No, for me, the second year blues really hit in. I was so upset and I don't know how I've managed to cope throughout second year. What? What are you both on about? What? Am I going to be okay? I'm literally going into second year now. That's right everyone. I'm here to tell you all about surviving second year and how to make the most of your year at university. And to completely ignore the negative comments that you might hear like those. Firstly, as always, there's a disclaimer. Now, what I experience in my personal life and what I do at uni is literally mine and my own journey. So before you listen to any tips, advice, any horror stories, just remember that this is your journey, your personal journey throughout nursing, throughout university life and it's how you deal with those situations and how you are as a person, not anybody else's. So please take that into consideration before you listen to anybody else. And also, I'm at Birmingham City University. So what my university does and the modules that we have might be completely different to what your university does. So just think about that as well while listening to what I'm about to say. Thank you. So I kept hearing these comments about second year being so hard. It's the worst year making or breaking point for some people. It's the workload goes up. It's horrendous.  I keep hearing these negative comments. So I went into second year thinking, oh my God, what is second year really going to be like? But do you know what? It's not that bad. It's not that bad. I've had a fantastic second year and the only tough time I've had is towards the end coming to the end of second year. The last few months have been really tough. I'm not going to lie about that. So basically the first half of second year for us, we just had one module, one exam and that's literally it. So the first half of the year was a breeze for us. We were just like, yeah, this is great. What's everyone moaning about? And then come back for the second half of the year. We were given all these different modules, all this workload. We had a care plan, a rationale to write, a mother and baby leaflet, a rationale to write, a poster presentation to prepare for. We had a maths exam. We had an anatomy and physiology exam. We had an assignment, 2,000 word assignment to do. All of this workload just thrown at us in the matter of a couple of months. We were all just like, oh my God, how are we going to do this? How are we going to manage this? But it's not that bad and I'm going to give you two tiny pieces of advice to survive in second year. And these pieces of advice can be input across any university, any person, any individual. These are just transferable advice and tip skills, whatever you want to call it. You can do this. My biggest tip is tip number one, be organised. If you're the sort of person that leaves everything until last minute, no. You're not going to survive second year. Get organised, get your stuff on the ball. Be prepared. Just you need that organisation because if you're lacking behind and you're doing all of that workload all at once, you're not going to make it. You're not going to get the grades and you might possibly fail. And I'm really sorry if that really breaks your heart. I'm really sorry. I don't mean to be horrible, but you need to be organised. Tip number two, prioritise. You want to look at your timetable, your assignment scheduler. Look at what's coming in when, where, what's coming first, what's coming last. Prioritise whichever is due in first. Whatever's first, do that first. Whatever's second, do that second and just do it bit by bit as it comes in. And if you do those two things, you'll be well away for second year. But I do want to say I have no children, no commitments, nothing. I literally have no life. So for me, the workload, the organisation, the prioritisation is easy. It comes easy to me. So if you're the sort of person that has children, you have family at home, you've got a hectic life, it might be a lot harder for you.  So they, they just have to sit aside for a second, which as hard as that might be because you have to look after your daughter, your son, all of your children. But you have to just say, do you know what, and need an hour, need an hour just to do this assignment, just to get started on it. Just please, everybody just calm down, sit in the other room and just need to do this or wait for them to go to bed, wait for them to go to bed, do your assignments then or get up earlier, an hour earlier, do the assignments then, do it in your breaks at university, do it in your breaks at work, do it on your, if you get the train or the bus, sit and do your work on that because that's an extra, I mean, for me, that was an extra hour on the way to university that I could just sit and do things on my bus. So it was just, it was nice. But I just, I just wanted to say that I do understand that if you have children and families, this can be really tough for you and you all deserve an extra qualification to say, do you know what, you're amazing, you're the superheroes of this world because it must be tough and I can't even begin to imagine how, how people fit this in to their busy lives. It was a lot of workload, there was a lot of revision, there was a lot of researching and there were times where I did struggle to find the research and things and I was tearing my hair out, but you just get on with it, you do it, you can, it's not as bad as, I don't think it's as bad as people make out.  I think that's a bit extreme but then it depends on the person, it depends on the university they went to, it depends on their workload, it depends on the children and the family lives. I can't say what you're going to experience, you have to experience it for yourself but just please get organised and prioritise your workload because that is going to save second year for you. The next thing I want to talk about is this second year blues thing that everyone keeps going on about and I'm just like, what are you on about? But now I actually fully understand the second year blues and for me, I don't know if this is for everybody but for me personally, I got serious second year blues after my poster presentation results and if you saw my vlog before, I was really upset with my result because it wasn't the result I wanted. It was a good result, I got 60% but it wasn't enough for me, I was expecting 70% at least for that module and I was gutted that I got 60% and I got really upset about it and for the next two weeks after that, I went really down, I went really, really down in myself, my self-belief, my confidence. I had such a tough time with it. I had to physically move myself out of the house because it got to the point where I was thinking, I don't even want to go out, I don't want to go and see anybody, I don't want to go to uni, I don't want to go to work, I've got to go to work today, I've got to put a smile on, how am I going to cope? I got really down about it and to be honest, this is the first time I've actually spoke about this because I haven't spoke about it on social media, nobody actually knows this yet, I didn't vlog about it because I didn't want to put any negativity or anything up there but it is important to realise that actually we're all human, we all get those down moments, we all get really frustrated with ourselves, we all lack confidence and self-esteem sometimes and it's okay to talk about and as long as you pull yourself through and get to the other side, stronger and smiling at the end of it is going to be fine. So what did I learn about those two weeks? I learned the second year blues are actually a real thing and I feel really bad that I judged anyone for saying this because I thought second year blues I'll behave, don't be so silly and do you know what? It is a real thing, it is a real thing and it won't affect everybody, some people have a great time throughout second year and they won't feel any stress, they won't feel any negativity, they'll breeze through it, they won't feel the second year blues at all but and I'm the most positive person in the world and even I felt it so if I can feel it, anybody and everybody can feel it and it is a very real thing but I just want to try and analyze it and think actually okay, why did I feel like that? So reflecting back on it initially it was the grade and because in first year you do so well you get the really good grades I got a first overall for first year, my grades went from 75% to 90%, actually 91%, there was a really good good grade in first year so coming into second year the level goes up to level five so the marking criteria goes up as well with it and what you necessarily got in first year isn't going to be the same as second year so it was a bit of a shock going down to 60% and that really hit me and it just made me feel like I can't do this, I can't be a nurse, how can I do this? I'm giving people advice and tips and things on assignments and everything and I've got 60%, that's not good enough and I really put myself down and I really beat myself up over it and I just managed to luckily climb out of that hole that I was in and just say, do you know what, it's okay and I did manage to pull myself out of it and carry on, get my head down, do better for my next lot of assignments because that really gave me a bit of a shake-up so I just went out and I tried to smash my next assignment, I haven't got my grades yet and getting my grades on Friday for my first assignment back, fingers crossed it's gonna be okay but literally apart from those two weeks where I did feel down and I beat myself up, second year has been amazing, it's been so good, the modules are fantastic, I've learned so much, growing in myself, confidence is just growing now as a nurse and the knowledge you gain from second year is just amazing and you start to put the theory into practice and everything's linking together, I have proper loved second year so please, I'm just gonna say it again, make second year your own and your own only, don't listen to the negative comments, don't listen to anything else, have this experience yourself and make the most of second year to really develop yourself professionally and personally. And that's literally all I've got to say about second year, I don't feel like I can say anymore just other than be organized, prioritized and make the most of second year and also get help. If you are struggling, please get help, seek advice from whoever you do at the university, please because you don't struggle alone, it's not fair, it's not nice and no one's gonna judge you for getting that help, so please do it. So that's it, so thank you so much for watching, thanks for tuning in, as always, don't forget to subscribe if you haven't subscribed and I shall see you next time.


This study examined the effect of metallic moieties on the thermoelectric properties of endohedral metallopholarine, EMF, complexes. The results showed that the charge transfer from metallic moieties to the EMF cage can be used to tune its thermoelectric properties. This article was authored by Majid al-Shamri, Turkey al-Ataibi, Motab al-Ataibi, and others.


