A Personal Story

I woke up early Saturday morning. As I lay in bed trying to fall back to sleep, it occurred to me that the work for my biggest client was slowing down and I wasn't sure what I could do to ensure it continued. A prospect had emailed me earlier this week with some ideas to scale back the work I had proposed to do for him. And a couple of other prospects I was hoping to close hadn't returned some emails I'd sent over the past couple of weeks.

Despite enjoying one of the busiest months since I went out on my own, I allowed that morning's sleep to be ruined by thoughts and worries over the future. Such is the life of an independent contractor, and given the current economic climate, these worries are affecting many others as well.

Thankfully, an article in the Sunday New York Times pointed out that this fear is a natural process of our brain when confronted with uncertainty and threat. "When Fear Takes Over Our Brains," by Gregory Berns of Emory University, furthermore, reminds us that "when the fear system of the brain is active, exploratory activity and risktaking are turned off."

And this is the problem with recession or whatever you want to call it--people and businesses stop exploring and taking risks. Other people read in the newspaper (every single day) about the hunkering down of these groups, become afraid, and hunker down themselves.

Berns talks about what he is doing during this time to get himself and his brain thinking again, moving past the fear. Sharing his own fears and plans is a gift and helps me focus on what I should be doing. This week, I'll be working hard on all my current projects. I'll be calling prospects back who I haven't heard from. I'l be thinking of new things I can do with may big client and proposing them. And I'll be reflecting on other actions I can start and other opportunities I can pursue.

Because I won't get paralyzed thinking about the bad things that could happen. And if we all can put the fear aside, and start exploring and taking risks--even small ones--we will begin to shape the next era, beyond this recession.

career, narrative, recession, neurology, risk, New York Times

Why doesn't the New York Times take advantage of the web's most basic feature?

I read the New York Times website regularly. But I have one significant complaint. Articles on the website do not hyperlink to anything outside the Times archive. As such, the articles don't have the value and impact they could.

Here's an example. In today's Times, I read this article about the McCain campaign. I was intrigued by the following paragraph:

He has been searching for a message and a way to make a case against Mr. Obama, and often publicly venting his frustration at the way the campaign is going, as he did this week in a contentious meeting with the editorial board of The Des Moines Register.

A contentious meeting with the Des Moines Register? I was intrigued. Where was my link to more information? There was none. To find out about it, I needed to do a Google search to find this explanation (with lots of external links, by the way).

This may sound like a trivial complaint, but hyperlinking within a document to other sources is one of the primary features of Tim Berners-Lee's design for the web (described at length in his great book Weaving the Web). And it's one of the main reasons a web site is richer and more vibrant than a newspaper or a book.

So why doesn't the Times use it? Out of a misguided notion that a web site needs to keep people inside by constantly referring to itself. Every web site does that to an extent (this one does, as well), but internal references need to be leavened with numerous external links... especially when there's not an internal elaboration available (as was the case with the Des Moines Register reference).

Even if you're the Times.

Tags:
New York Times, websites, hyperlinking

Is it time to downsize that big house?

Friends of ours, as their small business grew, moved up into a large, spacious house with a big deck and yard overlooking a creek. Business is still good, but this month they are moving back to the smaller house they used to live in.

The VP of Common Sense has from time to time floated the idea that we downsize our house as well. "Wouldn't it be great to live in a nice little Cape?"

And today's New York Times profiles people who are radically downsizing into "tiny homes" that measure 100 sq ft or less.

Rising energy prices and carbon-awareness are certainly impacting this thinking, but there are other factors as well. Bigger houses mean more stuff--furniture, wall hangings, rugs, toys (if you have kids). Keeping them clean is hard to do yourself. Maintenance costs are higher. And neighborhoods can be a factor--our friends found that their large-home neighborhood was too quiet. They rarely saw their neighbors, there weren't kids around. It was lonely.

The "little Cape" discussions in our house usually don't last long. But they keep coming back. Who knows? If you come visit us someday, you may have to sleep on the living-room couch.

