All posts by Al Herbach

Follow Up on Technological Innovations

Follow-Up: Last week I wrote about Technological Innovation, where I talked about Microsoft’s introduction of the search engine Bing. I was interested in seeing how the world reacted to Bing after the introduction.   Microsoft has chosen to push shopping and decision making as the key aspects of Bing’s success.  The screens are colorful and the sample searches that I completed were fine.  The media has generally been pretty favorable to Bing’s introduction. But you can make your own determination with a visit to a site called Blind Search which will compare your search results through the use of Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Microsoft has also made good on its promise to advertise the heck out of Bing.  There are banner ads, newspaper ads, television ads,  keyword ads, blog post ads and even, dare I say it, Google AdWords. They have increased their influence on buyers with the Bing Cashback program which like a combination of the Google Checkout program and the Discovercard’s Cashback program.

Google is not taking their leading market position for granted. It is interesting to me is that Google has started to ramp up their advertising engine for the first time.  Both adwords and blog ads have become much more prevalent.  For a time, Google even changed their normally sparse home page to include a link to Explore Google Search to help people understand the wealth of options that Google provides for finding stuff.

In the early weeks of June, since the introduction of Bing, Microsoft’s share of the search market has grown a bit.  Much of this can be attributed to searchers taking Bing out for a test ride.  The real question wil be whether people continue to utilize Bing or if the honeymoon ends as people go back to their first loves.

Find the Highest Value

Being an entrepreneur is not an easy job.  There are so many things that pull at you to spend time and effort and energy to address.  How do you make sense of what is important?

Well, other entrepreneurs have taken it upon themselves to try to help you by building productivity systems.  People like David Allen, who created the Getting Things Done process or Stephen Covey who created a system around his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Other systems break things down into categories of Urgent/Not Urgent and Important/Not Important. There are many people who swear by these systems as they try to find ways to  manage the complexity of their work (and personal) lives.  But in the end, you have to find out what works for you. And in many cases, you don’t need a system.

I bring this all up because I have had several conversations lately with entrepreneurs that addressed this very topic, although I don’t think they thought of it in this way. Most entrepreneurs feel like they have to do everything.  I wrote about this in my column last week about Superheroes. It is a fallacy.  You have to look at where you can provide the highest value to your business at that particular point in time. The area will change over time, as you get smarter, more experienced, more valuable in your company and as your company changes.  But you need to make that evaluation every week (at least).

As an example, I know an entrepreneur who, before he started his business, was a top salesman.  Loved living the rough and tumble world of no-base pay, just full bore commissions.  And he did it for years, attaining recognition as a top salesman and big bucks. Now he is in charge of building his own company.  What he needs to do is to sell.  What he is doing is taking care of the details of the business.  He is doing a fine job of it, but in reality he is the best one to sell his product and service to prospects.  But, it seems, he looks at it as beneath him, not presidential and therefore tries to manage a salesman rather than sell.  His highest and best usage of time and energy is to utilize the skills he learned earlier in his career to sell his product. At this point in time, he should be the face of the business and help to build a sales team through example, not management. When that is working to his satisfaction, he can find other projects where the value is highest for him to participate.

Look around you to ensure that you have the highest value discussion frequently.  Sometimes you are so in the midst of running and building your company that you can’t determine which side is up, much less where your skills could best be used.  Take an opportunity to discuss it with someone you can trust who is outside of the maelstrom: a partner, a board member, a mentor, a business friend. Find ways to utilize your strengths and help (delegate to?) others to utilize their strengths in order to benefit the business.

Behind the Scenes, Entrepreneurship and Thought

Behind the Scenes: Sometimes the government does it right.  A couple of stories from the past several weeks have shown that our government does not necessarily have a tin ear when it comes to public opinion.  First the story about President Obama writing a note to excuse a student, who was attending a Presidential speech, from class.  Some of the people that I have talked to think that President Obama was being a smartass, but I believe that he took the time to talk one-on-one with a student in a very real and meaningful way.  Another story was the US Navy allowing a group of top bloggers, including Robert Scoble and Guy Kawasaki to spend 24 hours on the USS Nimitz, an aircraft carrier.  These bloggers were able to tell a story of the servicemen and servicewomen who work on our behalf and provide a very interesting group of reports including photos, podcasts and videos.

Entrepreneurship: Inc. Magazine wrote a nice piece on Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator.  When I grow up, I want to be like Paul.

Thought for the Day:

My life is not adrift.  There is no road map, but there is a horizon that I am moving towards. That horizon is broad, but it is informed by what I believe… The keel to your boat needs to be to your values, your principles, your beliefs and some sense of purpose, but that needs to be aimed at a horizon, not a point of latitude and longitude, because that point may turn out to be irrevelant.

– Randy Komisar

Behind the Scenes, Economics and Big Picture

Behind the Scenes: The cloud in cloud computing requires extensive data centers.  Most of us don’t think about the infrastructure of  how Google can get search results to your desktop in 0.15 seconds multiplied by millions of users every minute.

Economics: Alex discusses idiot taxes and the price of HDMI cables.  I have been surprised by the same phenomenon with regard to Apple iPod chargers and headphones.  Deals can be found online sometimes, but almost never in retail stores.  Why is that?

Big Picture: Innovation is a hot topic in business circles for a while now. Jeff Jarvis writes thoughtfully about how the innovations of the last few years have acted differently from innovations in prior years.  Previously, business innovations created increases in GDP, things like the Personal Computer and the ShamWow that consumers bought and companies derived income from.  Lately, some of the most important innovations, Craigslist and Google included, reduced corporate income (macro), but increased personal wealth (micro).  This is critical because reporting on our economic progress have been focused on macro trends for many years.  We need to develop alternative measures to accurately report on our progress.

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.