Music as a medium is different. It allows artists to truly express themselves in a way that TV shows and video games just can't because unlike them they cannot be carried by perfect graphics or writing. There really is nowhere to hide on an album. That feeling of seeing the announcement of your favorite artist's new project which they most likely have put years of energy and work into. It's unmatched honestly. Unless they never drop it. Yandy! And what's the first thing you're likely to see before any leaks or snippets is likely to be the album art. Setting the tone and pace for the whole project before that first listen. It's the artist's job with the album cover to grab your attention and to persuade you to listen to their music. And that's the beauty of album covers.  You know be it about music or be it about media in general. I'm gonna need you to like and subscribe. The simple mathematics of the situation is that if you like and comment I may finally get a crumb of that algorithm juice alright? Okay alright. The way I see it there are two kinds you can fall into. You can think that album covers don't mean anything and that it's all about the music.  Don't let people tell you different okay? No matter how many pieces of art people produces. Or you can think that they go such a long way to creating that immersion and add to the storytelling of the album. Album covers are so important and powerful because of two main reasons. One they provide a physical representation that artists chosen to use for their album.  A bad representation of that can seriously damage your longevity and how people remember that album. Because in the world today if it doesn't grab my eye I'm gonna forget about it in two seconds. Secondly for that same image to add to the narrative and to the tone of that album. Reading into the themes and the topics discussed on the album prior to even sinking your teeth into it. Marrying these two ideas is extremely difficult and something you don't even realise most of the time. Until you take that further look into the covers themselves. More often than not containing such rich back stories which add to the texture and the understanding of that album. Which enhances that overall experience around it. When these two ideas that aesthetics and narrative are perfectly balanced it allows for the user to be completely immersed into this world that the artist has created. But without further ado let's talk about some covers. We started off strong with Watch The Phone. This album cover makes me feel like my name's Laurent. Cruising down the Monaco Highway in my new Lamborghini with a cigar puffing out my mouth. Just coming back from doubling my life's savings in the Monte Carlo. When in reality I'm in my pajamas on my third pot of instant noodles. It just oozes excellence and decadence which is absolutely everything the music is trying to achieve. The narrative of that album is playing into it as well. When you hear that opening line by Frank Ocean talking about what's a king to a god. At that exact moment you gain a better understanding of the album cover. It looks like a golden broil plate for royalty. Fully playing into the throne that Hove and Yeah are on. And I personally think that any other cover than this gold piece of extravagance would give that album a massive underwhelming feel. It's rare to see a cover just perfectly connect with the music. Now by far my favourite album covers are usually minimalistic. I'm thinking Jay Z's 444.  Just this tiny line at the top saying this is his 13th studio album.  Or like this quaint Welsh indie rock band Catfish and the Bottleman. Their first three albums all having these chalk drawings of symbols. Showing some continuity between the three. As all three of them explore similar themes and narratives. Ready to die. Mad villainy. Channel orange. Swimming. I mean even views by Jay. Where the cover is more interesting than the album itself. Or as we call it in the business the Drake special. All take this simple minimalistic approach. Which on their eyes is super pleasing for me. It's a sign of a great artist when they can say so much with so little. Yet remaining so iconic and engraved into my mind. That whenever I hear one of these tracks it brings me back to the themes and the colours of the cover. So I don't know if you guys would have picked up on this because I've been pretty subtle about it. But I'm kind of a Kanye West fan. And to avoid another 15 minute video I'm only going to talk about the cover of my favourite album 80 Ways in Heartbreak. Because it encapsulates everything I want in an album cover. First of all aesthetically it's beautiful. It's cold. It's dark. It's depressing. It's everything that the album strives to achieve. And secondly it does play into the narrative quite a bit. The first thing you notice about this is that it ditches the iconic dropout bear. Which was seen on every Kanye album prior to this point. Immediately highlighting the change of pace and tone on this album. Replace with this calming grey background. Symbolizing the emptiness and vulnerability of the album. Paired with a punctured balloon heart. Symbolic of Kanye's psyche at the time. Deflated and worn out. Telling you pretty much everything you need to know about the album at that first glance. There's a small colour palette to the left. And to the untrained eye it may seem like an odd decision. But there's a method to the madness. Kanye had a myth of having synesthesia. Which for those who don't know is a condition where information can stimulate more than one of your senses. A lot of musicians have this. And in this case it's where a certain song would make Kanye think of a colour. He could visualise it. So each one of the songs on the tracklist are represented by that colour chronologically. This was furthered by the vinyl to not only see the physical representation of the turmoil and despair that Kanye was going through via the cover. But for each one of these songs to have a colour attached to it that you can visualise while listening to the album. It's absolutely genius and is so creative. It really was so ahead of its time especially for an album that came out in 2008. And the colours don't lie. Heartless has this pale ghostlike colour of nothingness. Representing how frigid this girl was. Maybe even part of the coldest story ever told. I don't know. Whereas coldest winter has this muted red colour. Completely different to all the other songs on the album. And this is to show the outpour of emotion on that song. Now look. We've talked a lot about good album covers. Alright. But that's only one side of the coin my friends. All the Yin and no Yang. All Drake and no Ghostwriter. Okay I'll stop. I'll stop.   The artists have had to change them. Goat and human form. Oh god. It's just an abomination. I'm sorry.  Which isn't much better might I add. But at least I got this Narnia looking bum off my screen. Now you're thinking. It can't get much worse than this. Can it? Well ladies and gentlemen welcome Lupe Fiasco's Lasers. Or is it Losers? What does this really mean Lupe my boy? Please. I'm so confused. This is the album equivalent of a war crime. What have you done here? Your album covered to do so is so cool. It's so slick. It's so clean. How'd you mess this up?  It'd be surely. There can't be a worse goat theme album cover. Can there? Can there really be one more? This is the granddaddy of all horrible album art. If anyone wants to blame for the murder of Tupac it was the artist of this cover. Cause this man did not want to see music succeed. This man was trying to send us back another 10 years. These were all really painfully bad. But there's been a recent trend of just lazy half assed attempts at album art. So robotic and corporate just shoving them out. And it makes me feel so disincentivised to listen to the music. Even if it's good. Don't get me started on a whole lot of ed. On the other hand someone like Kid Cudi does maximally this cover so brilliantly. Man on the Moon 1 is bursting with colour and life.  Whether you like it or not it's got your attention with these bursting colours. And the way it plays into the themes of that album is brilliant. With Cudi feeling like an outsider and out of place. Symbolised through the moon. Man on the Moon 2 carries this idea forward and pushes it to its limits. Slumped over. Looking defeated with a glass of whiskey in his hand. A window of stars behind him not only staying true to the vibes that Cudi was going for at the time. But also again so out of this world. Similar to the music and some of the tracks feeling so extraterrestrial. And it already expresses someone the narrative of the album. With substance abuse. Feeling trapped in your own mind and suicidal thoughts all represented on the album cover. What makes the cover so good is that it's also open to interpretation. Some people have said that whiskey glass could be a gun. Everyone I've talked to about this album cover has had a different approach to it. And that really plays into the beauty of it. To conclude album covers are so important to your listening experience. And one of the most underappreciated byproducts of the music creation process. And in my opinion they make or break an iconic album for me. When I think of the albums I'm most emotionally attached to. All of them must have that good cover art. So that they stay in my mind throughout the day. They provide this immersion that nothing else in the music can. And that's why they're so different and important. Well this has been a man just talking about album covers for a pretty long time. And that's all I have to say. Thanks, like, subscribe and have a nice one guys. I'm done.