(Photo: a Tumbleweed Tiny House)

Tags:

real estate, housing, environment, New York Times

Zuckerberg learns

I didn't like much of what I read about Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. Seemed like a bratty kid, ego on overdrive. The questions about perhaps appropriating the idea from Harvard classmates cast a shadow to me.

But I am impressed with what I'm reading about him now. Today in The New York Times, Brad Stone profiles some new Facebook integration tools, and in the article some quotes from Zuckerberg that are out of step with his old persona, to say the least.

Like this:

“We paid a lot of attention to making sure that people have complete control over what is in their feed,” he said. “We learned from last time.”

And this:

“As happy as I am with the growth of the ecosystem, there are a lot of mistakes we made,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “I think we can all agree that we don’t want an ecosystem full of applications that are just trying to spread themselves.”

To that end, Facebook announced a series of new incentives for developers to write what it characterized as “meaningful” tools for the service. It said it would pick certain applications that meet a set of Facebook principles to be part of a new “Great Apps” program.

Others are recognizing Facebook's progress:

Blake Commagere, the developer who created zombie and vampire games for a variety of social networks, said Facebook was simply learning as it goes, like everyone else in an unprecedented Web experiment.

“It’s been a learning process for developers and for Facebook,” he said. “They are breaking new ground, but these guys are sharp. They are going to continue to improve it.”

So, it's a much humbler and seemingly wiser Zuckerberg. That can only bode well for the future of the platform and the company.

Tags:
entrepreneurism, learning, mistakes, New York Times

Food doesn't only have to be fresh, it needs a story as well

This from today's New York Times ("Food-Shopping Tips Direct From the Manager," by Ron Leiber):

Not every grocery store bothers to highlight local products. So you may need to ask what comes from nearby and who grew or made it. “One of the things Whole Foods taught us is the need to tell stories” about our products, Mr. Heinen said. In fact, Heinen’s has 50 stories that it trains employees to tell customers about its meat, produce, baked goods and other items.

I guess it's not surprising, in the wake of salmonella scares on tomatoes and spinach, that the dominant narrative for food products is becoming, "where did this come from, and how did it get here?"

narrative, food, produce, New York Times

The new media onslaught is making entrepreneurs out of creators

An article from the New York Times earlier this week ("Bridging The Gap, The Sequel") starkly illustrated that venture capitalists from Silicon Valley and creative types from Southern California are having difficulty cooperating to create financial and partnership models for new media.

One of the biggest obstacles, according to the articles, is the Southern Californians' focus on upfront cash rather than long-term equity.

How this situation came to be is easy to understand: when the means of production of creative property were expensive, there was a distinct separation between the "suits," who raised needed capital, and the "talent," who wrote, acted, sang, directed, etc. The suits financed productions and paid the talent, who worked job to job. It was in the talent's interest to get as much of their payment upfront as possible because (1) they didn't know when their next job would come through and (2) the suits could, and wanted to, maintain full ownership of the property.

Now production costs can be much smaller, for music, video, text, etc. Prices for distribution are coming down too as new outlets emerge for digital distribution. And media companies are looking to hedge their risk as the old moneymakers (CDs, DVDs) erode.

As a result, an entire new entrepreneurial class has emerged, between the suits and the talent, combining the ability to raise money, cut deals, etc., with songwriting, producing, or acting. Around this "middle class" is a new set of technology and business enablers that are providing key pieces of the production and distribution infrastructure for these creators. (This edition of the radio program "Fresh Air" discusses some of the new models and companies emerging in the music business. Companies like Indieflix provide distribution services for video/film producers.)

Here's an example of the new world order for music: the LinkedIn profile for Fran Ten of the LA band West Indian Girl:

oversee and run all the departments of the west indian girl business - management, marketing, new media, touring, merchandising, promotions, licensing, legal, accounting, art, etc etc.

music is a business and musicians that dont understand this are at a disadvantage.

this job is just as much a blue collar job as the one i had in high school working at a brake factory in grand rapids, mi. sometimes i think it's even dirtier.

Technology advances have made internet video and mobile entertainment accessible to consumers on a wide scale. The business models are lagging behind. The old way--suits and talent--isn't going to be able to work them out. The "middle class" will have to do it.

