Category Archives: The thoughtful manager

Google edging closer to being "the new Microsoft"

A few years ago, I wrote an essay about how Microsoft had become the new IBM – i.e., the dominant, love-to-hate company of the computer industry. In this interesting article, John Lanchester discusses how Google now is stepping into that role, with its aggressive moves into making the world searchable, and a lot more than you would like findable. Interesting point:

[…] as Google makes clear, nothing short of a court order is going to stop it digitising every book in print. Google doesn’t accept that that constitutes a violation of copyright. But the company won’t even discuss the physical process by which it scans the books: a classic example of how very free it is with other people’s intellectual property, while being highly protective of its own.

This issue, in all its various forms, isn’t going to go away. Book Search, Street View and many of Google’s other offerings simply bulldoze existing ideas of how things are and how they should be done. I was highly critical of Gmail when it first came in, on the grounds that the superbly effective mail system came at the unacceptable price of allowing Google to scan all emails and place text ads. But I soon began using it, because it was free, and because it’s such good software, and because I frankly never noticed the ads.

He goes on to show how a hard disk crash and a botched backup restore left him without his documents, until it dawned on him that, yes, Gmail had them all, ready for download. So big brothers can be nice, but they are still Big Brothers…

Collaborative walled gardens

Collaborative platforms are all the rage at the moment – every company wants one, has one, lives and dies by one. Cisco’s CEO John Chambers blogs, Michael Dell is on Twitter, Microsoft is selling Sharepoint by the truckload (well, figuratively speaking) and every software company in the world is busy putting 2.0 behind their offering, from backup to presentations.

I am worrying that all these platforms will lead to less collaboration, not more.

First, a personal observation: I am what Malone and Rockart in 1991 termed an intellectual mercenary. That is, I think of myself as a company of one, working for many organizations, but I am never member of only one community, and never, for a number of reasons, a full member of one. Sure, I have been on the faculty of the same business school since 1996 and had relationships with more or less the same set of people in the consulting world since 1994, and currently I am in year three of what I hope will be an 8 year research project on information access technologies. But that doesn’t change the fact that I am not a full member, at least not technically speaking, of any one of them.

My base job, as an academic, has a technical infrastructure geared towards a physical presence at the campus (at least on a regular basis) and a lack of visibility outside campus. The school has an outdated infrastructure, but since most of the faculty thinks this is just fine, since it works, few things change. So I have to have my own web site and email to project a less antiquated face for the rest of the world. Fine. Then I work with two companies (one mostly in the States and one mostly in Norway) on various projects. In case of their technical infrastructure, it is more modern, but tightly integrated around a different platform than what my main place of work is using.

The interesting thing, of course, is that as long as communication took place via email and collaboration was done sending Word documents around, everything was hunky dory – I could use whatever I wanted. Now each collaboration partner has their own collaborative platform, with integrated calendaring, Twittering, email, directories and Turing knows what else – and I find myself fighting new user interfaces every time I need to do something.

Software evolves from application to platform to standard. The problem is that we do not yet have standards for collaborative activities, only for the end results of those activities: Reports, teleconferences, single emails, and presentations. If you want integration, you have to belong to one organization, and that organization only. Which is fine for most people, but not for those of us who wants to contain multitudes, and do.

At the current state of collaborative software, it strengthens intra-organizational collaboration but weakens inter-organizational collaboration. We are back to the days when some companies used Wordperfect and some Word, and everyone fiddled with translations between them. Now we have to find ways to maintain a personal creative space (in my case, Evernote, Word, and Windows Live Writer) while injecting and extracting the results from various collaborative platforms. I find myself yearning for something that will maintain my collaborative activities in much the same way Live Writer (along with Live Sync, the best product Microsoft has come up with in a decade) allows me to suck down and load up posts to my various blogs. (A bonus would be if you could update the various Wikipedia articles you care about as well, but I digress).