In this video, I want to introduce the idea of the orthogonal group, which is an important group of real matrices, and in order to do that, I want to remind the viewer of some important properties from linear algebra. So if we recall from linear algebra, the so-called transposition operator, the transpose map, it's typically denoted by some type of capital T, sometimes lowercase t, or some symbol that kind of resembles a t in some regard. And so if you have a matrix A, A transpose is you're going to switch all of the rows to columns and columns to rows. So if the typical element of your matrix is Aij, so this element Aij is in the i-th row j-th column, the transpose will interchange the roles of rows and columns. So the number Aij will then move, so the number in the i-th row j-th column will move to the j-th row i-th column, so those things go things get mixed around. Again, you've probably seen something like this before. You can click the link on the screen right now to see some examples of this if you need a little bit of a refresher. Some properties of the transpose operator I want to make mention here, that if you take the sum of two matrices and you take its transpose, this is equal to A transpose plus B transpose. So if you come down here for a second and you take the transpose operator, if you take the group R to the m by n, excuse me, with respect to matrix addition, so this is an abelian group, the transpose will convert this to the matrix group, I should say the vector space, Rn by m with respect to addition. What this says here is that because A plus B transpose is equal to A transpose plus B transpose, this tells us that this is an additive homomorphism. So it's a homomorphism with respect to matrix addition. Now when you talk about a set of matrices with respect to addition, it's not really good form to call it a matrix group, even though it's a group, matrix groups typically refer to matrix multiplication, so it might be better to call it a vector space, which it is. So the transpose with respect to matrix addition is homomorphic. The transpose also preserves scalar multiplication if you take R times, so R is just some scalar, so we can pretend it's like a real or complex number or whatever the scalar of the field is.  Now I should mention here that we talk about the transpose, although analogies of the transpose exist for basically any field, we probably are talking about the real vector spaces, real matrices in this context. For complex matrices, we never talk about the transpose, we talk about something else called the Hermitian transpose, excuse me, the conjugate transpose, that's usually what's called in generality. And then for other vector spaces, again, you can talk about transposes, but it doesn't have the same geometric benefit that does for the real numbers. So we are talking about the real numbers in this video as we lead to the orthogonal group. So if you put properties one and two together, this tells you that this map is actually better than an additive homomorphism, it's actually called a linear transformation because it preserves addition and scalar multiplication. So that's a property of this transpose. Some other things we see here, if you take the double transpose, you get back to the original thing, so the transpose is transpose is the matrix. So this says that the transpose as an operator has order two, something we also say about the determinant. The determinant is not affected by the transposes, and you can kind of get this from the usual Laplace cofactor expansions that I could cofactor expand any row or column and it would give me the same determinant. Well, if you switch the rows and columns, since you can still expand over any row or column, that doesn't affect the determinant. And the last thing I want to mention here is that the transpose satisfies the so-called shoe sock principle, that if you take A times B transpose, this gives you B transpose times A transpose. So with respect to matrix multiplication, this is not a homomorphism, but this is what sometimes referred to as an anti-homomorphism. It's homomorphic except it switches the order of the product. And if the operation's non-commutative like matrix multiplication is, then that actually gives you something different than a homomorphism. So the shoe sock principle we've mentioned many times in this lecture series, that is just sort of a mnemonic device to remember what's called a anti-homomorphism. It puts it in the wrong order. The inversion map of a group is, in fact, an example of an anti-homomorphism. So with the transpose now out of the way, that is, we've reviewed it. Now we're ready to define what we call the orthogonal group. The orthogonal group is typically denoted as O of N, but sometimes it's denoted as O sub N of R. This is to emphasize that the scalars in play are real numbers. And like I said, the orthogonal group can be defined using the transpose operator, which has analogies to other rings of scalars. So we can talk about orthogonal groups for other scalars other than the real numbers. But in the classical sense, the orthogonal group is always referring to the orthogonal group of real numbers. So oftentimes just O of N is mentioned. We don't specify the real numbers because it's inferred. Because if we're talking about the orthogonal group, it's got to be real numbers. Now the orthogonal group gets its name because it'll be the subset of the general linear group of orthogonal matrices. What's an orthogonal matrix again? Well, depending on your linear algebra background, there's a couple different ways we could have defined orthogonal matrix. How we're going to define it for this video is the following. We're going to use transposition to do this. So we define a matrix to be orthogonal if the transpose of the matrix is equal to the inverse of the matrix. So if the transpose is the inverse, then we call that an orthogonal matrix. Well, if the transpose is the inverse, that means the matrix has an inverse. It's a non-singular matrix. So every matrix inside the orthogonal group is necessarily non-singular. This is going to be a subgroup of the general linear group. All right, so that's something that should go without saying. Now I'll leave it up as an exercise to the viewer here to prove that this set of matrices is in fact a subgroup, right? It's closed under multiplication. It contains the identity matrix, and it also contains inverses. I'll let you double check that. The properties from the previous slide are exactly the properties one needs to prove that property, to prove that theorem, that statement right there. But like I said, this might not be the way that orthogonal matrices were defined in your linear algebra class. So we could define them as the transpose is the inverse. Another way of defining it is the following. You could say that q transpose, q transpose is equal to q transpose. So excuse me, q transpose is equal to q transpose q, which is equal to the identity, right? Now I do mention both of these because matrix multiplication is non-commutative. So just because one order goes one way doesn't mean the other order will be the same. So sometimes people take this as the definition. So if you multiply a matrix by its transpose and either direction get the identity. Now it's very easy to go from here back to here, right?  The q transpose is acting like the inverse right here, right? Because if I take q times q inverse, that should equal the identity matrix. So the transpose is acting like an inverse so you get this direction. And of course, if your transpose is your inverse, then since this statement holds, then this statement holds as well. So you can very quickly go back and forth between these two statements here. That the transpose being the inverse is equivalent to this identity right here. Now another statement, and this is often how I think orthogonal matrices are defined in a linear algebra setting in the following way. And this will suggest that the transpose is the same as the inverse. And this will suggest the name behind the orthogonal matrices. A square matrix u, square, of course, meaning it's n by n, the same number of rows as column, square matrix is orthogonal. So we're defining it here by orthogonal, we mean its transpose as its inverse. A matrix is orthogonal if and only if its column vectors form an orthonormal set. What does orthonormal mean again? So if you think of the column vectors here as vectors, of course, because we're calling them column vectors, orthonormal means two things. It first means it's an orthogonal set. So if we take the dot product of these different vectors, their dot product will equal zero. That's a zero scalar, excuse me. And then normal here means they're each unit vector. So the length of the vector is one. So each of the column vectors has length one. And if you take the dot product of any two vectors, you always get back to zero. And so that's why we call these things orthogonal matrices because the set of vectors is orthogonal, is orthonormal. Now some people are like, well, why don't we call them orthonormal vectors or matrices? I don't know. Their color on orthonormal matrix has an orthonormal set of column vectors. I should also mention that this will be equivalent to showing that the row vectors form an orthonormal set. I won't prove that one. I'll prove it for column vectors, but it's very easy to go back and forth between them because, again, the transpose and the inverse are acting the same way. So what's the argument there? So this is an infinite statement, so we have two directions to go. So first, suppose that U is an orthogonal matrix. That means if it's an orthogonal matrix, its transpose is equal to its inverse. OK, now consider the column vectors of U. We'll call the first column U1, the second one U2, all the way up to Un. Now, because the transpose, I guess I should be calling it U not Q, but whatever, because the transpose is its inverse, we have that U transpose U is going to equal the identity, right? We get this thing right here. But if we look at it term by term, how do you compute this thing? Well, the general elements of U will look like Uij. U is the number in the i-th row, j-th column. So when you multiply these things together, U transpose U, well, this just actually makes a matrix of dot products. When you take U transpose U, this just gives you a matrix where an arbitrary element in this matrix is going to look like you take the i-th row, transpose the i-th, or the j-th column. That's what it is. And the critical thing to see here is that Ui transpose Uj. If you take a vector, transpose another vector, this is just what the dot product does in the first place. It's just the dot product.  But this thing is going to equal the identity matrix. So if you're the identity matrix, you get ones along the diagonal and zeros everywhere else. So if you're in the diagonal, it means the row and column index are the same. So Ui.Uj here, you're going to get a one if you're on the diagonal. That happens exactly when you have i equal to j. And if you're off the main diagonal, you're going to get a zero, which happens exactly when i doesn't equal j. This number right here, this expression, zero when they're different, one when they're the same. This is often abbreviated in mathematical literature as delta sub i sub j. And this is commonly referred to as Kronecker's delta. So whatever you see in a mathematical text, Kronecker's delta, that means it's one when i and j are the same, and it's zero when i and j are different. So because U transpose U is equal to the identity, that means that the entries of this matrix are going to be Kronecker's delta. So you can get ones along the diagonals and zeros everywhere else. But that's exactly what it means to be orthonormal, right? If i and j are different, that means these are different vectors, different column vectors, their dot product is zero, so they're orthogonal. But if we get i Ui.Ui, that is i is the same, you're going to get that Ui.Ui equals one. Well, notice that the vector dot itself, this is just the length of the vector squared. So taking the square root, you get the length of the vectors one. So it is, in fact, an orthonormal set. And this whole argument was an if and only of statement. Every step was reversible, so that we actually proved both statements at the same time. So why do we care about the orthogonal group whatsoever? Well, geometrically speaking, the orthogonal group, ON, consists of all rotations and reflections of Rn. So essentially, the orthogonal group consists of the so-called isometries. Can I spell this word? Isometries, there we go. Try that again, isometries. They're isometries of the vector space Rn. That is, we're going to talk about those transformations of the vector space, of the geometry of Euclidean space Rn. So that distance angles don't change, right? Isometry, this word here means same measure. So distances between points don't move when you act by an orthogonal matrix. Angles don't move. Dot products don't change when you do, when you multiply by an orthogonal matrix. And it's this group of symmetries. We'll talk more about this in the next lecture, why we care so much about the orthogonal group. Now, let me do give you an example of such a thing, because these things are not necessarily easy to produce on their own. Let's take you to be this three by three matrix, which we're going to have three square root of 11, over square root of 11, excuse me, negative one over square root of six, negative one over the square root of 66.  