Worthy Articles

Traveler IQ Challenge

2007-12-15T00:27:00.001-08:00

cool game

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Traveler IQ Challenge

via Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed by pk on 12/14/07

A story in the WSJ got me trying to excel tonight at the Traveler IQ online game. Well, there went the evening. God, I thought I was so much better at geography. Depressing.

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good article

2007-09-01T22:45:00.001-07:00

...

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I recently spoke at Yahoo! about the book, and, for this presentation, I adapted the Agenda Detection and Meeting Creatures chapters into a piece about how I assess agendas and people in the first 10 minutes of any meeting.

Early on in the presentation, I asked the audience, "What are the things you are supposed to do to make a successful meeting?" First hand: "Make sure everyone closes their laptop." Yes. Full agreement from me. If you're sitting in my meeting and your laptop is open, I promise, I swear -- you are giving me half of your attention. Maybe less.

The Yahoos couldn't drop the topic. In Q&A, the laptop question came up. In the post-presentation mingle it came up again. Everyone wanted to know if there was a situation where it was OK to whip out the laptop.

My answer, over and over again, is "No."

Now, this is religion and not reality because it's likely I'll bring my laptop to a couple of meetings this week, but I am ultimately fucking up by doing this. Here's why.

Laptop Tolerance

There were three different angles the Yahoos tried on me, and I have an answer for each:

"What if I'm taking notes on my laptop?"

This is how laptops got invited to the party. Pre-wireless-everywhere folks were using their laptops as note-paper. This is fine, but nowadays, are you really just taking notes? Really? It takes one lull in the conversation to get bored and starting glancing over at CNN, and in that moment I might say something you need to know and you missed it because you stopped listening. So, what are you doing in this meeting? If you're going to ignore me, you can just as easily do it sitting in your office.

One solution to this problem is to leave the laptop in your office and bring a nice, bright sheet of white paper to the meeting. Try it. When forced, you might even find something interesting in the dull parts of the meeting.

"I'm required to go to this meeting and I have no role, so I bring my laptop to get work done."

I have two answers to this. First, why the hell are going to this meeting if you have no role? Second, even if you don't have a role, how do you know you don't have a role? If you're sitting there ignoring whatever is being said while you're scrubbing the bug database, you have nary a clue what is being talked about.

When I'm forced to go to a meeting where I have no obvious role or responsibility, I give the meeting the benefit of the doubt and listen hard. What is going on here? Do I care? How can I help? With all the wonders of the Internet sitting on my MacBook Pro, this can be tricky, but what I'm trying to figure out is if I can add any value in the time that I'm required to sit there. If, after a few meetings, I'm certain I'm a) not going to learn anything, and b) can't add any value, I stop going to the meeting. Consequences are forthcoming, but more on that in a moment.

"I run the meeting and they're not respecting my laptop policy."

Some meetings involve piles of people, and this creates a comfortable anonymity where attendees ignore the no-laptop policy and type away. My advice here is to politely remind everyone of your policy. Still a problem? Remind them again. More typing? It's time to remove these people from the meeting.

Being a meeting jerk has consequences, but it's those consequences you want to face because you've got a bigger problem than people ignoring your meeting.

The Herring

All this focus on laptops as the problem is a red herring. Whether you're running a meeting with a rampant laptop problem or sitting in a meeting where you have no role, the actual problem is that someone doesn't understand the value of the meeting.

No, it's actually worse.

The problem is that everyone attending this laptop-laden clusterfuck is subconsciously hearing "Hey, in this meeting, it's A-OK to waste people's time."

My question is: "When is it ever ok to waste people's time?"

You're on the defensive now and you're thinking "But Rands, while I'm not actively contributing to this meeting, I am getting work done on my laptop." No, you're not. You're giving the same partial attention to your laptop task that you're giving to the meeting. You are doing two things poorly rather than one thing well.

The solution here is simple. If you're in a meeting where you have no role such that you're tempted to stare at your laptop: stop going. If you're running a meeting infested with laptops and, after repeated gentle reminders about your no-laptop policy, there are still laptops: remove the laptop offenders from the meeting.

This brute force approach strikes me as being a violation of the Rands "Don't be a prick" policy, but frequent readers know that not being a prick is always trumped by the even more important policy of "Don't waste my time". Besides, being a prick is going to have some interesting side effects.

Standing Meeting Momentum

Meetings become part of organizational culture. Just like any organization has a healthy layer of baffling acronyms, they also have a set of core standing meetings. Some of these meetings have been around forever and have a life of their own.

Thing is, in the five years that you've been working at that company, the company has (hopefully) changed. More importantly, so have the employees. So why in the world do we still have that useless product status review for everyone on Tuesdays at 4pm? I can get all the information from the wiki Frank set up.

If you have no role in a meeting and stop going, or if you remove someone from a meeting, you're going to create a conflict with whoever believes that you (or the other someone) should be in that meeting. This is great. This is the discussion you want to have: "Frank, I've been to this meeting 12 times and I've no clue what I'm doing here. Please advise."

Maybe Frank has some insight for you. Maybe he can explain some strategic shenanigans that will adjust your perspective so that your first reaction in this meeting isn't to surf the popular videos on YouTube. If Frank can't clearly explain why you need to be there -- guess what -- I've just saved you 30 minutes to an hour each week. Please consider this an early Christmas present.

A bunch of people sitting in a meeting, staring at their laptops, is a fat meeting. The people sitting at their laptops have no incentive to change a thing because they're lost in whatever has captured their interest on their laptops. This is a lazy meeting full of people who are ignoring the most important question: "How do we figure out how to never have this meeting again?" Even worse, an organization that lets this meeting exist is a rotting organization. It's a company where it's slowly becoming acceptable to sit there and do nothing.

A meeting must fight to exist. It must defend its existence to its attendees who should constantly be asking "Why are we here?"

Now you understand the other thing I do in the first 10 minutes of any standing meeting: I think about how I can kill it.

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CDO Insiders: "We Knew We Were Buying Time Bombs"

2007-09-01T16:55:00.001-07:00

the article reminds me of two things:
no free lunches...
and past doesnt predict the future...i remember this story:
in a investor mtg a company and sustained losses ( a dot com i think) and the investor was saying it is about to go down is clear from the papers in his hand.. so a legg mason bigshot peered into this investor's papers ( in his hand) and explained to him that you have some extra papers because those in my hand dont predict the future... i think it is from chaggi's book on warren buffet investing that i read

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CDO Insiders: "We Knew We Were Buying Time Bombs"

via The Big Picture by ritholtz on Aug 24, 2007

Here's an email I received late yesterday from a friend, "R," who was in the CDO business from way back when to right through the past few years.

"R" writes:

"I've been paying attention to your macro economic call lately and you're right on. Three anecdotal stories for you that you can use on Kudlow. (PLEASE don't mention my name).

1. XXXXXX and I were talking in 2003 about how shaky these low FICO, high LTV, 2/28 ARM's that were being created were. People in the know knew then those loan products were going to be a problem in the future. Way back in 2003, it didn't make sense.

2. In early '05, XXXXXX tried to hook me up with a HF he knew that wanted to play the CDO issuer game. I talked to the guy and told him that at the risk of talking them out of hiring me, I wouldn't do it. I thought that game was topped-out even back then. A bit early, but perhaps the right call.

3. I was talking to CDO managers in mid-'05 that were saying how rich sub-prime MBS was and how wrong everyone was for buying that stuff at the spreads they were. To a man, they all agreed they were paying too much for the risk, they all believed that HPA [ED: home price appreciation] was going negative soon. But, sadly, they had to buy the stuff because they needed to accumulate collateral for their CDO issuance. Fuck, we all knew we were overpaying, even back in 2005. We knew it was essentially a bet that home price appreciation was going to continue at levels that couldn't be sustained. No way that could keep going on.

Everyone was saying the same thing: Home pricing cannot continue appreciating at the same rate, and the second this thing turns, we are FUCKED.

Is it really any surprise to anyone that the mortgage business got too far ahead of itself? To me, the only surprise has been it took so long for all of this to happen."

So what was the prime motivating factor?:

"The answer is quite simple: DEAL FEES. I gotta keep buying collateral, in order to keep issuing these transactions as a CDO manager. Its my job: I gotta keep accumulating collateral, and I gotta issue the liability against that collateral.

In 2005, we all said "I hate the real estate market, I hate the credit spread, but my job is to keep doing this: Buying Collateral and issuing CDOs. Everyone was the buying this shit to do any deal. The greed went thru the whole chain, from the home owner buying a property they couldn't afford right up to the CDO manager buying subprime paper."

Why did these managers keep buying this bad junk?:

"Well, nothing is "bad junk" -- it's just priced wrong. No one believed the under-performance of these MBS loan pools would ever be so severe. Everyone knew in the back of their minds that the possibility existed, as did the possibility that residential real estate prices would move LOWER someday.

But no one wanted to be the first to acknowledge it fearing that they'd miss the opportunity to participate in big fees, big alpha, etc. . . ."

Thanks, R. Great insight from inside the belly of the beast.

UPDATE: August 24, 2007 3:49pm

R asked me to add the following:

"I hate the fact that I'm getting pulled into this, but I'm seeing the need to clear a few things up.

1. To Fred or MS, I "had a spine" by walking away from an opportunity to start up a CDO management business at an established hedge fund company in '05. Everyone was going the same way on that trade, the collateral sucked, and HPA was maxing out. What I told Barry about were my observations from daily interactions with buyers of sub-pime HEL's as collateral for their CDO transactions. My role then was on the sell-side. Minds far smarter than mine were eager to accumulate this collateral. Fraud? Nothing fraudulent at this stage of the proccess. If there was fraud, reading an offering memorandum and monthly remittance reports cover to cover or spending hours of cash flow modelling on Intex wouldn't have shown it. Oh, and where was the fraud? My opinion; mortgage brokers possibly lying about and jamming loans into the wrong people to get fees from the lenders. My view on the relative value of sub-prime HEL's during this time period was not nearly as upbeat as others in a world where EVERYONE else was a buyer.

2. Eclectic, it's not quite as disgusting as you might think. Everyone knew the bet they were making; a combination of HPA and continued positive loan performance would continue sans interruption. It was a market call, similar in concept to the market calls most of you reading this make each day in your chosen financial markets and products. It was a bet that the collateral was going to continue doing what it was supposed to. It's a bit annoying when the "talking heads" claim that institutional investors and HF's buying these products don't know what they own. Bullshit. They know. They own a bet on Average Joe's house staying equal or going up in value and his continued ability to make his loan payments.

3. Stuart got it right, unfortunately. In a capitalist society, one sells what people want. And they wanted sub-prime HEL's with HUGE credit spreads such that the arbitrage was bigger. How is that huge credit spead possible? Lower quality loans; low FICO's, low LTV's.

Thanks Barry. I really want these folks to read this extra detail in an effort to clear up mis-understanding."

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How Low Will Housing Go?

2007-09-01T16:46:00.001-07:00

this means they expect prices to go lower another 15-30% ...say 20%

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How Low Will Housing Go?

via The Big Picture by ritholtz on Aug 23, 2007

That question may be the key to the future actions of the Federal Reserve. One estimate of "How Low Will Housing Go?" comes from Jan Hatzius, Chief Economist of Goldman Sachs:

"Our working assumption has been that US home prices are about 15% overvalued. This relies on a simple "affordability" measure which essentially adjusts the home price/income ratio by the level of (nominal) mortgage rates. Depending on one's assumption about income growth, the likelihood of overshooting on the downside, and the length of the adjustment process, this suggests cumulative nominal home price declines of 5-15% in the next few years.

However, affordability is becoming an increasingly problematic concept because it ignores changes in credit availability and changes in nonconforming mortgage rates. Hence, it may be better to look at simpler price/income or price/rent ratios to get a sense of house price valuation. These paint a more dire picture.

Even if we assume that the long-term trend for price/income and price/rent is higher now than the average of the 1975-2000 period (because interest rates are likely to stay lower), cumulative nominal price declines of 15%-30% are possible."

That's not so different from what HSBC HomePulse wrote back in January 2006:

"We suggest that about half of the US housing market is frothy and that this 'bubble zone' may be overvalued by as much as 35-40%, after taking into account low interest rates and tax advantages.

Current valuations imply a large permanent reduction in the risk premium and/or a sizable step up in future capital gains, not all of which, we think, is justified. The 'bubble zone' accounts for 50% of US GDP, or over USD, nearly the size of the German, French, and UK economies put together. In other words, it's big. Therefore, when these housing bubbles begin to deflate, it is likely to have substantial macroeconomic consequences.

What's troubling is that even a perfect 'soft landing' in the form of flat national house prices would be consistent with a 35-40% collapse in existing home sales. The gush of liquidity from mortgage equity withdrawal would dry up, resulting in a growth drag worth over 3% of GDP. If this adjustment can be managed over many years (and hopefully it will), the economy can avoid recession and get away with soft growth.

If the process is squeezed into a shorter time frame instead, then recession is probable, forcing the Fed to once again consider unconventional policy options - a probability that would only rise if the money supply were to decline at the same time the 'bubble zone' deflates."

Whenever I hear anyone suggest that these events were totally unforeseeable, I know that person is full of $%#*.

Source:
A Froth-Finding Mission: Detecting US housing bubbles
HSBC Macro US Economics, January 2006
http://neweconomist.blogs.com/new_economist/files/HSBC_frothfindingmission.pdf

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The "When and Why" of Incumbent Negotiations

2007-09-01T16:27:00.001-07:00

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The "When and Why" of Incumbent Negotiations

via Sourcing Innovation by Michael Lamoureux on Aug 22, 2007

I recently came across a recent edition of Procurement Insight from CGI by Denise Dattomo and Chuks Amajor entitled Incumbent Negotiations: When and Why that reviewed 7 situations where incumbent negotiations may be more attractive than competitive procurement which was quite good. Although comprehensive competitive bidding approaches are typically the right way to go, direct negotiations with incumbents might be the the right choice under certain circumstances. CGI has found that, based on their experience, incumbent negotiations yield an average savings of 9%, and sometimes the savings can be (much) higher. Furthermore the effort, and cost, involved in incumbent negotiations ...

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Timeless Principles To Steer You Through Negotiations

2007-09-01T16:24:00.001-07:00

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Timeless Principles To Steer You Through Negotiations

via Sourcing Innovation by Michael Lamoureux on Aug 22, 2007

Over on The Negotiator Magazine, Eric Garner recently had a great article on Timeless Principles To Steer You Through Negotiations that listed seven principles of negotiations that define a sure-fire way to succeed. The list, which also included 7 timeless quotes, one per principle, is as follows: Negotiating is an essentially human way of interacting. Negotiating is not about dividing up a limited cake in ways that are divisive. It is about making a bigger and better cake. Conflict is at the heart of negotiation but only a positive view ...

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Advice du Jour: Do Whatever Gets You Tenure

2007-07-30T20:30:00.001-07:00

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Advice du Jour: Do Whatever Gets You Tenure

via Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed by pk on Jul 23, 2007

I was recently talking to a CEO friend of mine who is having trouble with his board. He thinks there is a very good chance that he will soon be fired.

What's the problem?, I asked.

"Fucking board full of VCs," he said. "They undervalue me. I'm knocking myself out getting this company on analysts' radar, getting our systems in place, hiring good people, and even closed this recent round. And what do I get? Grief at every board meeting, and at weekly calls inbetween."

What are they giving you grief about?

"Number crap," he said. "They are hung up on a couple of key accounts, ones that we thought we would have closed by now, but haven't. It'll either happen or it won't, but beating on me every week isn't going to change anything. These fuckers should get a real job sometime and see what it's like on the other side."

I don't want to sound glib, I said, but why don't you just close the deals?

"What?", we're trying. "But it's complicated and time-consuming, and I can't spend every minute hanging with my sales guys as they work the process. There are too many fires to spend my time only on those ones."

I told him the story of another super-smart friend of mine. Harvard Ph.D. One of the most intelligent people I've ever met. Quicker than quick. He took a job as an academic at a top-tier U.S. school, had a great research program, and proceeded to not get get tenure, despite being the smartest guy in the place, which everyone knew.

Why? Because to get tenure he had to publish papers, and he had a couple of key papers in the edit cycle, and he knew they would eventually get published. He spent the bulk of his time doing other stuff, like consulting, teaching, helping other faculty, and doing doctoral supervision. Trouble is, those key papers weren't accepted in time for his tenure review, so he was terminated -- even though the papers were accepted 3-4 months later.

The moral of the story: Do what gets you tenure. If he had been knocking himself out getting other papers in other publications, even if they hadn't published, he would have been cut more slack than he was for what he did (however laudable it was).

Same thing for my CEO friend. Boards are wrong about many things, but if you balk at the thing they unanimously want, then you are going to have to soon find other employment. Do what gets you tenure. If they want to see you selling, be seen selling. A lot.

And if you think that's being cynical or pandering, then you have no business in real world of business.

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Perspective with Humility: i probably want to read this interview

2007-07-29T13:21:00.001-07:00

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Perspective with Humility

via Aswath Weblog by aswath on Jul 13, 2007

Just listened to an interview given by NEA's Managing Partner Kittu Kolluri. There he says: "Success makes you look better than you really are; failure makes you look worse than you really are." I can use the quote as an...

