Check out this panoramic, high resolution image of the A380 cockpit: http://www.gillesvidal.com/blogpano/cockpit1.htm. Awesome.

This is another speech transcript from my old computer games days. At IG, we had a deliberate policy of working with major brands, including LEGO, Action Man, Frank Herbert’s Dune, Formula 1, FIFA World Cup and so on. Sometimes it was painful to compromise ultimate artistic freedom but there is a lot of creativity within the constraints of an existing brand. I think these lessons are the ones that serve me best in my post-computer games existence.  Writing for magazines like Wired and Popular Science and now for clients including eBay, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, the ability to understand what a brand means and how to really inhabit it and get the most out of it are very valuable skills.

Introduction

Intelligent Games (IG) has been around for the last ten years.  About three years ago we deliberately adopted a strategy we called "hit driven, brand led".  We aimed to be the developer of choice for brand owners.  This strategy was based partly out of fear - our original plan of developing original products seemed to be failing - and partly out of opportunity - we saw this as the way the whole industry was headed.  It has been an enormously successful strategy for IG.  This article is an post-mortem, from a brand point of view, of the first two products of this strategy:- Dune 2000 which we developed for Westwood Studios and LEGO Loco which we developed for LEGO Media.  These two products, combined, have sold in excess of one million units.  My intention is to look at both products’ histories and identify what went well and what went badly to derive some ‘take-home’ lessons for other people attempting a brand-led development strategy. 

What is a brand? 

Don’t worry this isn’t Marketing 101!  We set ourselves some targets to help us identify what ‘brand-led’ actually meant.  We had been badly burned by developing a Waterworld game.  Clearly that was a famous brand but for the wrong reasons.  We wanted to identify brands that would lead to hits.  Our definition is quite simple, to be an attractive brand for IG, it must be either 1) a gaming franchise that has had cumulative sales of over a million units (e.g. Tomb Raider, SimCity, Command and Conquer) or 2) a non-games brand with proven throw weight and relevance for the game we were developing.  Examples of the later include: celebrity endorsements like Tiger Woods, sports governing bodies like FIFA or NBA, commercial brands like Coke, Fox, Nike and finally cross-overs from other media like books, films, toys and games, such as Dune or Action Man.

Why work with brands?

I think everyone who reads this would like to own a hit-generating brand, so the obvious answer that everyone can relate to is that they make money.  But why?  I think, in this industry at least, it is because they create confidence in the product with consumers, retailers and - from a third party developer viewpoint - with publishers’ marketing and sales departments.  The first major game that IG developed was SimIsle for Maxis with a budget of £120,000.  Many of our current projects, only five years later, have budgets ten times that amount or more.  This is an industry-wide trend.  Even worse, there are many, many more titles on the shelves than can ever recoup that kind of investment.  Publishers used to be able to afford to bet on ten SimIsles and hope that one or two would break through, but they can’t afford to bet on ten times ten.  With a good branded product, a publisher can more accurately predict sales and justify investments because they know that they work.

This is a fairly cynical, and perhaps depressing, view of the games industry.  There are, of course, other very compelling reasons for branded products.  They stand out on the shelf to bewildered consumers because they are recognisable.  The brand makes a promise to the consumer about the quality, authenticity or content of the game.  They help people know what to expect - everybody knows what a Tomb Raider game is going to be like when they buy it.  No existential angst at all for the consumer!  No wonder EA calls locking in brands ‘winning the air war’.

If any further evidence were necessary, look at the UK charts on the 12th January (the time of writing!): of the top twenty, only four are unbranded or original titles.  Alternatively, look at the PC best sellers in 1998 (gleaned from PC Data’s website).  Of the top twenty titles, only four were really original.  I suppose I should own up and say that I am lumping any deer-hunting game together as a single original title since there are three of them in there.  You can do a similar exercise on any recent chart table.

Why shouldn’t you work with Brands?

Some brands don’t add value, don’t increase recognition or confidence and some brands generate an enormous amount of compliance work.  For example, any title based on TinTin must only use artwork generated by the author and cannot use any new images that did not appear in the books.  This makes it pretty much impossible to do a TinTin game.