One over the square root of 11, one over the square root of 11, two over the square root of six, one over the square root of six, negative four over the square root of 66, seven over the square root of 66. You may wonder why all the square roots here. Well, remember, the column vectors need to form an orthonormal set. So in particular, they have to be unit vectors. So when you look at the columns right here, you'll notice here that when you take its length, you're going to get the square root of nine plus one, plus one, which is 11, over 11, which are going to get one in the end. So that square root of 11 has to be in the bottom to compensate for the fact that the sum of the squares here, nine plus one plus one is 11. And this one, you get the sum of squares, one plus four plus one is six, and then one plus 16 plus 49 is 66, all right? So, and you can check also that term by term, these are going to be orthogonal with each other, right? When you take the dot product, it's sort of ignoring the bottoms because we can factor out scalars. Essentially, you're going to get negative three plus two plus one, which is zero. You're going to get negative three minus four plus seven, which is zero. You're going to get one minus eight plus seven, which is zero right there. So we can check very quickly that the column vectors form this orthonormal set, but it also should be true that when we multiply these things out, we should get the identity, right?  So if I just take the matrix and transpose it, you get the following, and you look at all the possible dot products right here, I'll let you pause the screen and double check all of these. But if you take, for example, the first row times the first column, you're going to get nine over 11 plus one over 11 plus one over 11. So you get nine plus one plus one, which is 11 over 11, that's going to give you a one. Okay? If you take the first column, a first row times the second column, you're going to get negative three over the square root of 66 plus two over the square root of 66 plus one over the square root of 66. So that's negative three plus two plus one over the square root of 66. That's what I was talking about earlier about the columns being orthogonal with each other. And if you go through all the possibilities, you're going to get ones along the diagonal, check that, and you can get zeros everywhere else, above and below the diagonal. So this is an example of a orthogonal matrix. All right? And so I mentioned earlier, write that orthogonal matrices correspond to these isometries. Sometimes the word, instead of isometry, they use the word rigid motion. That is, we're talking about how we can transform the plane, but it's rigid that as things aren't flexible, so the little distances between vectors doesn't change over time. Since multiplication, well, here's a theorem here. So theorem 1214 here tells us that if you have an orthogonal matrix, then if you take the dot product of two vectors, but you also look at the images of those vectors under the linear transformation multiplication by U, it doesn't change the dot product, right? So UX dot UY is equal to UX, or UX dot Y, excuse me. So the dot product between UX and UI is the same as the dot product between X and Y. And as a consequence, distance in the Euclidean space is defined by the dot product. If the dot product is preserved, sometimes it's called the inner product. If the dot product is preserved, that means the distances between vectors will be preserved. Angles in Euclidean space is defined using the dot product. If the dot product is preserved, that means angles is gonna be preserved. So multiplying by an orthogonal matrix is an example of this isometry, this rigid motion. Now, so again, since multiplication by orthogonal matrices preserves dot products, like I said, it's gonna preserve lengths, distances, angles, orthogonality, that is when vectors are perpendicular to each other. So as a consequence of this theorem, U here, we're gonna see that the length of UX is the same thing as the length of X. The length of the vector does not change when you hit it with an orthogonal matrix. In particular, orthogonal matrices are exactly those linear transformations of RN that preserve lengths, the so-called rigid motions. Now, I should emphasize that not, orthogonal matrices are not the only isometries of the plane, but they're the only isometries which are linear transformations in a vector space sense. So what's the argument here? It actually is, it goes really straightforward here. So if you take the left-hand side of this identity, UX dot UY, we'll just take that. Well, the dot product is the same thing as taking the transpose with respect to matrix multiplication. You get UX transpose times UY, for which the transpose, like we saw earlier, it's an anti-homomorphism, the Schusack principle.  But redoing parentheses, you get U transpose U. Aha, that's the identity since it's an orthogonal matrix. So it just disappears. You get U transpose X, which is the same thing as the dot product. So orthogonal matrices are like perfectly designed matrices. You see the condition right here. These are the perfectly designed matrices that'll preserve inner products and then everything that we derive from an inner product. And so closing this video, we've talked a lot about the orthogonal group, which is an important, it's one of the classical matrix groups. Related to the orthogonal group is the so-called special orthogonal group. Like I mentioned in the previous video, special means the determinant here is one. So the special orthogonal group denoted S O of N, or sometimes called S O N of R to emphasize the scalars are real. But if we don't specify other scalars, it should be inferred that the scalars are real. That's in the classical sense, the special orthogonal group only is over real coefficients. So the special orthogonal group is the subset of the orthogonal matrices whose determinant is equal to one. In particular, S O of N is the intersection of O N with SLN of R. So it's the intersection of orthogonal group with the real special linear group. As such, the special orthogonal group is a subgroup of the orthogonal group. It'll also be a normal subgroup of the orthogonal group because the special linear group is in fact normal inside of the general linear group. Now I cannot say that the special orthogonal group is normal inside of the general linear group. No, no, no, but it will be normal inside of the orthogonal group. And also, right, you can prove that the determinant of an orthogonal matrix, so Q is orthogonal, you can prove that orthogonal matrix is determinant is always plus or minus one. If it's a plus one, that indicates that the matrix is essentially a rotational matrix. And if it's negative one, that essentially means that it's a reflection matrix. And so when you take the special orthogonal group, you're just taking those with determinant one, you throw out the negative ones. There's just as many determinants being one as there are negative one inside the orthogonal group. And so you can actually make the argument that the index of the special orthogonal group is two because half of the orthogonal matrices have determinant one, that is the rotation matrices, and the other half have determinant of negative one, the reflection matrices. And so therefore the special orthogonal group is essentially the group of rotations of the vector space Rn. And since it's a subgroup of normal two, that gives more reason why it's normal because index two subgroups are always normal.


You see I know why you're attending a conference like this. I know why you would be drawn to the book. I wrote It's because you were hoping somewhat beyond hope To bring joy into your own workplace Deep down you know that there is a better way to run a business a team a company a department. You've always known it Those thoughts come to you just before falling asleep or just after waking and then your day begins and the idea of Transformational change evaporates like a maddening dream. You can't seem to reassemble after waking from it Although you may be silently or perhaps not so silently tortured by that monster boss in your own Broken company culture. You haven't given up completely change is still possible. I was in the same place once deeply unsatisfied with my work and my own ability to do anything about it But things can be better And that's what I'm going to walk through in my talk with you today So great to be here. It's my first time to India. You guys have already taken great care of me Can you get the slides up on the screen now doesn't look promising? Figure a guy runs a software company is probably gonna have technical difficulties. Let's try replugging it in here See if that helps Voila excellent So the first thing I'm going to do is I want to give you a peek inside of my company And I think the best way to do that is with a video the video is a trailer for the book It's not the point of me showing you this It's really to just give you a 90-second view into what I'm about to describe Hit a trough of disillusionment and by 1997 I wanted out. I wanted to get as far away from this industry as I could and then in that moment Decided to change the industry and that's the story that I've captured in this book People are coming from all over the planet to come visit this space It's in the basement of a parking structure in downtown, Ann Arbor, Michigan, and they're coming for a reason They're coming to see something what most people are looking for is some lessons around what it takes to build an Intentionally joyful culture imagine half of my team had joy in the other half didn't which half would you want working on your project? We had so many requests for these tours We realized it was time to share this story with the world in a different way The space is flexible. We work two to a computer. We assign these pairs We switch them every five working days the human energy that results in this kind of organization You can actually feel the joy when you're in the room My name is Richard Sheridan, and I'm the author of Joy, Inc. Thank you So I want to just give you a little bit of peek into my personal history because I think if you don't understand where I've come from The rest of what I described. I don't think makes particular sense Oh, so I started out in this industry when I was just a little kid. I wrote my first program in 1971 it was a two-line program in basic typed into a teletype. Yes kids There were in fact computers back in 1971 as hard as that is to imagine and I was hooked Right from the beginning. I realized that I want to be in this industry I thought software was going to be one of the coolest professions ever by 1973. I had created a game That would now be term fantasy baseball, but I just wanted to play baseball on the computer side typed all the major league players and in the major leagues into the computer so my friends and I could play Games of baseball against each other in the winter months where I grow up. You can't play baseball in the winter There's too much snow on the ground and that won an international programming contest And quite frankly my career was started at that point because I got a first my first job as a programmer before I could drive in 1973 I Eventually