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Good IDEAs

2007-07-29T10:54:00.001-07:00

i should go thru them

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Good IDEAs

via Anil Dash by Anil on Jul 23, 2007

The International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) winners for 2007 have been posted on BusinessWeek's site. There are all of the usual slideshows and essays that you'd expect, but perhaps the coolest tool is the interactive table of winners from 2000 to 2007, sortable by client, school, or designer.

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RE: Bill Gates, Ambition, Legacy, and Obligation

2007-07-18T05:32:00.001-07:00

great idea..let do it...

From: Umesh [mailto:ukumar@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, July 17, 2007 8:20 PM
To: ukumar.articles@blogger.com; Kumar, Umesh (REPO); Trivedi, Ashish
Subject: Bill Gates, Ambition, Legacy, and Obligation

hi ashish,
how about lunching one day on baby carrots every week and collecting that money for donation ?...two weeks will translate to 1 child 1 year of food.

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Bill Gates, Ambition, Legacy, and Obligation

via Anil Dash by Anil on Jul 07, 2007

I've followed the history of Bill Gates and his career and work since I was a kid. Though he's not nearly charismatic enough to inspire an army of fawning fanboys, the complexity and eccentricity of a lot of his choices makes his character endlessly fascinating to me. And of course, it is an extra bonus that most people confuse such an interest for uncritical adoration, which ain't the case.

I'm not a Bill Gates fanboy, I just think he's more ambitious and more likely to permanently change the world for the better than anybody else in the history of the technology industry.

Part of understanding why is having the proper perspective. I remember Microsoft's mission from when I was a young kid -- a computer on every desk and in every home. That mission, of course, had an implicit suffix of "...running Microsoft software". About 25 years into that mission, before Bill Gates had even turned fifty years old, Microsoft had achieved that goal. Think about that -- you set a goal as ambitious as you can imagine, and before your kids are even in high school, it's happened. What do you do when you've accomplished your biggest goal?

It's not a problem most of us ever have to deal with. Honestly, most of us that would even take the time to set such a goal would make it so big or so fuzzy it would be impossible to ever achieve. But by being just slightly specific, Microsoft under Bill Gates' direction achieved a seemingly-extraordinarily ambitious goal.

So, what next? You have to go for an even bigger goal. What's bigger than computers everywhere? How about curing malaria? And AIDS? That seems big enough. And the true innovation seems to be approaching those problems in an entrepreneurial way, with a big focus on accountability.

And after years of seeing his awkwardness in articulating the benefits of technology, it's startling to see just how good Gates is at telling this far more important story. You might have seen a link to Bill Gates' Harvard commencement address and probably thought "eh, I'll read it later". Go read it now: it's the kind of leadership and accountability that's been sorely missing from those in a position of power in the technology industry. Hell, it's the kind of message that's been curiously absent from the lips of nearly all of our leaders.

Just one highlight:

I remember going to Davos some years back and sitting on a global health panel that was discussing ways to save millions of lives. Millions! Think of the thrill of saving just one person's life - then multiply that by millions. ... Yet this was the most boring panel I've ever been on - ever. So boring even I couldn't bear it.

What made that experience especially striking was that I had just come from an event where we were introducing version 13 of some piece of software, and we had people jumping and shouting with excitement. I love getting people excited about software - but why can't we generate even more excitement for saving lives?

You can't get people excited unless you can help them see and feel the impact. And how you do that - is a complex question.

Still, I'm optimistic. Yes, inequity has been with us forever, but the new tools we have to cut through complexity have not been with us forever. They are new - they can help us make the most of our caring - and that's why the future can be different from the past.

The defining and ongoing innovations of this age - biotechnology, the computer, the Internet - give us a chance we've never had before to end extreme poverty and end death from preventable disease.

I'm sure those who make their decisions based on fashion and popularity contests won't want to give Gates the benefit of the doubt. But I'm okay with someone uncool doing the right thing on an unimaginably ambitious scale.

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Starting Up Again: tips on managing job change

2007-07-17T20:23:00.001-07:00

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Starting Up Again

via In the Pipeline on Jul 09, 2007

I'm back! This entry comes from temporary quarters in Cambridge, which will be my home for about another six weeks. The second half of that period will find the rest of my family in here with me, but for now it's just me, an internet connection, and some take-out souvlaki.

Going to work tomorrow will be a novel experience, after a solid five-month break. But this isn't the first time I've changed jobs, and like everyone else in the industry, I've seen a lot of turnover around me. Both vantage points have suggested some avoidable mistakes when starting a new position.

First off is badmouthing your old company. It's tempting - I mean, after all, you left the place for a reason, right? And isn't the new place so much better, and shouldn't you make everyone happy by telling them so? Actually, no, you probably shouldn't. There's a real risk of coming across as someone who does nothing but moan, and most labs have enough of those folks around already. Keep in mind that you just started, and that people haven't heard you talk much. You don't want your co-workers to realize that half the things you've said so far are complaints. Hold your fire.

You can screw up in the opposite direction, too, of course. (You always can, a general principle I try never to forget). Talking about how things were so much better back at the old gig won't win you any friends either, obviously. Sure, maybe it was easier to order supplies, or get instrument time, or whatever. But no one cares, and you shouldn't either.

This it-was-better stuff turns, very quickly, into another method of complaining, and we're back to the same place as with the first mistake. My view is that grousing about work conditions is something that should be done only among peers that you've worked with for a good while, people who know you and have seen that you can get the job done. At a new job, you don't have anyone in that category yet, so it's better to keep quiet. And anyway, how silly does it look to start in on how things are done when you haven't done anything yet?

Other mistakes: coming on as if you're the answer to everyone's prayers (because that, of course, makes the inference that everyone was doing it wrong until you showed up - if you really are the answer to said prayers, that'll become apparent on its own pretty soon, wouldn't you think)? And its opposite - starting off so quietly that people start to wonder why you were hired in the first place. It's normal (and a good idea) to shut up and listen for a while at first, but that can be taken too far. Eventually, you'll need to speak up.

Well, I won't be making these particular mistakes, I hope, but that just reserves me the right to make some others. At any rate, it's good to get back to research, and no mistake about that.

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excellent concept of tax saving...reverse vesting of shares

2007-07-17T17:51:00.001-07:00

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Vesting

via Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky on Jul 16, 2007

Steve from Richmond, VA, wrote in to ask a couple of questions:

"With software development, is it better to get something out there with customers and then continually improve or build the best wiz-bang software and then start marketing?"

That depends. You want to avoid the Marimba Phenomenon, where you get so much publicity in the early days that everybody checks out your underwhelming offering and decides that you're never going to have something worth looking at. (I should rename this the live.com phenomenon, in honor of Microsoft's horrible launch of live.com. Or the Zune phenomenon.) On the other hand, small startups are unlikely to have the problem of too much attention, so most companies with a 1.0 product can certainly get real customers with their earliest usable versions and build from there.

Steve is starting a company with a software developer.

"Assuming the software developer is getting paid at a reduced rate, but concurrently with his development. If you were giving also giving him some equity in your company, would you make that equity contingent on phases of the software getting done, the entire software getting done or vesting over time."

The standard solution is to vest over time -- anywhere from four to seven years -- with unvested shares being forfeited if he leaves for any reason. If the software doesn't get done, you fire him and he loses the unvested shares -- it's not necessary to make the vesting contingent specifically on finishing the software (besides, "finishing" software would be too hard to define in a contract).

You can set it up either as normal vesting (where he gets, say, 20% of the shares every year) or reverse vesting (where he gets the shares up front, but you have the right to repurchase them for a penny, and this right evaporates by 20% every year). Reverse vesting is preferable for tax reasons, because at the time you give him the shares, they're worth a lot less, so there's less income and more capital gains, which are taxed at a lower rate.

Not loving your job? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

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Business of Software Conference

2007-07-17T17:45:00.001-07:00

big names and book suggestions

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Business of Software Conference

via Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky on Jul 13, 2007

The Business of Software conference coming up at the end of October is new this year, but it's got a pretty phenomenal line-up of speakers:

Guy Kawasaki practically invented the field of high tech evangelism working at Apple in the 1980s, and has written some of the best books about marketing I've read (my personal favorite is The Macintosh Way.)
Rick Chapman wrote the encyclopedia of software marketing, The Product Marketing Handbook for Software, and the hilarious In Search of Stupidity, which makes the quite convincing argument that success in software is a matter of just not doing stupid things. (My foreword to In Search of Stupidity).
Hugh MacLeod does those great cartoons, which is reason enough to listen to him, but he's also the marketing strategist for the only Web 2.0 wine company.
Tim Lister needs no introduction to this crowd. He's the author of Peopleware, the first and last thing you have to read about managing software teams. That's really all you need to know.
Eric Sink, moderator of our own Business of Software forum, co-founder of SourceGear, the classic small software company success story.

Also speaking: Dan Nunan, Jennifer Aaker, Jeffrey Pfeffer, Bill Buxton, and me. Register here.

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Lowering The Water Level

2007-07-17T17:41:00.001-07:00

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Lowering The Water Level

via Evolving Excellence by Dan Markovitz on Jul 12, 2007

Toyota calls it "lowering the water level."

Imagine a value stream or a production process as a river. Reducing the inventory in the process - "lowering the water level" - exposes the "rocks" that represent all of the hidden costs and waste in production. Only by revealing those rocks can you improve the process and reduce the waste.

This metaphor works for knowledge workers, too. In this case, however, their key inventory item is time. Having too much time to do one's work hides the waste and inefficiencies in the process.

Now, most people would deny they have too much time to do their work. Not too many people are taking three-martini lunches anymore, or leaving the office right at 5:00pm. Hell, on average Americans only take about 79% of their vacation time, and 20% of people work on their vacations. And with our cellphone- and Crackberry-addled days, nights, and weekends, it seems as though there's an infinite torrent of work. Ironically, these same vacation-skipping, Blackberry-beholden employees complain vociferously about a lack of time for their personal lives.

But here's the thing: your cellphone, Blackberry, and general willingness to work late and on weekends are part of the problem, not the solution. Counterintuitive, but true.

Yeah, yeah. I can hear you now: "If I didn't have my Blackberry, if I didn't put in a few hours on the weekend, I'd never get on top of everything I need to do. I'd be buried. I'd get fired. I'd end up on the street with two Dixie cups and a string instead of an iPhone."

Let me ask you this (in the words of Dr. Phil): How's that working for you so far?

Has it helped? Are you on top of your work? Do you spend enough time with your friends and family? How's your fitness level?

The fact is, if you had less time for your work, you'd get it done more quickly. Parkinson's Law - work expands to fill the time available for its completion - recognizes this painful aspect of human nature. And if you don't believe it applies to you, think about what I call the Vacation Paradox: even though you never seem to be able to get all your work done on a regular day, the day(s) right before you go on vacation, you somehow manage to crank through all your daily work plus the backlog of stuff that's been moldering on your desk for the past month.

What's going on? Well, when you're short on time, you work more efficiently. You reduce the waste in your work process so that you can get stuff done. There's no choice, because you're on the plane to Maui or St. Moritz tomorrow.

But (to go back to the analogy I started with) when the water level - your inventory of time - is high, there's less urgency to reduce inefficiency. Why bother removing the waste in your work habits when you can just stay at the office an hour later, or get it done over the weekend? This is just another manifestation of the normalcy of waste.

And that's the nefarious aspect of living on your Blackberry 24/7, and your willingness to work on weekends and give up your holidays: you effectively raise the water level by increasing the amount of time you have to accomplish your work.

Lower your inventory of time available for work, and then you can reveal and address the inefficiencies in your work habits. In the spirit of kaizen, commit to leaving the office 15 minutes earlier one day this week. Then make it two days next week, and three days the week after. (Applying 5S principles to the information you manage will help. Read about how to do it here.) Carve out time for the non-work activities that you regret missing. Schedule time with your family; go for a run; read a book. Fill your calendar with these important commitments, decrease your inventory of work time, and you'll find ways to become more efficient.

Not only will you expose the rocks, you just might enjoy the trip down the river.

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Fun With Statistics, Laffer Edition

2007-07-17T17:34:00.001-07:00

good knowledge and argument

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Fun With Statistics, Laffer Edition

via Evolving Excellence by Kevin Meyer on Jul 16, 2007

Several blogs are discussing the article in Friday's Wall Street Journal on how basically the entire world, with the notable exception of the United States, is reducing corporate income tax rates.

Last week lawmakers approved an 8.9 percentage point reduction in the corporate income tax rate. Too bad the tax cutters are Germans, not Americans. At least 25 developed nations have adopted Reaganite corporate income tax rate cuts since 2001. The U.S. is conspicuously not one of them. All of which means that the U.S. now has the unflattering distinction of having the developed world's highest corporate tax rate of 39.3%.

Not to mention the vast majority of the developing eastern Europe and Asian economies.

What do politicians in these countries understand that the U.S. Congress doesn't? Perhaps they've read "International Competitiveness for Dummies." In each of the countries that have cut corporate tax rates this year, the motivation has been the same -- to boost the nation's attractiveness as a location for international investment.

Basically they know about the dynamics of the Laffer Curve. Lower corporate tax rates lead to more, not less, tax revenue from business. As a very partial excuse for the short-sighted lovers of taxation, it is somewhat counterintuitive. Until you dig deeper, and that's today's "fun with statistics." On the graph on the right, note how Ireland receives a higher percentage of GDP in tax revenue with much lower tax rates. And keep in mind that several of the countries on the right side of the curve, such as France, are aggressively reducing corporate tax rates.

As tax rates go up, the incentive to find and exploit loopholes goes up. If the tax rate gets high enough, companies shift more operations overseas. And if they continue to go up, such as the current Senate thinking about raising taxes on foreign-source income, those companies then move their corporate headquarters abroad. Already the number of major corporations relocating overseas has reached record levels, and even Microsoft occasionally threatens to move a few miles north to Canada.

But the impact doesn't end with high tax rates creating lower tax revenue and driving companies offshore.

For all the talk of "tax equity," this is also a recipe for further inequality by driving more capital offshore. Research has shown that high corporate tax rates reduce the rate of increase in manufacturing wages. For that matter, most economists understand that corporations don't ultimately pay any taxes. They merely serve as a collection agent, passing along the cost of those taxes in some combination of lower returns for shareholders, higher prices for customers, or lower compensation for employees. In other words, America's high corporate tax rates are an indirect, but still damaging, tax on average American workers.

And guess what... there's also an almost identical Laffer Curve for individual taxes. The more the government taxes, the more income is shifted, moved, hidden, and sometimes just not realized. So as we're fighting to remain competitive through the implementation of lean manufacturing and other methods, tax policy is making some companies ask "why bother?" and simply move overseas. As the WSJ concludes,

One immediate policy remedy would be to cut the 35% U.S. federal corporate tax rate to the industrial nation average of 29%. That's probably too sensible for a Congress gripped by a desire to soak the rich and punish business, but a Democrat who picked up the idea could turn the tax tables on Republicans in 2008. Meantime, as the U.S. fails to act, the rest of the world is looking more attractive all the time.

And that's today's edition of fun with statistics!

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Bottled Water Is Still A Scam

2007-07-17T17:24:00.001-07:00

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Bottled Water Is Still A Scam

via Anil Dash by Anil on Jul 03, 2007

Bottled water in America is generally less healthy than tap water, extraordinarily more expensive, and far more destructive to the environment. It's something I started blogging about years ago, and thanks to an an exceptional package of stories in Fast Company, I had a reminder to revisit the issue.

From my old post:

In case you don't know, bottled water is an incredible scam. I used to help out with running a water company when I was a kid, so I got a good background in the stringent set of requirements that utilities must meet when providing drinking water to a community. Generally, bottled water doesn't have to meet standards that are anywhere near as tightly regulated in regards to contaminants, filtering, or purity. Not to mention the fact that waterwhich stagnates in plastic containers on supermarket shelves frequently has a higher bacteria count than water from public utilities.

Meanwhile, the Fast Company article adds an incredible amount of new specifics, particularly about the explosive growth in sales of bottled water. As Charles Fishman says,

Bottled water is often simply an indulgence, and despite the stories we tell ourselves, it is not a benign indulgence. We're moving 1 billion bottles of water around a week in ships, trains, and trucks in the United States alone. That's a weekly convoy equivalent to 37,800 18-wheelers delivering water. (Water weighs 81/3 pounds a gallon. It's so heavy you can't fill an 18-wheeler with bottled water--you have to leave empty space.) Meanwhile, one out of six people in the world has no dependable, safe drinking water. The global economy has contrived to deny the most fundamental element of life to 1 billion people, while delivering to us an array of water "varieties" from around the globe, not one of which we actually need. That tension is only complicated by the fact that if we suddenly decided not to purchase the lake of Poland Spring water in Hollis, Maine, none of that water would find its way to people who really are thirsty.

It's worth reiterating that Aquafina and Dasani are just tap water. There's nothing wrong with that, since tap water is very good water -- it's just not worth paying 500 times as much for. I don't have any argument against the convenience factor, either, since it makes perfect sense to take water with you when you're on the go. You'll just get something that's got less bacteria and generally better quality if you fill your bottle from your tap. It's also worth checking out this story for the slideshows that are displayed alongside it; These usually just seem like blatant attempts for magazines to increase their page views online, but in this case they seem to have actually included original content and research.

