A good leader has these four factors (Hogan, Kaiser, 2005):

1. Decisiveness: in case of uncertainity, they make decisions and take responsibility.
2. Competence: they are skilled and can create good teams.
3. Integrity: they are able to create deep trustworthy relationships.
4. Vision: they are able to see both short term and long term, seduce and inspire.

But to reach the next level and be a great leader, there are two more (Collins, 2001):

1. Modesty: it’s very interesting to see that modesty is a quality for great leaders, something that goes agains the common perception of being show-offs.
2. Persistency: they constantly push their goals, vision and push the team forward.

Jeremy wrote also another post, about the seven reasons why leaders fail. These are:

1. Strict hierarchies
2. Poor decision-making
3. Huge pay differentials
4. Impossible standards for leaders
5. Climb the greasy pole
6. Psychology of followership

These may all sound like pretty straightforward characteristics, but apparently few have what it takes. Many surveys have been carried out asking people what they think of their immediate bosses. On average these find that about half are seen as incompetent.
— Dean J. (2012) How to be a great leader

I did a quick summary here, but the two posts from Jeremy digs into much more detail: How to be a great leader and Seven reasons leaders fail.

Q: What makes design different at Apple?
A: We struggle with the right words to describe the design process at Apple  but it is very much about designing and prototyping and making. When you separate those, I think the final result suffers. If something is going to be better, it is new, and if it’s new you are confronting problems and challenges you don’t have references for. To solve and address those requires a remarkable focus. There’s a sense of being inquisitive and optimistic, and you don’t see those in combination very often.

[...] When you make a 3D model, however crude, you bring form to a nebulous idea and everything changes — the entire process shifts. It galvanises and brings focus from a broad group of people. It’s a remarkable process.
— Ive J. (2012) Sir Jonathan Ive: The iMan cometh by Marc Prigg

Design is inherently connected with prototype and make.

There isn’t much to add.

I used to speak in a regular voice. I was able to assert, demand, question. Then I started teaching. At a university? And my students had this rising intonation thing? It was particularly noticeable on telephone messages. “Hello? Professor Gorman? This is Albert? From feature writing?” [...]

The sorority members’ own interpretation of uptalk was that it was a way of being inclusive. McLemore’s conclusions are somewhat similar. She says the rises are used to connect phrases, and to connect the speaker to the listener, as a means of “getting the other person involved.” [...]

Once commercial airline pilots start using uptalk, McLemore notes, it will mean that a full-blown dialect shift has occurred. Uptalk won’t be uptalk anymore. It will be, like, American English?
— James Gorman (1993) Like, Uptalk?

Here’s a video example of uptalk.

There are a lot of interesting details here. The first is that while it’s a simple and easy to spot inflection and as such it’s easy to notice its spread over different areas and countries, it’s still hard to track. It seems that it originated as a way of talking of the adolescent girls in California, and it inherited the name “Valley Girl” from a Frank Zappa song that highlights that intonation.

It’s even more interesting because while it’s commonly perceived as a adolescent, immature or low-class inflexion, some researches noticed some different scenarios:

McLemore studied intonation in one very particular context. She observed uses of intonation in a Texas sorority, where uptalk was not at all about uncertainty or deference. It was used most commonly by the leaders, the senior officers. Uptalk was a kind of accent, or tag, to highlight new information for listeners: “We’re having a bake sale? On the west mall? On Sunday?” When saying something like “Everyone should know that your dues should be in,” they used a falling intonation at the end of the sentence.
— Gorman James (1993) Like, Uptalk?

New studies show that people who use uptalk are not insecure wallflowers but powerful speakers who like getting their own way: teachers, talk-show hosts, politicians and facetious shop assistants.

Mark Liberman, a phonetician at the University of Pennsylvania, who has been monitoring George W. Bush’s speeches on his fascinating weblog Language Log, points out that the President has started peppering his Iraq speeches with HRTs. Why? Not, apparently, because Bush’s confidence is failing him. Rather, it has more to do with an aggressive need to direct conversation.
— Marsh Stefanie (2006) The rise of the interrogatory statement

That’s even more interesting, because if it’s validated as it seems happening, it might point out that adolescent girls are in fact the ones that are more able to evolve the language as a whole.

But linguists now say [...] Girls and women in their teens and 20s deserve credit for pioneering vocal trends and popular slang, they say, adding that young women use these embellishments in much more sophisticated ways than people tend to realize.
“A lot of these really flamboyant things you hear are cute, and girls are supposed to be cute,” said Penny Eckert, a professor of linguistics at Stanford University. “But they’re not just using them because they’re girls. They’re using them to achieve some kind of interactional and stylistic end.” [...]
Carmen Fought a professor of linguistics at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif. ”The truth is this: Young women take linguistic features and use them as power tools for building relationships.”
— Quenqua Douglas (2012) They’re, Like, Way Ahead of the Linguistic Currrrve

This overall is an excellent example of spoken language evolution: its birth, usage, diffusion and perception. And also how we try to understand it and, sometimes, can’t just avoid it.