got a couple of degrees from the University of Michigan and computer science and computer engineering and I will tell you in This period of my life. I was experiencing absolute joy in my profession I thought boy, this is going to be the coolest career ever and quite frankly the career that followed Was a wonderful upward trajectory from programmer at one end in 1982 to vice president of R&D by 1997 Everything the world would measure a success I had title position authority team size Responsibility pay stock options. I had it all There was only one significant problem. There was a different line in my life Not the line the world measures the success, but the line measured in here You see I began to fall out of love with what I did as a profession. I Didn't want to be in the industry anymore What was going on at this time for me well shortly after graduating from the University of Michigan I I got into this profession and suddenly I realized that a lot of what I was experiencing was chaos Chaos in the software industry is easy to imagine Most of you have probably experienced it Bug reports coming out of our ears missed deadlines blown budgets feeling like we're coming to work in firefighting costumes every day I would come home after work long days. My wife would look at my tired eyes The cold dinner in the microwave and she'd say honey You look really tired. Did you get a lot done today? And I'd say no I got nothing done today In the trouble of operating in chaos is eventually chaos produces negative events You end up and you can have big negative events in the software industry The one I talked about in my book is where a tired programmer in New York City mistakenly updated some server software and In the next 45 minutes Night capital groups trading platform traded seven billion dollars worth of securities. It wasn't supposed to Costing night capital group four hundred million dollars in 45 minutes Are you with me? That would be considered a negative event where you work Losing four hundred million dollars in 45 minutes. You know, there's an old saying this is to air as human to really follow Things up requires a computer and I think that's good evidence of it I was experiencing negative events. Nothing quite as serious as losing four hundred million dollars in 45 minutes But I'll tell you when your organization experiences negative events when something goes wrong There is an organizational response and my company was no different It usually shows up in the form of a three-ring binder With no value added documents whatsoever, you know in our industry. We call it a software development life cycle There's a bunch of templated documents with stage gates and committees and sign-offs and approvals and standing meetings And that sort of thing you actually have to put a police force in charge of it a project management office Now you go from chaos The full-blown bureaucracy You go from the land of never getting anything done To the land of never getting anything started Because you're waiting you're waiting for an approval to happen. You're waiting for a sign-off You're waiting for a meeting to occur a decision to be made and so on That was my life and the trouble is even in the bureaucratic world where you're trying to prevent mistakes Stuff still needs to happen. So little shadow IT groups were forming So you could work around the system to actually get things done And now I was operating in the worst possible world the world of chaos and bureaucracy simultaneously This is why my heart was breaking early in my profession I was only in my 30s at that point and I couldn't look out ahead and say I can stay in this business for another 30 years I just don't think I could do it. I don't think I had the mental energy Now usually what happens in this case is eventually the company wakes up and says hey, let's let's Back this bureaucracy off just a little bit. Let's let's create a lighter version of our processes and procedures a little stapled together document for short projects and Usually even those meetings don't happen We eventually get rid of the process and we fire the PMO and then we say we're agile now Or we're lean and usually all that means really is we're just choosing chaos again Just going back and forth and back and forth between chaos and bureaucracy This was my life for a decade So what did I do? I Was thinking of getting out of the industry. I didn't want to be here anymore But the trouble was this is what was paying for my Lifestyle, I was married three children house to cars The only way I could afford this lifestyle was to stay in this job.  I will keep digging till I find the pony and so my journey out led me to authors and books but not Books on technology because quite frankly technology is easy compared to organizing human teams effectively So the books I was seeking out were books like Peter Senghe's book the fifth discipline on the art and practice of building a learning Organization Tom Peters book in search of excellence Peter Drucker's books on management John Nays this book mega trends all these books for pointing away to a bright future They just didn't tell you how to get there But I was determined to find it. I knew I would know it when I saw it and quite frankly in 1999 two years after I became VP I had a click moment. I Read a book by Kent Beck called extreme programming explained I saw a video on an industrial design firm in California called IDEO and suddenly the future was clear for me I knew where I was going. I knew how I was going to get there and for the next two years. I Transformed a tired old company a tired old public company to look much like what Menlo looks like today and in 2001, maybe you remember 2001 this thing called the internet bubble burst and Suddenly hundreds of thousands of people like me were out of work. I Had laid off my entire team and then the California company that had purchased my company said rich We don't need a VP anymore for a team of zero. So you lost your job, too I went home and told my wife. I I was on I Was out of work and she looked at me with tears in her eyes and she said you're unemployed. I said no, honey I'm an entrepreneur now remember eternal optimist It took her six months to figure out that entrepreneurship actually pays less than unemployment in the United States But then we were profitable because you see in 2001 when I lost my job They could take everything away from me, but one thing Yes, I lost my title. I lost my authority. I lost my team my paycheck my stock options Everything taken away from me, but one thing they could not take away from me what I had learned in those two years. I Hear voices. I Realized there was an antidote to this world It isn't a choice between chaos and bureaucracy. Those are not the only two choices. We have There is actually a third path out and it was the one I discovered in those two years And it's the one I'm gonna draw you through and I believe why you're here Why you're here at this conference to learn about these things and the word I use for it is structure simple repeatable measurable visible structure based on human relationships that feed human energy You know, there's an there's a lot of talk these days about sustainability of Ecosystems of climate of energy sources and so on I Think it's time. We start introducing a topic around sustaining the humans who work for us Because the human energy crisis in our workplace may be the biggest energy crisis we have in the world right now And that's what I want to explore with you today and I describe it in the context of joy And I will tell you this is a weird word in a business context to write a business book that has the words joy and love on the cover I wondered if I'd be taken seriously Well given the number of airplane trips I took last year and the number of conferences I key noted I was on a plane every week last year Speaking about joy around the world clearly the world is hungry for a different kind of business message and the one They've been being fed for quite some time And for me this joy is very personal See, I remember Thinking about the title of the book and thinking why joy why would I talk about joy and people started actually questioning They said rich. Where does the joy come from for you? And I I thought back to that little kid in 1971 and The typing in and those first two lines of code and having the computer come back in a roll of paper and clock out High-rich because that's what I told it to do and I thought yeah, that's where the joy came from But then I thought about I said no not really That's not really where the joy came from for me. I had to go back further I had to think about myself as a ten-year-old When my parents had bought the equivalent of a an Ikea bookshelf They didn't have those back in the United States in those days But it was the same kind of thing a piece of furniture and a cardboard box that needed to be assembled and My parents had gone out to dinner in a movie that night And ten-year-old me said you know what? I'm gonna build that bookshelf And I went out in the garage of our house, and I put it all together It's eight feet wide and six feet tall It was 50 pieces of wood and 200 little nuts bolts and screws, and I was so excited I couldn't wait. Oh, no. I built it in the garage and my mom wanted it in the living room So for the next hour ten-year-old me inched it out of the garage and Up the sidewalk and through the kitchen and I pushed it right into place in the kitchen and Or into the living room and I set up my dad's books and my mom's little nicknacks in the stereo system And I had music playing when my mom came in the door. She she was so delighted. She cried And I realized that's joy That's why we get into a profession like we do like any you know anything where we're engineering products for the world What we want more than anything else is to delight other people with the work of our hearts our hands in our minds When you choose engineering as a profession you are choosing a service oriented profession You are building things for others and you're building it to delight other people And that's quite frankly where the joy comes from for me And it's clear wherever I go in the world the heart of the engineer is the same We want to delight other people. We want people to be amazed with what we've created and That's what I pursuing inside of our company at Menlo and There was that time where this was taken away from me Where my joy that early childhood joy turned into fear I learned to be managed with fear And then I learned to manage with fear it didn't come naturally for me But I thought it was just the right thing to do and I spent a lot of time away from my family And then I lived in this chaotic world which quite frankly felt like I was coming in every day in a firefighting costume you know a rubber coat and plastic helmet and a visor and oxygen on my back while the Processes where we're using at my company felt like the Metaphorical equivalent of flicking lit cigarette butts everywhere while carrying sloshing gas cans and we wondered why there were fires everywhere That's because we were setting most of them and Then finally the saddest story of all in our industry is when the work that we do never sees the light of day When the boss comes in and says hey that thing you've been working on the past two or three years it got canceled But don't worry. There's another project coming. Oh boy exciting You see we want to see our work get out into the world don't we we want to see it Delivered we want to see it shipped and we want people to use it We want people to be delighted with it when the work gets buried out in the backyard Before it ever sees the light of day We don't get that chance You know there was a company who I believe suffered the largest business project failure in history mankind 10,000 people were assembled for five years in a death march like culture To produce a product that never saw the light of day you all know exactly what I'm talking about It was Windows Vista as soon as it shipped Microsoft sent a coupon out with all of the New computers saying you can downgrade XP. You don't need this operating system And can you imagine how that felt to the 10,000 engineers at Microsoft who were working on that and their work never saw the light of day It's not what I wanted for me. It's not what I wanted for the people who worked for me and so I searched and I