May 3, 2010
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Teach Engineers to Be Remarkable
Engineers are trained to deliver high quality, repeatable processes. That is very good.
But very good is not good enough in today’s marketplace. Books with titles like “Good to Great” and “Purple Cow” are rife with the sentiment that “good is the enemy of great” and “very good is not good enough.”
What is needed in today’s economy is to be remarkable. Only remarkable stuff gets people’s attention. Only remarkable stuff can survive.
Remarkable, incidentally, doesn’t mean the next biggest invention.
As Seth Godin says, remarkable is anything worth remarking about, worth telling someone else about. It can be a cool new product. It can also be the a wonderful interaction between a client and customer or between a project manager and team member.
It takes innovation to produce remarkable stuff. You have to take risks and put yourself out there. You have to be willing to invest part of yourself into the thing that you’re doing, make it personal.
So, the challenge for engineers, and the people who work with them i.e. entrepreneurs, managers, and a State like Michigan -that has more engineers than any other state, is to create an environment, a process that pushes engineers to not just be very good, to not produce testable, repeatable processes.
The challenge is to push engineers to be remarkable and produce remarkable stuff.
I don’t agree. I think being remarkable is overrated. I mean it is worth to be remarkable but it is neither the only way nor the crucial element on a way to achieve a success.
I’ve seen tens if not hundreds of projects which weren’t even very good. They were just good enough. They were about delivering predictable, yet boring, result. This was expected. This was delivered. Everyone was happy.
But yes, if you’re going to be the next Google, Facebook or Twitter you need to be remarkable in the first place.
By the way: looks like Seth Godin himself failed to be remarkable with Squidoo. The same as Guy Kawasaki with Alltop. How come?
In a competitive market, if what you are doing is not worth “remarking” about, not worth telling anyone about, you’ll have a hard time growing. If an employee has no-one to speak up on their behalf when times get time, they are likely to lose their job.
Likewise, in an economy in transition (like Michigan), the predictable is what failed. Delivering the same results, even high performing, high quality, minimal failure-rate type results, is not going to produce jobs, create growth or drive interaction.
You don’t have to be the next Google to be remarkable. You can just go above what is expected. Give more of yourself into your interactions with people, add a personal touch or meet your customers need in a way that shows you know them and care about them.
As far as Seth Godin with Squidoo and Guy Kawasaki with Alltop, nobody is right 100% of the time. They took a risk and tried something new. No guarantees. They had ideas and a willingness to give it a try, to create something that people might find remarkable enough to talk about, and spread to other people.
On one hand we have different perspective (US versus Europe), on the other software became global some time ago so differences aren’t that big.
I don’t deny being remarkable has value. But vast majority of companies/teams/projects/software I’ve seen isn’t remarkable and they grow. They bring healthy profit and new jobs.
There’s one thing which all these projects/teams etc have in common. They don’t build web based apps addressed directly to end-users. You might say that none of them is purely on B2C market.
When you focus on web apps for end-users only rules change and being remarkable is much more important, but still in many cases not crucial. Your life is your user base - if it doesn’t grow which means you’re (sooner or later) out of business. But don’t tell me that being remarkable is the only way of building user base because that’s just false. I use a lot of sites which aren’t remarkable just because I got used to or because of lack of other alternative. And that’s perfectly fine. What I expect from them is to be good enough. And I get what I want.
By the way: think about other things you buy. If you are in bakery business you don’t need to bake remarkable bread to have clients. On the other hand if you sell gadgets being remarkable can make or break your business. It all depends on market segment you live in. There are however more of these which allow you not to be remarkable than those which don’t allow so. Software is no different.
Remember the bell curve people.
It’s always shifting it’s centre and there are people and companies at both ends.
The baker down the street can only remain unremarkable until a competitor shows-up that starts taking business away. For years, where I lived, there was only one main bakery. Then a new bakery opened up that was completely “nut-free.” They didn’t use any nuts in their store at all. Since there are kids in almost every school that have a nut allergy, this bakery became the default choice for parents in the area. The nut-free bakery did something worth talking about, opened up a new niche in the market and took business from the other bakery.A business can only remain unremarkable until there’s competition.This applies to business customers as well as consumers. Every user matters and every interaction with a customer can be made to be something special.
True, Craig.But the idea behind being remarkable is that mass consumption is driven by early adopters who spread the word on great new products or services. Aiming for the middle of the curve fast becomes a commodity/price game where lower-wage environments have an instant competitive advantage.
My 2 cents : It’s a nice idea, and a great position to have, as a culture; in reality, as a manager, you don’t teach an Engineer to be remarkable.
At best, you can cultivate an environment which allows capable young engineers to become remarkable by themselves, and convince those who are older and already remarkable, to join you. The trick as a manager is to keep them.
I suggest instead, that if you want an engineer to deliver a remarkable solution, you should devise a remarkable solution for them to deliver.
Then, all they have to be, is competent.
Adam
Adam,
Absolutely, the goal is to create an environment where, by being competent, an engineer can be part of a process of delivering innovation.
The innovative solution may come from a product manager or visionary. Or it may come directly from the engineer, provided they’re given the freedom to take risks and to sometimes fail.