An alternative is a shared platform, such as Google Docs, but again, that forces you to work in a different interface (though it is very similar to Word), does not bring the work inside your own space (where you are reminded about doing it) and forces everyone else to move out of their space. What we need here is some serious standard work in XML, and a recognition by the platform providers that a substantial amount of collaboration (and, I suspect, much of the innovation) comes from those that jump between platforms.

So, here is my message to the collaborative platform vendors: Tear down the walls before you have erected them! Do it by offering APIs or facilitating cross-platform synchronization. While we are at it, some software company with a stake in keeping their operating systems dominance should probably take me up on creating a cross-platform personal collaboration client.

I want my PCC revolution now!

Unintended consequences

How Michael Osinski Helped Build the Bomb That Blew Up Wall Street — New York Magazine

This is so good it just can’t be made up…

Wikipedia as a city

Good article comparing Wikipedia’s development and life as that of a city by Noam Cohen, drawing on Lewis Mumford’s description of how a city comes to be:

Since their creation, cities have had to be accepting of strangers — no judgments — and residents learn to be subtly accommodating, outward looking.

Mumford elaborates: “Even before the city is a place of fixed residence, it begins as a meeting place to which people periodically return: the magnet comes before the container, and this ability to attract nonresidents to it for intercourse and spiritual stimulus no less than trade remains one of the essential criteria of the city, a witness to its essential dynamism, as opposed to the more fixed and indrawn form of the village, hostile to the outsider.”

The marvel of Wikipedia — and cities — is that all the intercourse and spiritual stimulus don’t make living there impossible. Rather, they are exactly what makes living there possible.

[..]

It is this sidewalk-like transparency and collective responsibility that makes Wikipedia as accurate as it is. The greater the foot traffic, the safer the neighborhood. Thus, oddly enough, the more popular, even controversial, an article is, the more likely it is to be accurate and free of vandalism. It is the obscure articles — the dead-end streets and industrial districts, if you will — where more mayhem can be committed. It takes longer for errors or even malice to be noticed and rooted out. (Fewer readers will be exposed to those errors, too.)

Like the modern megalopolis, Wikipedia has decentralized growth. Wikipedia adds articles the way Beijing adds neighborhoods — whenever the mood strikes. It is open to all: the sixth-grader typing in material from her homework assignment, the graduate student with a limited grasp of English. No judgments, no entry pass.

That simple and that beautiful…

Good survey of web business models

image Box UK, has a very complete survey of web business models. My concept of business models (though for information content and services, not just services) on the web was four: Free, ad-supported, subscription or some form of micropayment (Skype, I would say, is the largest user of this concept, though they pull it off a regularly replenished account).

This site expands that classification a bit, including things like taking payemnt for physical products and letting the service follow the product (which more and more electronics manufacturers do). What strikes me is that there really is nothing new here – all the business models have been around since time immemorial, something the media industries of the world should take note of.

The answer for more and more of the granulated information providers of the world lies in moving either towards the user (becoming, essentially, an integrated part of the user’s information need, such as Bloglines) or to step further from the individual information consumer, becoming a source of content for others to fight over. Paying a license, of course.

Anyway, a good list, and a good survey. Check it out.

(Via Chris Anderson of Wired.)

Shirky on newspapers

Clay Shirky, the foremost essayist on the Internet and its boisterous intrusion into everything, has done it again: Written an essay on something already thoroughly discussed with a new and fresh perspective. This time, it is on the demise of newspapers – the short message is that this is a revolution, and saving newspapers just isn’t going to happen, because this is, well, a revolution:

[..]I remember Thompson [in 1993] saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” I think about that conversation a lot these days.

[..]

Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.

[..]

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

That simple. He draws the line back to the Gutenberg printing press and the enormous transition that caused – much more chaotic that you would think with 500 year hindsight.

Highly recommended. And another piece of reading for my suffering students….

