technology

Flipping The Master Slave Relationship

Howard Lieberman

The complex choreography between innovators and technology gives rise to many different types of dances. At times engineers invent what they would like to have, without inquiring into the needs of customers. As the story goes Henry Ford once said said “if I asked them what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse”. Many technology driven enterprises over the years have adopted this stance on the product development dance floor and to great effect, both good and bad.

For example, it is doubtful that Steve Jobs ever asked the world if it wanted a retinal display, an iPhone or much else. On the other hand, Video Cassette Recorders  designers did not realize that almost no one would be willing to program the VCR system clock, which resulted for years, in a usually red flashing 12:00 in hundreds of millions of homes. When engineers design consumer electronics products, it is never the goal to make everyone who uses them feel stupid, yet this does happen too frequently.  The same could also be said for many of our online interactions. We have to gird our loins before beginning some routine tasks that we suspect are going to take an hour instead of a minute.  Some of the time things work really well. This should be the rule not the exception.

For all of us, it feels terrible when machines undermine our self esteem. In recent years we have been told that product development has become market driven. Based on the number of brain dead products we all have to deal with, one might assume there is a very large market for self esteem damaging equipment. As computer processors are now found in everything, from cars to thermostats, humans have learned to adapt to the demands of their gear. This is surprising in that digital systems inherently have a great ability to adapt to our needs. Somehow, it is now the end user doing the adapting to the technology instead of the other way around.

As a technical person myself, I find it crazy that in many situations, people have become slaves and somehow made machines masters. How many people experience incredible frustration when trying to use phones, computers and other consumer electronic devices? The time is overdue, to Flip the Master Slave Relationship between technology and people.

As SVII enters our tenth year of helping Innovation Advocates at all levels, from the largest entities in the world to solo emerging startup entrepreneurs, to “Turn Vision into Value”, it is time to resurface some of the more important themes we have been addressing from the very beginning.

This is a call to all innovators, to try harder to make sure, while we are in the process of inventing tomorrow’s systems, to prevent these products from making customers feel stupid. Yes this takes extra effort to put oneself in the place of others, and some of you may say “this is too hard, too time consuming and too costly” and “our competitors do not care because that is just the way things are”.

Let me present exhibit A for Apple. One of the reasons Apple has become the most valuable company in the world, is Apple and other successful companies try harder to make it much easier to use their products. This philosophical stance is what Apple’s imitators should be copying not only specs and designs.

Delivering this additional value can take longer, but isn’t it silly for us to have to adapt to the devices and systems we are creating?

OCT 1st 2014: Getting More Done With Less Work

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Avoid the unrecognized costs of technology innovation culture.

This discussion led by Dr. Greg Marcus is on whether long work hours are necessary for a better end product and if the longer hours are desirable. While working longer hours people often make more mistakes as their minds are not in top form due to fatigue. This workshop hopes to help business owners and workers alike create a healthier work environment.

The Paradox of Silicon Valley: The very culture that spawned some of the greatest technological innovations in history has come at an unrecognized human cost. Many of the people powering the engine of innovation have developed a single-minded focus on their work, leading to long hours, strained relationships/alienation from people closest to them, health issues, spiritual angst…On the business side, there is introvertible evidence that overworked people have lower creativity, make more mistakes, and have more health issues, and a higher turnover rate.

The October roundtable discussion will examine whether long hours are necessary or desirable when attempting to achieve spectacular results. 

High performance requires both inernal and external balance.  Balance is best achieved through integration, not just juggling incoming requests, and integration presumes some proficiency at context management. Are you the one managing your context or are you allowing some other party with perhaps different priorities than yours to manage your context? The speed of Silicon Valley can cascade complexities more rapidly than individuals can process; Having some complexity processing skills can help.

SVII is returning to Angelica’s in Redwood City for this highly interactive session. Angelica’s extensive renovation has taken this already excellent venue up several notches to provide a very classy place for compelling dialog to occur accompanied by fine food and drinks. Join us for the first program of SVII’s fall season.

Event will take place October 1 at 6:30 PM (1st Wednesday) at: 

Angelica’s Restaurant 

863 Main Street

Redwood City CA

Appetizers will be provided; No host dinner and drinks will be available (and encouraged!)

Pre-Registration Tickets ($15)  – On SALE Now!

PANELISTS:

DR. GREG MARCUS

Dr. Greg is a recovering workaholic who helps the chronically overworked work fewer hours while thriving in their career.  In the process, he transforms stressed out people ready to jump ship into highly productive leaders who want to stay.

Dr. Greg has a Ph.D. in biology from MIT, and worked for ten years as a successful marketer in Silicon Valley. At one point, he was working 90 hours a week, which impacted his health, family relationships, and job performance. Then, he made a discovery that allowed him to cut his hours by a third without changing jobs. The secret? He started putting people first.
Dr. Greg is the author of Busting Your Corporate Idol: Self-Help for the Chronically Overworked and the founder of the Idolbuster Coaching Institute.