Some of the other points made in the article:

Fiji Water produces more than a million bottles a day, while more than half the people in Fiji do not have reliable drinking water.
If the water we use at home cost what even cheap bottled water costs, our monthly water bills would run $9,000.
24% of the bottled water we buy is tap water repackaged by Coke and Pepsi.
The bubbles in San Pellegrino are extracted from volcanic springs in Tuscany, then trucked north and injected into the water from the source.
We pitch into landfills 38 billion water bottles a year--in excess of $1 billion worth of plastic.
Worldwide, 1 billion people have no reliable source of drinking water; 3,000 children a day die from diseases caught from tainted water.

I'd encourage everybody to take a look at the Fast Company article -- it makes it clear that the costs of bottled water, aside from its extraordinarily expensive price, are simply not worth it. And that's not even taking into account the fact that a lot of experts think the next resource that will spark a wide-scale international conflict isn't going to be oil, but fresh drinking water.

Thanks to Lisa for the article link and to Philippe for the photo.

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Bill Gates, Ambition, Legacy, and Obligation

2007-07-17T17:20:00.001-07:00

hi ashish,
how about lunching one day on baby carrots every week and collecting that money for donation ?...two weeks will translate to 1 child 1 year of food.

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Bill Gates, Ambition, Legacy, and Obligation

via Anil Dash by Anil on Jul 07, 2007

I've followed the history of Bill Gates and his career and work since I was a kid. Though he's not nearly charismatic enough to inspire an army of fawning fanboys, the complexity and eccentricity of a lot of his choices makes his character endlessly fascinating to me. And of course, it is an extra bonus that most people confuse such an interest for uncritical adoration, which ain't the case.

I'm not a Bill Gates fanboy, I just think he's more ambitious and more likely to permanently change the world for the better than anybody else in the history of the technology industry.

Part of understanding why is having the proper perspective. I remember Microsoft's mission from when I was a young kid -- a computer on every desk and in every home. That mission, of course, had an implicit suffix of "...running Microsoft software". About 25 years into that mission, before Bill Gates had even turned fifty years old, Microsoft had achieved that goal. Think about that -- you set a goal as ambitious as you can imagine, and before your kids are even in high school, it's happened. What do you do when you've accomplished your biggest goal?

It's not a problem most of us ever have to deal with. Honestly, most of us that would even take the time to set such a goal would make it so big or so fuzzy it would be impossible to ever achieve. But by being just slightly specific, Microsoft under Bill Gates' direction achieved a seemingly-extraordinarily ambitious goal.

So, what next? You have to go for an even bigger goal. What's bigger than computers everywhere? How about curing malaria? And AIDS? That seems big enough. And the true innovation seems to be approaching those problems in an entrepreneurial way, with a big focus on accountability.

And after years of seeing his awkwardness in articulating the benefits of technology, it's startling to see just how good Gates is at telling this far more important story. You might have seen a link to Bill Gates' Harvard commencement address and probably thought "eh, I'll read it later". Go read it now: it's the kind of leadership and accountability that's been sorely missing from those in a position of power in the technology industry. Hell, it's the kind of message that's been curiously absent from the lips of nearly all of our leaders.

Just one highlight:

I remember going to Davos some years back and sitting on a global health panel that was discussing ways to save millions of lives. Millions! Think of the thrill of saving just one person's life - then multiply that by millions. ... Yet this was the most boring panel I've ever been on - ever. So boring even I couldn't bear it.

What made that experience especially striking was that I had just come from an event where we were introducing version 13 of some piece of software, and we had people jumping and shouting with excitement. I love getting people excited about software - but why can't we generate even more excitement for saving lives?

You can't get people excited unless you can help them see and feel the impact. And how you do that - is a complex question.

Still, I'm optimistic. Yes, inequity has been with us forever, but the new tools we have to cut through complexity have not been with us forever. They are new - they can help us make the most of our caring - and that's why the future can be different from the past.

The defining and ongoing innovations of this age - biotechnology, the computer, the Internet - give us a chance we've never had before to end extreme poverty and end death from preventable disease.

I'm sure those who make their decisions based on fashion and popularity contests won't want to give Gates the benefit of the doubt. But I'm okay with someone uncool doing the right thing on an unimaginably ambitious scale.

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The list of 4 lists...

2007-07-17T17:04:00.001-07:00

interesting ones....maps to rahul garg's quote

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The list of 4 lists...

via Soaring on Ridgelift by 1vc on Jul 09, 2007

Whether you are the founder of a startup company or someone interviewing for an executive role in one, it's important to keep in mind the List of 4 Lists. Before you head off to your favorite book store, the List of 4 Lists isn't a book by some long expired philosopher - it's a thought exercise I use with early stage companies to get them to think outside the box.

The List of 4 Lists:

The list of things you KNOW.

The list of things you DON'T KNOW.

The list of things you ASSUME.

The list of things you DON'T KNOW YOU DON'T KNOW

Any of us looking at the business plan of a startup company can fill out the first two lists. It's easy; you have a set of knowledge and experiences whether gained through formal education or via post graduate education at U. of HK (University of Hard Knocks) that acts as review filters for the plan. You can look at the different risk factors (market, team, technology) and populate the lists - being a smart person you can then work to move items from the second list to the first by asking questions, research etc.

The third list isn't so easy - any business plan is based on a set of assumptions such as how long it will take to recruit people, develop the product, how much customers will pay for the product, etc. This isn't just about the formulas in the spreadsheet behind the modeled financials (although that is a good place to look for assumptions!) - It is about the thought process that went into building the plan. It is very helpful to make your assumptions explicit - it is the implicit assumptions that are difficult to test and often lead to nasty surprises.

The fourth list is the real challenge - it's a virtual list because the moment you identify something that should go on it, by definition you now KNOW YOU DON'T KNOW and it gets added to the second list. We always need to be on our guard and thinking about how to identify items for this fourth list - fortunately, one of the best ways to fill it is to remember that everyone has the same List of 4 Lists and THEY ARE DIFFERENT. This is one reason why a team of people is often far more effective than any individual. You can populate this virtual list by reviewing the plan as it unfolds with the executive team, cofounders, investors and advisors.

Most problems in business stem from the last two lists - assumptions prove to be wrong (or simply aren't recognized because with hindsight, it's clear they were wrong!) or something nails you in the back of the head that could have been anticipated if you'd been open to thinking about the fourth list.

Remember the List of 4 Lists!

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Interesting Study: Brand and Search

2007-07-04T07:59:00.001-07:00

crux:
This is in line with the finding last year by German researchers who showed using MRI scans that well-known brands activate positive emotional responses in people's brains.

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Interesting Study: Brand and Search

via John Battelle's Searchblog on Jul 03, 2007

Thanks to reader JG for this interesting writeup of a recent study on how brands effect search results. From it:

Web searchers who evaluated identical search-engine results overwhelmingly favored Yahoo! and Google, providing evidence that people go for brand names on the Internet just as they do in the real world, according to new research presented at the Computer/Human Interaction 2007 Conference in San Jose, California....

Despite the results pages being identical in content and presentation, participants indicated that Yahoo! and Google outperformed MSN Live Search and the in-house search engine.

I also found this very interesting:

This is in line with the finding last year by German researchers who showed using MRI scans that well-known brands activate positive emotional responses in people's brains.

Link to the study. Link to the MRI study.

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The Evolving New Economy

2007-07-04T07:38:00.001-07:00

no particular value, but interesting read if you are feeling down
factual knowledge:
Can we escape the Red Queen effect?

There's a powerful image that resonates in corporate boardrooms around the world - the image of the Red Queen running faster and faster just to stay in the same place. Adaptation in a world of more rapid change implies running faster just to stay in same place.

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The Evolving New Economy

via Evolving Excellence by Kevin Meyer on Jun 27, 2007

Each year an annual conference called Supernova is held to discuss the impact of technology on the world. Lots of deep thinkers attend, many of whom have actually worked in the real world and can therefore pontificate and bloveate meaningful analyses. I've attended occasionally in the past but wasn't able to attend this year. However John Hagel of Edge Perspectives posted several observations predominantly based on his own presentation at the conference. They can be rather esoteric to those of us in the knuckle-dragging manufacturing world, but enlightened leaders may want to at least mull them over a bit. The world is changing, like it or not. John's observations are actually thought-provoking questions.

Questions are often as valuable as answers It's appropriate to step back occasionally and reflect on what we don't know, rather than simply sharing what we know. In times of rapid change, asking the right questions is often as important as the answers - at least they help us figure out where we might start looking for answers.

So let's here are the paraphrased versions of a couple of his more interesting questions.

What if there is no equilibrium?

We all understand that the component technologies of our new infrastructure continue to advance at exponential pace. In fact, this is the one central difference between this new generation of infrastructure and all the previous generations of infrastructure that shaped our economies in the past. All of these earlier generations were characterized by a major technology breakthrough, followed by the adoption of key standards and a diminishing rate of performance improvement.

Our new infrastructure defies this pattern and proceeds with exponential rates of performance improvements. Here's the paradox: at the same time, we cling to traditional equilibrium concepts and institutions that emerged and prevailed in more stable times. Nathan Mhyrvold highlighted in his talk yesterday the contrast between the exponential advance of technology performance and the linear thinking of most executives. Clayton Christensen got the attention of the business world with his perspective on disruptive innovation - but even that is a punctuated equilibrium view - it holds on to the assumption that equilibrium will eventually return.

Early conventional wisdom suggest that these architectures should focus on agility and flexibility, but that misses the real opportunity - balancing agility with the persistence and stability required to build and deepen long-term trust based relationships. Being able to discern what needs to change and what needs to remain stable may be the greatest challenge of all.

I find the key phrase to be "the real opportunity - balancing agility with the persistance and stability... being able to discern what needs to change and what needs to remain stable..." That is what many lean companies are doing. They focus on standard work and defined, repeatable processes while also leveraging the power and magic of kaizen and kaikaku. Always agile, always changing, but still standardized.

Can we escape the Red Queen effect?

There's a powerful image that resonates in corporate boardrooms around the world - the image of the Red Queen running faster and faster just to stay in the same place. Adaptation in a world of more rapid change implies running faster just to stay in same place.

Product and process innovation only provides temporary relief for the Red Queen effect as companies become more adept at copying the advances of others. We need to harness institutional innovation and move from scalable efficiency to scalable learning so that we can begin to learn faster and find ways to get ahead of the pack in a more sustainable fashion.

This time the key statement is "harness institutional innovation and move from scalable efficiency to scalable learning." Taking advantage of the knowledge, creativity, and experience of people rather than treating them as a simple set of hands that needs to be optimized in a quest for additional efficiency. Contrast how true lean companies grow by leveraging their employees and utilizing the additional capacity created by lean efficiencies to how companies like Whirlpool lay off and then re-hire less experienced people in the desire to save a few financial bucks. Companies that chase low labor from country to country without fundamental innovation and improvement are Red Queens.

How are pull platforms likely to evolve?

As the pace of change accelerates, we are in the midst of a broad transition in terms of how we access and mobilize resources. As JSB and I have written elsewhere, we are moving away from push programs that attempt to forecast demand and make sure that the necessary resources are available when and where needed. In their place, we are seeing the emergence of much more flexible pull platforms that help people connect with the resources that are most relevant to them whenever and wherever they need the resources.

Push programs treat people as passive consumers (even when they are producers like workers on an assembly line) whose needs can be anticipated and shaped by centralized decision-makers. Pull platforms treat people as networked creators (even when they are customers purchasing goods and services) who are uniquely positioned to transform uncertainty from a problem into an opportunity.

The pull platforms that we now have are only the earliest stages of development. To harness the full potential of these pull platforms we will need to move to much more robust federation governance structures that accommodate services from a growing number of independent and diverse participants. The lean manufacturing approaches of leading edge manufacturers succeed only because they dramatically narrow the number of participants. Different governance structures are likely to be required to scale pull platforms.

We've blogged about the "pull economy" before. That's lean, pure and simple, and in my view is probably the most disruptive as well as critical change already in progress.

John Hagel poses many more similar questions. Take some time to read them here.

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Be Careful What You Measure

2007-07-04T07:32:00.001-07:00

labels: general timeless advice

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Be Careful What You Measure

via Evolving Excellence by Kevin Meyer on Jun 30, 2007

Have you taken a hard look at your metrics recently? Not the values and trend, but the underlying attribute being measured. Is it really an effective reflection of some facet of business success? A project by the federal government should teach us a couple lessons.

From the Cato-at-Liberty blog,

One of the behind-the-scenes initiatives of President Bush's budget staff the past six years has been something called the Program Assessment Ratings Tool (PART) analysis. It's an effort to measure the "effectiveness" and "efficiency" of nearly 1,000 federal programs. Each program is graded on how well it achieves its "goals."

Sounds good. About time we measure the effectiveness of programs, right? I wonder what the results show. In Tuesday's Investor's Business Daily op-ed section, Ernest Christian and Gary Robbins take a look at the results to date of the effort:

Congress is about to wave its wand over nearly $1 trillion of additional "discretionary" spending that will, among other things, perpetuate or increase funding for nearly 500 expenditure programs that are not even "moderately effective," according to the Office of Management and Budget. This includes more than 200 expenditure programs that have failing grades of D or F. In these cases alone, the cost of government incompetence is over $250 billion per year.

The list of programs with the lowest grades might make any supporter of limited government point wildly and say, "Told you so!" This rogue's gallery includes the Department of Housing and Urban Development's pork-filled Community Development Block Grants, the Department of Education's Even Start literacy program, and Amtrak.

There we go! All kinds of waste just begging to be removed. Don't even think about raising my taxes, and these are probably the last people I want in charge of my healthcare and retirement. But I wonder what some of the more "efficient" programs are...

But what about the ones that received the equivalent of an A or B grade - those programs that are "effective" or "moderately effective"? That list includes homeless assistance grants, agricultural export subsidies, Indian housing loan guarantees, the non-insured crop assistance program, and corporate welfare programs like the Trade and Development Agency which subsidizes overseas demand for the products of various corporations.

Hmmm... uh oh. The government is efficient at spending money on corporate welfare and helping out people that decided a government bailout was cheaper than buying insurance?

Sure, knowing when the government is losing money to fraud or mismanagment is important. But it makes more sense to determine whether these programs should exist at all before deciding what they should be "efficient" at doing. Besides, an efficient but unjustified wealth-redistribution program might actually be worse than an inefficient one. The former will likely be better at finding innovative ways of expanding the scope of its operations.

And that's also the lesson for businesses and other organizations. Take the time to really understand what you are measuring, and whether a positive trend is really a positive. Many of us know (and some of us have experienced) the saying of "you can sell yourself out of business" when you don't understand how cash flow plays into converting the top line into the bottom line. I would add you can "streamline your way out of business" if you find ways to create waste very efficiently.

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The Obesity Epidemic

2007-07-04T07:29:00.001-07:00

philosphical kind of article...not much value but common observation across multiple fields
interesting lines:
Ecology teaches that whenever an excess of organic matter arises anywhere in nature, creatures large and small inevitably step forward to consume it, sometimes creating whole new food chains in the process.
Now we have 32MB Palm PDAs, 8GB iPhones, 80GB computer hard drives, and a lot of it (most of it?) is filled with garbage. It's the electronic equivalent of the obesity epidemic.

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The Obesity Epidemic

via Evolving Excellence by Dan Markovitz on Jul 03, 2007

On my too-frequent flights to New York recently, I started reading Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma. It's a trip up and down the food chain from a naturalist's perspective, and one of his first stops is an examination of corn.

Government policies over the years have led to overproduction of this crop, from 4 billion bushels in 1970 to 10 billion bushels today. At the same time, because supply exceeds demand and prices are so low, federal government payments to farmers -- for corn alone -- comes to slightly more than $4 billion.

There are plenty of lean lessons here, from the folly of "push" production (even in food) to government muda. But what's really interesting is Pollan's view of the result of this overproduction:

Another way to look at this 10-billion-bushel pile of commodity corn -- a naturalist's way of looking at it -- is that industrial agriculture has introduced a vast new stock of biomass to the environment, creating what amounts to an imbalance -- a kind of vacuum in reverse. Ecology teaches that whenever an excess of organic matter arises anywhere in nature, creatures large and small inevitably step forward to consume it, sometimes creating whole new food chains in the process. In this case the creatures feasting on the surplus biomass are both metaphorical and real: There are the agribusiness corporations, foreign markets, and whole new industries (such as ethanol), and then there are the food scientists, livestock, and human eaters, as well as the usual array of microorganisms (such as E. coli O157:H7).

What's involved in absorbing all this excess biomass goes a long way toward explaining several seemingly unconnected phenomena, from the rise of factory farms and the industrialization of our food, to the epidemic of obesity and prevalence of food poisoning in America. . . .

As I read this, I thought about people's struggle to keep up with their work. Knowledge workers are being crushed by the weight of the email and data they have to manage. As I pointed out in another post, the increase in data storage at Chevron is growing by 60% a year, resulting in employees losing from one-and-a-half to three days per month simply looking for (!) information. And there's the recent story in the Washington Post about the venture capitalist who declared "email bankruptcy" because he couldn't keep up with his email.

You can point fingers in many directions in trying to identify the causes of this tidal wave of (often useless) information. And certainly, our own poor work habits often exacerbate the difficulty of staying on top of it all.