From a business point of view, it is possible to argue that owning the IP in a hit game can be enormously profitably and valuable.  There are lots of examples of companies being built (and bought) on the back of the creation of a single, strong franchise.  Most of them are owned by EA now.  However, our view is that your chances of creating a hit in the first place are very limited, and in order to secure the funding needed to do it you probably have to give up ownership in other ways, for example to get venture capital funding. 

A last reason not to work with brands is that they are perceived by some developers as being restrictive of their creativity.  I think this is only partially true and what they take away in one area, they give in another; but I shall come to that later.

Dune 2000

We were originally asked by Westwood to pitch for the opportunity to ‘bring Dune 2 up to Red Alert standards’ as a kind of data disk or ‘gold’ release.  We started work  in September 1997 with a target release date ten months later.  As the design and prototyping progressed, it became clear that we weren’t going to be able to reuse the original Dune code which was long past its sell-by date and we weren’t going to get our hands on the Red Alert source code which Westwood (rightly) considered to be their crown jewels, so we set about writing the game from scratch.  Along the way, we (meaning mainly Westwood!) decided to add new features to the game like 4-way Internet gaming, sixteen bit graphics and a host of other small feature improvements.  In any case, although the original request was for an update, there were a host of expectations within Westwood.  Most of them were to do with making the game a worthy Westwood title, reaching Westwood’s standards in the art, being an honest addition to the Dune franchise (explained always as ‘being true to the fans’) and applying the lessons of Westwood’s enormous experience with C&C and Red Alert.  In some ways it was the weight of C&C and not the Dune brand that bore down on us the most.  It resulted in a lot of compliance work and much reworking, and reworking and reworking of art, features, and balance issues. 

Westwood were used to dealing with internal teams where the level of quality could be absolute and the resources and schedule could be made elastic to fit.  This is not the way of IG, where budgets and hence schedules are fixed.  We must have seemed quite inflexible to them and they seemed unreasonably demanding to us (especially to the more put-upon team members).  However, we worked out the practicalities of the schedule and budget (and added resources and money of our own) so that we could respond to their requirements.  And so that I am not misunderstood, their unrelenting quest for quality was also an inspiration and a compliment to us and stood in complete contrast to the benign (and occasionally malign) neglect we had experienced on our previous, non-branded titles.

LEGO Loco

The original concept of LEGO Loco was a simple, 2D desktop LEGO railway set.  It was aimed at the screensaver and ‘dogz’ end of the market as a simple, constructive toy.  We had had the benefit of doing another design for LEGO in Denmark earlier in 1997 and, in doing so, had been exposed to, or perhaps more accurately, indoctrinated in, LEGO values as part of that project.  LEGO Loco embodied these values: it offered endless play, it was fun for boys and girls, it was a system of play without any victory conditions etc. etc. 

At the same time we were designing the game for LEGO Denmark, LEGO Media in London were working out a strategy for LEGO interactive entertainment that went in a very different direction.  It was 3D, it was multi-player and it was games.  When they came to the project they grafted on their own ambitions and agendas.  At their request, we added a print studio feature, the ability to link train layouts over a LAN and the ability to send postcards by train over the Internet.  This doubled the size and cost of the project, without, in my view, adding a single sale.  Suddenly, Loco had a more complicated LAN / Internet component than Dune 2000!  Apart from this, we had almost no other input from LEGO and the design we released in November 1998 was almost exactly the design we had written up in September 1997.  This was a result of completely understanding and buying into the brand values of the original toy.  We didn’t need to be told, for example, what colours we could and could not use or that LEGO trains don’t actually kill people when they crash.  It was also, in part, because the development went very smoothly and the product was not overly complicated (outside the communications elements).

Lesson One: Live the Brand

The first step is to get the right team on the project.  There’s no point having people who want to develop first person shooters work on a kids title like LEGO.  The good news is that there are very excellent developers - some of IG’s finest - that genuinely want to work on these kinds of projects.  Equally, don’t put them on a cutting-edge real-time strategy game. 

