbar’s number – a theory that after a group grows larger than 150 people, its impossible to for an individual to have a relationship with everyone in the group. Though Anderson raises the idea within the context of economic relationships, it resonated with me because I joined HubSpot just at the point it was hitting that size. In fact just as I was joining, some of my new peers were bemoaning the fact that they don’t recognize everyone in the office anymore. We’ve taken some steps to mitigate this phenomena like creating a wall of faces with pictures of everyone and some personal details, but I’ve found that I just haven’t gotten to know everyone at the company yet – and probably won’t ever know 100% despite my efforts to combat Mr. Dunbar’s number.

2) The Art of Science Fiction. As a bit of diversion, Anderson writes a bit about science fiction. Honestly, I don’t remember how it tied into Free. But he did describe how science fiction writers have one major rule – that they can incorporate into their stories one instance in which the laws of nature are broken.  Readers of science fiction are willing to suspend disbelief for one impossibility. Anything more and the writer loses the reader. As an infrequent reader of science fiction, it was a new way to frame the genre. And piqued my interest to read more of it now that I can view it through that lens.

3) Piracy as just another form of Free. Anderson also frames piracy (music, software or otherwise) as just another form of the free business model. That point stuck with me because it was a fresh perspective on a topic with a reasonable amount of press. Anderson posited that companies like Microsoft give lip service to fighting piracy, to maintain the moral high-ground, but in reality accept piracy as a freemium business model in growing economies Those companies expect to benefit in the long run when those economies (like Brazil, China, Russia) mature to the point of willingness to pay. Then I read this article in the New York Times tying Microsoft to heavy handed police tactics in Russia last weekend.  Which left me seriously skeptical of that point of view. Original thinking by Anderson? Yes. Accurate? Maybe not.