found that click moment with Kent Beck's book and the IDO video and and Boom I knew where I was going and that's what I want to explore with you for the rest of my talk The question I want to ponder with you is does joy matter? Can you see it? Can you feel it? Can you touch it and does it produce business results because if it doesn't produce business results? We can't do it for a long time Because only if we can generate a profit what we're doing do we get to play another day Now we'll tell you a lot of people come to see Menlo They come from far away Shane came from New Zealand Spent it five days with us. That's not uncommon people come from all over the planet To come see this place in the basement of a parking structure and when they walk in the door, there's Kind of an interesting moment. They're confronted first with a tour count We keep track of how many people come this is our tour count last year almost 4,000 people came through our doors last year alone just to see what I'm about to describe to you in slides And when they walk in the door what they see is one of those horrible open-office environment you read about Fast Company magazine said this is an idea born in the mind of Satan in the deepest caverns of hell And They have psychologists with data that proves these environments don't work Especially for introverted engineers who need library quiet And whenever those articles come out and they come out about once a month Everyone sends them to me And they say rich why does it work at mental and it doesn't seem to work anywhere else and I tell them It's very simple. You see we didn't build an open and collaborative workspace We built an open and collaborative culture Our workspace is simply a reflection of our cultural values and that's important because a lot of times You come to a conference like this some somebody gets an idea It says yeah, let's do what menlo's doing and they just change the physical space But they don't think about the culture at the same time That doesn't work We need to think about all the elements of our culture simultaneously workspaces simply one of them and Our space is noisy We have very few rules at menlo one of the strongest is you cannot wear ear buds while you're working We want people to overhear the ideas of others We work in one big open room all together Menlo's kind of about the size of this room and we work together Shoulder to shoulder Embracing this noise you can actually see the teamwork. It's not an org chart. It's not a hierarchy They're in fact at menlo no bosses The team work shoulder to shoulder around the tables They prefer to work this way they this environment that they work in is very flexible We have these pull-down wires from the ceiling and the lightweight aluminum tables Tell the team change me if you want to change me if you need to there are no rules around our space If you want to change the space you just drag a table over somewhere else Now the team will change the space in small ways every single day to adapt to the workflow that we're working on that week Every once in a while they get bored with the total setup and they just come in one night maybe with a Few beers and they tear the whole place apart and put it back together the next day in a different Configuration and everybody has to figure out where they're sitting In fact, I sit out in the room with everybody else. There's no corner office for the CEO The last time I changed the space. They moved me from around this pillar to around this pillar If they move me that far again, I'll be on the other side of the glass doors So I'm trying to be good these days I Don't choose where I sit. I go where the team puts me. I don't care where I sit So I figure they'll either put me where I can be the most help or do the least damage. I've learned not to ask that question The space is also very visual. We use the walls for a lot of our most important artifacts So you can actually see our process manifesting itself on the wall And yes, we built that learning organization that I desired when I read Peter Sangy's book on the art and practice of learning organizations the fifth discipline and we have books everywhere with lots and lots of books, but Books are just a small piece of the learning system. We've created at Menlo You see where we built the learning in really is how we organize the team We connected the team intellectually We connected them physically and emotionally We put them together at one computer Two people one computer working on the same task at the same time all day long The pairs are assigned and we switch them every five working days that construct alone produces so much human energy in the room and so much speed that it defies understanding at times I'm sure you'll have questions about this part of how we work We'll have plenty of time for those at the end And then we realized what we had to do is we had to change the conversation because one of the biggest challenges in the tech industry Is we speak a different language than the rest of the world? We refer to our language internally at Menlo is dolphin speak You've ever heard dolphins make sounds, you know, they seem intelligent They seem to understand one another, but no one else knows what they're talking about That's our little tech speak right, but we realized if we're really going to succeed we have to learn how to communicate Internally inside the team in a different way we have to learn to communicate differently With the people who are paying us to do the work what we do And we also need to take care of what I call a lost tribe of technology and I'll tell you about them later Now I love this quote What's most impressive about this John Nays bid quote is that he wrote it in 1982 Think about this he says the most exciting breakthroughs of where we are today are not going to occur because of technology But because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human I was at a deli in Ann Arbor not too long ago And I was sitting there having a coffee and a bagel and there was a young couple sitting next to me with their two Young children and it was a Saturday morning when family should be together and the entire time the parents were sitting there with their two young children They were like this and the kids just sat there quietly and I will tell you having raised three daughters myself With my wife all I wanted to do is grab those parents and tell them you have no idea how fast these years go past Spend time with your children our technology is tending to separate us rather than draw us together This is something we need to think about as teams We think we can solve human relationship issues with technology and I will tell you that's the most difficult way to solve it At Memlo when we communicate internally with one another inside the room. We don't use electronics We use what we like to call high-speed voice technology The hardware was pre-installed at birth includes vocal cords tympanic membranes auditory nerve stimulation of the brain supplemented by body language and eyebrows and tonal inflection In fact if we want to call an all-company meeting at Menlo. Do you guys have meetings where you work meetings? Anybody have meetings show hands who has meetings at work. Okay, great. We hate meetings We think they're mind-numbing spirits sucking energy draining devices of management So we pretty much eliminate them and the ones that we do have we keep them short So if we want to call an all-company meeting at Menlo All we do is we say hey Menlo and hey rich so you're gonna practice it with me. Hey Menlo And the whole place goes quiet Awesome. Now you're in an all-company meeting You transact the business of the meeting nobody moves no book the conference room.  It's our daily stand-up meeting Our daily stand-up meeting is called by the dartboard on the wall Why a dartboard has an alarm clock? We have no idea, but it was programmable. We're programmers So we programmed it to go off at 10 and every day at 10 o'clock And everyone gathers in a circle Yes, we have stand-up meetings of 60 or 70 people all at once It's crazy Everybody comes even fern the dog comes to stand up She knows she's gonna get walked after stand-up And then we pass around the iconic symbol of Menlo the two-horned plastic Viking helmet We like the plastic Viking helmet for its practical purpose and value you see we work in pairs So we report out in pairs this controls the meeting. This is Tracy and Joe talking about some QA work. They're doing here's Nate and Katie talking about some of the programming work that they're doing and Thomas and Carol two of our high-tech Anthropologists will talk about that in a minute Talking about the work that they're doing The token moves around the circle of 70 people and Complets and our stand-ups take 13 minutes It's crazy. How do we know they take 13 minutes because we look at the dartboard and usually at the end of the meeting It says 1013 I Define most organizations to begin a meeting of 70 people in 13 minutes Let alone call it assemble it started hold it give everyone a chance to report out Complete it and go back to work in 13 minutes It's crazy And then we had to change the conversation with our customers. You see the problem with software is software is theoretical Until you can actually touch it This is one of the things I appreciate about an iterative and incremental approach to software design and development Is that we now have a chance for the client to check in with us to see how we're doing and the way we do this when our Customers closest we invite them into the room They are put front and center They sit at the keyboard in the mouse while the software is projected on the screen and the team that worked on the software is sitting Around them while the customer is going through the software. We built the previous five days everything in menla works in a five-day cycle and The customer is showing us our work.  Well, is that what you thought we meant? That's not what we meant Our answer is awesome We worked on a story card four hours and less than five days later. We found out we got it wrong boom make mistakes faster It's not that we prefer making mistakes. We would prefer not to make mistakes We just know we're going to we're human. There's going to be no matter how good with job We do a communication. We're gonna make mistakes. So let's make them quickly so we can correct them while they're still small This actually feeds one of the fundamental elements of our culture to pump fear out of the room You see fear has an insidious effect on a team, doesn't it? Fear doesn't make bad news go away Fear makes bad news go into hiding and when bad news going through the hiding we can no longer do anything about it It's really easy to say. We're done in software when we actually aren't done Isn't it? So by putting the customer front and center they can see exactly what we've done Sometimes they look and they do that gee that's you that's what you thought we meant that's not we meant at all Sometimes they look and they say, you know what what you did is exactly what I was hoping for It's exactly what I'd imagine but now that I see it. It's not what I need Awesome. We worked on a four-hour story card in less than five days later We found out we built exactly what you wanted and now you find out. It's not what you need. What do you need? So again that iterative and incremental approach gives us a chance to actually succeed because you see our focus of attention Is on joy and we define the joy In one simple way we want to see the work of our hearts our hands that are mounds get out into the world and delight the people We intend to serve the users of the software and then we do this crazy thing We go into a paper blade based planning system, this is the way we plan all these little tokens represent Estimated story cards. I actually brought some examples here with me All work at Menlo is First handwritten down on five and a half inch by eight and a half inch index cards Then the cards are estimated in hours We don't use t-shirt sizes or story points or gummy bears We estimate in hours and then we fold the card to the size of the estimate So an eight-hour card ends up being half the size of a 16-hour card. Does this make sense? If it doesn't let me show you what a four-hour card looks like if you're not getting it. We tape a full-size Sheet of paper to a 32-hour card, which makes it twice as big as 16 And then what the customer does is they make decisions around their budget by picking up these little folded sheets of paper and Laying them down on a sheet that represents the three fundamental characteristics of professional project management Time one week humans two people Budget 80 hours worth of effort two people working together for 40 hours Yeah, that's a crazy thing about Menlo is we work 40 hour work weeks We never work weekends.  