Secondly, manage the communications within the team and to the client so that they embody the brand values.  This adds to the client’s confidence and helps reinforce the brand within the project.  On our LEGO pitch we enclosed a picture of the team where their faces had been mapped onto LEGO Minifig bodies - silly but it made a point.  On our more recent Action Man title for Hasbro we prepared our proposal as if it were a mission brief for Action Man himself, complete with bullet holes and camouflage.  We deluged the LEGO team with LEGO bricks and models and LEGO posters and our Action Man team room looks like a shrine to Action Man (or should that be an aisle in Toys ‘R Us). 

Thirdly, the best brands have these attributes: they are grounded in their own history, they take themselves seriously (in most case without being sanctimonious about it), they have a distinct philosophy and their own sense of identity.  The best brands say something about you if you choose to buy into them.  I went on a seminar given by Charles Carney of Warner Brothers at the end of 1998 when we were working on a design for a Looney Tunes game and he gave me the best example of this when he talked (humorously and with great respect to both sides of the debate) about the difference between Disney people and Looney Tunes people. 

Disney People                                                    Looney Tunes People

Rhyme                                                              Rhythm

Waltz                                                                Rhumba

"And they all lived happily ever after"                     "Of course you know this means war!"

"When you wish upon a star"                               "That’s all folks"

I could go on - the list was long and exhaustive.  However, you can use the values and identity that the brand creates to build a team identity and project loyalty as well as ensuring that the game itself embodies them.  Carney also showed that to make it work, you have to make it fun. 

Finally, you have to share the business realities.  Otherwise, it all seems like pap.  Developers aren’t dumb - they know we’re here to make money and they know that making hits is better than not making hits.  However, you need to give them data that support this.

Lesson Two: Be Canonical

Our objective is to know the brand as well as we know our code - to be more royalist than the king.  If you don’t get any feedback, you know you’re doing it right.  For instance, for Dune, we all played the original game extensively, watched the movie about a zillion times, read the books and - as Westwood’s expectations became clear - the team also studied C&C and Red Alert.  Several times we were able to tell Westwood how a particular feature worked when they had forgotten or got it wrong.  By the way of practical advice, this needs to be done diplomatically if you don’t want to practice holding a rattlesnake by the tail!  On the Looney Tunes project the entire team watched about 600 Looney Tunes cartoons to make a list of what characters could and could not do.

Lesson Three: Creativity within Boundaries

While working with a brand can constrain the scope for originality on a large scale, yet it provides many opportunities - or challenges - for developers.  When we were told that Yosemite Sam isn’t allowed to shoot his guns anymore (I guess this is a kind of displacement gun control), we came up with the solution that he would draw his gun and pull the trigger, but when nothing happened he would get so frustrated that he would throw his gun at his opponent instead.  This seemed to be very in keeping with his enraged character and much funnier at the same time.  Another, similar example is in SimIsle where you could fire your employees by clicking on a gun cursor and shooting their onscreen icon.  Maxis, like LEGO and like the new, PC Looney Tunes, don’t have guns; so we changed this to a Monty Python-like ten-tonne weight falling on the hapless employee instead.  Again, acceptable and funnier.

As an aside, there is an example of this not working very well.  In LEGO Loco, most of the buildings have easter eggs of various kinds.  One simple one was that if you clicked on the statue of a Viking Brunhilda warrior maiden she turned round and did a moony (is that an Anglicism?  It means flashing your buttocks).  Anyhow, the boss of LEGO - being a relaxed Scandanavian - thought this was hilarious and loved the feature, but when the sales people saw it they made us take it out immediately.  So there are limits to creativity after all!

On a more serious note, working with brands which have established art styles presents a major artistic challenge.  For example, recreating famous images like LEGO, Action Man, Bugs Bunny in a different medium (be it 2D or 3D art, with or without animation).  It may not be as much ‘fun’ as animating your own creation but it is every bit as professionally demanding, and probably more so.  In our experience, Westwood had higher art standards than we thought were humanly possible.  It was a challenge meeting their expectations – like training for the marathon – but a huge satisfaction when we finally won the race.

