This is another great article about over working ideas. It’s something I see quite a bit in a corporate environment.

I consider myself a pretty good people manager but it took me a long time to become one. I’ve always been good at working with photographers but it took quite a bit of work to become good at managing the people under me and I only really figured it out in the last year or so.

The greatest piece of advice I ever read (out of 20 or so business books) goes something like this: Taking someone else’s idea and increasing the quality by 5% occurs at the price of a 50% decrease in their commitment to execution (here’s a recent explaination on the Harvard Business blog).

This is a huge problem in the publishing industry. Everyone tries to “add value” to everything: stories, photos, ideas, line-ups, headlines, cutlines, pull-quotes, captions, typefaces, colors and hairlines. If you’ve ever worked with an editor who makes slight modifications to every single effing thing that comes through the door then you know what I’m talking about. Your desire to execute is deflated because you no longer own anything thanks to the misguided idea that the readers will somehow notice a slight improvement in quality. They don’t. Half the readers were bought by the newsstand director anyways.

Photo editors know all too well of this phenomena that I call “shuffling the deck” where someone will come along and rearrange the photos and change singles into half’s and half’s into spreads all in the name of somehow improving the story. It’s not better, It’s different.

Some of my greatest accomplishments as a photo editor are a direct result of me doing nothing. See if you’ve got the sack to admit that.

If you want to make the magazine better do your job as well as you can and keep your mitts off mine.

You can find the article here.

This is a great essay by Paul Graham.

…A company that could pay all its employees so straightforwardly would be enormously successful. Many employees would work harder if they could get paid for it. More importantly, such a company would attract people who wanted to work especially hard. It would crush its competitors…

…If you want to go faster, it’s a problem to have your work tangled together with a large number of other people’s. In a large group, your performance is not separately measurable– and the rest of the group slows you down…

…The larger a group, the closer its average member will be to the average for the population as a whole. So all other things being equal, a very able person in a big company is probably getting a bad deal, because his performance is dragged down by the overall lower performance of the others. Of course, all other things often are not equal: the able person may not care about money, or may prefer the stability of a large company. But a very able person who does care about money will ordinarily do better to go off and work with a small group of peers…

My buddy turned me on to this site. It’s got some great articles and essays.

Here’s a quote from his quotes page:

“Don’t worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

- Alan Kay

I’ve been quite busy since the birth of my daughter in December. I have kept up my drawing but it’s been difficult to make time for posting. Once I have time, I’ll post some work.

I recently finished my illo for our illustration collective (GIANT illustrators) so I’ll post that when I get a chance, along with some sketches.

HAPPY 2008!!

Much to my surprise, I’ve been asked by the local chapter of the Screen Actors Guild to be the Visiting Artist at 2 local elementaries. My thoughts? I’M STOKED!!

This is absolutely wonderful. I love elementary aged kids. I still have fond memories of my experience in elementary. It’s still very fresh in my mind. The new discoveries of art, music, literature and so on. I’m looking forward to seeing my daughter go through that experience and be a part of it as a parent.

As exciting as it may be, I’m also quite nervous. It’s been a while since I’ve worked with kids (my first job was as an after school activity leader for Royal Palm Elementary in Miami) so I don’t know where to start. But luckily I’ve been given the teachers contact info so I can plan this out with them.

I’m looking forward to the experience and hope to have more of these in the future.

I’ll post a follow up and hopefully I’ll have pictures as well.