But I wonder if Michael Pollan hasn't hit upon the real root cause of the problem. Perhaps the supply of cheap computing power and storage capacity has also created an imbalance in nature. As a result, we've spawned new creatures to feast on the surplus "electronic biomass" -- stupid and irrelevant emails, forwarded jokes, multiple copies of "FY2007budgetfinalfinalv5.doc," etc. Something has to consume those available bytes.

I read somewhere that the computer on board the Apollo 11 Lunar Excursion Module had a whopping 32KB of RAM. Imagine: NASA landed people on the moon and brought them back with 32KB. Presumably they didn't have Tetris installed, either -- they didn't have a kilobyte to spare in their work. Now we have 32MB Palm PDAs, 8GB iPhones, 80GB computer hard drives, and a lot of it (most of it?) is filled with garbage. It's the electronic equivalent of the obesity epidemic.

But is the information obesity coming from us through poor work habits or more complex jobs, or is it simply an inescapable natural law like entropy or F=ma? Are we doomed to ever-greater demands on our time from email, text messages, and the like? Or can we fight the explosion of electronic garbage by going back to older technologies like the telephone or (gasp!) face-to-face conversations?

I'll be thinking about this over my next Supersized Big Mac and fries.

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The Enemy

2007-07-02T20:44:00.001-07:00

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The Enemy

via Rands In Repose on Jun 20, 2007

The $150,000 mistake, your shipping schedule being off by a year, and The Really Bad Hire (aka: we're being sued).

These are not screw-ups, these are fuck-ups. When you discover them, the air leaves your lungs, the back of your head tingles, and there's an odd metallic taste in your mouth. Your mind goes blank except for the crisp mental picture that is your fuck-up.

This initial discovery is shocking, but what I want to talk about is secondary discovery. This is when your boss learns of the fuck-up, and you shouldn't be worried whether there's an odd metallic taste in his mouth, you should worry about who he's about to turn into.

Management Transformations

Ideally, your boss is the levelheaded type and he'll manage your fuck-up cleanly and easily using his years of experience, but fuck-ups knock people off their game and out of their comfort zone. Fuck-ups create stress and stress can mutate normally sane people into unrecognizable caricatures of themselves. Let's talk about some of them.

The Interrogator

The Interrogator's approach is an endless stream of questions: "When did the customer first call?"; "Who triaged the bug first?"; "What were the results?"; "How did we proceed from there?" It goes on and on.

What's annoying about the Interrogator is that he actually only wants to ask one question -- THE question -- but he's putting you through the paces to build a sense of context. This stream of questions will demonstrate the relevance of the one question. The one question is the only question that matters, and when it shows up, it's time to start the meeting.

While you're being grilled, I want you to remember this: The Interrogator is blowing off steam while asking the endless list of questions. This process of question and answer is laborious, but with each piece of data you convey, you have an opportunity to paint a more detailed picture of your fuck-up and increase the chance he can help.

There are Interrogators who don't actually have one question that they're driving towards, and these managers need managing. If you're 27 questions into your 1-on-1 with no clear direction, it's time to dig in your heels and ask, "Hey, Boss, what are you really trying to figure out here?"

The Prioritizer and the Scheduler

These are two tightly coupled management reactions that share so much, I've got to lump them together.

Meetings with both start with a complete inventory of the to-do list for your team. They want to know everything that you're planning to do to resolve the fuck-up, and if this list doesn't exist or isn't complete, you might as well reschedule the meeting, because there is no other way to satisfy either the Prioritizer or the Scheduler.

With that list in hand, the Prioritizer will now put you through the agonizing process of prioritizing every single task on the list. If he's in a really bad mood, he's going to want to talk through your mental process of prioritization for each task. And, if he's also the Scheduler, he's going to want dates. For everything.

Unlike the Interrogator, there is no obvious point where you're going to understand, "Oh, this is what he wants to know". He wants to know everything. Your fuck-up has him freaked out and his reaction to this is to gather as much data as possible. Feels like micromanagement, right? It is. More on this in a moment.

The Randomizer

The insane version of the Prioritizer/Scheduler is the Randomizer. This is the manager who is going to swoop into the situation with good intentions, but he's mostly going to randomize the team with his endless good intentions.

The warning signs of the Randomizer are easy to recognize -- his marching orders to address the fuck-up change every couple of hours. You might not initially see this because the Randomizer is the boss. His sense of passion and urgency is intoxicating because everyone wants to get to the other side of the fuck-up. They want to succeed. After the third drastic change to the plan of action, the team is going to start scratching their heads and thinking, How is running around bumping into shit actually helping us?

You job as the minion of the Randomizer is to get back into the 1-on-1, close the door, and see if you can summon the Prioritizer. Your boss should be your strategic muse, not your tactical nightmare.

The Illuminator

The Illuminator is on the same mission as everyone we've already talked about, but hes subtle about it. You may not even know the Illuminator is in the room when you show up for your 1-on-1. I love the Illuminator. I love being the Illuminator.

See, you fucked up. The Illuminator isn't going to interrogate or prioritize you for an hour; he is elegantly, calmly going to get you to realize the magnitude of the fuck up and also get you to suggest a reasonable course of action. In fact, you'll be proud of yourself halfway through the meeting when you slap your forehead and say, "Wow, this what happened and this is what we should do!"

The transcendent Illuminator experience is when you don't realize the Illuminator is gently mentally course correcting you and providing silent guidance. The cherry on top is, even if you do see this management manipulation, you realize, "Oh, he's trying to help."

The Enemy

On the opposite side of the spectrum of the Illuminator is The Enemy.

Like the Illuminator, the Enemy isn't going to reveal his colors immediately, but unlike the Illuminator, he will not revel in silently providing guidance; he loves going on the attack. The Enemy is pissed. The Enemy is angry about your fuck-up and The Enemy believes that dragging you through that anger is a useful learning experience.

Here's the terrifying reality regarding The Enemy: unlike all the other personalities I've talked about, the Enemy is not on your side. As long as your fuck-up didn't involve breaking the law, your manager is part of your team, and even if he's furious with you, he should always be trying to lead and trying to help.

If The Enemy shows up, your fuck-up has now doubled in size. You've got a fuck-up and you've got a manager who doesn't believe in you. My hope is that The Enemy is a mood; it's the peak fury of your manager's reaction to your fuck-up, and, fingers crossed, it should fade into a calmer personality. Still, even when it does, you need to figure out why your manager doesn't trust you when he's freaking out?

The M Word

Yes, everyone except the Illuminator is a micromanager, and while being micromanaged sucks see, you fucked up. It'd be great if your manager remained even keeled, but we humans are a squishy, moody bunch, and how we react when a fuck-up is thrown in our laps varies by the day.

Whether you're being interrogated, scheduled, or prioritized, you need to remember two things. First, it's partially your job to figure out how to bring your calm, levelheaded boss back into the room. As long as you're not dealing with The Enemy, each moody variant is looking for something and you need to deliver it. Second, as you stare at this strange person who was your boss, you need to remember that people with more experience can teach you stuff, but you might need to wait for it.

While you wait, might I suggest a healthy dose of proactive fuck-up triage? Your boss should help, but success here will be taking active an role in understanding the full scope of your fuck-up, fixing it, and making sure it never happens again.

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Management books

2007-07-01T21:40:00.001-07:00

i want to read these books

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Management books

via Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky on Jun 29, 2007

I'm reading two very good management books right now.

The first is a classic: Up the Organization, by Robert Townsend. Apparently this book first came out in 1970, was widely admired, and slowly fell off everyone's radar, until Wiley republished it last month. Townsend ran Avis back in the day, and when you start to read a management book written in the 1960s, you expect to find secretaries, two-martini lunches, executive golf club memberships, etc. What you find instead is rather refreshing even by today's standards. On Mergers:

If you have a good company don't sell out to a conglomerate.... Conglomerates will promise anything for your people... but once in the fold your company goes through the homogenizer along with all their other acquisitions of the week, and all the zeal and most of the good people leave.

PS for Y Combinator kids: Don't be smug because you think that conglomerates went the way of the dodo. "Conglomerate" is just an old word for what you call "Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google." Oh and Condé-Nast.

Anyway. Townsend on management consultants:

[They] waste time, cost money, demoralize and distract your best people, and don't solve problems. They are people who borrow your watch to tell you what time it is and then walk off with it.

It sounds like a cliché, right? Townsend probably invented that cliché, boychik. And it's still true, and the jibe at Booz Allen later on in the book is still 100% on the money.

Even better is his disdain for marketing departments:

Marketing... is the name of the game. So it had better be handled by the boss and his line, not by staff hecklers. Once or twice a year for three or four days the boss takes ten, twenty or thirty of his key people... away to some secluded spot. On average they spend twelve hours a day asking unaskable questions, rethinking the business (What are we selling? To whom? At what prices? How do we get it to him? In what form?), four hours a day relaxing and exercising, and eight hours a day sleeping. It's hard work. But more good marketing changes will come out of such meetings than out of any year-round staff department of "experts" with "marketing" signs on the door.

Boy, I sure wish I had learned that one a few months ago. Two years ago, Seth Godin wrote essentially the same thing.

Anyway, that's just a few of the M's. The whole book is full of great advice like that, albeit focused on larger corporations.

If you're looking for something a little more, er, contemporary, Michael Lopp and his alter-ego Rands have just published Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager, which originated with some essays on his excellent blog Rands in Repose. (You can do that?)

Lopp has worked at Netscape, Borland, and Apple. He's the quintessential Silicon Valley middle manager. I hope he doesn't find that term insulting: he's probably the best Silicon Valley middle manager there is. He's brilliant, charismatic, and a poet-philosopher, and I could imagine no better boss.

You'll find that an awful lot of his book is about managing managers, big company politics, and the human side of getting technical teams to work together. And he has a style quite his own. You can get a taste of it from his classic Incrementalists & Completionists:

What was intriguing about my email repartee with the co-worker was that we weren't disagreeing about whether or not we should do something about the problem. We're arguing about how much we should do. The disagreement reminded me there are two distinct personalities when it comes to devising solutions to problems: Incrementalists and Completionists.

Incrementalists are realists. They have a pretty good idea of what is achievable given a problem to solve, a product to ship. They're intimately aware of how many resources are available, where the political landscape is at any given moment, and they know who knows what. They tend to know all the secrets and they like to be recognized for that fact.

Completionists are dreamers. They have a very good idea of how to solve a given problem and that answer is SOLVE IT RIGHT. Their mantra is, "If you're going to spend the time to solve a problem, solve it in a manner that you aren't going to be solving it AGAIN in three months." I used to think that architects were the only real Completionists in an organization, but I was wrong. Architects are the only RECOGNIZED Completionists in the company, but the personality is hiding all over the place.

Finally. One more book.

The same publicist who sent me Up the Organization also included a copy of Ben Casnocha's new book My Start-Up Life. Ben is a charismatic, energetic, brilliant 19 year-old who founded a successful software company, Comcate, at age 14. It's all very adorable. He's the Doogie Howser, MD of software startups, except for the fact that he probably has no idea who Doogie Howser is, given that the show went off the air when he was 4 years old, and, frankly, at age 4 he was probably too busy working on his second IPO to watch much television.

Ben is a seriously cool 19 year old. He's very smart. He's quite a good writer.

But.

But but but.

His book, unfortunately, tells you almost nothing about starting a company. It's really, really thin on stories of what the actual company did and how things worked. Worse, the book is padded with really, really embarrassing sidebars in which Ben gives you jejune Great Thoughts about business management.

Great entrepreneurs show up, take small risks (and sometimes, large risks), raise their hand when they're confused, and try to figure out what's going on and how a situation could be made better.

When you show up and raise your hand, you've already outperformed 90 percent of the crowd.

And:

The person on the receiving end of the mentoring relationship should work hard to insure it's not totally a one-way street.

Ben Ben Ben.

Yes, you're smart and good looking. Yes, you know more about starting a software company than practically any other 19 year old. And sure, I'll be happy to invest in your next startup, or hire you, or adopt you, whatever.

But. Mark my words. You're going to reach the ripe old age of 23, and you're going to look back on this book you wrote, and you're going to say, "how on earth did anyone let me publish such self-important crap," and you're practically going to die of embarrassment. Trust me: I'm in my 40s, and I'm still morbidly embarrassed by the pompous, arrogant, self-important crap I write on this site here, up to and including this very sentence.

Feel free to skip this book.

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How to pick an accountant for your online business: read the book mentioned in the article

2007-07-01T21:35:00.001-07:00

awesome, i need to read this book and follow that weblog

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How to pick an accountant for your online business

via fortuitous on Jun 28, 2007

Finding an accountant that understands the internet isn't easy and after going through half a dozen myself, I came up with some tips and approaches for finding the right one.

Taxes are a necessary evil in the course of doing business, but core to financing a government and living in a society. While the internet offers tons of tax advice both good and bad, I feel finances are important enough to warrant bringing in outside professional help. If you're a geek, the temptation is to think "this is math -- I know numbers!" but what you might be ignoring is the additional tax of having to learn an extremely complicated system. Leave it to the pros so you can focus on the thing you do uniquely well.

For me, having an accountant handle the complicated state of my finances also reduces the stress I get from using TurboTax each year and wondering if I did anything wrong. I want to state upfront that I'm not advocating cheating or cutting corners, but I've found in my own experience that the difference between a good accountant and a bad one can cost you thousands of dollars. A good accountant recognizes all the costs of running an online business, offers tips for good investments (that in turn, reduce taxes), and offers advice on how best to grow your business. Bad accountants miss out on all those things and simply give you a large bill due each Spring.

Compared to a traditional business, starting an internet business is trivial and carries a great number of advantages. You don't need a staff right away (as long as you do all the work). You don't need a storefront, inventory, or even anything to sell. You won't be limited by the hours of the day or your physical location. You don't need the permission of anyone to start. With just a single webpage you can start earning revenue through ads or other measures and begin from there building a business. I know people that have monthly expenses as low as $100 to rent a colocated server that brings in $10,000 per month. While that is amazing from the point of view of economies of scale, when it comes to taxes, it can be really problematic.

The rules governing taxes on business are geared towards the traditional, capital-intensive types of businesses (it always feels like half of the questions in TurboTax are about whether or not I own a farm). If you don't have to buy parts, pay a large staff, or purchase trucks to move products around, you don't have a lot of options when it comes to built-in deductions against your revenue. For the first few years I started making some money online, I only wrote off a minimum of computer equipment and a portion of my hosting and bandwidth fees. Every time I'd discuss taxes with friends, I'd hear new ideas for things I should have written off. After a few years of this, my finances and tax bills started to grow to the point where I felt a professional could help out.

Every Spring I'd take my 1099s to a new local accountant to run the numbers. What I found after using several local accountants was that they just didn't understand how the internet worked. They would ask me about equipment (minimal -- just a laptop), how much I drove (none, I do it all online from my home office), and how many employees I had (zero, though I've paid programmers and moderators as contractors for the past couple years). When asked for ideas of how I could reduce my taxes, they were stumped. I realized I wasn't using the right accountant when I ran my taxes through TurboTax online and found I saved several hundred dollars over what my own accountant was telling me to pay. And that was before paying the accountant.

All about shades of gray

While specific tax rules are fairly black and white, when you look at a tax return and consider there are thousands of decisions based on individual tax rules, the end result of where you balance revenue and deductions starts to become more art than science. I realized that several of my past accountants gave conflicting information and most would take a conservative approach by default. Only one accountant mentioned deductions from retirement accounts. I would argue with most accountants over things like how much goofing off I do using my laptop or my cable modem, even though being a "professional blogger" kind of meant that any and all web surfing might end up as content on my sites.

Earlier this year, I stumbled upon this post from someone offering tax tips for creative professionals. While I didn't think I'd use most of the tips, it definitely was a step in the right direction and I ended up ordering the book by the author. The book is loaded cover to cover with creative ideas on how to bend tax rules to your advantage and even though in my opinion about 1/2 of them seemed really dodgy and probably left you open for an audit, the book served as a good reference point when talking to accountants. The ideas in the book were beyond my comfort zone of things I'd do with my own finances, but I wanted to find someone that was somewhere in the middle.

By the time I read the book, I was getting advice from a local and very conservative accountant. On a zero to ten scale of conservative-to-creative accounting attitudes, I'd place that accountant at a 1 or 2 while I'd put the advice in the book at a solid 10. As April 2007 began approaching, I realized I was looking for an accountant to handle my upcoming taxes and I needed to find someone closer to my line of thinking, maybe at a 7 on my internal scale. Aggressive, but still safely within generally accepted accounting principles.

Finding the right one

I've gone through five local accountants in three years by simply scouring the phonebook and talking to them. It's not the best way to go, but you can eventually find someone to work with this way. After three years of searching I found a great (non-local) accountant by asking around among friends that are also involved with internet businesses. I'd definitely suggest using your personal network of friends and colleagues as they're likely to have found a tax pro familiar with the industry.

If you have a lawyer you're happy with, ask them who their clients work with. Like in any social network, the people who are the best at what they do tend to be connected to other people who are also very good. Or at the very least they can let you know if they've heard bad things about a potential accountant.

