Friday Fun, Chutzpah and Tech Tips

Fun: Spend 2 minutes and watch this great stop action film, done as a senior project by a student at the Savannah College of Art and Design.

Chutzpah: Wow! I haven’t posted a chutzpah link before today, but I had to post this. For those of you who are unsure about the meaning of chutzpah, according to dictionary.com it is unmitigated effrontery or impudence; gall.

Technology: I consider myself pretty competent around a spreadsheet.  I knew about half of these double-click wonders for Excel.  On this page there are also links to a few other pages with Excel shortcut magic.

Behavior cubed

Behavior: Since I have a child in college, I am not sure that I want him to see this, but those entrepreneurs and innovators are out there, creating new and better products. According to Bruce Schneier, the ones to lose in this battle of wits will likely be the innocent student who really does have the computer trash his paper.

Behavior: How do our parenting skills relate to the future of our children’s intellectual development?  Does Dr. Spock bear a lot of the blame?

Behavior: A new book,Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive by is pretty impressive. Here is one of my favorites:

How restaurant mints are a personalized affair. Let’s a say a restaurant provides mints for its customers on the way out. If the amount of tips per week is the baseline for that restaurant, let’s make the waiters include a mint as they give the check to the customer. The tips go up by 3.3%. However, when the waiters offer the mints themselves, prior to signing the check, the tipping amount went up by 14.1%. In yet another experiment, the waiter would present the patrons with 1 mint per guest, then give them the check, then turning around to leave, then, as if remembering something sudden, turning around and giving them yet another mint per guest. Result? 23% increase in tips, as this signaled high amount of personalization.

The ones left behind

We are definitely living in difficult economic times.  According to the the Bureau of Labor Statistics, from January 2009 through May 2009, we have lost a total of 3.4 million jobs; a staggering average of over 680,000 per month.  Why that is like the entire population of Memphis, Tennessee losing their jobs… for 6 months straight. And appropriately we focus on the people behind the job losses.  The personal stress, the family concerns, health insurance, retirements, downsizing, mortgages, college funding.  All important concepts.

I am not an economic prognosticator, but I don’t believe that we have seen the end of job losses.  Heck, GM, Chrysler and the Boston Globe haven’t figured out if they are going to be in business a month from now.

But one area that we really haven’t focused a lot of attention on are those people who are still working.  Now what our large corporations have done is cut jobs – that is clear from the BLS statistics.  My guess is that they did what they always do and cut way deep.  Now, I learned the lesson from a mentor back in my corporate days, that you want to cut deep and cut once to keep morale of the remaining staff as positive as possible.  You don’t want your staff to be continually wondering when the other shoe is going to drop and the next round of layoffs is announced. I am not sure that our current corporate leaders learned from the great John McCarron.

Generally speaking, the team that has remained is stressed because they don’t know if their job is next.  They feel resentful because they now have to do their work plus that of workers that have left.  They feel ashamed to be feeling resentful because they have a job and a paycheck and health insurance.  All of this mental stress is not helping our corporations get what they need, which is to start selling, delivering, servicing, writing, producing again.

I have stated it before – someone in Big Corporate America needs to stand up and say that we won’t lay anyone off this year.  In fact, we are going to start a limited hiring campaign to ensure that we can still deliver the best products to the marketplace.  Now is the time for some American Executive to make his mark.  Will it be someone you know?

The Keiretsu Experiment – Update

Several months ago, I discussed the concept of the Kereitsu Experiment. To recap, I invited 15 of my entrepreneurial friends to get together to see if we could develop a group that worked in concert to increase sales of our combined businesses by 20%.  The goal was to get each person to set and attend 3 meetings per quarter with other members to determine how best they could help each other.

During our first meeting, we had serious dialogue about the ways that this collaboration could help.  Each of the members were enthusiastic and some interesting conversations about potential relationships were started.  What we were experimenting with was the creation of a community that would be focused on growing businesses.

Fast forward to this month.  The results are in and while there have been some victories, the amount of interaction between the members has not really grown into the expectations that we had agreed upon during our first meeting.

There has been one member who is doing a paid project for another member.  There have been a small number of documented meetings and networking sessions.  But overall the project has not accomplished what we had hoped in the first quarter.

One facet of an entrepreneur’s experience that doesn’t get talked a lot about (we always look for the positive side of things) is knowing when a certain project has failed and to end it gracefully (and quickly).  It doesn’t mean that I don’t care for the members of the experiment; I always have and will continue to do whatever I can to help support their goals and aspirations.  What I have realized is that the grassroots nature or design of this organization was not conducive to keeping the member’s interest. It is much harder to build and sustain a community that works than is usually imagined.