There is also the opportunity to re-interpret the form of the game, even if you can’t change the content.  Westwood’s Monopoly product allows you to do things with Monopoly that you can’t do with the paper game – such as play against people across the world with different languages or play the game very quickly.  There is no great art without constraints.  I expect that Michangelo would have been happier if he had painted the Sistine entrance hall and if he hadn’t had to lie on his back with paint dripping in his eyes for three years but without the agony, there would have been no ecstasy. 

Conclusion

I believe that there is a seismic shift coming in the games business.  Developers need to become trusted service providers and developer value will come from consistent, high quality service.  Working with external IP is just part of the job.  In most other areas of software people either don’t own the IP they generate - any bespoke database or business engineering software house, for example, pretty much does work for hire - or they can’t wait to give it away for nothing, like Linux, Internet Explorer or Star Office.  Value and profit come from fees, services, support, licensing, online and, of course, explosive P/E ratio growth.

From our own, more local, perspective, a brand-led philosophy has been a great success for IG.   I respect anyone and everyone who rejects it and tries to plough their own furrow, but our experience is that, given the right conditions, people and management, brands work.

Marketing matters. Even for freelancers. Especially for freelancers. Here are the things that work for me:

1. Wake up!  No marketing = no business. This realisation is the necessary starting point.
2. Brand you. For freelancers, Tom Peters’ book The Brand You 50: Reinventing Work is fundamental. You are selling yourself as much as your time and services. Everything you do is marketing.
3. The Trusted Advisor. David Maister’s book (The Trusted Advisor) is full of good advice for freelance consultants and professionals.
4. Allocate time. It’s really important to carve out time every day to do some kind of marketing activity. It’s also important to dedicate a day or two every month (more if you’re starting out). There’s are no big bangs in marketing but you can make the universe expand steadily.
5. Daily pitch. The daily pitch is something that worked really well for me when I was a journalist. I’d just email an editor with a story idea once a day. Now, I try to contact a customer or prospective customer every day in one way or another. I might try to set up a meeting, make a call, send an interesting link etc. Sometimes, it’s just about keeping the lines of communication open. It’s all about personal contact.
6. Keep marketing when you’re busy. The biggest mistake I regularly make is to get so busy that I forget to market myself. When you’re busy, you need to be lining up the next deal so you don’t have any downtime. (It’s like the farmer with the leaky roof. When it’s raining it’s too wet to fix it and when it’s dry is just as good as any man’s house.)
7. Meetings are marketing too. If possible, never turn down an invitation to a meeting. Sometimes, those tedious interruptions are your best marketing opportunities. Big companies love big meetings and they are a good way to meet new people at your existing clients.
8. Don’t be afraid. If you have confidence in what you do, there is no reason to fear being thought ‘pushy’.  Marketing isn’t like selling second hand cars. You are trying to reach people who NEED what you have to sell and who would be customers if only they knew you existed and could help them. I think perhaps this reluctance is a peculiarly English phenomenon.
9. Think about technique. I really like Chris West and Mike Southron’s Sales on A Beermat. It’s short (always good) and it contains really helpful tips about how to make a pitch and how to generate new business. One tip which is very good for initial contacts is to ask for a ten minute meeting to introduce yourself. There aren’t many people who can’t spare ten minutes if it might be useful to them.
10. Try different things. When I started Articulate Marketing, I hired a PR company, started a blog and ran some seminars. The blog was fun and helped a little.  The seminars were fantastic and generated a lot of business. The PR didn’t help at all. There are no guarantees in marketing and the best approach is experimental and based on evidence.
11. Keep track of pitches. I use Excel to track pitches and opportunities. I do this because I keep my accounts in Excel too (I know, my accountant wants to shoot me too.) But it gives me a single page where I can see my sales pipeline, orders, work in progress, invoices outstanding, VAT and tax liability. It’s like a business control panel. I get away with Excel because my business is relatively simple from a bookkeeping perspective.  (In my last business, I used Sage and had to employ a bookkeeper and a financial controller to tell me the same information and it was always about a month after the fact. Never again.)