(Photo: a still from "Fields of Mudan," the all-time best-selling DVD on Indieflix.)

mobile, media, alliances, technology, music, video, business models, New York Times

Can mobile phones eradicate poverty?

This past winter I had the opportunity to spend a night working at a local homeless shelter. It was an unforgettable night for many reasons, including the memory of huddling around a radio with four other guys after lights out listening to the Giants beat the Packers to go to the Super Bowl. Among everything I experienced, one thing that surprised me was the share of people staying at the shelter that night carrying cell phones. By my reckoning, it was roughly half.

As I thought about it, though, the idea of a homeless mobile-phone subscriber seemed less peculiar. Without a fixed address, the phone provided a means of connecting to the world. Employers could call if there was work available. Family and caregivers could check in. For most of us, the ability to be connected while mobile still seems an extravagance, a luxury. For these guys, it was a lifeline.

An article in today's New York Times magazine brought this back to mind. "Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?" by Sara Corbett trails mobile "user anthropologist" Jan Chipchase of Nokia as he studies how people use cellphones in developing countries and thinks aloud about whether mobile phones could provide a key ingredient in reducing poverty.

Corbett writes:

There are a growing number of economists who maintain that cellphones can restructure developing countries [similar to how just-in-time techniques changed manuracturing]. Cellphones, after all, have an economizing effect. My “just in time” meeting with Chipchase required little in the way of advance planning and was more efficient than the oft-imperfect practice of designating a specific time and a place to rendezvous. He didn’t have to leave his work until he knew I was in the vicinity. Knowing that he wasn’t waiting for me, I didn’t fret about the extra 15 minutes my taxi driver sat blaring his horn in Accra’s unpredictable traffic. And now, on foot, if I moved in the wrong direction, it could be quickly corrected. Using mobile phones, we were able to coordinate incrementally. “Do you see the footbridge?” Chipchase was saying over the phone. “No? O.K., do you see the giant green sign that says ‘Believe in God’? Yes? I’m down to the left of that.”

To someone who has spent years using a mobile phone, these moments are common enough to feel banal, but for people living in a shantytown like Nima[, Ghana] — and by extension in similar places across Africa and beyond — the possibilities afforded by a proliferation of cellphones are potentially revolutionary. Today, there are more than 3.3 billion mobile-phone subscriptions worldwide, which means that there are at least three billion people who don’t own cellphones, the bulk of them to be found in Africa and Asia. Even the smallest improvements in efficiency, amplified across those additional three billion people, could reshape the global economy in ways that we are just beginning to understand.

Corbett writes, "In an increasingly transitory world, the cellphone is becoming the one fixed piece of our identity." Based on my experience at the shelter, I'd have to agree.

Related:
The cure to poverty is connectivity...
Another inspiring thought from Dr. Yunus

[Photo: the Nokia 1200, designed for emerging markets]

mobile, wireless, poverty, New York Times

Old technologies hang on for decades

What do radio, mainframe computers and photocopiers have in common?

They were all predicted to die a quick death at the hands of a successor technology, and all are still here today.

The New York Times profiles the venerable IBM mainframe, still a multi-billion-dollar business (not that any CIO would admit publicly to buying one), which has hung on through the minicomputer revolution (remember DEC?), the PC revolution and the client-server revolution.

According to the Times article, "survivor technologies" retain certain compelling benefits that the successors do not offer. Hence, for certain niches, they continue to provide value. For radio, it is the idea of "audio wallpaper," entertainment that's less distracting than video--i.e., good while driving or working. For the mainframe, it was the ability to retain billions of dollars of software investment while taking advantage of hardware's increased price-performance. Photocopiers offer easy-to-handle and share hardcopy documents that the paperless office can't provide. (I worked for a year without a copier and was that ever a pain.)

So consider this: the next time you read that a certain technology will be obsolete within five years, you may want to buy some stock in the dinosaur.