Real tale from a real assembly line

Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line by Ben Hamper

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Ben Hamper worked on the production line of the General Motors bus and truck plant in Flint, Michigan from 1977 to 1988, and wrote about the experience in this book. It is a rambling and often funny account of mind-numbingly dull work, schemes employed by the workers to make it less dull, and the equally inane managerial schemes to, well, manage. Witness Howie Makem, the "Quality Cat" mascot, an actor in a cat costume showing up at various intervals to get the workers to produce higher-quality vehicles.

The books should be required reading for business school students (and is in some courses) showing the sometimes vast difference between the managerial and worker view of the world. Hamper ridicules the ways of top management, while at the same time showing how, with relatively little effort (such as, when the factory in-house magazine reports that a country music singer was going to buy one of their cars, Hamper wants to know which car it would be and realizing that that was the first time he ever heard anything about who the customer was). In the end, the dull and hard work: Hamper develops anxiety attacks and eventually drops out from the assembly line. You kind of suspect it is from under-use of his brain – he likens it to forever dropping out of high school, staying in suspended animation in a never-ending adolescence, seeking relief in alcohol and mindless games.

Highly recommended because it offers a different view of things, sorely needed as something of a counterweight to all the starry-eyed management books out there. And it leaves you wondering, as Hamper does: If not the assembly line, what else can a middle-aged autoworker with no marketable skills do? Hamper can write and do auto shows. Most of his colleagues, you suspect, cannot. Given the current state of General Motors (at present, bankruptcy seems inevitable within a year) this is a question of more than fleeting interest for a sizeable portion of the US workforce.

View all my reviews.

Wolfram is at it again

Stephen Wolfram’s next project, the Wolfram|Alpha search "engine" (or, rather, answer to everything that is computable) is due out in May visit it here.) To me it seems like a combination of Google, CYC and, perhaps, Mathematica. It certainly is interesting and should do much for factual search, not to mention conversational interfaces to search. Nova Spivack thinks it is as important as Google. Doug Lenat (in the comment field to Spivack’s blog post) says

[…] it’s not AI, and not aiming to be, so it shouldn’t be measured by contrasting it with HAL or Cyc but with Google or Yahoo. At its heart is a formal Mathematica representation. Its inference engine is basically a large number of individually hand-engineered scripts for tapping into data which he and his team have spent the last several years gathering and "curating". For example, he has assembled tables of historical financial information about countries’ GDP’s and about companies’ stock prices. In a small number of cases, he also connects via API to third party information, but mostly for realtime data such as a current stock price or current temperature. Rather than connecting to and relying on the current or future Semantic Web, Alpha computes its answers primarily from his own curated data to the extent possible; he sees Alpha as the home for almost all the information it needs, and will use to answer users’ queries.

Another way of seeing it might be as the latest shot at providing answers by processing rather than storage – which fits nicely with Wolfram’s idea of computational equivalence – that the universe can be described by a simple set of rules, which as far as I understand it means that all complexity is only apparent, not real, and only so because we have not yet understood the underlying algorithms.

I just can’t wait to try it out – and to see what the impact will be on more storage-intensive search engines and their use.

Update March 12: This is garnering some serious attention for a service that isn’t even in beta yet…

Stimulus Bill Restricts Hiring of Internationals

This is going to help the US economy?

Under a recently passed amendment to the federal stimulus bill, companies participating in the Troubled Assets Relief Program—a government financial-rescue plan implemented last fall—will face more restrictions in hiring H-1B visa holders, foreigners with at least a bachelor’s degree and “highly specialized knowledge” in a particular field.

[…]

Firms that have accepted TARP funds would be required to demonstrate that they have made concerted efforts to employ and avoid laying off U.S. citizens before hiring H-1B visa holders, said Kevin Casey, the University’s chief lobbyist.

I can only repeat (almost) what I said in the comments:

As an HBS graduate who works with software and technology companies both in Europe and the US, I can only bemoan this measure as uniquely shortsighted – and very helpful to European and Asian software companies, who can hire graduates from top US schools. For mysterious reasons, the US don’t want them once they have been trained and can contribute to the economy.