12. React fast. It’s vital to react quickly to requests.  A good reputation in my business comes from delivering good quality work, on brief, on budget and above all on time.  However, occasionally, my clients need me to pull a rabbit out of a hat. Delivering a 2,000 word article over a weekend can save a client’s skin and people remember that stuff. In practical terms, it means being constantly available by phone and email, returning calls and emails promptly and occasionally working over the weekend. Importantly, it means seeing all this as a marketing opportunity not a huge drag.
13. Automate process.  I have a template for briefs which helps me produce a good, detailed brief for my clients very quickly. It saves them having to write it and it helps me look efficient and thorough. It’s all about thinking through the process in advance and automating or streamlining as much as possible.
14. Your obvious is your talent. An editor at Wired told me that if I wanted to write about everything, I had better be the best writer in the world. Better to be the go-to guy for aviation articles than a hack writing about every topic under the sun. As a freelancer, it’s really difficult to do everything well. Better to be a deep expert in one area and cultivate a network of agencies, friends and colleagues who can fill in the gaps.
15. Seminars. I ran ten or so seminars in 2006 and they brought in a huge amount of work and several new, big clients. I’m still dining out on the leads and goodwill they generated. It takes a bit of organising and you have to talk about something that a) is interesting to an audience and b) lets you display your talents without being too commercial. I’m thinking of running the seminars again but perhaps with more focus on social media and blogging.
16. Blog. My blog has only generated a small amount of work directly. However, it has been fun. It helped me refine and think through my ideas. It also helped establish my credentials when it came to pitching a couple of corporate blogs (see: www.hp.com/blogs/amibitiouscompanies for example). It has also been a very valuable aid to search engine optimisation.
17. Website. My website, www.articulatemarketing.com, gets many fewer visitors than my blog but I guess people who go there actually want to know about my business. The first thing most people do when they get an email or a pitch from a company is look up a website.  Companies without a website (or for that matter their own email domain name) look like small beer. 
18. Follow-up.  "Is there anything else I can do to help?" Doesn’t hurt to ask?
19. Add value. Setting up extranet to act as a library for deliverables and a way of sharing progress and deadlines with clients (I use Basecamp) is one easy way to add value. In my case, hiring a professional proofreader to check my paid-for work (but not my blog - I’m too cheap) and having proper professional indemnity insurance are two other ways.
20. Become an expert. Spend the time to understand your customer’s products and services. For example, I bought and installed Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 before I wrote about it and I am now the owner of a shiny collection of HP kit.
21. Upsell. Would you like to supersize that? There’s always some extra work or value you can offer. If they want a case study, why not offer a good deal on a PowerPoint ‘win card’ based on the same copy?
22. Attach.  Would you like fries with that?  If they want some website copy, why not offer them a website review as well?
23. Intra-company recommendations. My biggest source of new business is new people inside my existing clients. I don’t think it hurts to ask your customers if there’s anyone else they know who might be able to use your work. I find that the more work I do for a given client, the more connections I am able to make for them. For example, I can write about notebooks for HP but I can also link their services and so on because of other projects I’ve done for them.
24. Get rostered. This is the key thing with big clients. Once you’re a rostered agency, it’s easy for new people inside big companies to hire you. If you have a unique and valuable service someone will find a way to add you to the roster of approved suppliers. Finding such a champion and offering such a service is the right way to go about it. Going via the purchasing department or as a subcontractor to another agency is a guaranteed way to slash your margins. In my experience, it also constrains your ability to do the kind of good work that the customer wants.
25. Find a flagship client. I was very lucky to be hired by Microsoft for a project early on. A flagship client is like a passport to other companies.
26. Find a better market. I used to do a lot of journalism. In many ways it was harder than the corporate writing I do now. For instance, I had to spend a lot of time developing and pitching stories.  Also, there was a lot of people who wanted to be freelance journalists so it didn’t pay very well. The biggest change in my life came when I decided that I didn’t want to play that game any more.  Instead of free-pitching magazine editors for badly-paid articles, I switched to a different market altogether.
27. Stuff that doesn’t work: In my experience lots of stuff doesn’t help: fancy business cards, brochures, mail shots, random cold calling, PR.