Go with loaded questions

Interviewing accountants is pretty straightforward. Once you decide on a specific accountant, you schedule an hour with them and they'll ask you about your business and your finances. This will be the first indication of whether or not the accountant is familiar with online businesses. Then they'll let you ask them questions and you'll be able to hit them with anything on your mind. Usually they'll charge you for an hour of their time and it is typically around $200 or so.

When you ask questions, it's good to feel them out a bit by asking very specific questions using your actual revenue numbers. If you've read the book or blog post I mentioned earlier, you might want to ask an accountant about some of the ideas you are comfortable with, as most find them fairly unconventional. If you ask about something the accountant disagrees with or warns against doing to save taxes, make sure their explanation makes sense and their demeanor is something you can work with.

My best piece of advice is to ask a prospective accountant questions that you already know the answer to. If you build websites, chances are you can deduct at least some part of any device that displays HTML and that you use for testing your sites and apps. Ask an accountant if you can write off a new iPhone (hopefully they ask if it's your official business phone and how you'd use the device). If you run a topic-centric blog or write about a specific industry, ask them if you can write off purchases that you review extensively on the site. While the accountant might not give you an answer 100% in the affirmative, it's good to gauge their response against your personal thinking on the issue. You should also ask about specific deductions that apply to you. If you have kids, ask about childcare tax credits (I knew I qualified for this but one accountant missed it on my taxes last year) and be sure to ask about retirement accounts. For most small internet businesses, you can setup a SEP-IRA that deducts money you put towards retirement right off your total revenue. It's not a 1-to-1 deduction but you can reduce your total taxes while you plan for the future. Only two accountants I spoke with even mentioned IRAs when I first talked to them. Only one of those two explained each and every option before I had to ask.

Accountant Showdown 2007

By April of this year, I had a local accountant I was wary of, I had a big city accountant suggested by a friend, and I had my old familiar buddy, TurboTax Online. I figured my finances were worth getting a second opinion about, so I decided to spend the money to have my taxes done all three ways. My local accountant charged about $350, the big city one was about $550, while TurboTax's business level with all the options ran me $99.

In the end, the big city accountant asked me the right questions and figured out a couple deductions I didn't know I qualified for, and saved me $1500 below what TurboTax came up with. I probably could have gotten my TurboTax return to match but I probably mis-read one of the hundreds of questions lobbed at me during the online process. The local accountant I wasn't a fan of turned out to be the worst option, coming up $1200 over my own TurboTax return. I suspect she left off a few business expenses I listed.

What's the point of having an accountant, can't I just use TurboTax and Google?

After doing my taxes online for 8 years and going through six accountants in the past four years, I've come to a few conclusions:

TurboTax Online is pretty dang good and can get you 80% of the way

All but the best accountants I've worked with didn't do any better than me using TurboTax on my own.

If you have time to do research and read up on tax info, TurboTax + your knowledge is probably equal to most accountants

This is a big "if", but if you have the time and you won't be satisfied unless you handle it yourself, a few books and a lot of reading at MotleyFool.com can you pretty close to the best advice you'll find in the wild. Then again, if you're dealing with thousands of dollars and you're busy, it's best to try out an expert instead.

Quarterly tax payments are your friend

If you've ever run your own business or been a freelancer, you know the pain of scrambling to pay an unexpectedly large tax bill. Be aggressive with the amounts you pay on your quarterly payment schedule and you'll spare yourself a lot of pain down the line.

Even if you handle taxes yourself, you should see a trusted accountant every December with your estimated year-end totals on revenue and spending to figure out where you'll stand come April

Every tax day for the last four or five years I've owed the IRS thousands of dollars. For the last two years, I've met with an accountant in December to handicap where I'd stand come April. It's been a godsend because I've been prepared both times for the worst, and had plenty of savings ready to pay the bill. A December accountant visit is also good for determining if your estimated taxes are inline with your earnings -- whether you should be putting away more or less the same amount the next year. Since first quarter estimated taxes are also due around April 15th, it helps to know that ahead of time as well.

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interesting article on why or whynot an mba and skills that i should considre acquiring

2007-07-01T21:24:00.001-07:00

the crux:
my case, post-MBA, I joined Mercury as the first marketeer; there was nothing that I learned during my studies that was of any relevance whatsoever. I learned from doing and watching my boss, my peers, my competitors and customers. In school, we never learned about product marketing, product launch, market penetration, pricing for a non-existent market, financing for start-ups, venture capital, etc, etc.. I did learn how to balance a balance sheet (although was never quite good at it), how to do all sorts of statistics, game theory, HR fundamentals, economics, manufacturing, some advertising, etc., etc. Great for the horizon opening exercise, but useless for the business world in which I found myself.

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Why was my TAU MBA a waste of time...

via Israeli VC on Sand Hill road by taliaben on Jun 27, 2007

I thought I owe a more detailed explanation about my insignificant MBA. Back in 1986, I decided that it wasn't enough to have an undergraduate degree (Math/Computer Science). Not wanting to deal with the school of Mathematics anymore, I opted for a business degree to "open new horizons" (...and not be quite as academically challenging as another exact science). Back then, there was no executive MBA program. Classes were taught in the middle of the day, totally ignoring the fact that 99% of the students had full-time jobs. In fact, there was really nothing that took this into consideration; the administration of the school felt that working students were an annoyance, and treated us as such.

Now, let's talk "form vs. substance". The "form" was a disaster. It took me 3.5 years to complete the degree. I definitely earned points for perseverance.... by the time I was done, I had sworn never to set foot into a University again!

But was it worth it? Let's talk "substance". Business school was described to me by an HBS graduate, as similar to plumbing school. You're taught the tools, and the talk, required to be a plumber - or rather investment banker, consultant, etc.

In my case, post-MBA, I joined Mercury as the first marketeer; there was nothing that I learned during my studies that was of any relevance whatsoever. I learned from doing and watching my boss, my peers, my competitors and customers. In school, we never learned about product marketing, product launch, market penetration, pricing for a non-existent market, financing for start-ups, venture capital, etc, etc.. I did learn how to balance a balance sheet (although was never quite good at it), how to do all sorts of statistics, game theory, HR fundamentals, economics, manufacturing, some advertising, etc., etc. Great for the horizon opening exercise, but useless for the business world in which I found myself.

Then 5 years later, when I joined Gemini as a venture capitalist, and was given the task of looking at the P&L of a company, I had no idea what I was doing (didn't have a clue what was a gross margin, nor operating margins). Mind you, I did very well on the exams during my MBA studies, but they had no context to my real world out there.

My conclusion: my Tel Aviv University MBA was a waste of time, and not enjoyable either. That does not mean that all MBA's are like that. The main advantage in obtaining a good MBA, goes to the network that you build, and I am sure that at Stanford, Harvard and INSEAD, the relevancy of what you learn, has higher correlation to the real world. In retrospect, I made a poor choice. I would certainly recommend MBA studies - but pick the institution according to career goals, and not what's most accessible.

Tags: MBA+studies

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interesting resource that this vc is offering : No Harm, No Foul - Update

2007-07-01T21:19:00.001-07:00

maybe someday i can make use of it

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No Harm, No Foul - Update

via Soaring on Ridgelift by 1vc on Jun 25, 2007

Some weeks back in my post "Early stage funding - VC or Angel?" I offered to take 30 minute "no harm, no foul" (NHNF) meetings with people who contacted me to pitch their ideas.

After seeing Marc Andreessen's post on his blog today ("...But I don't know any VCs!") about some VCs offering to be contacted by entrepreneurs directly, I thought it would be useful to summarize my reactions and the feedback I've given to the folks with whom I have met through these NHNF meetings.

Explain the market!!!! Cover these topics - a) the size of the market opportunity, b) the path to the market and c) the real value to the customer - paying or otherwise. This is one area where the NHNF meetings could stand improvement versus the more traditional meetings. Be really explicit about what you are going after, why this is important to your customer and how you are going to reach them.
Watch the business model and beware of credibility traps - at the risk of overloading this post with links, please "Sanity check your business model!" - This applies to both NHNF as well as traditional meetings. Going through the financial model and the market easily represented the bulk of time in all meetings.
Some proof of concept is necessary unless you have a long and relevant track record in the same domain as your new idea. A prototype helps... A prototype with some customer validation points REALLY HELPS! If you don't have either then show how you can reach this important milestone on a modest amount of capital.

Overall, the quality of the NHNF meetings stacked up very well compared to meetings I took via the more "traditional" referral route. All of the meetings were time well spent and I learnt something or got something to really make me think from each of them. Thanks to those of you who contacted me so far and I'm still open for NHNF meetings!

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Trade Like a Scientist

2007-06-24T08:54:00.001-07:00

good one

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Trade Like a Scientist

via The Big Picture by ritholtz on Jun 24, 2007

Doc Steenbarger has a terrific 3 part series on trading like a scientist. All three posts are short and easily digestable, but here's what stood out to me:

* Observation and deduction are the key to developing a trading strategy;

* Understand what is meaningful and what is random.

* Scientists have humility; They know their best theories are only approximations of reality.

* Knowledge, for a true scientist, is always provisional; Ongoing empirical tests generate further additional observations and revisions.

* Scientists remain open to data that may invalidate their hypothesis.

* Scientists focus on the process and not the outcome. A single winning or losing trade does not prove a strategy works -- but it does provide some additional data.

* The aim of Science is to understand through observable phenomna, what is going on in reality. This, Scientific traders do not "Trade Without Understanding;"

* Since all scientists understand probabilities, they never Oversize positions;

* Recognizing errors is key to an objective mind. Thus, why Traders should be prepared to admit error: never average down, and always use stop losses.

Good stuff, Doc. Thanks!

Source:
Trade Like a Scientist - Part One: The Scientific Mindset
Brett Steenbarger
TraderFeed, June 15, 2007
http://traderfeed.blogspot.com/2007/06/trade-like-scientist-part-one.html

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Design Philosophy?

2007-06-24T08:43:00.001-07:00

very good article with links

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Design Philosophy?

via Sramana Mitra on Strategy by Sramana Mitra on Jun 23, 2007

We discussed Design Philosophy earlier. Recently, I asked around for people's design philosophies, and here's one answer that I want to showcase, to kick off this discussion.

I like to keep it simple and pleasing to the eye. A teacher once said to me: "When creating something look at it like a mini skirt. Make it short enough to keep it interesting and long enough to cover everything."

So, what is your design philosophy?

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share your desktop: https://skyfex.com/expert/index.php

2007-06-23T22:56:00.001-07:00

--
Regards,
Umesh Kumar

http://worthyarticles.blogspot.com/
http://learnbooks.blogspot.com/
http://cplusplusnotes.blogspot.com/

Catalyze - A New Community Site For Us

2007-06-23T22:27:00.001-07:00

i want to check this out more

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Catalyze - A New Community Site For Us

via Tyner Blain by Scott Sehlhorst on Jun 19, 2007

www.mycatalyze.org. From the FAQ:

What is the Catalyze community?
Catalyze is a new member-driven community for all professionals involved in the defining and designing software applications or websites. Catalyze is a place to share experiences, find resources, ask questions, offer opinions, get involved and network with other professionals engaged in defining and designing software applications and websites.

What is the goal of the Catalyze community?
The goal of the Catalyze community is to be the number one destination for software application definition and design professionals. Peer-based content is the most powerful force for change and learning in the world today. For the first time, that power is now in the hands of the professionals that define and design the world's software.

Who are the target members of the Catalyze community?
If you are a Business Analyst, UI Designer, Information Architect, Interaction Designer, Usability or UX Professional, Product Manager, Project Manager or anyone else involved in the definition process of a software application, then you will find value in joining the Catalyze Community.

From looking at the site, it looks like some great opportunities for all of us

Forums - good categories, including business analyst and usability job postings. Not a lot of traffic yet.
Resources - including articles, whitepapers, etc. It also allows members to upload resources.
Blogs - there are several blogs operating within the site, and a main page/feed that aggregates them. About 50 articles so far across 9 blogs. If you want to start a blog at Catalyze, there's a contact link.
Feeds - there's a feed room that has a widget that aggregates content from many blogs in our niche (including Tyner Blain - thanks guys).
Events - good focused calendar of upcoming events for BA and UX professionals.

Exciting

The event calendar is exciting to me - great opportunity to aggregate "what's going on.
Resources - I think there's a lot of opportunity here.
Job Posting Forum - I haven't really looked, so maybe there is a good place to post/find BA and UX jobs already on some other site. I like that it is here (and there are already over a dozen postings in each category).
The site is done in partnership with the IIBA and UPA. Excellent.

Not Bad

The other forum elements. When I think of a requirements forum, I think first of Seilevel's message boards. I don't know of a good UX forum.
Blogs. Good start, good framework. I'm optimistic that the content will grow consistently and be high quality. Jury's really out for now.

So check it out, sign up, contribute and make it great.

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Shameless Self-Promotion Week: LiveOps

2007-06-23T22:26:00.001-07:00

interesting call center solution

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Shameless Self-Promotion Week: LiveOps

via VentureBlog by David Hornik on Jun 20, 2007

When I first met with LiveOps' CEO Maynard Webb, I asked him what it was about LiveOps that would get him back to work. After all, Maynard had just recently retired from Ebay where he had served as COO. While head of technology at Ebay he was credited with stabilizing a platform that, at the time, was on the verge or implosion. His reward for fixing the technology mess was a license to fix everything else as COO, which he did with great aplomb. Maynard had a well earned reputation as a tireless worker. Clearly he had earned himself a summer or two (or ten) off. But when Maynard heard the LiveOps story, he found himself back in the saddle.

So what was it about LiveOps that Maynard found so exciting? In his words it was the ability to do well while doing good. That may seem surprising when you consider that LiveOps is a call center software and services platform. At its core, LiveOps is an incredibly sophisticated VOIP software platform that allows a customer to route, track and manage calls in ways that none of the traditional systems allow. And one of the most important byproducts of LiveOps' all-IP system is that agents can be located anywhere that there's a web connection. They may all be located in a call center in Ohio, or they may be scattered throughout the country in their homes.

LiveOps is the biggest customer of its own call center software. Along with selling its platform to big corporate clients who are looking to better manage the performance of their agents (wherever they may sit), LiveOps uses its own software to manage the LiveOps distributed call center that now encompasses 13,000 active agents and growing rapidly. LiveOps agents on the whole tend to be stay-at-home moms and home-bound individuals who are looking for a way to make money while maintaining the flexibility to work where and when they choose, as may be dictated by their own personal circumstances. Which is precisely what appealed to Maynard. As he told me, one of the things he was most proud of with Ebay was that it empowers a whole host of entrepreneurs to create businesses that best suit their particular life circumstances. The same is true of LiveOps. Rather than outsourcing jobs to other countries, LiveOps insources opportunities to underemployed, but well-educated, individuals who need the flexibility to control their own work environment. And, as Maynard pointed out, the more successful LiveOps is at serving its customers with the most efficient and most effective call center available, the greater the number of individuals the company can empower to take control of their own circumstances.

There is another byproduct of this massive distributed phone force; LiveOps is the only call center in the world that can massively scale in short order to suit the needs of virtually any customers. One great example of this capacity to scale came immediately after the Hurricane Katrina disaster. The American Red Cross was inundated with requests to donate on behalf of the victims of the hurricane. In an effort to support the generosity of the country, the Red Cross went out looking for a call center that could field the enormous volume of calls for donations. Ultimately, only one company could deliver the necessary scale to support the overwhelming call volume, and that was LiveOps. In a matter of hours, LiveOps was able to route the Red Cross's 800 number to thousands of agents throughout the country, who immediately were able to service the generosity of hundreds of thousands of donors.

LiveOps recently put that capacity to good use again when American Idol had its Idol Gives Back campaign. During two separate American Idol shows, the stars of the show promoted a charitable giving program that included an 800 number on the screen and on their website. While the producers of American Idol suspected that the volume of giving would be quite large, they could not scope the scale of the participation with any specificity. That was no problem for LiveOps. They were able to scale the size of their phone force with demand, continuing to take pledges long into the night, and were unencumbered by the limitations of traditional call centers. What's more, they were able to give the American Idol producers instant feedback as to the scale and velocity of the program. In the end, LiveOps deployed over 3,400 agents who answered approximately 200,000 calls and collected more than $6 Million for charity. That's the sort of thing that makes Maynard Webb excited to come in in the morning. And it is the sort of thing that makes me thrilled to be an investor in LiveOps.

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Cognitive Biases: A Short List

2007-06-23T19:49:00.001-07:00

i want to read the complete list. interestin gknowledge. maybe put on a chart and display it somewhere prominent

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Cognitive Biases: A Short List

via The Big Picture by ritholtz on Jun 17, 2007

One of the aspects of investing that I have long enjoyed is looking at the many ways are wetware works against us. Despite what nearly half of America believes, we have evolved in a certain way, and that has significant repercussions for our analytical processes.

There are many ways our brain wiring fools us. I discussed a few in the Apprenticed Investor series -- Know Thyself and Curb Your Enthusiasm -- that are worth revisiting. And one of the favored books around here is Thomas Gilovich: How We Know What Isn't So.

Many of the common foibles investors get themselves into can be tracked to our propensity for cognitive bias. What our minds commonly do to distort our own view of reality has an impact on our invement results.