I would urge each of the members to continue to use the keiretsu network individually to gain more advantages for your business.  But it doesn’t make sense for us to meet as a group to try to increase our businesses.

Entrepreneurs as superheroes

Entrepreneurs in our world are venerated for their risk-taking and innovation skills.  It is always a great story to tell when an entrepreneur is successful.  But we must be careful to ensure that we recognize and applaud the skills that got the entrepreneur to the success and understand that most entrepreneurs cannot do it on their own.

Let’s take a few examples.  Steve Jobs is rightly considered an entrepreneur.  When he and Steve Wozniak developed the Apple I computer, they came up with a radical new approach to delivering personal computers.  Steve Wozniak developed the hardware and software and Steve Jobs sold the vision.  Over time, Steve Jobs became the design guru and leads Apple in the development of unique products.  But this grand picture wouldn’t have happened without a man named Mike Markkula. Mike was the initial angel investor in Apple and served as the first president.  It was his leadership that gave both Steves the ability to do their best and allowed Apple to grow.

Another famous entrepreneur is Oprah Winfrey.  She is famous for her TV show, movies, magazine, XM Radio channel, Oprah.com and her tremendous philanthropy work.  She is the master of her domain, keeping on top of all of the vehicles that bear her name.  But if it wasn’t for Jeff Jacobs, an entertainment lawyer, CEO and 10% owner of  Harpo, Inc. (Oprah’s master organization) who runs the businesses, she would not be able to “be Oprah”.

Bill Gates is another entrepreneur who was fantastic at some details, but didn’t have a particularly strong business background.  Bill was able to understand the state of technology and envision a world where every desk would have a computer running Microsoft products on them.  True innovation, absolutely.  But it required Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s  first business manager to bring the company to the heights to which it ultimately reached.

Too many entrepreneurs have watched Oprah Winfrey (or Steve Jobs or Bill Gates) and thought that they needed to do everything themselves.  Some people chicken out because they know they don’t have all the skills and discount the ones they do have.  Others continue through this phase expecting somehow to become Superman (or Superwoman) and manage all aspects of running a business by themselves.  Neither of these solutions is optimum.

Entrepreneurs need to be open to get a helping hand in developing their business.  Sometimes they can get free advice to help them along.  But more often, they need to understand that they will need to pay to get the highest level of support.  Sometimes it is cash and other times equity. In all cases, it is better to have 50% of a million dollar idea than 100% of a failure.

The real test of the entrepreneur is how much they are willing to sacrifice to see their idea become a success.  Find those folks who have skills where you are lacking.  Sell them on your vision and get them to help you deliver.  You will be the richer for it.

Economics, Big Picture and Fun

Economics: Wonder how the local governments are going to handle the reduction in tax income?  Some places have it figured out…  If you haven’t gotten the ticket yet, it seems you will.

Big Picture: I am reading a very interesting book, The Numbers Game: The Commonsense Guide to Understanding Numbers in the News, in Politics, and in Life, by Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot.  The idea is that we need to have some sense of numbers before we can make rational decisions.  The book is broken up into chapters like Count, Size and Average. In each, the authors try to show how a little thinking can help us understand what we read and how people can use numbers to confuse.  On a related point, the Freakonomics blog today talks about why it may be better for us to move to an SUV rather than a Prius.  How could this be?  Well, it has to do with our understanding (or lack thereof) of the most common statistic related to fuel economy, miles per gallon.

Fun: There is this group called Improv Everywhere.  They stage fun, surprising scenes.  For the past 8 years, they have staged the No Pants Subway Ride, where their teams (in 22 cities this year, with over 1200 participants in New York alone) get on the subway wearing only their undies.  No harm, no fuss, just bringing fun to the world.  Their latest escapade was to provide a wedding reception to a couple who had just been married by a judge in New York City. What a great gift. The world needs more Improv.

Baseball and Business

As you know, I love baseball.  Baseball is a sport that is managed by the numbers.  The cool thing is that the numbers are available to everyone.  For example, if you tried, you could find out that in a game on April 30, 1977, Carlton Fisk of the Boston Red Sox batted 3 for 4 with a double and a stolen base (he stole home!), scored 3 runs and the Red Sox (Luis Tiant) beat the Oakland A’s (Mike Norris) 8-4 in an afternoon game on a 72 degree day.

Some baseball players, like Alfonso Soriano go for the fences every time they go to the plate.  Sometimes they are successful, other times, not so much, but overall they are recognized for the ability to go long ball. Not the first guy you would pick to move a guy from first to second in a close game. Good to have on the team for power, an expert in a certain discipline.

Other players, like Barry Bonds or Manny Ramirez go outside the rules of the game to get the extra oomph to make their careers. Their numbers are great, but they will always have that thorny asterisk besides their name signifying that their accomplishments might not be on a level playing field. Think of the bankers who changed the rules of the game to make more money.

