Singularity University, brainchild of Ray Kuzweil and other industry leaders (Nobel physicist George Smoot, for example, and Tom Byers of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, Google leaders Vint Cerf and Chris DiBona, SIM City creator Will Wright; quite an impressive list), is up and running now at the NASA-Ames research center in Moffett Field, CA, tucked away between Mountain View and Sunnyvale, just west of the huge obsolete blimp hangars that have been there for at least 50 years. It’s an amazing venture. From it’s website:

“Singularity University derives its name from Dr. Ray Kurzweil’s book “The Singularity is Near.” The term “Singularity” has been used to refer to a future time of rapid and accelerating development of various sciences and technologies including biotechnology, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, robotics and genetics. One goal of Singularity University is to [expand / teach / show] how these rapid developments occur today, sometimes so common that we do not see them for what they are, as when a graphics card is faster than any supercomputer of just a decade ago.”

A first lucky group of a few dozen students is there now, taking part in a 9-week program. In the near future they’ll be offering some 10-day programs for middle managers, and 3-day programs for executives. Here’s Ray Kurzweil introducing it earlier this year, as a TED talk:

If for any reason you don’t see the video here, you can click this link to go to the source at ted.com.

I heard about this a couple of weeks ago from David Rose, founder of angelsoft.net, who is also, it turns out, leading the finance and entrepreneurship track. I’ve been meaning to post about it since. What an opportunity!

Pictures, words, ideas. If one picture equals 1,000 words, how many ideas does it generate? Is there a transitive property there? I had time over the weekend to pick up two unrelated pictures. Each covers something entirely different. Both are full of ideas.

The first, a chart by Seth Godin:

From Seth Godin

This is one of those things that must have been hard to come up with, but makes sense when you look at it. A map of communication. On the horizontal axis of the chart, from book on one end to a conversation at the other. With a book, the writer writes it at one point in time and the reader reads it at an entirely different time. With the telephone and coaching, both parties of the communication, sender and receiver, are involved at the same time. On the chart’s vertical axis, how much bandwidth is involved, from mail and graffiti at the low extreme, to movies and coaching at the high extreme.

The Second, from Buzz Networker:

From bizzia.com, buzzworker

This one is fascinating to me. As always with this kind of research, accuracy depends on how they sampled, but even if it could be off by a bit, it still gives a big picture of the main social networking sites (which is what I assume the acronym SNS stands for) usage by age. I have no conclusions to draw, but maybe you do.

That’s right: it’s a doggy washing machine, not a faked photo, at least according to the write-up at www.davison.com in a hilarious collection called dangerously dumb designs. (Editor’s note: That page has been removed from the Davision Creators’ site, subsequent to the publishing of this  post.)

The description says:

Yeah, that’s right, a dog washing machine. Traumatic and automatic. Dumb, dumb, dumb. I would strongly suggest trimming your dog’s nails before placing your loved one in this machine (or taking it out) to avoid becoming both dumb and dangerous.

And that’s not all. It’s a fun collection of 10 of these.

And a lot of other interesting pages, too. I discovered this site thanks to Guy Kawasaki on Twitter. He pointed out 11 Creative Advertising Designs, which is also really good. Here’s one of the highlights from that one (and do you get that it’s a Harley-Davidson ad?):

And, once I was there, I couldn’t resist the dangerously dumb post as well. I don’t know Davison Designs, but hey, great stuff. Pleasant surprises on the Web.

(Photo credits: I found them both on the www.davison.com site, and I’m hoping with the link back, they won’t mind. The doggy washer started with craziestgadgets.com, and I’ve linked back to there from the photo. And the Harley-Davidson ad started with www.thecoolhunter.net, and I’ve linked back to that site for that one. Both are ads, so I apologize in advance for not getting permission.)

Try this exercise with a group of people: take out a piece of paper, take three minutes to list uses for a brick. Be creative. List as many as you can.

After the three minutes are up, share your results.

What’s this about? It turns out that most experts agree that creativity is about quantity of ideas, not quality of ideas. Long lists of odd uses for a brick (the more odd, the more bizarre, the better) are better than short lists with very good uses. Quantity, not quality.

What does this mean for running a company? Think about it.

Committees don’t make great software. It takes a single person, an author. Maybe he gets some help. Teams don’t do it. Nobody sees the whole elephant.

I’m pretty sure I heard that basic sentiment first in about 1986, from Dave Winer, who was then the author of a Macintosh outlining program named More (now he’s better known as the de-facto father of blogging).

What reminded me of this over the weekend was my son emailing me about Jeff Atwood’s Software Engineering: Dead post on Coding Horror. In his post, Jeff’s looking at this article by Tom DeMarco, author of Controlling Software Projects, a software management classic.

What DeMarco seems to be saying — and, at least, what I am definitely saying — is that control is ultimately illusory on software development projects. If you want to move your project forward, the only reliable way to do that is to cultivate a deep sense of software craftsmanship and professionalism around it.

The guys and gals who show up every day eager to hone their craft, who are passionate about building stuff that matters to them, and perhaps in some small way, to the rest of the world — those are the people and projects that will ultimately succeed.

That sounds to me a lot like what Dave Winer was getting at about 25 years ago. And if it takes a single user, someone writing code and working the application because he or she wants to use it, then that’s hard to manage.