(Photo: an IBM mainframe that is likely no longer in service.)

innovation, product management, marketing, New York Times

The new gamer: social and casual

The New York Times' astute video games columnist, Seth Schiesel, has written an article explaining the current state of the videogame industry, with insightful comments from speakers at the recent Game Developers Conference. Former leaders like Microsoft and Sony have lost ground due to their fixation with single-player games aimed at young men. The "new wave" including Nintendo and Activision (both companies with a lot of history) have brought out product that meets customers' desire for social gaming experiences--and less daunting, "casual" games.

Judging by our household, where the Wii is such an attraction to our seven- and five-year-old sons that we must ration access, and where playdates involve bringing your Wii remote to your friends' houses, I'd say we are right in the middle of that new market.

When winter breaks, we will see if my hours of swinging the remote on Tiger Woods PGA 2008 has any impact on my proper golf swing.

(Photo: a Nintendo Mii avatar in the image of Paul McCartney from kottke.org)

videogames, marketing, New York Times

How is the Getty Museum different from Enron?

It's not a trick question. There may be little difference at all. The Getty is one of several museums that have been accused of systematically acquiring stolen antiquities. (The Getty last year agreed to return forty disputed works to the Italian government.) In today's New York Times, an article states that staffers at two other LA-area museums knowingly engaged with smugglers wishing to sell antiquities to the museums.

But there's one difference I see. The Enron spectacle played out on the front pages of the nation's newspapers. Today's Times article led off the Arts section. The Enron conspirators received sentences of twenty years or more in prison. By contrast, there seems to be little appetite to "make an example" of those associated with trafficking in smuggled artworks (charges were dismissed against the main figure in the Getty case, though other charged remain open).

Why the double standard? Why is buying smuggled artwork less odious than defrauding shareholders? Are curators somehow too classy to engage in criminal behavior?

Or is that no one cares about fraud in the narrow niche called the art world?

(Photo: a disputed funerary wreath returned to Greece by the Getty Museum in 2006, from Agence France Presse via the Guardian)

art, fine art, crime, New York Times

The world's worst professional services invoice

In today's New York Times, a front-page article in the Business section concerns the legal difficulties of famed plaintiff's lawyer Richard Scruggs, one of the authors of the multi-billion dollar settlement with the tobacco companies. What caught my eye was the above invoice, sent to Scruggs (or "Dickie") by PL Blake, a figure in the case.

There is little or nothing tangible exchanged in a professional services transaction. Therefore, the invoice is normally constructed to give comfort to the payer (and its auditor) that the vendor delivered appropriate and valuable services in exchange for the payment.

Given the large amount due and the, say, haphazard way it was put together, invoice #856 sets a new low in the practice.

I wonder what his tax return looked like?

professional services, invoicing, law, New York Times

Vivendi acquisition of Activision shows shift in videogame market

There's a perceptive article by Seth Schiesel in today's New York Times about how the proposed new company Activision Blizzard--a combination of the owners of Guitar Hero and World of Warcraft--demonstrates that the future of videogames relies on expanding beyond the core console audience of young-adult males.

gaming, videogames, marketing, , acquisitions, New York Times

Religion and science both require faith

I've been thinking all week about a New York Times Op-Ed article from Saturday, by the cosmologist Paul Davies of Arizona State University, which stated that if you're a scientist you have to have faith--faith in there being an order in the universe sufficient to support the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, etc. Beneath every testable theory we've developed, there is a point at which the greatest scientists say, "It is that way just because." or "We take that as a given."

Writes Davies,

Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too. For that reason, both monotheistic religion and orthodox science fail to provide a complete account of physical existence.

It's humbling to think, with all the discoveries we've made, all the rules we've constructed about the universe, at the base of it is a vast, possibly infinite number of things we don't know and won't ever know. It made me think that maybe religious faith and science are more reconcilable than they might seem.

(Photo: N81 in the Small Mag from NASA's GRIN site.)

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faith, religion, science, cosmos, spoken post, New York Times

Another "marketing-for-ill" practice

Promoting your product based on an ingredient it doesn't actually possess.

How to read a web newspaper

OK, so I know that everything on the web is miscellaneous. But I've been wondering why I interact with two highly similar web sites so differently.

