Switch came in the mail the other day – and I haven’t wanted to put it down since. The only reason I have is that I have a feeling that there is a relationship between the small chunks  of time and the way their message sinks. I want this was to go down to the base.

Using a metaphor of an elephant and a rider – the Heath brothers create their next hit. Following up Made to Stick wasn’t easy, but somehow they managed to meet expectations that were unusually high. They look at cannons of research on change and what is required to bring it down to a simple framework: the rational + the emotional engine + a plan of action that is situation-ally adapted = the change we are searching for.

I’m finding the most nuggets in the place where I’ve spent the least time – the emotional engine. Where authors like Steven Pressfield have focused on what gets in the way – resistance – the Heath brothers side up with Marcus Buckingham and focus on what works. By focusing on where the emotions all align and the mind is unleashed into a torrent of creativity may be the best thing that I’ve ever done for my career. It also helps me to understand what isn’t working by understanding what is, rather than trying to look at what isn’t working to find out what should be done.

More tomorrow – but in the meantime, go buy it from Amazon or any other bookseller.

As with many books, starting at the back sometimes is the best way to dive in.

Jeff Howe lays out a few concrete rules for Crowdsourcing in his book.

1. Pick the Right Model

   Whether doing crowdfunding, crowd creation, crowd voting or depending on the crowds for wisdom – know what you are trying to use the crowd for. Some mixture of the models may be required, but make no mistake, know what the ask is.

2. Pick the Right Crowd

   He quotes Alpheus Bingham, founder of Innocentive, saying that the ideal base for a crowd sourcing program is five thousand people. If you can get 1% of 1% of 1% of the people with Internet access to join your crowd – you still have twice as many people as you need. (Starting with 1 billion.) Know the channels to reach your crowd, give them a way to see each other and then let the crowd rock.

3. Know your crowd.

    

   What do they want? A chance to become immortal? A chance to work on a task bigger than themselves? Are they in it for the love of the game? Are they in it so they can make a little money?

    

   If you know why they are there, you don’t have to risk offending them and having them burning any bridges of a successful future as they go. Stymie the crowd and they’ll burn the bridges as they cross back to where they came from.

    

4. Don’t turn to the crowd for things that staff should do.

   The crowd has jobs already. Even if they are passionate about their jobs AND your project, you have to realize that doing crowd sourcing is never easy or cheap. It requires a lot of guidance, editing and sifting. It will take a lot of work from the leader to source the crowd and shouldn’t be viewed as a way to staff out jobs. It won’t work.

5. Everybody needs a little leadership.

    

   Even if you want the crowds to assume some control and run with an idea – they are going to need a leader. Everyone needs a little leadership and crowdsourcing is no exception. Take the Linux community, Linus Torvalds was fantastic about shaping that community while pushing the open source dimension. Put in a layer of administration and community leaders – then they know which way to go and run.

    

6. Make it simple, make it easy.

    

   The crowd isn’t stupid, but they do like simple. So when you are asking for help, make the response easy to give, require as little response time as possible and make it high reward. Let them see a high output to the amount of time and interest they put into a job.

    

7. Sturgeon’s Law – 90% of everything is crap

    

   So it is with crowdsourcing. There will be a lot of junk out there – as long as the barrier to entry is low. Don’t look at crowdsourcing as a way to get better ideas in the same proportion – this is the opposite of Chris Andersen’s Long Tail – it takes awhile for gold to arrive. The point of crowdsourcing is that it provides a way for the gold to get to the miner’s pan, when it might not have another way. Think of it as Srinivasa Ramanjuan writing a letter and ending up at Cambridge.

    

8. How to fight the crap – use the crowd again.

   We don’t all know what crap looks like when we see it, but it doesn’t take much expertise to be a critic. This is why there are more people out there destroying the beauty of art than making it – critique is easy when done badly, difficult when done well. Kind of like performance reviews. But, I digress. Let the crowd sort through its own content and determine whats being kept.

9. Trust the masses.

   I was involved in an experiment once where we all had to guess the amount of money in a jar. Surprisingly, the crowd of us (35 people) guessed the right answer on average, while I low balled it by 50%. If you are going to have a leader, they have to lead through persuasion and moral authority – but never can they lead through absolute authority.

10. You work for them.

    The crowd doesn’t work well for dictators or tyrants. But they work great for themselves. If you give them what they want, they are sure to work long and hard to get the reward they seek. As an old b-school professor put it, make sure that everyone’s interests are aligned.