So you can imagine my surprise and delight when I stumbled upon this Wikipedia list. Here are the 26 most studied and widely accepted cognitive biases:

Bandwagon effect - the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink, herd behaviour, and manias. Carl Jung pioneered the idea of the collective unconscious which is considered by Jungian psychologists to be responsible for this cognitive bias.
Bias blind spot - the tendency not to compensate for one's own cognitive biases.
Choice-supportive bias - the tendency to remember one's choices as better than they actually were.
Confirmation bias - the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.
Congruence bias - the tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing.
Contrast effect - the enhancement or diminishment of a weight or other measurement when compared with recently observed contrasting object.
Déformation professionnelle - the tendency to look at things according to the conventions of one's own profession, forgetting any broader point of view.
Disconfirmation bias - the tendency for people to extend critical scrutiny to information which contradicts their prior beliefs and uncritically accept information that is congruent with their prior beliefs.
Endowment effect - the tendency for people to value something more as soon as they own it.
Focusing effect - prediction bias occurring when people place too much importance on one aspect of an event; causes error in accurately predicting the utility of a future outcome.
Hyperbolic discounting - the tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs, the closer to the present both payoffs are.
Illusion of control - the tendency for human beings to believe they can control or at least influence outcomes which they clearly cannot.
Impact bias - the tendency for people to overestimate the length or the intensity of the impact of future feeling states.
Information bias - the tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.
Loss aversion - the tendency for people to strongly prefer avoiding losses over acquiring gains (see also sunk cost effects)
Neglect of probability - the tendency to completely disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty.
Mere exposure effect - the tendency for people to express undue liking for things merely because they are familiar with them.
Omission bias - The tendency to judge harmful actions as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful omissions (inactions).
Outcome bias - the tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcome instead of based on the quality of the decision at the time it was made.
Planning fallacy - the tendency to underestimate task-completion times.
Post-purchase rationalization - the tendency to persuade oneself through rational argument that a purchase was a good value.
Pseudocertainty effect - the tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is positive, but make risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes.
Selective perception - the tendency for expectations to affect perception.
Status quo bias - the tendency for people to like things to stay relatively the same.
Von Restorff effect - the tendency for an item that "stands out like a sore thumb" to be more likely to be remembered than other items.
Zero-risk bias - preference for reducing a small risk to zero over a greater reduction in a larger risk.

Complete list of cognitive biases - Wikipedia

via Healthbolt

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Guest Posts: The Year in Review

2007-06-23T15:52:00.001-07:00

i think these are good articles with nice pointers to websites. innocentive and brightidea are two in the first 5-6 articles i read.

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Guest Posts: The Year in Review

via Sourcing Innovation by Michael Lamoureux on Jun 07, 2007

Over the past year, I've blogged a number of guest posts over on eSourcing Forum, including forty posts last summer as part of the weekend series. For new(er) readers to the blog, here is a list of all guest posts over on eSourcing Forum with direct links. Weekend Series Posts Purchasing Innovation I: An Introduction Purchasing Innovation II: TRIZ Purchasing Innovation III: The Verifier Approach Purchasing Innovation IV: Innovation Continued Purchasing Innovation V: Sourcing the New Organization ...

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It's About Place (Part 3)

2007-06-22T22:38:00.001-07:00

i shud read again to get a feeling for it

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It's About Place (Part 3)

via Sramana Mitra on Strategy by Calvin McElroy on Jun 20, 2007

by Cal McElroy, Guest Author

Location is fundamental to our personal and business lives - yet it is a concept that is easily and often misunderstood. The Oxford Dictionary defines this word as "the point or extent of space that is occupied by a person, place or thing". So a place is not a location - it has a location...

In fact, location is an abstract concept that is described by geometry (e.g. lat/long coordinates, boundary polygon, or the intersection of two lines for a major street intersection). This geometry, when used with a geographic reference system, can define "where" in the world a person, place or thing is located. And in turn, mapping systems can depict this location at various levels of granularity or zoom scale.

Most human beings have spatial intelligence and some degree of geographic knowledge - so the location encoded in the answer "near San Jose" to the question "where are you?" actually means something. The vast majority of computers systems (with the exception of mapping and GIS systems) might achieve a string match on San Jose, but will have no concept of near - or closest, adjacent, contained by, or within 5 miles.

Invariably, the answer to the question where is a place reference (except in the military, where "geographic coordinates" are commonly used). This reference could be a street address, building name, intersection, neighborhood, district, region, natural or man made landmark, city, state, country, and numerous other concepts for place. These are all physical real world objects, unlike location, which describes a theoretical spatial extent.

Places are identified by addresses, place names (often building occupant or owners name) and other codes - and always have a location. Within enterprise computing and the web, location context is emerging as an important way to organize and find information -but location it is really a function of place. In a search-oriented user interface, a simple "where are you looking for it?" box could prompt a wide range of place references at many levels of granularity, from country to a suite within a building or store within a mall.

According to an urban myth (some city or county level study, completed 15 years ago that is referenced by virtually everyone involved with maps and GIS), 80% or more of the worlds information is associated with locations. Actually, it's not! This content contains place references such as addresses or place names, and must be transformed by a process called geocoding (determine the lat/long coordinates for street address, ZIP code or city name), to associate the content with a location.

Why does this distinction matter? Simply - if this content is not enhanced with geometry and geographic data elements, and linked to and indexed by a spatially-enabled search or mapping engine, there is no location intelligence! In an earlier part of this series, I pointed out that there is a tiny amount of content indexed by Local Search engines, as compared to the keyword search engines in the Web. This place-to-location conundrum, at the data level, is reason.

So, we have established that places are real world objects and always have a location. What about the other objects we represent in our databases and documents... people and things? This gets interesting because places typically don't move around, but people and things do! In fact, according to United States Postal Service and directory publishers like Yellow Pages, 25 - 30 % of consumers and businesses move every year. But, using the model we have established, they are not moving (directly) to new locations, but rather to a new physical home, apartment or place of business - which has a location. Errors, discrepancies, and lack of standards in address entry interfaces make address data integrity and thus, the accuracy of location a global problem.

And finally, we have vehicles, cell phones, or PDAs with GPS or other "locator" technologies... these mobile things (or the person carrying them) are not directly associated with a physical place. Mobile assets and resources have a "position" and may be "at" or near place.

Mapping engines, spatial indexes, and GeoTags (geocode tags on content) have center stage in Local Search at the moment, but there are several big problems with this approach:

1. Precision - there are 20 to 50 meter error factors involved in the various address validation, geocoding, map data, spatial index, GPS and mapping components needed to determine and display a location. A lat/long pair does not uniquely identify a building, let alone a suite or store within a building.

2. The vast majority of business data and web content contains place references and not location attributes, and must be processed, indexed, integrated and linked to a spatially-enabled search/mapping engine to enable location-centric search.

3. There is a hierarchy of places (e.g. suite, building, street, city, county, state, country), and the relevance of the search result can vary widely based on where in this heirarchy, the user initially anchors his search. In other words, a single piece of content could be (appropriately) associated with all the places in this list.

4. Reverse Geocode - determining the real world place from a lat/long coordinate, say from a GPS chip on a cell phone, is fraught with problems and is highly inaccurate, due to the precision issues above and the lack of a definitive database of places, with precise lat/long attributes, to compare the position to.

A use case that ties this all together, is inventory on the shelf of a specific store. The Mall of America in Bloomington MN, has 9 different valid street addresses (and associated lat/long attributes) - none of which uniquely identify any one of 520 stores. Items in the store are associated with specific places, but couldn't be geocoded, mapped and located in a Local Search context, until they are linked to the higher level mall object, and associated with the "nearest" mall entrance, based on a detailed floor plan.

A URL for a virtual place in the Internet is unique, precise and reliable for finding content, regardless how far down the tree structure of specific domain name, the content is organized. This concept of a unique place identifier, place hierarchy and index does not exist in the way content about real world places is currently organized.

If indeed 80% of the worlds content is associated with places, and these places all have locations, then a universal method to index and organize this content, based on place-centricity, and associated location intelligence, would be major step forward for the Local Search and Location-Bases Services (LBS) industry.

To be continued...

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Avoiding Supply Chain Disasters

2007-06-22T22:14:00.001-07:00

interesting facts and pointers etc that

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Avoiding Supply Chain Disasters

via Sourcing Innovation by Michael Lamoureux on Jun 14, 2007

Last year, Supply Chain Digest documented The 11 Greatest Supply Chain Disasters of all time which contained a number of lessons on what not to do if you want a successful supply chain. Since it's probably been a while since you scanned it, now would be a good time for a brief review. The lessons therein are valuable.

Don't rely on unproven / untested technology or aggressive automation.
The rate of technological advancement these days is rapid, but that's not a guarantee the systems will be ready when you need them.
(Foxmeyer, GM, WebVan, Adidas, Denver Airport)
Don't upgrade all your core systems at once.
Integration is usually more involved and time consuming than you think. The big-bang approach doesn't work.
(Foxmeyer, Hershey, Nike)
Don't overestimate your capabilities.
A sure way to lose customers is to over-promise and under-deliver - especially if the short-fall is significant.
(Toys R Us.com)
Don't forget the basics of good demand planning!
Forecast, read signals, and repeat.
(Cisco, Apple)
Don't sacrifice quality for perceived lower costs.
Lower costs don't always exist, especially if your costs are low and quality best-in-class, relatively speaking.
(Aris Isotoner)
Don't count on an unlimited budget.
Capital is always limited.
(WebVan)

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NAM's Manufacturing Profiles, A Resource

2007-06-22T22:07:00.001-07:00

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NAM's Manufacturing Profiles, A Resource

via ShopFloor.org: The Manufacturers Blog on Jun 20, 2007

Glad to see people beginning to take notice of the NAM's new manufacturing profiles for each congressional district. The Oakland (Mich.) Press cited the profiles for a piece on the local manufacturing economy and House members, Republicans Joe Knollenberg and Thaddeus McCotter and Democrat Sander Levin.

New data show manufacturing continues to be critical to Oakland County.

U.S. Rep. Joe Knollenberg, R-Bloomfield Hills, said in a report this week that his district, which includes much of Oakland County, has more manufacturing jobs than all but two other congressional districts in the nation. More than 96,000 jobs in Knollenberg's district are linked to manufacturing, according to the National Association of Manufacturers.

The neighboring district represented by U.S. Rep. Sander Levin, D-Royal Oak, which includes parts of south Oakland and Macomb County, also is among the top 10 congressional districts with a large manufacturing sector, according to the NAM data. Levin's district had more than 84,000 manufacturing-related jobs.

The 11th Congressional District, represented by U.S. Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, R-Livonia, which also covers a large portion of Oakland County, as well as western Wayne County, held nearly 60,000 manufacturing-related jobs. The NAM profiles -- please click here -- include data on the number of manufacturing plants in the district, top manufacturing sectors, number of jobs, and gross state product.

Great resource for journalists and voters seeking information.

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Effective Management Techniques

2007-06-20T20:40:00.001-07:00

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Effective Management Techniques

via Sramana Mitra on Strategy by Sramana Mitra on Jun 17, 2007

You have read Dominique' article, Top Ten, on an effective management technique from the Steve Jobs school.

Do you have such well-honed and highly effective management techniques that you would like to share?

Here are a couple I received from the network:

Bruce Everiss: MBWA. Management By Walking About. Just regularly walking round the company/department chatting to people. You have your finger on the pulse, everyone knows who you are and you learn loads from impromptu discussions with staff at all levels. It was part of the HP way practiced by Bill Hewlett and Bill Packard and gets promoted in the book "A Passion For Excellence" by Tom Peters.

Ian Davis: I discovered a technique that creates incentive, builds allegiance and reduces churn rate all at the same time. I have used for years in every management role I've had since 1992. I call it "The Roadmap To Accomplishment".

What I do, is I sit down with my direct reports and help them define "where they want to be" professionally, in 18 months. For one person, it might be a management position, for someone else it might be a position in another department or even another company. For others, it could be to achieve a higher level of performance at what they currently do.

After, we define the 18 month objective, we agree upon quarterly goals designed to get him or her where he or she wants to be. I require my subordinate managers to do the same with their people. Whoever reaches their quarterly goal gets a reward, usually time off or a dinner for two at a nice restaurant. The reward gets bigger each time for those who consistently meet their quarterly goals more than twice in a row. Although everyone's goals and objectives are kept confidential, I do track each person's progress on a large grease board for everyone to see. I also send out annoucements praising those who hit their goals.

I found this to be an excellent team building tool. Besides helping people achieve a major objective, it has resulted in long term friendships and ongoing professional relationships that continue today.

Please contribute yours below.

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the webware 100 link is a good resource

2007-06-16T16:21:00.001-07:00

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Help Us Take Down Wikipedia!

via Ross Mayfield's Weblog by Ross Mayfield on May 23, 2007

Socialtext is a finalist in the Webware 100, in the Reference category for some reason. So vote for us! We all know that Wikipedia is unreliable, Google Maps is so 1.0 and IMDB doesn't have user-generated movies.

But seriously, these "people's choice" awards are based on who can draw short-attention or vote bots. Can't we bring the industry back to the good old fashioned 100 awards? You know, the kind where you bribe someone?

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prefer pass by reference to const to pass by value

2007-06-16T14:37:00.001-07:00

default is pass by value.fn parameters are initialized with copied of actual parameters.

passing params by refernce avoids the slicing problem.
when a derived class object is passed as a base class object, then the base class constructor is called,and derived class parts are lost.... that means virtual functions will resolve to base class inside called function ?

i want to test it out in code.

for built in types, stl iterators and types for which you know that pass by value is inexpensive , function object types you can use pass by value ( though you wanna be sure that the size of these types wont become large in future).

what are function object types and why is pass by value appropriate for them ?
things to remember:
prefer pass by reference to const over pass by value. its typically more efficient and it avoids the slicing problem

the rule doesn't apply to built in types and stl iterators and function object types for them pass by value is usually appropriate

Fwd: Treat class design as type design

2007-06-16T14:17:00.001-07:00

Class designer = type designer.

How should objects fo your new type be created and destroyed ? --this effects your constructors, destructors, memory allocation and deallocation( operator new, new[], delete , delete[]) etc. Shud people call a static fn / normal creation/singleton/ restricted access (??) of some kind , who is responsible for releasing allocated resources, clients or class is self managing, centralized resource release, reference counting or auto ptr semantics when things are copied ?

How should object initialization differ from object assignment ? -- this answers the differences that will be there between your constructor and your assignment operators. think reference counting, no assignment, deep copy etc ??

What does it mean for objects of your new type to be passed by value -- remember pass by value is defined by the implementation of your copy constructor.

What are the restrictions on legal values for your new type : --- this determines the invariants that your class needs to maintain, invariants determine your error checking and exceptions your functions throw and exception specifications of your functions

Does your new type fit into an inheritance graph ---if you are inheriting than you are constrained by your parent classes ( their virtual,abstract and non virtual functions and destructors) and if other classes are going to inherit from you than do you want to have virtual/abstract/non virtual functions and destructors ?

What kind of type conversion are allowed for your new type --- do you want to define any implicit conversion operators. And explicit conversion functions

What operators and functions make sense for the new type --- what functions you want to declare, shud they be member /friend/outside/ in same name space/public functions/private functions/ etc. Does it make sense to nest your class inside another class

What standard functions should be disallowed -- declare these private, e.g. may copy in network socket connection management class etc)

What is the undeclared interface of your new type ---what guarantees it offers w.r.t performance, exception safety, resource usage ( locks , dynamic memory), these impose restraints on your implementation.

How general is your new type : are you defining a new type or a whole new family of types, if you defined a family of types than you want to define a new class template not just a class

Is a new type really what you need ---- if purpose of new class is just old class + more functionality…then you can maybe use some non member functions or templates to get the work done

Its hard to design smart classes..but worth it.

Things to remember:
Class design is type design. Before defining a new type , be sure to consider all the issues discussed in this item

I need to reread this item and get a hang on it

There's No Inflation -- Except for Necessities

2007-06-16T08:32:00.001-07:00

interesting note at the end indicating that china was a net seller of treasury bonds last month.

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There's No Inflation -- Except for Necessities

via The Big Picture by ritholtz on Jun 16, 2007

Barron's Alan Abelson weighs in on one of of our regularly and favored subjects: There is no inflation, except for all those pesky things going up in price (a/k/a/ inflation ex-inflation):

THERE'S NO INFLATION -- EXCEPT FOR SUCH NECESSITIES of daily sustenance as food, gasoline and The Wall Street Journal (which, in case you were too busy having a jolly time at the beach to notice when it was disclosed, next month will fetch $1.50 a copy rather than the current buck). But those are obviously exceptions that prove the point, for none constitutes a component of core inflation, so, in the larger economic scheme of things, how significant can any of them be?

Once again last week, confronted by a disquieting indication that inflation is alive and virulent -- namely, that the producer-price index shot up 0.9% in May -- the Émile Coué chorus in the Street rushed to reassure the investing masses by singing their anthem of everything gets better every day, citing the much more demure 0.2% rise in core producer prices as incontrovertible evidence. And, we're pleased to say, the masses were sufficiently reassured to shrug off the downbeat data and send the market bounding ahead.