I just came across this speech transcript when I was writing an earlier post about managing geeks. I wrote it about a decade ago when I was running IG, a computer games company. I’m sure that I didn’t always practice what I preached but looking back some of the points still seem pretty valid.

Target Audience

The core audience for this talk include development managers, project leaders, and game designers - people on the boundaries of development and management.  A broader audience includes any involved in game development who is interested in the development process as a whole (rather than functional specialisations within it like programming or scheduling) and how they fit into it.

Introduction

Creativity is the hub around which this industry revolves. We need creativity to come up with original game ideas, of course, but it goes way beyond that. Creativity produces effective programming solutions, innovative game play, better user interfaces, cool special effects, efficient optimisations, ever-better graphics and, ultimately, more customer satisfaction and therefore sales.  My premise is that creative genius is absolutely vital for successful games but that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum.  My talk will be about the balance and boundaries between creativity and management.

Sources of Creativity

In descending order of utility, this is a list of the possible sources of creativity in development.

1. The team
2. In-house producers
3. Client producers
4. Outside experiences (books, conferences etc.)
5. The rest of the world and then…
6. … Management

At IG, we believe in the primacy of the team as the source of creative solutions to their development issues and in particular we hold to the belief that management should design games.  We have learnt this lesson through bitter experience but also by starting from the principles of empowering individuals and delegating responsibility as far down the system as possible.

Ways to Obstruct Creativity

People get into this business because they want to be creative.  It is easier to kill existing imagination than it is to encourage it.  Here are some classic ways to pour cold water on bright sparks:

• Ignoring people’s input - especially when management overrides it.
• Alienating team members by allowing dominant people to control the creative process.
• Allowing people who are not directly involved in the process to dominate it (this is particularly true of producers and clients) rather than inform it.
• Not providing a forum for debate and brain storming.
• No discipline for agreeing and recording decisions.
• The tyranny of the weak - “it can’t be done because….”
• Messing up hygiene factors, such as pay, appraisals, expenses, promotions etc.  These can be strong demotivators.

Above all, though, it is a question of confidence.  It is very easy to slip into negativity and hard to break out of it.  “We can destroy ourselves with cynicism and disillusion just as easily as with bombs” (Kenneth Clarke).

How to Encourage It

There are many proven ways for management to encourage creativity in a team environment.

• Notice it
• Regular team sanity checks
• Reward it
• Systematise it
• Request it
• Delegate it
• Build individual and team ownership

In managing creativity, one of the key tasks of a leader is to understand the problem space and help people define it and then work within it to solve the problem .  The list above are all examples of how this works in practice.  The abstraction and objectivity of a partial outsider helps put creative issues into context and can help the team match the right solutions to the right problems and avoid false trails.  

The Role of Motivation in Creativity

Management textbooks and studies show that recognition, ownership, and responsibility are key psychological motivators.  The role of management here is to build them into your development process and make sure that your management structure permits and encourages them.  One of the most challenging aspect of this for a manager is learning to let go - being freer with information and delegating precious responsibility.  I want to cover two aspects in more detail: building a creative environment and build structures that nurture creativity.

Building a Creative Environment

Everyone in the company has a responsibility to build a positive culture within the company, but generally management takes the lead and senior management often sets the tone for the whole company.  It is also important to remember that in rapidly growing companies, decisions made early grow in effect in proportion to the size of the company and are often very hard to reverse later.  This is a list of some attributes of a creative environment:

• Tolerance of honest mistakes - providing people learn from them.
• Good timely feedback - people shouldn’t be expected to mark their own exam papers.
• Giving experience a voice.  It’s easy in a young industry for people to believe they know ALL the answers.  Better to learn whatever you can from others rather than make the mistakes yourself.
• Mutual respect.
• Everyone has fun.  Fun builds teams, self confidence, communication, morale and respect.
• Commonly accepted high standards - creativity doesn’t mean anarchy or lower expectations.
• Open to suggestions.
• Forums and rituals for communication (e.g. team brainstorming)
• Effective team behaviour

The sum of all these parts is a philosophy we call ‘Team Democracy’.  It has all the attributes of real-world democracy - freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, the right to a vote and (for Americans, at least) the pursuit of happiness - but it also carries some of the responsibilities and disciplines.  For example, you have to participate, you have work within its rules and you have to accept and live by the decisions of a majority.  It is interesting to extend the analogy to the role of management - in a democracy, people look to leaders not dictators to help them achieve their goals.