I spend a lot of my time meeting with startups, and it usually takes three or four long meetings just to explain what marketing is all about. They start out with a fundamental question — should we be advertising more? — and they use the word “brand” very loosely. I always say don’t use that word, because brands are built. They don’t just exist because you run an ad or because you create a nifty logo. The brand comes from the consumer’s view. How do you build innovation into your product? How do you design the product in a way so that it sells itself?
— Regis McKenna (2012) Apple’s First Marketing Guru On Why ’1984′ Is Overrated

A short but interesting serie of questions to the creative mind behind the historic “1984″ ad. The answers aren’t really good aphorisms to be quoted, but they contain a lot of interesting details and advices hidden in them.

One of the most important for me is about the concept of brand, and the detail that it takes as long as three or four meetings for someone as experienced as him to make understand what really marketing is to startups.

It’s true, most of the people get marketing wrong, and branding wrong. Or, from another perspective, they get the dark side of marketing. The critical sentence there is connecting the “brand” with “How do you design the product in a way so that it sells itself?”. Because, in the end, the trick is as simple and as complex as that.

As early as the 1950s, IBM programmers were working on software for things like submarine control systems and missile tracking systems, which were so complex that they could not be conceived and built in one go. Programmers had to evolve them over time, like cities, starting with a simple working system that could be tested by users, and then gradually adding more function and detail in iterative cycles that took one to six months to complete. In a 1969 IBM internal report called simply “The Programming Process”.
— Dave Gray (2011) Agile development

A small history excerpt from Dave Gray. This excerpt shows how much Agile isn’t – as many think – suited only for small projects: it was born in IBM and it was created specifically to cater a problem bigger than the actual planning possibilities with lots of variables and moving parts.

Another interesting detail that’s often overlooked is that even in its inception the release is not an option. You have to release to the final users, otherwise you aren’t really iterating. If you release only to your client, you aren’t really iterating, because you aren’t measuring and planning against the real world, but only against the fiction of the working team.

While, I agree, at the beginning you shouldn’t probably release (as you read above, a “cycle” could have lasted up to 6 months) it’s critical to test the platform with real users to really achieve the objectives of Agile.

There are about 489,000 YouTube videos that say “no copyright intended” or some variation, and about 664,000 videos have a “copyright disclaimer” citing the fair use provision in Section 107 of the Copyright Act.
— Andy Baio (2011) No copyright intended

Finally, with mock exasperation, I said, “O.K., let’s try one that’s a little less complicated: You want a movie or an album. You don’t want to pay for it. So you download it.”

There it was: the bald-faced, worst-case example, without any nuance or mitigating factors whatsoever.

“Who thinks that might be wrong?”

Two hands out of 500.
— David Pogue (2007) The generational divide in copyright morality

These are excellent articles about a very interesting cultural shift: the perception of copyright. The problem here is that people have a natural inclination in sharing and manipulating and here they’re just doing that.

I’m not trying here to write extensively on copyright, but I’d like to point out some interesting details that sometimes are overlooked.

Copyright started as a protection for authors, and accordingly to Wikipedia it started with the printing press in 1662 first and 1709 next in England. There was no copyright before, because it was the printing press that made duplication easy. Copyright rises at the same time as a simple and cheap way of duplicating is born. This doesn’t mean that it didn’t exist before, the author always had rights, but copyright is explicitly tied with the problem of duplicating.

Today, copying is easy, and copyright is a very challenged law, not because there are people that like to pirate (even if, of course, there are) but because it harms not only them, but also the natural inclination of people of sharing and manipulating.

From a certain perspective, the kids that are posting these manipulated works are understanding copyright better than the people that made the law: they understand that the author must retain authorship and revenues and at the same time they can’t see a problem in sharing and manipulating.

The problem of duplications started only because at some point duplication become easier, simpler and cheaper, but payment to authors didn’t. Quite the opposite, from a certain perspective: paying an author in the 15th century meant just taking some coins and giving them to the author, today you have to pass through complex online payments systems, while copying is still just one click.

When you balance in these three factors:

1. natural inclination in sharing
2. simpleness and cheapness of copy
3. complexity of payment to authors

You see today’s copyright struggle clearly.

And you’ll see also another thing.

Today, you can change only one of these three variables. ;)

In 2006 the rumors of Apple making a phone were ramping up again and one day I had an idea by reading of the LED screens powering devices like the Sony NW-A3000: a phone that will have a full touchscreen surface, with a under-the-skin screen. I wasn’t really thinking of the “iPhone”, but I decided to give the mockup that title to get into the discussions.
A few months later, trying to make a better render with the help of Cristiano, I inherited however an element from the iPod: the wheel, because I thought that it might still be a good way to go through a long list of items.

In hindsight, it’s clear that with just a little more thought I should have dropped the scroll wheel as well like I did on the first mockup. Still, I think that given the timing it’s strikingly similar to the Apple patented prototype and I got also right the most important feature of the final iPhone: the full touchscreen surface with an ad-hoc interface.