And, of course, fresh fuel for the bulls came the very next morning as that same Coué chorus -- or should we more properly call them "core-ists" -- seized on release of the consumer-price index as confirmation that all's well on the inflation front. What better proof, they exulted, than the miserly 0.1% uptick in the CPI -- once you take out pesky items like food and energy. As for the 0.7% rise in the CPI when food and energy are included, "pshaw," they scoffed, that's just the "headline number"!

For the life of us, we must confess, we don't quite understand why "headline" is a pejorative. Do those contemptuous of us benighted souls who award it more serious notice laugh and sneer when a banner headline in their daily proclaims, "War Is Declared" or "World's Tallest Building Collapses" or "Mets Win"?

We've no objection, of course, to anything that makes people happy, even if it's a patently ersatz invention of the Federal Reserve conceived in the '70s when that august body was desperate to find a semantic antidote to the heaving inflation of the time. So at the behest of the then cantankerous chairman, Arthur Burns, it tossed out first energy and then food from the standard calculation of inflation. The result, lo and behold!, was "core inflation," which has served nicely over the years to dim the perception of inflation and buoy spirits on Wall Street, if not in the real world whose inhabitants have to cope best they can with rising prices. (Please don't accuse us of being anti-semantic; our source is the redoubtable Steve Roach, who was one of the economic-spear carriers at the Fed back then.)

And we're also aware that the price of certain commodities has plummeted. DRAM prices, as we noted some weeks back, have suffered a huge markdown. Moreover, the Journal reports that a gram of cocaine, which sold for around $200 barely a decade ago, can be bought these days for as little as $20 (which perhaps tells you more about the no-inflation crew's recreational habits than the legitimacy of their overall analysis).

Bur for ordinary folks like us who don't dabble in DRAMS or do coke, such instances of lower prices might as well be snippets of fluff. The stuff, essential and not so essential both, we must fork over our hard-earned dough to acquire has been getting inexorably more costly for quite a spell now. And to judge by the action in the commodities markets -- wheat at an 11-year high, crude at a nine-month peak, etc. after sad etc. -- we might as well grimace and bear it, and draw what solace we can from the knowledge that core inflation is so meek.

Not much more to add to that . . .

UPDATE June 16, 2007 9:22am

The NYT's Floyd Norris weighs in on the same subject in a blog post: Inflation Soars -- But Wall Steet Ignores It:

"Wall Street is relieved that inflation is under control. Consumers know it isn't.

Share prices are soaring today, on the good news that the core consumer price index was up just 0.1 percent in May. Economists are ignoring the fact that the overall C.P.I was up 0.7 percent.

The core figure leaves out food and energy, and since that is the rate the Federal Reserve watches, traders think there is little risk of a Fed move to tighten. The theory is that food and energy numbers can be volatile and thus misleading.

The trouble with only watching the core rate is that real people eat and also use energy. And changes in those prices are important over long periods of time.

Over the past three months, the total consumer price index has risen at a high annual rate of 7 percent, while the core rate is advancing at the small rate of 1.6 percent.

To be sure, three months is a short period. But four years is not. Over that period, the overall CPI is up at an annual rate of 3.15 percent, a full percentage point more than the core rate. Food is up at a 3.1 percent rate, a 13 year high for that measure. And energy costs have risen at a 12.9 percent annual rate.

Norris also notes that recently, China was a net seller ($941 million) of Treasury bonds. "One month does not make a trend, but if China is getting hesitant about adding to its Treasury portfolio, interest rates could be headed up even if the Fed does want to ignore the actual inflation rate."

I wonder if there is any correlation between our interest rates and that little factoid . . .

Source:
Perils of Going Public
ALAN ABELSON
UP AND DOWN WALL STREET
Barron's, June 18, 2007
http://online.barrons.com/article/SB118137047234330191.html

Inflation Soars -- But Wall Steet Ignores It
Floyd Norris
NYT, June 15, 2007, 11:39 am
http://norris.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=202#comment-769

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nexus on tyner blain is a archive of good articles

2007-06-14T19:38:00.001-07:00

i think i shud just read all of it

--
Regards,
Umesh Kumar

http://worthyarticles.blogspot.com/
http://learnbooks.blogspot.com/
http://cplusplusnotes.blogspot.com/

Planning for Effective Meetings

2007-06-14T19:33:00.001-07:00

i probably want to read this entire article

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Planning for Effective Meetings

via Tyner Blain by Scott Sehlhorst on Jun 14, 2007

Jonathan Babcock has written a couple interesting articles on preparing for a review meeting. He touches on a couple generic "good ideas" and explores one critical idea in more detail. We focus on that detail - helping participants be prepared to participate - in this article. His articles, and this topic in general are useful to anyone who runs meetings that require participation from attendees - business analysts, product managers, and project managers, for example.

Meeting Planning Articles

We've created a bundle of articles at nexus about how to plan and run effective meetings. The bundle includes both of Jonathan's articles, as well as one of our own on making meetings more effective and a Business Week article on how Google runs meetings.

The bundle is open for collaboration, so other nexus users may add other articles on the topic. You don't have to be a registered user at nexus to read the articles, so click on over and check them out. Then take a couple minutes to register and rate or review the articles - because the seconds you spend vetting these articles will save others minutes when they are researching in the future.

Summarizing the Main Prep-Points

Jonathan's main prep points include

Distributing the material early enough for participants to review and provide feedback
Circulating an agenda in advance
Reserve the meeting room & equipment
Request confirmation of attendance or delegation where appropriate

The other articles include the following prep points

Defining the goals and deliverables of the meeting up front to set expectations
Assigning a note-taker or scribe for the meeting

Unprepared Participants

Jonathan raises an interesting issue - when, in spite of your prep work, people fail to prepare for the meeting, what should you do? This is a tough one. If you start with the assumption that only people who need to be in the meeting are actually invited to the meeting, this issue becomes critically important. In many organizations, too many people attend meetings. They are certainly wasting their own time, and often end up wasting everyone's time. If you are culturally obligated to invite superfluous people to the meetings, that's unfortunate, but don't worry about making sure they are prepared. Focus on the people who need to be there and be prepared.

Jonathan writes his advice specifically for requirements specification review meetings - where people's input is critically important. The issues and advice apply to any of a number of collaborative or approval meetings. They can be generally described as meetings where multiple people need the information, should provide input, and ultimately must agree on the outcome of the meeting.

Don't Do This

Sometimes you, and everyone else in the meeting needs to take the efficiency hit of dragging along the folks who didn't do their homework. If you have to, you have to. After the meeting, talk privately with the person who let everyone down, and work together to prevent it from happening in the future.

Don't attack the person publicly in the meeting. Don't slam your notebook closed and declare the meeting to be over because someone had something more important to do. That would be just as unprofessional as it was to discover that people were unprepared for the meeting. Maybe that person did have something more important to do. The problem truly isn't that they were unprepared, the problem is that you didn't know about it in advance, and couldn't respond appropriately.

That's the crux of the issue, and the reason that Jonathan's advice is good.

Do This Instead

Touch base with the attendees before the meeting. Make sure that everyone who needs to be prepared is prepared. If someone needs to bring materials, make sure they have them ready to go. Work with them to get them completed if you need to. Reschedule the meeting if you need to. Carry on with the meeting, and deal with the missing contributions if that is what is appropriate. You can't do everyone's job for them - but you can do your job for everyone. The meeting attendees are implicitly relying upon you to not waste their time. And since it is your meeting, if someone you are relying upon is failing to deliver, it is your responsibility to adapt.

Jonathan offers a couple suggestions to get attendees to prepare for the meeting. His first suggestion is to get their inputs so that you can incorporate them into the agenda. This is a good approach, because it helps attendees develop a sense of ownership in the agenda. Even if they don't modify the agenda, they are taking some ownership in what you have put together by acknowledging and accepting it.

Jonathan also suggests letting attendees know that you will cancel or reschedule the meeting if you don't have their inputs a day or two in advance of the meeting. We would approach this with a slightly lighter touch, but we like the base idea. When there are inputs that would crater the meeting if they were absent, work with the contributors to assure that they will have those inputs ready. If they can't get them done in time, work with them to reschedule the meeting (before the meeting begins) so that you can carry out the meeting with their inputs.

Often, meetings get derailed when people who are "too busy" are simply not conversant with the material to be covered. They don't have the background they need, or a deep enough understanding to be effective in the meeting. The classic example is a decision maker who needs to know the context for making decisions. When everyone else in the meeting has the context, you're wasting their time getting the decision maker up to speed during the meeting. Work with that attendee to find a time to help them review before the meeting, or reschedule the meeting, or ask them not to attend it at all. If you have a one hour meeting with seven people, you're wasting six hours (across the team) by going over the material again to get the laggard up to speed. Wouldn't it be better to spend two hours in a one-on-one with that person before the group gets together?

To quote Jonathan:

Worst of all, whether it's completely fair or not, the productivity of a Business Analyst's meetings are seen as a direct reflection on the his/her organizational and interpersonal skills.

Other Approaches

Craig Brown offers a couple tips in the comments on Jonathan's second article. He suggests meeting with the leaders in advance of the meeting, and also providing them with printed versions of the materials before the meeting. Craig suggests letting the leaders know that you will collect their "marked up" versions of the documents [before] the meeting. I've seen this be very effective with upper managers and decision makers. There's something about marking up a print-out that engages these folks.

Maybe they are less comfortable with electronic documents (although that is becoming less true every day, and varies from company to company). I suspect that marking up a paper copy allows someone to "scan" more effectively, cross-reference with other documents, and put things in context better. Often the "decision makers" are in a unique position of having fewer details and more context. Giving them an alternative medium for reviewing the docs may help them to put things in perspective more effectively.

What approaches would you suggest?

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The World's Power Law Crazy, Lawdy So Am I

2007-06-14T19:29:00.001-07:00

motivating and calming article

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The World's Power Law Crazy, Lawdy So Am I

via The Stalwart by Joseph Weisenthal on Jun 12, 2007

Over the past few years, there's been more talk about the so-called "long tail" than most people could reasonably expect to stomach. Sure, it's a useful concept, but at some point you have to have move on in your thinking. Lately, it seems, everyone is talking about power laws, black swans, kurtosis, and non-Gaussian distributions. These are related concept to the long tail, except that they're more interested in the heads (and their frequency, size and significance), than the tail. Even the US Treasury is reminding hedge fund investors that just because we haven't had a .400 hitter (in baseball) in several years, it doesn't mean there won't be another one right around the corner. I've been on this kick for some time. A key characteristic of power law distributions is that the "average" of the pool doesn't mean anything. Sure, you can mathematically compute the average, but it doesn't give you any usable information on the whole dataset.

Of course, there's been a lot of talk about how to exploit (or protect yourself against) these market dynamics (which are arguably becoming more pronounced). One way to take advantage of this is to be YouTube. Create a platform that serves as a petri dish for all kinds of media, some of which will break out and be huge (Coke & Mentos videos), while others will languish in obscurity. There's just one problem, being YouTube is tough. Not every business can be a platform, unfortunately.

Another approach is to be a fast responder. In other words, acknowledging that there's no way to predict what will explode (they're black swans after all), you have to be ready to ride the top of wave comes next.

The best recent example I can think of is Toyota and its Prius line. Regardless of whether the Prius is actually as environmentally friendly as its thought to be, there's no doubt that it's been an extraordinary hit. Last week, the company announced that it's sold its millionth one. The rise of hybrid vehicles (which is related to a number of things including the Iraq War, 9/11/ and global warming) was really difficult to anticipate back in 2000. No company trying to figure out what the "average" car buyer was looking for could've ever been expected to predict the demand for hybrid cars. As such, the Detroit automakers were caught completely off guard. Even seven years later, they're still not moving the dial in this market. It's not that Toyota anticipated selling so many Priuses, but that the company was prepared to handle the wave of demand for them once they did start taking off.

There would seem to be two kinds of business that can thrive in markets with this type of model. Companies like Google harvest tiny dollops of profit scattered widely across the land. And companies like Toyota are prepared to react to the unexpected spikes, which nobody can predict, but only react to.

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Tax Cuts for the Taxpayers: If it ain't broke, why fix it?

2007-06-13T19:46:00.001-07:00

i want to read the paper mentioned in the article, that shud be perspective broadening

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Tax Cuts for the Taxpayers: If it ain't broke, why fix it?

via The Skeptical Optimist by Optimist123 on Jun 08, 2007

Two days ago I discovered a recent paper by the Tax Foundation, and so far it's the only example I've found that categorizes the total federal tax burden by quintile (households grouped by income level). Definitely take the time to...

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FQ.07.22: Favorite Quote for This Week

2007-06-13T19:44:00.001-07:00

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FQ.07.22: Favorite Quote for This Week

via The Skeptical Optimist by Optimist123 on Jun 02, 2007

If you're not working, you're dependent on the productivity of those who are.--Francis X. Cavanaugh...

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Why Bond Yields are a Triple Sextuple Threat

2007-06-13T19:43:00.001-07:00

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Why Bond Yields are a Triple Sextuple Threat

via The Big Picture by ritholtz on Jun 13, 2007

Last night, Larry asked me which was a bigger threat to stocks, a US/Iran conflict -- or rising bond yields.

The correct answer was, of course, rising yields.

I described it as a triple threat -- but it may be even more than that; it could be a quadruple or quintuple or even sextuple threat!

Why? consider:

1) Valuation: Models such as the so-called Fed model that have been declaring equities undervalued rely on comparing the earnings yield with the 10 Year yield. As the yield spikes, what was "undervalued" by this measure suddenly is much less so.

2) The M&A / LBO Put: One of the firm bids supporting this market has been the manic pace at which public companies have been taken private of by Private Equity (soon to be public themselves). Some have argued this was based on cheap stock prices, but we shall soon find out that it was based in fact on cheap money. As that gores away, so too will the LBO Put.

3) Competition: If you could get a guaranteed 5.5% or 6% on your money -- risk free -- would you? The answer depends on your personal situation, but for many institutions and wealthy investors, the answer is absolutely.

4) Profits: If it costs more to borrow or finance, that bites into profits. Indeed, this has been one of the primary complaints about the Fed model, it double counts low rates this way, and can makes apparently cheap looking companies more expensive-looking in fast order as rates rise.

5) Share buybacks: Much of the share buybacks we have seen have been financed with cheap borrowed money. This is another leg of the bullish stool that is about to leave town on the same stagecoach as low rates. (cue music, sunset)

6) Consumer spending: WIth MEW sliding, we have seen an increase in consumer credit driven spending. Watch that crimp if rates stay near 5.25%. Indeed, we could see a move towards 5.5% by Summer's end once people realize Bernanke is serious about a rate hike by year's end.

We have PPI and CPI out later this week, so this may all be moot by the weekend.

But with inflation over 3.4% in China, I somehow doubt that . . .

Sources:
Oh, Yeah -- Inflation
David Gaffen
Maretbeat, June 12, 2007, 4:35 pm
http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2007/06/12/four-at-four-oh-yeah-inflation/

Chinese Inflation Fuels Few Worries So Far
By ANDREW BATSON
WSJ, June 13, 2007; Page A2
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118162534329732351.html

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Turn Logic into Magic (3)

2007-06-10T14:17:00.001-07:00

insight on people buying behaviour today that one wants to remember

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Turn Logic into Magic (3)

via Sramana Mitra on Strategy by Dominique on May 24, 2007

By Dominique Trempont, Guest Author

Brand has become so crucial in the 21st century because our purchasing choices have expanded and we do not have the time or energy to compare every product or service.

Furthermore, our buying decisions have become increasingly confusing: everybody copies everybody, everybody claims superiority and best value.

Increasingly we base our choices on brands we trust to deliver on our expectations and to fix things if there is a problem. It is not anymore only about product or service features and functions, it includes what kinds of people buy it, what market segment will I join, where does that position me?

Think of cars. What is the product feature difference between a Lexus and a Mercedes?

Some, but that is not what determines our choices.

It is not about the features and functions.

It is about how it makes you feel and what it says about you. (more...)

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Research on MicroFranchising

2007-06-10T14:14:00.001-07:00

i might wanna read the microfranchising book mentioned to learn about this entire paradigm

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Research on MicroFranchising

via Sramana Mitra on Strategy by DaveStoker on May 26, 2007

By David Stoker, Guest Author

While the concept of microfranchising sounds simple and exciting, and successful models are starting to emerge, there are endless opportunities for research in methodology and impact evaluation. One university that is dedicating specific resources to researching the field of microfranchising is Brigham Young University in Utah. Their business school houses a Center for Economic Self-Reliance which conducts research with partnering organizations to help families become economically self-reliant. They have a specific MicroFranchising Initiative and have published a series entitled "Where There Are No Jobs" which consist of handbooks for business training of microentrepreneurs and case studies of microfranchises.

They are also sponsoring the publication of a new book that is currently coming off the presses called, MicroFranchising: Creating Wealth at the Bottom of the Pyramid authored by Jason Fairbourne, Stephen Gibson, and W. Gibb Dyer. My copy is yet to arrive but I look forward to reading their outlook and forecast of the movement.

I am personally aware of a number of organizations that are experimenting with the concept and hopefully integrate monitoring and evaluation into their models to help all of us learn from their experiences.

In the last Post: My forecast of immediate needs

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Role Model Interviews

2007-06-10T14:10:00.001-07:00

do i want a blog seperately for interviews that i have come across and found good.