Team Structure for Creativity

A producer is ultimately responsible for the project’s quality and timeliness as the most senior manager who deals with the project and team on a daily basis.  S/he deals with project management and personnel issues, provides an objective viewpoint onto the project, is the main interface for the project to the outside world and acts as a ‘court of appeal’ for the team.

At IG, an assistant producer is a team member responsible for scheduling, testing and other project related administrative issues.  They also act as team archivist and general factotum.  It is important for the team to see these roles as an integral part of the development process and not as an adversarial, alien imposition and for this reason we insist on a peer-to-peer relationship between assistant producers and the rest of the team.

Each project needs a team leader.  At IG, where the size of the project and the experience of the individual merit it; a project has a ‘project director’.  They are always team members with a constructive role on the project, either as an AP, an artist or programmer, and their role is to direct the creative process and share the projects vision.  They are the focus of the team democracy process acting as chairman rather than president, as befits their ‘first among equals’ status.  They are also responsible for team morale, setting standards and being a figurehead for the project outside the team.  It is a demanding, diffuse and challenging role but also one of the most satisfying when done properly.

Building a team along these lines, in our experience, can dramatically improve a team’s level of creativity. 

Conclusion

We have found that creativity, like a flame, cannot exist in a vacuum - it needs the oxygen of discipline and the spark of leadership to exist.  Management has a central role in building a creative company but for it to be effective it has to work with developers to define the boundaries of responsibility, to build bridges between disparate functions and to build a team structure and culture that supports disciplined creativity.

Alexander Kjerulf is in the category of people who wrote their own job description and then people took them seriously. The self-described Chief Happiness Officer is working on the same "Happy People" project at HP as me and I really like his blog.

Like me, he comes from an IT background. I think is why I enjoyed his post: How NOT to lead geeks so much. In summary:

1. Downplay training
2. Give no recognition (I used to write handwritten thank you letters to team members when products shipped, but I wished I had given more recognition generally.)
3. Plan too much overtime (I was very guilty of this back in the day)
4. Use management-speak (see my old posts The Devil’s Marketing Dictionary Part One, Part Two and Part Three)
5. Try to be smarter than the geeks
6. Act inconsistently
7. Ignore the geeks
8. Make decisions without consulting them
9. Don’t give them tools
10. Forget that geeks are creative workers

Another common problem in my experience is "two peoples divided by a common language".  I wrote about Geeks: how to write for a non-technical audience and (in the opposite sense) How to write like a hacker.

Just as management-speak is inspires cynicism in geeks, techno-speak inspires fear in managers. I’m thinking of writing a post on this. Does anyone have good examples? Any good suggestions for bridging the gap?

Years ago, my laptop was stolen. It was a little Dell ultraportable PC with a black and white LCD screen and Windows 3.11. Someone pinched it when I was playing pinball in a pub.

Partly because of that embarrassing experience and partly because I write about security a lot now, I am increasingly concerned about laptop security. (See my article about new laptop with a fingerprint sensor and whole disk encryption.)

If you’re a writer or entrepreneur, your laptop is your life.

Anyhow, here are some links to recent articles on the subject that I wrote for my Hewlett-Packard blog:

• How secure are your company’s laptops?
• The price of insecurity
• Steve Gales on notebook security

Here is a list of the ten most bizarre things left behind on a London taxi:

1. A harp
2. A throne
3. £100,000 worth of diamonds*
4. 37 milk bottles
5. A dog
6. A hamster
7. A suitcase from the fraud squad
8. A baby
9. The original models for Wallace and Grommit
10. MI6 laptop with secret files

* I interviewed the cabbie who found them. Even though he returned them to the rightful owner, he didn’t get a tip. True story.