Then there are the less remembered players, like the shortstop for the Red Sox in that game, Rick Burleson.  Rick played 13 years in the majors, hit .273, fielded .972, got into a couple of All Star games, was honored with a Gold Glove and a Silver Slugger award.  The unusual fact about Rick was that he once hit an inside the park home run. He was methodical and steady. Not a Hall of Fame candidate, but a good solid player that you would want on your team.

We know these facts because they are measured.  The great advantage is that everyone has access to the numbers.  When the managers of the teams build a plan for a game, they use these statistics to choose strategies to win. Does it always work?  No, of course not.  That is the fun of the game.   But it can tip the balance in your favor.

What if your whole business life, every decision, every program, every customer interaction was available to everyone for viewing?  How would that change the way that you operate?

Technological Innovation (or not)

The entrepreneurial world is always talking about innovation.  If you just offer the same thing or a minor tweak on the same thing as others are providing, you are taking the biggest risk of all.  It is very hard to break into a field with a me-too product in an area that others have already staked out.

What is most interesting is to see this play out with the big boys.

In the technological world, we have had three major announcements in the last week or so.  The first was Wolfram Alpha.  Wolfram took the idea of search and really turned it on its head.  It is not a Google killer, as was first surmised, but an entirely new paradigm.  While Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, Wolfram wants to take formatted, vetted data and make it available in useful formats.  Wolfram Alpha takes on hard questions like “What was the top wind speed for Hurricane Dolores in 1966? “, “What is the life expectancy for a female living in Ghana compared with the US?” and even “Where do babies come from?“.  It provides answers in easy to understand tables, maps and graphs.  It even tells you where it got the answers to your questions, so that you can make a determination if the source is solid.

The second announcement was Google Wave(Disclaimer:  Google Wave has not been delivered yet.  What we have seen has been demoware.  But it presented to a group of 4000 developers, so chances of it getting to live status is pretty good.) Here Google asked the question “If we were designing communications like e-mail today, what would it look like?”  Total innovation.  Here they did not use the same metaphors that people have been using like inboxes, subject lines and chain letters.  Remember that email was developed over 40 years ago.  Instant messaging is no better.  It was designed to automate telephone conversations – one to one, wait for one person to stop talking before responding.  Don’t get me wrong.  Email and IM are both great tools, but they are based on old thinking.  Google took a new look at how we communicate and developed a program that leverages the technology of today to provide a totally new experience that has the potential to dramatically change how we work (and play). The entrepreneurial play here is that Wave was developed in the Sydney office with a team that maxed out at 50 engineers. In addition, the product will be offered as open source, which means that anyone can take it, enhance it, install it on their systems, interoperate with others and benefit from the open source community.

The third announcement was from Microsoft, announcing Bing.  Bing is the latest incarnation of Live Search.  They are trying to solve a problem that Google has already solved.  But, they have a cute new name (Bing!, your search is done) and will use a reported $100 Million advertising campaign to try to woo users to use it instead of Google.  Hello!  Microsoft has 8% of the search market, even with the dominant browser and Google has 62%.  How much market share can Microsoft really steal with a me-too product?

Kudos to Wolfram and Google for developing innovative products that change the way that we can use the internet.  Brickbats to Microsoft for spending $100M (on advertising alone, not to mention development costs) on a problem that has mostly been solved.  My guess is that $100M would pay for the engineering teams of both Wolfram Alpha and Google Wave for a couple of years, which would likely create new, useful products.

Economics, Technology and Behavior

Economics: The Freakonomics blog points us to Al Roth of the Harvard Business School.  He talks about the opposite of repugnance.  These are things that we as a society promote, even though there are no good financial or political reasons.  They include: monogamous marriage between a man and a woman, home ownership and donating to charity.

Technology: Lots of talk about this new product that Google introduced (not released) at their IO Conference, called Google Wave.  A good overview article can be found at Techcrunch, but if you have an hour and a half to spare, I heartily recommend you watch the keynote speech where the development team demonstrated the tool.  Wave solves some of the problems that we have today with out communications products, by providing a single repository for waves that can contain multi-media and can be edited by a specified group.  The good news is that Google is planning to release Wave as an open source product, so developers can use common interfaces to build new features, much like the Firefox browser.  This also means that Google will probably not be using this as an advertising vehicle. Lots of whiz bang stuff has been included like real time search, context sensitive spell check, easy two way integration with blogs and real time translation.

Behavior: My most popular column to date is the one I entitled “The Young Entrepreneur“.  Tomatonation wrote a version that was more life centered and less business life centered.  But it belongs on the reading list for any 25 year old.