The fact that large companies now are putting their software research and development (not maintenance ) centers in Canada (just across the border in Vancouver) or in India speaks volumes. On the other hand, it may make it easier for me to find people…

I think the best solution for the US economy is Tom Friedman and others’ idea to allow a few million Chinese, Indian or Korean immigrants, provided they buy a house. Talk about a shovel-ready project….

(Via Greg Mankiw.)

Update March 11: This is indirectly hurting American export of education (where there is an $11.2b trade surplus. I have heard similar from other academics recently. I suppose this is good news for the Norwegian School of Management (we’ll get more and  better foreign students since the USA offers a less attractive proposition), but still, this is bad news overall.

Shannon, explained…

Peter Cochrane has a simple and very useful explanation of Claude Shannon’s mathematical law of communication, complete with diagrams. And a warning that, when it comes to technology, magic won’t work there, either.

We might thus imagine the energy of a signal dispersed inside such a solid form in the same way that water is retained by the skin of a balloon. We can change the shape of the balloon but the amount of water stays the same. Similarly, different coding and modulation schemes can alter the ratios of the sides presented by Shannon’s equation.

We can certainly trade off signal power against noise and/or bandwidth and time, but we can never exceed the bounds set by nature.

FASTForward 2009 – impressions from the first day

This year, FASTForward is in Las Vegas, which is quite a shock to the system. I haven’t been here since 1987, when I visited COMDEX and stayed at the Bally, then the largest hotel here. Now you can hardly see it for all the new and much bigger ones. (Las Vegas has changed in other ways as well, the business model is no longer “cheap booze and food, make it up in the casino”. Since most people no longer come here primarily to gamble, so a glass of red wine was $15 in the bar..)

The theme for the conference this year is “Engage your user” and the program builds on the one from last year, but with, it seems to me, fewer circuit speakers and more company examples, which is fine with me.

Don Tapscott: The Net Generation

First speaker out: Don Tapscott, actually a colleague of mine from nGenera, talking about his new book Grown up digital. Don is very optimistic about the net generation, in contrast to the many articles that have cropped up saying that the current net-addicted generation is the dumbest ever. The population in USA has gone from boom to bust to echo: The echo group is called the Net Generation, the digital natives. For the first time in history, kids are authorities (in relation to their parents) on something that is important. In contrast to their parents, when asked whether they want to be smarter or better-looking, two thirds of them answer “smarter” (except in England.) Are they coddled? 40% of them move home after university. but is this a bad thing?

HTML beaten by XML: Tapscott’s son created a Facebook community around Wikinomics, got 126 users in 7 countries in one day. Then the community started pointing out errors in the book and requesting participation from Tapscott himself. Company ad spending online is growing faster than time people spend online. Prescription: Don’t create products, create Consumer experiences. Don’ create place, create Anyplace. Don’t focus on price, focus on Discovery as a mechanism for price setting. Don’t focus on promotion, focus on Engagement. Marketer are losing control of the brand, which now needs to have integrity, or the influence network will kick in and trounce you on the social networks.

There are many things young people don’t know – so perhaps it is time to tear down these generational firewalls and get some mentoring going.

Clay Shirky: Here comes everybody

Five word summary of the book: Group interaction just got easier.

Example: Someone posts an HDR picture on Flickr and asks what the best software for this is. It balloons into a long and very technical discussion, with more photos. Happens every day, but is a very powerful technology that has profoundly changed how we interact. Since you can attach conversations to everything, every URL is a possible platform for interaction.

Another example: HSBC sold many students on penalty-free checking, but reneged on it during summer vacation, wanting to charge their customers 140 pounds. Didn’t count on Facebook. The information advantage of HBSC disappeared – one person found out how to simply move his money to another bank, posted it, and that was it. Then the thousand of Facebook users started to protest – and eventually HSBC caved in to this group of coordinated participants.