Why do we do this because we want a humanly sustainable pace to our work? Now, I know some of you are here maybe to get some additional training additional certification You might even be taking notes right now. So I'm gonna teach you our project management system. Okay? No, so get your notebooks out. Here's how it works This is the ad function Did you see that? That's delete Delete. Okay. You've now learned our project management system. I'll leave the edit to your own imagination So what the customer does is having been trained like I just trained you and our project management system They start making choices. They start deciding what's in the plan. They work collaboratively alongside of our team They fill up these sheets and they decide What we should be working on what are the highest priority things we should be working on and Interestingly they also decide what we should not be working on One of the things that confounds most software projects is ambiguity If I don't know if this phrase is used here in India, but in the United States Often people who run meetings will say things at the end of a meeting like We're all on the same page now, right? Have you ever heard that phrase? We're all in the same page Okay translates good. I just never sure culturally whether So so you know somebody says well on the same page, right? Ask an annoying question at that meeting Say, hey boss. I'm okay being on the same page. Which page are we talking about? Are you talking about the whiteboard the flip chart the notebook the laptop the email comes out after meeting? I'm okay being on the same page. Just got to tell me which page But when we say we're all on the same page, we are literally all on the same page It's not possible to have any any ambiguity around that now The other thing if you want to be even more annoying at that same meeting where you said what page are we on? Say what did we decide not to do? The boss will look at you kind of funny and say well we decided not to do everything. We didn't decide to do. Oh, that's clear Can anybody see in this picture based on my Lengthy description of our project management system. Can you see what we've decided not to do? Is it obvious? Somebody just shout out. What did we what do you see what we decided not to do? Yeah, the things that are still up here on the table. Look at I didn't have to teach you that part of our system You could infer it right if it's still on the table. It's not in the plan. We're not gonna work on it And here's a fundamental truth of any project management. I don't care if we're going back to the Egypt pyramids We never have enough time to do everything we imagine. I Bet they were planning on building five pyramids in Egypt and they only built three Thank goodness the project management system Focused on value. Otherwise, we would have had five pyramids 75% complete And they'd all have a hole in the top They're like no, let's build three complete pyramids awesome great idea It's the same thing. We're trying to do here with our planning system Our customers get very invested in this. This is our client looking through these simple Handwritten story cars now. We love paper. I will tell you again. I don't know if this translates well But we have this very simple sect in the United States called the Amish you guys ever hear about the Amish They don't use electronics. They still ride around in horse-drawn carriages Some people call us the Amish of software development because we plan with paper But we love paper See even if I just do this I'm lighting up so many neurons in your brain right now because humans are visual tactile creatures Right. So we choose tools not because they're not electronic. We choose tools We believe work better for humans back to that John Nasebic quote and we find that humans work really well with these paper-based systems Because they're very approachable. They're easy to learn. They're very scalable amazingly And it's very collaborative. It's a multi-user system All supported by simple handwritten artifacts We we believe in handwriting because we think it's cognitively impossible to not read something you wrote by hand Whereas electronics you do cut and paste and grab attachments and put them together in a document It may be the case that no one not even the creator of the document has read it Then we put the work plan up on the wall for all the sea It's not tucked away in a server somewhere. It's up on the wall Every one of these swim lanes represents two people who are assigned to work together for the week They have their 40 hours worth of work outlined for them They work from top to bottom on each of the story cards. They work on one card till it's done We don't believe that humans can multitask. So we work on one thing till it's done You know my old life I used to manage people with percentages. Have you ever been managed like that? We're like you're 25% on this project. You're 50% on this project.  You're 35%. Yeah, you know, I'm over a hundred percent now, right? Humans can't do that. It's not possible. What does it mean to be 25% in a project? Does it mean well? Let's see. I should work, you know 12 hours and then this and then stop and then work on it Or should I like do 15 minutes every hour and then stop and then switch or should I like be thinking about it? Well, I'm doing other things. Is that what I'm supposed to do? No, in our world you work on one thing till it's done The cards are placed next to the day that we expect them to complete based on the estimates that came from the team themselves This project every project in our space has a five-day cadence This particular one starts on Wednesdays and ends on Tuesdays for one simple reason the client picks the day They want to check in with us. That's their show and tell day this particular client picked Tuesdays The project ends on Tuesdays the yarn indicates where we are in the week and the color-coded sticky dots give us a sense of status The sticky dots are important When a pair starts in a card they put a yellow dot on the card that says that's the one we're working on There should only be one yellow dot in your lane because you only work on one thing till you're done And when you think you're done you put an orange dot on the card you and your pair partner I emphasize think you're done Because programmers have as many different definitions for done as Eskimos have words for snow You've probably heard many of these different definitions. Maybe you how many of you have programmed for a living Coded programmers. Yes, like me.  Well, it's finished, but it's not ready Now it's ready, but it's not complete. It's complete, but it's not installable. Well, it's installable, but it's not deployable Right, you see where I'm going with this, right? So our programmers can only self-declare they think they're done and Then QA our quality abguts come around check your work, and if QA likes what you see you get a green dot It's an endorphin rush for the programmers If QA doesn't like what you see you get a red dot That's endorphin rush for the QA team Any QA people in the room? Oh Excellent, you're gonna love this. Okay. This is my favorite moment. Let's talk QA people when when you're checking stuff Okay, I need to like make eye contact with at least a couple of you so raise your hands again QA people excellent Great, so you're checking stuff, right? And you find something wrong every now and then, right? You're you're going through and like oh this didn't work the way it's supposed to and you kind of walk down the hall or whatever to the Programmers, you're like calm on the phone say hey, um This thing isn't working, right? What's the most likely thing a QA person is to hear from the programmer? Yeah, it worked on my machine, right? It's another definition of done it worked on my machine now QA people if you learn nothing else in this conference from any other Speaker take this one home with you as soon as you hear a programmer say it worked on my machine Grab their machine and ship it to the customer It's amazing how much of a cheer that gets It's like what's the point the program was trying to make right it worked on my machine so what? Right, can we get it to work on at least one other computer on planet earth that would be really cool, right? Now if you grab their machine and ship it they can never say it worked on my machine again because they don't have their machine anymore And I want to channel the heart of the QA people because I'm telling you I think QA people get a lot of grief Because people like what kind of person would delight in breaking things Like what kind of personality is that well, let me tell you what kind of personality is QA wants to break it while it's still in the room QA takes it personally when broken software gets out into the world you want that mentality on your team So let's give it up for the QA people just for a second here Now I want to talk about the Lost Tribe Yeah, if you think about Lost Tribes, I think about like that Amazon Forest You know the anthropologists are hacking through the jungle and one day they come across this tribe No one has ever seen before there's never been any contact with humanity before this other you know the tribe with itself Of course, but the anthropologist like oh my gosh, we've never seen you before in the technology industry We call them the users No, let me be more accurate.  Don't we? Right now and then we write dummies books for those poor people right What other industry can get away with through their entire history calling the people they serve stupid?  So What we need to do is Change that mentality. These are the people we serve We need to think about how to delight them with the work that we do At Menlo, what we did was we injected something completely new into the system We have a set of people on our team who are called high-tech Anthropologists their job go out into the world and study people in their native environment Observe them Not ask them questions not interrogate them Not send them survey forms not do focus groups actually observe them doing work in their native environment And with empathy and compassion bring back the knowledge they've gained through this process And turn it into screen designs that will actually be understandable By the people who are going to use the software See it's amazing to me how used to things we've gotten in the technology industry Let's face it. We're the industry that gives you if you want to shut down your computer Please press the start button That's intuitive, right? Or if that's too hard control-alt-delete is even easier, right?  This is a device. We call a persona map What we do is we go out in the world and we discover there's different types of people out in the world They're going to use a software We're building so we define them in these little archetypal forms of personas And then we have our client prioritize these personas But because I will tell you this if you build a piece of software that you want to work for everyone It will work for no one in particular So we do is prioritize the different types of users in this persona mapping exercise We force our customer to pick a primary persona That's the person. We're going to primarily serve every design decision is then filtered through this device We're going to add a feature in if the name of the primary persona is Gary in this case We will say how will this feature work for Gary? If you said well, it's not for Gary It's for one of the secondary personas is the tertiary personas say, okay So we're going to make it work for bill rather than for Gary How do we add it in for bill in a way that doesn't interfere with Gary's work? Because Gary's primary I'll just give you a simple example of how this works because it's amazing what you can discover when you go out in the world This is really important to go out in the world and watch people in their native environment because you will learn things through observation You won't normally learn other ways We were working on a handheld touchscreen tool for diesel motor mechanics people who fix trucks The first observation we did was at the Ann Arbor Transit Authority where they fix buses for the city that we live in and The first thing Bubba did that was working on a bus is he put on a pair of rubber gloves to do his work Our anthropologists didn't even realize that the capacitive screen that was picked for the hardware would wouldn't work with rubber gloves They brought that information back to our technical team and our technical team said Well, he's gonna have to take off his gloves. Whatever uses the device and our anthropologist said you've never met this guy He's not going to take off his gloves. In fact, he'll sabotage the device before he takes off his gloves.  