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Role Model Interviews

via Sramana Mitra on Strategy by Sramana Mitra on Jun 10, 2007

Over the last few months, I have done a series of interviews with leaders - CEOs, Entrepreneurs, Innovators, Technologists, Academics, and Social Entrepreneurs - which offer insights to young and old alike about key choices - in business, in career, in life.

Here is a Facebook Group called Role Models, which I invite you to join if you are interested in brainstorming on the topic. Or, you can use the Comments section right here to give me your feedback on whether or not you have been finding these interviews interesting and useful. Please, also write in your suggestions, as I would love to know what is it about the interviews (and the blog in general) that we could be doing differently and better.

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10 Startup Marketing Commandments

2007-06-10T12:38:00.001-07:00

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10 Startup Marketing Commandments

via Startupping Blog by Mark Fletcher on Jun 06, 2007

Don't believe what you read. Don't EVER believe what you read about yourself.
"The Press" is no longer the most important source of coverage; the bloggers are today's opinion makers, especially when it comes to coverage of technology innovations and, more importantly, the gossip that fuels the buzz of which products are hot, which are duds.
Traditional PR firms only marginally "get" the blogosphere. Unless you have true Wall Street Journal worthy news, or are stupid, don't bother paying $20,000 a month for an ineffective PR agency. You are far better off to hire a 21 year old who understands your stuff, give him/her a laptop and a six-pack of Crunk!!, and having them start chatting online about your firm/product.
If an article claims your company is a loser, your product is a failure or that you eat goats for lunch, don't kick the story forward by responding; better pour your energies into creating the best business model, the most elegant business solution, and go out and sell your company for a fortune. Unless you actually do eat goats for lunch.
Describing a product as "revolutionary, but with an evolutionary bridge" only makes sense to a journalist who will never actually use your stuff; your customers will think you have been smoking crack. Go "leverage your synergies" and "shift your paradigms" somewhere else, marketingdroid.
Never, ever, even if you have a term sheet from Google on the table, tell a journalist that your goal is "a billion dollars or bust" unless you want the next headline to read "Bust" when your sale/merger/IPO falls apart.
Journalists are like teenagers, they have their collective crushes, then move on. Really. I'd give an example, but I've already forgotten about them all.
The best quote in an article is from your customer telling the world why they love your product. The worst is you telling the world why they should love your company. That is unless the quote is from your mother telling the world how hard you work, that you are such a nice boy/girl and that her greatest wish is for a grandchild.
If you are being interviewed by a journalist, read their recent articles. There is no better way to deflate an interviewer than to suggest they cover a topic they just wrote a story about the week before.
You do keep track of what people are saying about your company, right? Subscribe to blog searches through Google or Bloglines and pay attention. Leave comments to blog posts where appropriate. It ain't rocket surgery.

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startupsearch.org tracks the startups and their details.

2007-06-10T09:07:00.001-07:00

--
Regards,
Umesh Kumar

http://worthyarticles.blogspot.com/

Akamai Releases Internet Traffic Visualizations

2007-06-09T19:56:00.001-07:00

nice tools...i shud explore more of these and learn what they can provide. maybe u can take data from these tools and decide not to bid higher on a keyword ( say if a football match is going on and people will google it to get to a website to get score.)

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Akamai Releases Internet Traffic Visualizations

via Read/WriteWeb by Josh Catone on Jun 07, 2007

Akamai Technologies delivers 15-20% of all web traffic each day, which puts them in a unique position to monitor the status of the global web. This week, they released their previously customers-only web performance visualization tools to the public. The set of six flash-based visualizations let users identify how data is moving across the Internet in real-time.

The flagship app is the Real-time Web Monitor, which shows the countries (or Canadian provinces or American states) that are experiencing the most traffic load. As I write this, California and the United Kingdom are together accounting for 15.5% of global data requests. The app also lets you view the ten worst performing cities (Hong Kong and Tokyo are really hurting right now), and the area experiencing the most outside attacks on the network. (Venezuela is not a safe place to be a server this afternoon.)

The Visualizing Akamai tool shows the mind boggling number of visitors per minute make up just the 20% of the world's Internet traffic that the company handles. The Network Performance Comparison appears to be just a marketing tool to show how much better Akamai's network is (fun to play with, but not as useful as the others, in my opinion).

In addition to the three web performance visualizations, Akamai offers three performance indexes: News, Retail, and Music. They show traffic trends in different market sectors. For example, you can see the peak shopping times in different parts of the world. The retail graph also shows spikes around certain major shopping times of the year (there is a spike shortly before Mother's Day on the current five-month graph -- I'd expect a big spike later in the year right after Thanksgiving in the US: the official start to the Christmas shopping season here).

Above is a picture of the music index, but my favorite is the news usage visualization. The news index is neat because it has a list of the news events that caused the greatest spikes in traffic to news sites since Akamai started tracking in 2005. Interestingly, they're mostly all sports related. Taking the top spot? Ghana eliminates the US in the World Cup last June. Second and third is the first day coverage of the US college basketball playoffs for the past two years. The first non-sports news is the death of Anna Nicole Smith last February, which checks in at number four, and just 6 of the top 15 news-related traffic spikes are non-sports items.

Akamai also offers desktop widgets for its three net usage indexes. The widgets use Yahoo! Widget Engine for Windows and OS X's dashboard widgets for Mac.

Akamai's data visualization tools are attractive and addictive and a fun way to keep tabs on what's going on across the global net -- trafficwise, anyway. (Other net traffic visualizations include the Internet Health Report and the Internet Traffic Report.)

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Paying for recruiting trips?

2007-06-09T19:05:00.001-07:00

the articles by Cialdini on social proof and scarcity ( linked to at the end of the post) are very good reading. other than that the article isnt worth it

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Paying for recruiting trips?

via Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky on Jun 08, 2007

bronek asks:

I'm from central Europe, looking for programming work in UK. After doing the phone interviews and more or less silly tests, it's time for some face-to-face interviews...

Now, I'm not quite comfortable of paying the expenses of flying and accommodation if they just want to chit-chat with one more candidate, and it's kind of hard to tell over the phone if this is the case.

What is your opinion about getting (or trying to) the recruiting agency (or the hiring company) to pay for the flight?

Well, bronek, if you're really committed to getting a job in the UK, you're probably applying for more than one job.

It's probably worth it to you to pay for the trip if you're going to go to a bunch of interviews. Maybe plan a trip for a week, stay with friends, fly the low cost airlines, and do five interviews in a week.

Then you could politely tell any interested employers who don't want to pay for the trip, "I'd be happy to interview in person. I'm planning a trip to the UK for all the interviews in two months. See you then."

Worst case scenario, you don't spend very much money on the trip, you almost certainly get a job, and you probably even have your choice of employers.

But there's a good chance the mere mention of other potential employers will make these guys realize you're actually in heavy demand. When they think that other employers are competing for your services, you'll seem like a more desirable candidate. This is the principle of social proof. They'll also start to worry that someone else will snatch you up. This is the principle of scarcity. "Opportunities seem more valuable to us when their availability is limited," says Cialdini.

The combination will drive up your market value, and probably even motivate the hiring company to pay for the flight.

Not loving your job? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

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Application Longevity

2007-06-05T21:00:00.001-07:00

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Application Longevity

via Artima Articles on Jun 06, 2007

In this interview with Artima, CipherSoft's Jennifer McNeill explains why adhering to standards is important in ensuring application longevity, and why natural developer curiosity can make it harder for applications to adapt to future technologies, frameworks, and languages.

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sitepoint is a website where you can sell your website

2007-06-03T15:47:00.001-07:00

please sell on ebay too
--
Regards,
Umesh Kumar

Live Ink offers better way to read text online

2007-06-02T21:57:00.001-07:00

quite interesting observation on how we interpret things. also explains the general way when we represent things on board/notes for self etc.

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Live Ink offers better way to read text online

via VentureBeat by Mark Coker on May 10, 2007

Did you know our primitive brains weren't wired very well to read this paragraph?

Scientific research conducted by Walker Reading Technologies, a small Minnesota startup that has been studying our ability to read for the last ten years, has concluded that the natural field of focus for our eyes is circular, so our eyes view the printed page as if we're peering through a straw.

And a very bad-behaving straw at that, because not only do our eyes feed our brain the words we're reading, they're also uploading characters and words from the two sentences above and below the line we're reading.

Every time we read block text, we're forcing our brain to a wage a constant subconscious battle with itself to filter and discard the superfluous inputs. This mental tug of war slows reading speed and diminishes comprehension.

When our ancestors first invented written language about 5,000 years ago, they unfortunately didn't have armies of neuroscientists standing by to tell them block type was the wrong way to format their papyrus rolls. But fret not. Help is on the way.

Walker Reading Technologies' CEO and co-founder, Randall Walker MD, believes he and his team have developed a solution with a product called Live Ink that allows online publishers to improve reading speed and comprehension. Live Ink works by analyzing written language for meaning and language structure, and then applies algorithms that reformat the text into a series of short, cascading phrases. It breaks complex syntax into simpler syntax, which makes it easier for the brain to absorb the material.

The company presented its latest findings yesterday at the sold out Digital Book 2007 conference here in New York.

(Click the thumbnail at left for an example of how Live Ink re-formats online text)

Early results have been encouraging. According to Walker, a study funded by the U.S. Department of Education found that students who read text books in Live Ink are adding 10-15 percentile points on nationally standardized reading tests. Non native English speakers are seeing similar improved proficiency.

A more detailed article about the technology and science behind Live Ink can be found here.

If the technology lives up to its promise, Live Ink represents a veritable breakthrough that could change the way people read online content. With eyeballs moving from dead tree media to a screen near you, readability of online text will become a competitive differentiator for many online content providers.

In 2003, the company signed a big licensing deal with Holt, Reinhart and Winston, one of the world's largest publishers of textbooks and a division of publishing giant Reed Elsevier. The deal allowed HRW to integrate the Live Ink technology into the company's line of online text books.

Now that the company has proven its technology (through the HRW deal, and Dept. of Education study), it's looking to aggressively expand by signing additional licensing deals with publishers of ebooks, blogs and newspapers.

The company has protected its intellectual property with a portfolio of international patents that its says covers 80 percent of the global economy.

The company was founded in 1996, and has taken in a little over $4 million in angel capital from private investors and $400,000 in U.S. Department of Education grants in 2001 and 2002. The company is profitable. Randall Walker tells VentureBeat the company is currently evaluating whether to fund its next stage of growth from cash flow or from a new funding round. If the company pursues a new funding round, Walker says the company may for the first time entertain funding participation from top-tier VCs.

Although Live Ink offers the potential to improve world wide literacy and support the growth of screen-based reading, it still faces the challenge of overcoming our entrenched reading habits. Since grade school, we were all taught to read block text. It's not perfect, but it's comfortable and familiar.

Yet the Internet has a way of forcing rapid evolution of communication habits, especially when the communication methods are faster, easier and more direct. One only has to look as far as email, cell phones, or recent innovations such as texting and Twittering to understand that we humans crave immediate communication. If Live Ink is truly a breakthrough, those who use it will have competitive advantage over those who don't. At a minimum, Digital Ink reminds us that as human evolution collides with Moore's Law, we're bound to learn more about ourselves.

Mark Coker is a contributing writer for VentureBeat. He's founder of Dovetail Public Relations, a Silicon Valley technology marketing firm. He has no clients among the companies mentioned in the story, nor among their competitors. More on Mark at http://www.linkedin.com/in/markcoker

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Evaluate Traders by Their Stories

2007-06-02T17:41:00.001-07:00

crux: Not only the results but the process matters.
Wise words. In trading it's as much how you got there as the results you obtained.

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Evaluate Traders by Their Stories

via Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed by pk on May 23, 2007

Emanuel Derman relates a Fischer Black observation on trading from 1994 that is worth pondering:

All opportunities have stories. When prices are funny, and we can tell a good story about why they are funny, we should take big positions. But stories about trends or monetary policy are usually not good stories. When we evaluate traders, it's crucial to judge the stories they trade on. Looking only at their profit and loss statements is a recipe for disaster.

Wise words. In trading it's as much how you got there as the results you obtained.

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Is VC Bashing Passe?

2007-06-02T16:58:00.001-07:00

crux of the article:
some of the smartest entrepreneurs I know roll their eyes when any VC-bashing starts: "Dude, that's so 2005." Instead, people who need outside capital/network/assistance are coming looking for it; and people who don't need it are operating without. Neither feel the need to pretend that we live in a world where either you need venture capital, or you don't. Nice.

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Is VC Bashing Passe?

via Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed by pk on Jun 01, 2007

News that Evan William is taking venture money for Twitter got me thinking. Is VC bashing finally passe?

We went through a period in the late 1990s during which people lusted after VCs and stalked them at conferences. It was as if people believed that not only was venture capital crucial, but a VC imprimatur was the surest sign of future success. That was complete moonshine, of course.

More recently we have been through another period (which is still ongoing in some remote geographies) when it has been cool to bash VCs. They're clueless! They're old! They're dumb! They wear funny clothes! They can't code! They passed on my last deal! Usually people then went on to talk about how the economics of startups had changed, and how you could build a consumer IT company on a VC-less shoestring, and then sell it for $5m. Coool.

Now, however, I am increasingly at conferences and elsewhere where some of the smartest entrepreneurs I know roll their eyes when any VC-bashing starts: "Dude, that's so 2005." Instead, people who need outside capital/network/assistance are coming looking for it; and people who don't need it are operating without. Neither feel the need to pretend that we live in a world where either you need venture capital, or you don't. Nice.

Reasonableness and realism in the VC/entrepreneur relationship. Who would have thought?

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The Value of Code Reviews

2007-06-02T16:10:00.001-07:00

i need to read it again.
says concentrate on reading code rather than peripheral things in a code review

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The Value of Code Reviews

via Artima Articles on May 30, 2007

In this interview with Artima, Matt Quail, a partner at Cenqua, talks about the role code reviews play in the development process.

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reCaptcha and human computation

2007-06-02T16:01:00.001-07:00

truly smart

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reCaptcha and human computation

via Geeking with Greg by Greg Linden on May 29, 2007

reCaptcha is a cute idea, trying to turn all the "prove you are a human" tests on the Web into useful work.

From their "What is reCaptcha?" page:

About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day.

What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher ... Each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA.

Very clever and very fun.

For more on Luis Von Ahn's work, see the discussion and links to talks and papers in my earlier post, "Human computation and playing games".

[reCaptcha found via O'Reilly Radar]

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What constitues a good meeting?

2007-06-02T15:24:00.001-07:00

i probably wanna follow it

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What constitues a good meeting?

via Israeli VC on Sand Hill road by taliaben on May 30, 2007

Entrepreneurs often suffer from a pseudo-illness, commonly referred to as optimism, rose-colored glasses or just plain naivete. I suppose that it's a required "illness", otherwise, most would never start a journey in which the odds are clearly not in your favor.

In many of my meetings, entrepreneurs report about a recent series of meetings with customers/partners/investors to discuss their company. Most often they are very energized, having had good meetings all over.

I have a simple question for all them: "Why was it a good meeting?".

Here, I would like to present my definition of a good meeting, which will obviously vary from one type to the next. Here're a few points to note:

Title of person/people attending - and more specifically - do they have any authority to approve whatever it is you're offering
Actions items - where there any clear next step action items defined.
Who's action items were they? For example, if a company has a demo product, and the action is for the company to deliver the demo product, that's not a good sign.... need to have some traction from the other side (the buyer in this case). Action items that require the other side are a much better sign of a good meeting
Was the meeting interactive, or did the other side nod their heads a lot and do less of the talking.
Did the meeting start on time ? If it's not deemed important, often the people that you go to meet don't take you too seriously, and keep you waiting in their conference room.
Did the meeting go over time ? Again, not because you spoke too slow, but rather the others were asking so many questions, that you ran over the alloted schedule. It's no secret that you are given a small time slot, but it's amazing how easy it is to make time if there is real interest
Is there a time line for the next meeting/call/AI deliverable? Committing to a date makes it much more real.

This may be very simplistic, but I think worth quantifying before declaring that a "good meeting" has taken place. I will blog separately about what I think is a good meeting with a venture capitalist...

Tags: business+meeting

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another book to read

2007-06-02T08:56:00.001-07:00

the difference : how the power of diversity creates better groups , firms schools an society.

when solving problems diveristy matters a whole lot......authors claims more than smartness....

Wikinomics : another book to read

2007-06-02T08:53:00.000-07:00

Another book that i want to read, by don tapscoot and anthony williams, on how you can use peer production to take weatlh creation to a new level.

Everything is miscellaneous by david weinberger

2007-06-02T08:40:00.000-07:00

For decades we've been buying albums. We thought it was for artistic reasons, but it was really because the economics of the physical world required it: Bundling songs into long-playing albums lowered the production, marketing, and distribution costs because there were fewer records to make, ship, shelve, categorize, alphabetize, and inventory. As soon as music went digital, we learned that the natural unit of music is the track. Thus was iTunes born, a miscellaneous pile of 3.5 million songs from a thousand record labels. Anyone can offer music there without first having to get the permission of a record executive.

makes me think it is a philosphical kind of book that broadens your thinking and makes you explicitly aware of the factors that are accepted to exist.

emialed post ing

2007-06-02T07:34:00.001-07:00

lets see if the emialed posting has come in