Information moves faster: The earthquake in Sichuan last year got reported immediately via qq.ch and Twitter. The last time something similar happened, in the 1970s, it took three months before the Chinese authorities would even admit it would happen.

Another example: Chris Avenir, student at Ryerson University, taking Chemistry 101. Started a study group on Facebook, 146 participants. And then he gets a note from the university saying he may be expelled because he was putting course stuff online, whereas he saw it as simply taking what he was doing in the real world online. This is a clash of metaphors: The university sees it as a media outlet, the students as regular social life. That is the wrong question to ask: Facebook is Facebook, not a manifestation of something else.

Crowsourcing: Howardsforums now has engineers from handset manufacturers sending their customers there. Companies look at this as a source of free labor, but fail to see the passion necessary – and the fact that they cannot, inside their companies, model the complexity and the uses of their products that takes place out there in the real world.

Example: Dogear, an internal service in IBM similar to del.icio.us, in that it let users tag and save URLs. It led to two research groups (one in England and one in the US) finding out they were working on the same problem and initiating collaboration.

How to get started with this? Amazon has lots of social applications, but have never had a strategy for it, nor a button marked “community”. Their social interaction tools have evolved through trial and error, which takes a tolerance of failure and a willingness to learn.

Dan Rasmus: Navigating the new world of business

Dan is Director of Insight in Microsoft (now, there is a title I have given to myself many times). His role is to look at changes in business and the workplace on a rolling basis. Quotes Schopenhauer: “The task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what nobody has yet thought about that which everybody has seen.”

Microsoft uses scenario planning to try to make sure that investments will work in several scenarios as opposed to depend on one and only one future change. Key dimensions: Globalization vs. bordering, centralization vs. decentralization. Four scenarios: Proud tower, Border Friction, Freelance Planet and one more. [This was presented in a rather busy video.]  Credit crisis has a tendency to overpower everything, but we still have to worry about environment, mobile tech, and other things. Globalization is there in spite of “buy American”: A standard breakfast cereal has components from all over the world. How do you manage a workforce of outsourced people, freelancers and consultants?

Other examples: Data everywhere, placeless work (punctuated workday), need to be open to attract younger workers. Going towards a blended future, with blended jobs – such as “authenticity engineer”

The Two Cow explanation of the financial crisis

Sometimes simple simple allegories have great explanatory power.

The two cows story, incidentally, is a respected literary tradition in economics…

ERP analogies

Andy McAfee uses an analogy of an ERP as a factory for business processes. Here are my analogies:

  • We are born as originals and die as copies. ERP systems are the other way – they start as copies and die as originals. An ERP system, when it is installed, allows you to configure it by choosing parameters – what kind of budget process, how you define "customer", etc. etc. After having set a few thousand parameters, you can be absolutely certain that you are the only company in the world with that particular SAP or Oracle or whatever configuration. Of course, standardization was what ERP systems were all about when they were introduced in the mid-nineties: The idea that software should be simple again.
  • ERP systems are flexible the way cement is flexible. Less true now than it was – cement is ultimately flexible when you pour it, then it hardens into the shape of the hole it was poured into.
  • A more advanced version of this is the old joke that SAP (or insert your favorite ERP system) is like a new basic element. Basic elements go through three stages: Fixed, fluid and gas. SAPium (and its cousin Oraclium) start out as a fluid that runs down and fills the holes (basic business process) you want fixed. It then becomes a gas, expanding to fill the whole area (organization) until it has permeated everything, whereupon it becomes a solid that can never be changed again….

Oh well. Less true now than it was, maybe. Or maybe not.

Controlling Wall Street

Excellent article by Michael Lewis and David Einhorn on the deeper, yet not addressed issues of the financial crisis: The flawed checks, balances and incentives of Wall Street. Among the suggestions to fix: "Stop making big regulatory decisions with long-term consequences based on their short-term effect on stock prices."

Amen.

(Incidentally, Lewis wrote Liar’s Poker, so his coming book on this financial crisis is going on my shortlist right now.)