And if you’re interested in software quality, creativity, and management, you might want to look at an exchange between user interface designerDustin Curtis and an interface designer at American Airlines. It starts here with Justin’s rant about the hostile interface on the AA website; and gets more interesting here with an AA interface designer’s answer.

However, there are large exceptions. For example, our Interactive Marketing group designs and implements fare sales and specials (and doesn’t go through us to do it), and the Publishing group pushes content without much interaction with us… Oh, and don’t forget the AAdvantage team (which for some reason, runs its own little corner of the site) or the international sites (which have a lot of autonomy in how their domains are run)… Anyway, I guess what I’m saying is that AA.com is a huge corporate undertaking with a lot of tentacles that reach into a lot of interests. It’s not small, by any means.

And apparently frustration was had by all.

And it certainly won’t make you wish you had a creative or design oriented position in a large company.

Two guys wrote the original spreadsheet (VisiCalc), one, Paul Brainard, wrote the main part of the first page layout program (Pagemaker). One of the more interesting facets of a lot of Web 2.0 work is that the programs are smaller, written more by authors, less by teams.

One of my favorite quotes,  by Adam Osborne talking about product development, gives way to Seth Godin talking about running your business.

Adam was a writer first, and a personal computer industry pioneer later. I met him when he spoke to my class at business school, then followed his nova-star company, Osborne Computers, as it rose and then fell. During the first high-tech industry boom in the early 1980s, talking about the critical problems of product development, and getting the product out the door, he said that the problem sometimes was that the product people wouldn’t stop developing and ship it:

Adequate is good enough.

That’s not a theme song or a motto for everything in business — not hardly — but it does fit some situations.

Fast Forward to Seth Godin’s post yesterday, Why aren’t you (really) good at graphic design?. He has put together a page of resources to help real-world people to do slides and such better than most of them currently do, with this rationale:

But now, in a world where it is expected that professionals will be able to make beautiful PowerPoint slides, handsome business cards, clever bio photos and a decent website, it’s as important as driving. And easier to learn and do, and requiring less talent.

That suggestion produced some criticism from designers, “upset that I would recommend that anyone do pretty good design.” Which leads to this response:

The fact is, business people do copywriting, simple legal and accounting work and more, on their own, every day. You compose your own email, don’t you? If your legal decisions were as bad as your design, you’d get fired in a minute for libeling people. Getting pretty good at things is merely a first step, but one that you need to take in order to be ready to spend the money to get great.

And I want to emphasize that last sentence, which belongs in the same real-world and practical reality as Obsorne’s wisdom above:

Getting pretty good at things is merely a first step, but one that you need to take in order to be ready to spend the money to get great.

Things in business are rarely simple and obvious. It’s hard, even dangerous, to come up with general rules that always apply. Sure, everything should always be insanely great; but there are times, projects, issues, on which our business is better with pretty good, and sometimes, even, adequate.

What we have to do is figure out which time is which.

When I saw that Bob Sutton called it "the best talk on creativity I ever saw," I had to see it myself. He's the author of several books I really like, a Stanford University prof, and his Work Matters blog has been on my list — here, in the sidebar — of good blogs for more than a year now.

When I saw it, I couldn't resist; I wanted to share it. Here's just a sample quote from somewhere in the middle of this talk:

…not just writers, but creative people across all genres it seems have this reputation for being enormously mentally unstable.

… even the ones those who didn't literally commit suicide seemed to be really undone by their gifts.  Normal Mailer just before he died, in the last interview, said 'every one of my books has killed me more.' An extraordinary statement to make about one's life's work. But we don't even blink when we hear somebody say this because we've heard that kind of stuff for so long and somehow we've collectively internalized and accepted this notion that creativity and suffering are somehow linked, and that artistry, in the end, will somehow always, ultimately, lead to anguish.

And the question I want to ask here today, is: Are you guys all cool with that idea?

Elizabeth Gilbert is the author of Eat, Pray, Love, a beautifully written, thoughtful, biographical travelogue, sort of. I liked that book so much that I was happy to click on Bob's link and see what she had to say. She has a fascinating new — old actually, more than new, but for that you'll want to listen to her — angle on creativity, work involving creativity, the pressure of the last successful work, and the value of showing up. This is really worth watching. And, by the way, if for any reason you don't see the video here, you can click here to go to the source.

Thanks to Garr Reynolds on Presentation Zen. I don't feel like I need to add anything, just watch the video. You can click here for the YouTube source page.

I found this interesting. It was in David Pogue’s column last week. He’s the New York Times Technology writer:

Q: David: I’ve noticed this for a year, and have not been able to get Microsoft to change it: Type "Obama" or "obama" in Microsoft Word or Outlook, and the spelling checker recommends "Osama" as the corrected spelling. How could this continue month after month, especially now that Mr. Obama is likely to be the Democratic candidate for president? Hope you can connect with appropriate folks at Microsoft and get this changed.

A: Well, it does seem like a silly glitch. But I’m not sure even I could convince Microsoft to release a new version of Microsoft Office software just to correct a single entry in the spelling dictionary. But if it helps, here you go: How about it, Microsoft?

I like this label. My wife bought this cheese yesterday at the local farmer’s market that runs on Tuesdays in the summer. I apologize for the quality — not the best scan — and in case you can’t read it, the main text block on the label reads:

"Freedom from hunger & thirst, freedom from discomfort, freedom from fear & distress, freedom from pain, injury & disease, freedom to express normal behavior."

Not bad for a piece of cheese, no?