I subscribe to both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal newspapers, and read both online (especially when traveling, like today).

When I read the NYT online, I meander through the sections--sports (yay Red Sox), technology, business, arts, books. Pretty much in that order. I just about never read the front page. I go right for the detail.

With the WSJ online, I invariably seek out the button that says "Today's Newspaper." Clicking this loads a page where articles are listed in the order they appear in the paper, with page number headings--A1, A2, etc. It's not laid out like the paper, but for example Marketplace is the second section, starting with page B1, just like the hardcopy edition.

Why do I use these two sites so differently? In part, I've always navigated the Times miscellaneously. (Sunday paper reading order--sports, arts, books, business, week in review, styles, magazine. I recall my astonishment seeing my friend Gerry Halstead read the Sunday Times front section once, beginning to end, each article in full. It took him a good hour.)

But I do read the Journal in order: section A (glance at the op-ed page but not too closely so I don't get annoyed), section B, skip section C (not enough investments to worry about that), section D, if at all, over lunch.

And so it is online. The cool thing about the web, and with well-organized web sites, is that the user can choose. Read it our way, read it your way. Whichever you prefer.

organization, knowledge, websites, New York Times, Wall Street Journal

Sometimes it's the package #2

Last month I wrote about product packaging. Since that time I've noticed a few examples of particularly innovative packages, pictured above. (I also ran this New York Times article. When you're interested in something, it seems you find it everywhere.)

Cape Cod Beer sells its products in half-gallon jugs that resemble old moonshine containers, standing out from the zillion other beers in the store. (It's good beer, too, but difficult to get outside Cape Cod.)

I noticed the Aquapod container at a school orientation picnic. (Check out its kid-oriented web site.) Its "orbtastic shape" is "a Blast of fun!" Elementary schoolers agreed: Among the six different types of water in the cooler, kids grabbed this one.

And, finally, at breakfast last week my six-year-old son pointed out Maple Gold Syrup. He said, "You're studying packages. You should write about this one." It has a built-in spout surrounded by a rim, to catch any drips and funnel them back into the bottle. This innovation has saved our kitchen counter any number of sticky syrup glops.

innovation marketing packaging New York Times

A few companies are not counting the hours you take off

Companies' continuing obsession with measuring their employees' input, rather than their output, is one of my pet peeves. "If you're not at your desk, you're not working," and its corollary, "If you are at your desk or at a meeting, you are working," are among the most persistent myths in white-collar corporate America. These myths ignore two facts:

1. Some people who aren't at their desks are, in fact working.
2. Some people who are at their desks are not, in fact, doing anything productive.

A related issue is accounting for vacation time. In today's Times, reporter Ken Belson writes about IBM's policy of leaving it to employees' and their supervisors' discretion as to when they take vacation time. Peer pressure certainly puts bounds on how much time can be taken, and IBM's intense work culture, according to Belson, leads to workers taking less time than they are allowed. Nonetheless, any move to allow workers and direct managers control over how and when time is spent at work is a major step forward in my mind.

Here's my favorite quote from the article:

“When you have a work force of fully formed professionals who have been working for much of their life,” Patty McCord, the chief talent officer of Netflix [which also leaves vacation time to employees' discretion], said, “you have a connection between the work you do and how long it takes to do it, so you don’t need to have the clock-in and clock-out mentality.”

(Photo by smartnetny via stock.xchng)

work ethic balance workaholism management productivity New York Times

NASA learns to avoid its worst practices in safety

The New York Times today includes an article on how the NASA culture has changed since the Columbia disaster of 2003. By dissecting how the agency has approached the tile-damage problem with the Endeavor shuttle, reporter Kenneth Chang shows how thoroughly studying and understanding what went wrong with Columbia has led to better practices and, more profoundly, an improved "safety culture." An excerpt:

For both the Columbia and the Endeavour, the falling foam did not initially worry mission managers. The day after the Endeavour’s liftoff, John Shannon, chairman of the mission management team, said that three small pieces of foam might have hit, but “nothing significant.”

What changed in the last four years is how NASA managers handle an event they do not consider serious. Michael D. Griffin, the NASA administrator, said he and managers listened to all of the data before making decisions.