HOWARD LIEBERMAN

Chairman SVII and CEO Clear Capital Management

Howard Lieberman is a global innovation guide, executive consultant and popular speaker addressing innovation audiences around the world. He has been the chairman of SVII, the Silicon Valley Innovation Institute, a 501c(3) California Corporation since 2005.

Howard and his team have been solving innovation problems, initiating and guiding execution of innovation-critical initiatives, and crossing internal and external resource boundaries in order to accelerate scalable innovation and unleash innovation potential for decades.

Mr. Lieberman exercised his innovation chops through 20 years at Bose, Apple and DARPA, all top-of-their-field, world-class innovation cultures. As a physicist and electrical engineer he founded several technology-based entrepreneurial enterprises, and as the Dean of Cogswell Polytechnical College he created their innovation management program in 2000. Developing that program lead to the formation of SVII five years later, and also Cogswell’s current MBA program in Innovation Entrepreneurship. SVII has presented over 100 innovation programs covering a very wide variety of topics, and has offices in Massachusetts, New York and Silicon Valley. He is also the CEO of Clear Capital Management whose proprietary algorithms changed the curve relating ROI and Risk to outperform the market while simultaneously protecting assets through far greater due diligence rigor.

As an involuntary innovator and energetic multi-instrumentalist, Howard has also found the time to perform over 1000 times in the last 30 years as a jazz artist. And as an electro-acoustician Howard has also managed to professionally combine music and technology to pioneer multi-billion dollar markets.

BERNARD MONT-REYNAUD 

Extensive R&D experience in academia and industry: algorithm designer at large, with many specialties. Exploring systems with users (front), deep domains (back), challenging computations (middle). To keep getting better at it and have fun along the way.

Specialties:Designing and implementing fast algorithms to solve problems in real-time systems, search, graphs, optimization, media processing, professional audio editing, auditory modeling, tracking and source separation, dynamic probabilistic networks, media indexing, search engines.

After he graduated from Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, France, Bernard Mont-Reynaud did research at INRIA, then left for Stanford University where he obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science; his advisor was Prof. Don Knuth. He taught CS at UC Berkeley, until called to join research in music analysis at CCRMA. The analysis, visualization and perception of music and audio have been major themes of his work over the years, along with image processing, real-time systems and advanced UI design. Places he has worked include Lucasfilm, TDW, Xerox PARC, Studer Editech and FXPAL. He was also the Chief Software Architect at Sony’s “Super Audio Project” R&D facility in San Francisco. Dr. Mt-Reynaud is also an accomplished painter and musician.

MJ MONT-REYNAUD

Independent Documentary Filmmaker and Photographer

I am a lover of documentary film. I love telling stories and learning about the world through them. 

My work has generally focused on social issues, broadly speaking. My first film, My Mountain, was about rural Haiti, where I spent 5 summers and first discovered documentary film and photography. I have since been learning how to use these media for social causes via short form and long form film, non-profit and commercial work.

I also enjoy using film and photography as a means of expressing love. In that vein, I have made short films and photo montages for weddings, birthdays, bar mitzvahs, family reunions and the like. 

 

DARIUS DUNLAP

Darius is fascinated by technology that shapes our world, and by the connections it enables between people as they create and learn. He has a strong business foundation in international operations and management, product and service definition, and global business development as well as deep technical knowledge in internet technologies and across the hardware and software of computing systems from supercomputers to mobile devices.

Darius is a mentor to startup teams and an advisor to startup incubators, universities, growing companies and large enterprises around the world. He leads workshops on Customer-Focused Product Definition and Development, Innovation Management, the [LUXr method](http://luxr.co) for [Lean Startups](http://theleanstartup.com/), Business Model Analysis and Strategy using variations of the [Business Model Canvas](http://businessmodelgeneration.com), Innovation in Service Operations, Innovation in the Enterprise, as well as custom-developed programs.

Pre-Registration Tickets ($15)  – On SALE Now!

FEB 5th 2014: Real, Long-Term, Value-Added Innovation through Social Architecture

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All organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they get. Innovative organizations have social architecture designed to promote and support innovation.

In this discussion the relationship between social structure and innovative success is explored.

This February 5th SVII gathering is special – During dinner Founder and Chairman Howard Lieberman will be reporting on CES, reflecting on the state of innovation and the implications of the new technologies. The evening’s panel will take the game of innovation to a new level of purpose and contribution as four social architects share their insights on enabling organizations to multiply their ‘true-value-adding innovation’ – innovation that makes lasting, positive contributions to all impacted. Our panel will address two questions:

a)    What organizational design elements best support growing a culture of ‘true value-adding innovation?’

b)    How might existing organizations best go about growing such a culture?

Who should attend? The February 5th SVII gathering is intended for those organizational leaders, changemakers and practitioners who are intrigued with the possibility of multiplying their organization’s capacity to innovate — both in their products and services and in their social architecture.

