Monday, July 30, 2007

Advice du Jour: Do Whatever Gets You Tenure

 
 

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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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Sunday, July 29, 2007

Perspective with Humility: i probably want to read this interview

 
 

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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

i should go thru them

 
 

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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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Wednesday, July 18, 2007

RE: Bill Gates, Ambition, Legacy, and Obligation

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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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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