There was silence on the other end they'd been in this industry for 30 years And they said they do And one of their engineers said man, you guys are so lucky. We said why is that he said you get to talk to our end users? He says I've been here 12 years. I've never even met one of our end users Remember the hacking through the job look You're here Go out into the world and study the people you intend to serve our anthropologists bring this information back They synthesize it because it starts out. It feels very ambiguous at the beginning So they have to bring this information back and synthesize it and then eventually boil it down into a pixel-perfect screen designs That our software developers then turn into working software. It's a very different kind of role on our team Now I want to leave you with an idea Because I know how these conferences work. I've been to lots of them You're gonna get ideas today. You might have gotten some from me.  Oh, that won't work That's not us HR won't allow that and Right then the idea dies doesn't it and you just go off you got emails to check you got meetings to go to you Just go and do this okay I want to arm you with one simple response when somebody looks you in the eye With your idea and says that won't work. You just look them in the eyes. Yeah, I know Let's run the experiment. Let's try something before we defeat it. Let's see what happens Let me tell you a story of how this played out in our world at Menlo Now this is a story about dogs and babies, okay, but if that's all you remember You will have missed that earlier point because this is really a story about let's run the experiment It's just a fun story a fun application of it. That's do with dogs and babies So nine years ago One of our team members one of our revered team members Tracy had little Maggie She was off on maternity leave and she was ready to come back to work. She came to me and she said rich I'm ready to come back to work. I said awesome. We can't wait to have you back How soon can you be here and she said well, there's just one small problem The daycare we plan to put Maggie in is full Grandparents live too far away to help my husband and I don't know what to do with the baby Now I will tell you in this moment There was a screaming match that occurred in my head that Tracy never heard You know how these go. There's the dark voice on one shoulder and the bright voice on the other one The dark voice said don't you dare say what you're about to say HR will kill you The lawyers will freak out the insurance policy will go through the room The bright voice said to your company or an entrepreneur. You can do whatever you want You don't even have an HR department So I looked at Tracy I said bring her in now if I don't need a camera in that moment to catch the look of bewilderment on her Phrase she says what do you mean? I said bring her into work? She said I said sure She said Every day I said why not and she looked around that big open room And she said rich where will I put her I said Tracy? She's not going anywhere. She's three months old I said put her in a bassinet on the floor wherever you're working Put her in a peck and play put her in a stroller or whatever put her in a car seat She said rich. What if she makes a fuss? I said here. It's like a noisy restaurant. You'll never hear She goes come on rich. There will be those moments. You've raised daughters.  It'll disturb the whole room and I said Tracy.  You'll do the right thing. Let's work it out together Let's run the experiment Now isn't she beautiful Funny thing is that's not Ellie there. That's not Maggie. That's Ellie. That's that's mental baby number eight Oliver I left when I left the office to come here Oliver was there mental Oliver's mental baby number 13 in the last nine years This experiment has been beautiful part of our culture the babies come in all day every day for months at a time There is often usually a baby in the room with us because I don't know We're prolific crowded memo or something we we think we know what's causing this now Now I have to tell you when you run experiments, this is important expect the unexpected and when you bring a baby into a room Unexpected things happen Now the things that we expected to happen. Of course. They did did Maggie fuss. Of course. She did was baby What we didn't expect was the response of the team The team was like no, it's my turn to hold the baby They're just grabbing the baby in their can these babies were raised by the village Right. I lead a lot of the tours. They would just oh Richard leading a tour Nice warm chest deep voice. It's nap time. You can put a baby to sleep as good as anybody So they just handed me the baby and I'd be carrying a baby around on tours, right? And then we found out that Ellie learned wanted to pair program Ellie wanted to go to design meetings This was a delightful addition your culture Henry came back to visit Visited Tracy Menlo mom number one Tracy Henry is Menlo baby number seven Fern wanted to get in on the conversation the dog and Then we discovered something really delightful We found out that our customers Behaved better when you bring a baby to the meeting Like you guys are awesome. They're like, oh my gosh, they're part of the marketing team. It's cool Hey You cannot deny the joy of a baby at work. This is little Henry with With John his dad You know, I told the parents I said look if we have a chance to let you guys see that one of those baby Firsts, you know the first roll over the first word the first step the first crawl whatever and you can see that at work awesome It's just been a delightful way to build our team and our culture This is Henry learning to manage. Hey, how's it going? What you're working on there? You're almost done. You stay in this weekend And then this happened We've always had dogs in our office and But this was a little different situation see Michael Here was our customer. He's coming in for a show-and-tell And he called me ahead of time. He says hey rich Do you mind if I bring Buster with me to the meeting? I'm said sure who's Buster? He says my great Dane like oh sure And he comes in with his dog. That's like almost horse size, right?   Okay, but so And it was a fun story Buster loved to hang out at the office He would take our glass doors and just pull them apart so he could stick his nose out into the smells of memo, I guess and I Realized that this story was fun for the dog, but it was actually far more important What I realized was our customer was choosing to be like us our customer was choosing to participate in our culture And I think about the trust that we work on so hard inside the team And we try and build trust also with our customer when you have your customers starting to behave like you you realize You've built a special culture indeed and I would encourage you to think about that as you think about the type of cultures You're creating inside of your organizations Michael wanted to be like us Michael couldn't bring his dog in where he worked Wasn't that he was in a bad office situation. It just wouldn't be appropriate given what he does for a living But when he chose to interact with us he brought his dog in We've actually had customers bring their children to work with to Menlo with them and then Mind-blowingly a little Lucy was Menlo baby number 12 John Who had Henry there? This is a second child The customer knew that Lucy was in the office the customer called up said hey John We need you to come over to office. They were right in Ann Arbor just a few blocks away Can you come to the meeting and they said but John do you have Lucy with you? And he says well, yeah, but that's okay. I can leave her here with some team members. It'll be all right And they said oh no, we want you to bring Lucy too So there's John walking across the Ann Arbor with a stroller going to a business meeting I Can't even imagine this stuff is actually occurring so again just think about How do we build such an engaging environment that the people we work with and around and Collaborate with want to be more like us. They want to join your tribe There's no question inside of all of this that while we have fun at Menlo I Want to be very clear joy and happiness are two very different things We are not happy every minute of every day. It's not possible that would require a medication But joy is that longer arc joy is that all that hard work We did together gets out into the world into the lights of people from it's intended and there's no way you can get to that kind of joy Without the rigor and discipline of many of the methods that you might be talking about in a conference like this For us, we've had a team together now for 15 years One of the strongest parts of our culture is the use of automated unit testing frameworks Test driven design write the test before you write the code to automate the tests and run them Probably one of the most powerful tools to ever occur in my in the history of my career And it's amazing how few teams use it. They don't teach it at universities yet systematically It's probably the most important quality tool that we've ever invented in our industry and it's still ignored to this day So don't forget that at the end of the day We can delight people with a great user experience But there has to be solid working software under the surface or that delight of the user experience will quickly erode under the crashing of broken software What I wanted to do in those early days to get out of the chaos and the bureaucracy was to build a learning organization and As Peter sang he says it is the only sustainable source of competitive advantage is your company's ability to learn faster than your competition That's what we wanted to do It's been an amazing journey for me. I'm glad to have come all the way to India to share it with you. I Would love to get your feedback There's a landing page. We've created specially for you There's places you can download these slides get a free chapter of the book that sort of thing There's also a place for feedback form. I am happy to take questions now. Thank you very much for bringing me into your world so attrition Yeah, so So I'll repeat the question if you don't get there quick enough with the mic So we can work together on this so the question is what kind of attrition do we have in our team? And I think our attrition is pretty standard We don't Unnaturally work to hold on to people too long if they want to go we embrace them on leaving But interestingly it's hard for us to measure attrition because people leave and they come back And often when they come back they plead with me and they say please don't ever let me leave again But you know people leave for all the standard reasons They we had three people leave a couple of years ago because they wanted to go live in Manhattan one of the big cities and In the United States and I didn't want to deny them that Pleasure and they all went together because they went as a small group and and they're just having a delightful time there And who am I to deny them that kind of? experience but you know when you build things in like bring your babies to work you do get a lot of loyalty as well, so I think We don't have to work Unnaturally to hold on to people which I think is one of the biggest things about a strong culture is because the trouble is we Start to hold on to people unnaturally if we we work really hard to keep them when they don't really want to be here I'm not sure you want those people walking in the door every day because they've got maybe a different mindset than you were hoping for Thank you very much