This event will take place at 7PM at:

Hangen Szechuan Restaurant (2nd Fl), 134 Castro St, Mountain View, CA 94041

Dinner will be served!

Pre-Registration Tickets ($20)  – On SALE NOW!

PANELISTS:

BILL VELTROP
Co-founder & Senior Evolutionary Architect
Monterey Institute for Social Architecture & GlobalGEA.net

Email: bill@misa.ws  Phone: 831-462-1992

Bill is a senior social architect with extensive experience in the fields of organization design, learning and change. A pioneer in organic action-learning approaches to leadership development, he has designed and led numerous generative leadership learning expeditions. Bill’s professional background includes over 35 years of experience in leading innovative organization design and large-scale change implementations in the United States, Canada, Europe and the Far East, both as an internal at Exxon and later as an external consultant. Bill’s deep commitment is to the transformation of our social systems throughout our planet (education, health care, commerce, governance, media, etc.), in a way that best serves all life — for all time. His recent focus has been on helping corporations grow their system-wide capacities for distributed leadership, collaborative innovation, rapid learning and change.

 

MAX SHKUD
Co-founder & Social Architect
GlobalGEA.net

Email: max@globalgea.net

Max is a social architect and organizational innovator with extensive corporate experience in management, product development, and organization development and change. During his career at Snapfish and later HP, Max successfully led several large-scale, division-wide change initiatives focusing on business transformation and innovative organization design. In 2009, after completing an advanced degree in Organization Development at Pepperdine University, Max chose to dedicate himself to his deep passion for social architecture and generative organization design, which he considers his life’s work. In 2011, together with Bill Veltrop, he co-founded GlobalGEA and has since been co-developing highly generative, innovative approaches to organization learning and transformation.

PETER GAARN
Social architect
Monterey Institute for Social Architecture

Email: peter_gaarn@yahoo.com

Peter is a senior social architect with extensive experience in organizational design, organizational development, executive development/coaching, and strategic change management. Peter’s professional background includes over 33 years of experience in strategic change work, innovative organizational design, cultural transformation and executive development and coaching. Peter spent 25 year as an internal consultant/director at Hewlett Packard and Lockheed-Martin, and 8+ years as an independent consultant serving both profit and not for profit organizations. Peter has deep knowledge in high tech, manufacturing, education and most recently health care. In communities, he has worked at the intersection of local government, non-profits and educational institutions to improve and transform the systems and coordination between agencies to better serve their constituents. Peter is a co-founder of MISA, and has affiliations with The Piras Group and Sapience Networks (website currently not available).

 

STU WINBY
Founder, Spring Networks

Stu Winby is Founder of Spring Networks, an organization strategy and design firm and also Managing Partner of Innovation Point, a strategic innovation firm – both headquartered in the Silicon Valley. His focus over the last decade has been in healthcare and technology, working at the CEO, state and national level in healthcare innovation and transformation. His interests are in the design of dynamic networks as continuous innovation and productivity sources of advantage, and the management of innovation.

 

 

 

Internships

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ABOUT SVII:
Is Technology, Business, or the Arts the key to the future?

The answer is all three, together.

The Silicon Valley Innovation Institute (SVII) seeks interns to join a team of vibrant volunteers out to change the world through intelligence, soul, and action. Our mission statement at SVII is to “Turn Vision Into Value”, and as a community, to support other innovative kindred spirits to do the same. We represent the spirit of the Silicon Valley, and we believe in the power of innovation in paving the way of the future.

COMPENSATION:
– Unparalleled networking opportunities (Interact with accomplished entrepreneurs, artists, and some of the most brilliant folks from all around the Bay and beyond!)
– Add valuable experience to your portfolio/resume
– Complimentary ticket to SVII’s monthly innovation events
– Be a part of cultivating this globally influential community, and help to put on the most intellectually stimulating, and emotionally poignant events every month around topics relevant to innovators

ROLE:
You will report to the Executive Director, and will be responsible for one of the following sample sets of responsibilities within SVII’s operations:

Web Design / Development: Help to revamp the SVII website to even more accurately reflect the community and its members and activities.

Marketing/Community Ambassador: Strategize and implement (fun!) and creative ways to broaden our impact and grow our community; Think outside the box to bring our stellar monthly events in front of new audiences and potential kindred spirits

Social Media Marketing: Help to promote our monthly events, and raise awareness and brand recognition through social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Analytics, etc.)

Event Organization: A lot of details go into our monthly innovation events – Work with Executive Director to ensure that each monthly Wed event is logistically successful

Innovation Blogger: Create interesting and stimulating blog post recap of each monthly event; Contribute other blogs entries around topics in innovation

Video Production Team: Capture footage (AV) for monthly innovation events; Edit footage into a single attention grabbing short film that captures the essence of the evening (for distribution on the SVII website and promotion to the Silicon Valley and global innovation communities); Writers with ideas for more unconventional coverage videos also welcome

It’s hard to master innovation from school books. We will customize each internship position we fill to create the most suitable synergy between you and SVII. If interested, get in touch!