However, while the other mockups now feel old, I still find the following rendering very fascinating with its glowing logo and its seamless screen, reminding a bit Space Odyssey.

To me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It’s obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better.

With an entire body at your command, do you seriously think the Future Of Interaction should be a single finger?
— Bret Victor (2011) “A brief rant on the future of interaction”

I don’t think I have much more to add to this excellent article, even if unfortunately he’s downplaying a bit too much touch interfaces that are really here at consumer level since a few years ago.

To his point, I’d add that I don’t expect things like bendable devices, the kind of interactions that I expect in the future aren’t about making strange things to objects in order to perform arbitrary actions. If I pull something, I expect it to grow, or get longer, or open, not surely do some action on the screen.

As I often stated, the limit of today’s computing is in input-output, and even more in reality while we have lots of outputs (mouse, keyboard, touch, wiimote, camera, etc) we have very few inputs. When they ask me what screen I do want, I answer “I want as many pixel as possible”. The reason is simple: stand up now, make a few steps backward, and have a look the percentage of your field of vision that’s taken by the computer screen, compared to the whole space you’re in.

That’s why.

It’s tiny.

That’s also why another field I’m interested in is the internet of things: because it’s a way to make everything around you an input/output device that could interact with any part of your body… and maybe your mind as well.

“The inconsistencies in the interface between apps and the occasional lag doing simple things like scrolling in windows just screamed at me.”
— James Kendrick (2011) After the iPhone 4S, Android just feels wrong

“That having been said, it unfortunately remains the case that Android [Ice Cream Sandwich] isn’t as swift and responsive as iOS or Windows Phone (or even MeeGo Harmattan on the N9).”
“The subtle, pervasive lag that has characterized the Android UI since its inception is still there, which is not a heartening thing to hear when you’re talking about a super-powered dual-core device like the Galaxy Nexus.”
— Vlad Savov (2011) Galaxy Nexus with Ice Cream Sandwich hands-on

“Android, on the other hand, has always felt laggy to me.”
— Mike Rundle (2011) Android’s Touch Responsiveness Is Terrible

From an interaction design standpoint, this is a quite huge flaw in Android as is today and it’s one of the things that can be easily dismissed but in the end is that one able to create the magic of a perfect user experience.

I found a discussion on Reddit about this, here are some quotes:

“I’m not saying android’s touch responsiveness is bad, it’s just not as good and it’s very noticeable when playing games on it.”
“Scrolling a list of apps in the market, or doing absolutely anything in Reddit is Fun–are jerky nightmares.”
“However even compared to those parts that are not jerky, iOS still seems to be smoother. I cannot put my finger on what is actually different, but I’m not sure it is actually smoother/faster/better.”
— Reddit: Why is the touch sensitivity/responsiveness on android phones not even half as good as apple products? [Not trolling, honest question]

From the discussion and some good analysis there, it seems that the problem isn’t in the detection of the touch even, but in the response of the UI. Most of the responses seems to point out to the lack of hardware acceleration as the culprit.

I like this discussion because it’s very hard to show people this very problem: while its consequences are very relevant in the overall user experience, it’s often very difficult to make someone understand that “it should be 0.1 seconds faster” is actually a very important thing to do.

“The best clients, to my mind, don’t say that whatever you do is fine, they’re intertwined in the process. When I look back, it’s hard to remember who had what thought when. That’s the best, most satisfying work, whether a large building or a house.”
— Peter Bohlin, Architect (2011) A Genius of the Storefront, Too

Peter Bohlin is the architect that worked with Steve Jobs to build the Apple Stores all around the world. The article by James Stewart is interesting, but for me that sentence above is the most interesting one.

When working together people are able to communicate better, avoid communication overhead and create consensus quickly. It’s obvious right? But so often within companies and teams this is taken as granted, and this happens both when there’s a positive outcome or a negative outcome.

When it’s positive, it just happened, so we usually don’t think that the project went smoothly thanks to this. When it’s negative, we just don’t think it was a problem of creating the environment for the team to communicate and collaborate effectively, because we expect that part should just happen. The justifications in the negative case are often external, we blame other things: we communicated badly, the specs weren’t clear enough, the client didn’t approve this in time, and so on. However, to a closer analysis, many times the issue was a team issue, missing a good and healthy collaboration space.

A few questions that could help you to see if you have a healthy team environment are:

1. Do I find effortless to communicate with others?
2. Am I able to get a clarification even for tiny doubts?
3. Do I chat even about non-related things with my team?
4. Am I isolating my work from others?
5. Do I know what each other is doing?

It’s even more interesting because if you think to the effectiveness of Agile, Lean and similar approaches from this perspective you notice that there are many techniques that in fact are just tricks to facilitate the communication and collaboration within the team. Why is the product owner included in the team itself? Why do daily stand-ups exist? Why are kanbans so effective?

Does your team has a healthy collaboration environment?
From this perspective, why do you think it works?