While the cat is out….

Gurcharan Das writes on the differences between India and China.

I just love the phrase “our economy grows at night when the government is asleep.”

(Also in New York Times.)

The girl effect

image

Pretty powerful use of Flash, music, and typography to underscore a very simple point: To get ahead, invest in the female side of the population. As a father of three of those, I find it hard not to agree.

(Via lots of places, starting with Arne Olav.)

The efficient US auto industry

Fareed Zakaria makes it clear: There is an efficient US auto industry. It just isn’t in Detroit. Operative quote:

…there are 12 international car companies that have manufacturing operations in the United States. Collectively, they employ 113,000 Americans directly — even though that is less than the 239,000 at Ford, GM and Chrysler. However, those international car companies sell more cars than the Big Three and their customers love their products.

[…]

CNN: So you are against the bailout?

Zakaria: No. But the reasons the CEOs of Ford, GM and Chrysler present — that they will restructure, they are still competitive, they will change — are bogus; they won’t. The best argument for the bailout is that it is the most cost-effective jobs program that the government can run in the short term.

(Via Esteban.)

Here is a more philosophical piece by Roger Cohen.

Quote of the day

From a recently concluded teleconference on continuous business strategy:

Nagging is a core part of collaboration.

Ain’t that the truth….

Cisco does it again

Jim McGee comments on the case of Cisco (Fast Company article here, calling the company "socialist"), which seems to actually try to become a web 2.0 enterprise, whatever that might mean in the end. Cisco has always eaten its own dog food – back in the late 90s, I somehow bamboozled Pete Solvik, the CIO, into giving a talk to my students via teleconference. One of the things he stressed was the importance of being the first user of their own Internet technology. Back then Cisco was famous for serial buying of companies (for their technology) and for their extremely efficient internal procedures. It is one of the few companies I have seen that truly are strategy-driven, with strategy being an explicit choice and their vision and mission something distinctive.

The interesting thing here is that Cisco seems to be pulled in the direction of a higher-margin consulting company by its customers, which could leave it vulnerable to a low-end disruption from, say, Chinese home and SMB networking component companies powered by open source software. For those few companies that have been able to survive such a disruption, their survival has either been based on a move towards other places in the value chain (somewhat consistent with what Cisco is doing, it could be argued) or by a conscious choice to allow cannibalization by lower-margin products or services. In the cases I have heard of (such as Intel’s creation of the Celeron chip) this has dependent on top management with strong decision power and a long-term view of technology evolution. Could it be that decentralized management could make such a move, should it be necessary, harder for the organization to execute? Or,perhaps, easier, since at least the start phase can be done in a skunkworks fashion.

Nevertheless, Cisco is at it, again. I am looking forward to the rest of the story.

Posner and Becker: Let the Big Three go bankrupt

Both Posner (who has changed his mind) and Becker agree that the Detroit Big Three automakers should be allowed to go bankrupt rather than continue to suck up subsidies and produce cars the world market do not want. It is hard not to agree on principle, and in this case, also in practice.

The thing is, if the big three go bankrupt, this does not necessarily mean that Detroit is finished when it comes to producing cars. The designers, workers and machinery will be put to use – if nothing else, other automakers as well as entrepreneurs will come in, buy up the assets (free of dept), and start to compete by producing the most popular models, licensed models from other auto makers, or new ones.

The failure of the Big Three is complicated: A disastrous decision back in the fifties or sixties to make pensions the responsibility of individual companies rather than the government, short-sighted management, ossified unions, overfocus on automation (GM in the 80s), bad product quality, old-fashioned or just bad designs, short-term product development, financial rather than real innovation, slow product development (7 years per new model vs. the Japanese 3-4 in early 90s), too much focus on the domestic market, focus on what you can measure (such as parts commonality) rather than new customer needs and segments, political lobbying as marketing, and on and on and on….

Why not just let it die, and have something more sustainable (both in business and environmental terms) rise from the ashes?