In order to get at that data, mission engineers took many steps to examine the damage, including having the shuttle perform a back flip to get a good photograph of the damaged area. Maybe most importantly, the NASA culture had begun to change since Columbia, with one shift being that "senior managers began to make sure that dissenting voices could be heard." Writes Chang in the Times article:

John Allmen, program manager for shuttle support at the NASA Ames Research Center, said the pre-Columbia culture of NASA was sometimes intimidating for an engineer to bring up a concern. “The general culture was that, ‘What are you talking about? Prove to me it will fail,’ ” he said.

Arrogance and confidence in one's own abilities must take a back seat to humility and openness to the opinions of others, especially when people's lives are on the line. It's probably not unexpected that NASA, the product of the "Right Stuff" test pilot and Mercury program culture, would be late to the game when it comes to carefully examining its own mistakes and addressing the root causes. But at least they appear to have made that change now.

UPDATE 21 August 2007: The shuttle lands safely.
learning worst practice New York Times

Sometimes it's not the product, it's the package it's in

Consumer-packaged-goods companies have long relied on packaging as the last frontier of innovation for aging products. Think of the cupholder-sized containers of Cheetos you can buy now. Or the toothpaste tube that stands upright.

But for content, packaging has not been a priority. And with music, technological advance has made packaging progressively worse. From the LP to the CD, credits and lyrics shrunk to unreadability. With downloadable music, even that small amount of text and photos went by the wayside. Music was simply a bunch of bits. It's no wonder that recorded music doesn't have the magic it once had.

A group called FM3 has once again brought honor to music packaging. As profiled in the recent New York Times Magazine, FM3 has sold 50,000 units of a release that had sold only 1,000 copies on CD. How? By packaging it in a plastic device called a Buddha Machine.

The Buddha machine is a self-contained unit with a speaker and a volume dial. It looks like an old-style portable radio without the tuner, and is based on a device that FM3's Christiaan Virant saw emitting chants in a Buddhist temple.

The novelty of the device created a buzz that has lasted since 2006. Writes Rob Walker in the Times article:

The public radio show Studio 360 featured the device in 2006; FM3 toured Europe again with a performance built around the Buddha Machines; and bloggers keep finding it anew, attracting music fans, design fans, gadget fans and those who view it as something like a fashion item.

It may be a mystery exactly why the Buddha machine has been so successful. But by finding an innovative way to bring its music to the people, FM3 has shown that plain old content, packaged cleverly, can capture the public's fancy.

(Photo: a whimsical Buddha machine schematic from the FM3 website)
innovation marketing packaging music New York Times

Are complexity and design harming innovation?

At some level, it's makes sense that technological advances and the open-source movement have made tinkering with and improving on our favorite products easier. Think of Google Maps mash-ups, Firefox add-ons, videogame hacks, etc.

Yet the proliferation of closed, highly-designed manufactured products (think iPod) limits much of the innovation on these products to the companies that create them (and perhaps select partners). Such is the hypothesis posed by G. Pascal Zachary in Sunday's New York Times--"In a Highly Complex World, Innovation from the Top Down" (link).

And I can see his point. Think about cars. When I was a kid, you could open the hood of a car and see the engine's parts clearly; there was plenty of open space to work, and parts were easy to buy and, to some extent, install. Lots of people worked on their own cars.

Now open your car's hood. Chances are the engine is hermetically sealed, surrounded by wires and electronics and plastic, with not a square inch of empty space inside the hood. When's the last time you even changed your own oil?

On the other hand, the web and most recently the web 2.0 tools that have come into wide use can make everybody an innovator in terms of virtual goods--wikis, photo collections, videos, playlists, etc.

So, as manufactured products close up, information products open up. Whereas a teenager in the 1970's had a Radio Shack electronics project kit, now he has Facebook's API. The net result to innovation is hard to calculate. But the emergence of Google, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, etc., would argue that innovation is alive and well.

That's progress for you. You just hope your car, or your iPod, doesn't break.

innovation creativity design product development web 2.0 automobiles New York Times