Dante Murphy — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 15:25:48 GMT

Erin-

Nice job describing the ethos of becoming a successful manager of design professionals. While I agree that the primary objective of a manager is to delegate work and provide opportunity for staff members, I also fnid tremendous value in continuing to work on a diverse cross-section of projects as a contributor. The key is to make sure that management tasks and objectives are met before rolling up your sleeves.

It’s also important not to “cherry-pick” taking the most interesting or high-profile projects away from your team members. If you are going to step on the field of play, try to do so as a role-player, delivering great design (as you should) why learning about the process of design and the corporate culture from a first-hand perspective.

This is a technique that is proven to be effective by companies that require all staff members to periodically work in the company call center, getting customer feedback first-hand and learning about the challenges of after-market support. The investment company Vanguard requires everyone to participate in what they call “Swiss Army”, from the CEO down to the entry-level staff. It’s become a keystone of the corporate culture.

I would also add a couple suggestions to your article. The first is to dedicate more time than you ever did before to reading and attending industry events. A big part of leadership is constantly expanding your professional vocabulary.

Thanks for posting such a well-crafted article.

Dante Murphy

Dante Murphy — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 18:49:18 GMT

Nice article, Patrick. A very good conversation starter on a ubiquitous problem.

Having just seen the BumpTop demo I can’t help but think that there’s another dimension at play in achieving peak productivity, in finally getting “organizized”. And that is to take al the rich information associated with single objects and begin to apply them to groups of objects, either permanently or as temporary instances.

If I envision the BumpTop dektop metaphor as a portable workspace (which I do, because I am a dreamy sort), then I can use their “pile” interaction to create homogeneous collections of objects and begin to apply enriched labelling and metadata to this temporary collection. Because BumpTop is a platform already (albeit for tablet PCs only), the only remaining hurdle is to extend the object model to include all the whiz-bang features of Flickr, del-icio.us, Gmail, etc.

Who knows when, or if, this will happen, but after years of wandering in the same dark forest you portray I can at least say I have a vision of one possible solution.

Look forward to reading more about everyone else’s.

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Dante Murphy