Anyhow, I promised some tips on keeping data on  your laptop safe and here they are:

1. Keep it backed up. I use Windows Vista’s Sync Center to automatically sync my work files with my server. I’ve heard Microsoft’s SyncToy and FolderShare are pretty good too. Failing those options, a detachable USB hard disk and a regular backup is another option. For routine backups, I use MozyPro which backs up my server over the internet to a remote, secure data store. It’s way easier than wrangling DAT tapes.
2. Encrypt your hard disk. I use HP’s ProtectTools because it came free with my laptop and I met some of the guys who test and develop it when I was in Houston last year. Microsoft Windows Vista BitLocker would also do the trick. (More advice about encryption, including a list of free software, on the excellent GetSafeOnline.org’s Use Encryption page.)
3. Use strong passwords. I recommend setting a boot password, especially on a modern laptop where it will be difficult to circumvent.  Similarly, use a strong password to log into windows. A strong password, as the class already knows, consists of a mix of upper and lowercase letters, numbers, punctuation marks and not whole dictionary words or easily guessed things. In Windows XP, set a password on the default administrator account but use a less-privileged user account for day-to-day work. In Vista, use UAC and, again, use a plain user account for normal work.
4. Be careful about what you copy. If you don’t have sensitive information on your laptops, it can’t be stolen.
5. Bag it up. Use a padded, drop-proof bag that doesn’t look like a laptop bag. I use a J. Crew satchel with a Tumi padded laptop holder as an insert. 
6. Security chains. I use a Kensington laptop lock when I’m in a hotel to chain my laptop to a desk. I’ve also seen USB alarms.
7. Don’t post your laptop.  Just because Apple’s shiny new Mac Book Air will fit in an envelope, that doesn’t mean you have to load it up with citizens’ private data and post it.  This means you HM Revenue and Customs.

We live in world of miscalculated risk. Here are some examples from my own experience:

• My friend used to take the London Underground to work every day. After the 7/7 bombings, his wife told him stop. So now he cycles to work.
• I have another friend who has two children. He and his wife refuse to get them inoculated against mumps, measles and rubella. Instead, they plan on an 18-year course of homeopathic ‘inoculations’.
• My wife will only buy a lottery ticket on a rollover week, when the prize is bigger.  (Coincidentally, her father was struck by lightning.  Twice.  And lived. So perhaps her family really is a special case.)
• I am a pilot flying light aircraft. The media report light plane crashes with the same fervour as big airliner crashes. Yet more people die on the roads in the UK every day than die annually in light aircraft crashes. Annual road deaths are never reported.
• There was huge outrage in the media about illusionist Derren Brown’s televised Russian Roulette. He’s too clever to take any chances at all but everybody fell for it.

So, I was fascinated to hear (from my chum Andrew - thanks!) about Dr. Frank Duckworth’s attempts to come up with a scale to measure risks. It is similar to the Richter scale for earthquakes.  Here it is:

• 8.0 Suicide
• 7.2 Russian roulette (one game, one bullet) [I don't think this applies to Derren Brown]
• 7.1 Continuing smoking cigarettes (male aged 35 - 40 a day)
• 6.9 Continuing smoking cigarettes (male aged 35 - 20 a day)
• 6.7 Continuing smoking cigarettes (male aged 35 - 10 a day)
• 6.4 Deep sea fishing (40 year career)
• 6.3 Rock climbing over 20 years
• 5.5 Accidental falls (new born male)
• 5.5 Lifetime car travel (new born male)
• 5.5 Dying while vacuuming, washing up or walking down the street
• 4.6 Murder (new born male)
• 4.2 Rock climbing (one session)
• 1.9 100 mile car journey (sober middle aged driver)
• 1.7 100 mile flight
• 1.6 Destructive asteroid impact (in the life-time of a new born male)
• 0.3 100 mile rail journey

Sources: The Sum, Chance News 7.11