Tom's blog

You are out there...are you ready for that?

Have you ever Googled yourself? The results are often not quite what you are looking for depending upon your point of view. One thing is pretty certain however, as time goes by, you are more and more likely to start appearing in that voluminous resource of information.

Part of the challenge with that reference of information will be in the correction of mistakes, or improper in some regard (see my comments on that problem here).

Now that access to all of this "stuff" is so readily available, one of the challenges will be that of exposure. Everything you do is exposed, your web sites are out there, your public forum comments are out there, Opinion posts (fortunately I am not that opinionated), Blog comments are out there, photos (my Flickr account), videos, and sometimes some pretty personal stuff too. So for those with multiple identities (you know what I mean, one for business, one social, one historical etc.), how does your online bio stack up?

Now that everything is so widely published and especially with the advent of Web 2.0 and Social Networking (see former comment here), it is very easy to check up on people. You can see if they worked at blah blah inc. or you can see if they did win that silver medal for Ju Jitsu, if they really were under sniper fire in Tuzla or more importantly, you can see if they didn't. Authenticity is now a pre-requisite for everything and anything that you put out there, or it will come back to bite you in the backside.

Gary Vanerchuck produced this little social comment on the topic...

Remember...it is watching you!

business, collaboration, commercial, consulting, creativity, data, database, Decisions, facebook, google, Politics, social networking, youtube

How much "Stuff" do you have?

Watch this video, The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard, it's 20 minutes long and talks about the Materials Economy Production System. [Click here if you don't see it below]

Interesting stuff huh? I found a some of facts from this short film pretty interesting, the fact that only 1% of products are in use after 6 months, the fact that for every single trash-can of household waste, something like 70 times that amount is produced in the production process.

There is an interesting blog at this site too. Check it out here.

Spread the word!

Email abuse?

I am sure like me, that you get a large number of emails that come from people who think you need to be cheered up. These emails will contain that latest joke, urban myth or funny picture and most likely will contain a huge amount of garbage text where they have been forwarded at least 3 or 4 times.

Most of the time, it's ok because you know the people who are sending these emails to you and because of your relationship with them, they have your permission (implied or otherwise) to send you this stuff. But what happens when a company sends you one of these things? This very thing happened to me just a couple of days ago and I was really quite surprised and left feeling somewhat abused by this uninvited extension of a purely business oriented relationship.

I know that I have given these folks my email address and I did agree to receive the occasional email from them, in fact, I really DO want to know about their new products in this area. But surely these emails should have to be related to their products and not the latest mix of funny urban myths? Or is it that, because I am interested in VoIP telephony, I must have with no life and thus need some comic relief?

Seth Godin writes about this sort of thing a lot and has a name calls this style of communication Permission Marketing and writes here about something similar he experienced with Amazon, i.e. I have given these folks permission to send me their latest marketing information. But this appears to be that permission marketing idea taken way too far.

I have written to these folks to see if I can get a response...I will let you know what they say.

Update: I got a nice note from Erin today who noted that I got this email by mistake. Apparently they have a 'tom' in the shipping department...anyway, my trust has been restored in the system over there.

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Here is the first few segments of the email:

Time once again to review the winners of the Annual "Stella Awards". The Stella Awards are named after 81 year-old Stella Liebeck who spilled hot coffee on herself and successfully sued McDonald's USA. That case inspired the Stella Awards for the most frivolous, ridiculous, successful lawsuits in the United States.

Here are this year's winners from 5th to 1st place:

5th Place (tie): Kathleen Robertson of Austin, TX, was awarded $80,000 by a jury of her peers after breaking her ankle tripping over a toddler who was running inside a furniture store. The owners of the store were understandably surprised at the verdict, considering the misbehaving little toddler was Ms. Robertson's son.

5th Place (tie): 19-year-old Carl Truman...

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You get the general idea.

Technorati Tags: business, commercial, email, permission marketing, quality, seth godin, voipsupply

NO! I don't want to be your friend.

Here is an interesting phenomenon that, if you have used any of the social networking sites ( Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace or similar ) you may well have experienced.

Being "Friended" by someone that you don't want to be "Friended" by.

Most of these sites are quite polite in the way in which this happens, which is sort of the problem. Someone discovers your FaceBook profile and hit's the add friend button. Boom! you have an email asking you for authorization, for most of these requests the reply is easy.

Now the dilemma, there are some people who you just don't want in your friend network, or that you have to interact with on a daily basis that just shouldn't see the picture of you and your you and your drunken friend in Canada...you know the picture I'm talking about. But I digress, suppose your boss tries to "friend" you. You could accept, and your whole social networking alter ego is now open to your new friend granting some intimacy never meant for office consumption. Or you could decline, and they get a polite email telling them that do don't want them in your circle, possibly damaging your working relationship from there on out.

I guess part of the problem is that you can't really separate your online life between personal and professional. At some point it all ends up in that great big melt pot called Google (Have you ever googled yourself?) and then everything is open for public consumption.

This leads to another question, if you are an aspiring college student or advancing in your career, would you want this sort of "social" information to be seen, read and used to judge your potential by a prospective employer? A lot of people seem to sanitize their profiles when they go through these sorts of life changes, which doesn't say much for their authenticity or moral character I suppose.

I imagine it's going to be sometime before the real implications of having so much personal, unsanitary information out on the information superhighway are evident. Unfortunately the event that causes awareness of that state might not be a good one for some of us.

Technorati Tags: creativity, facebook, getting things done, google, gtd, happiness, life, linkedin, list, mac, myspace, pc, social networking, youtube

What happened to the golden rule?

Sprint just let some customers go. MSNBC covered it here.

Apparently, these 1000-1200 customers were "needy" and probably caused more expense than provided revenue. They collectively called the customer service organization 40,000 times a month to complain on average.

In this blog post, Seth Godin suggests that Sprint did the right thing for the benefit of the customers who are "pleaseable" instead of trying to please the entire customer base, including the "unpleaseable".

I don't know that I totally agree with the viewpoint, I think the adage "The Customer is always right" still holds true. These folks were after all keeping up with their end of the bargain and paying their bills. If the shoe were on the other foot, things would be different I am sure. Have you ever tried to get released from a cell carriers contract, even for legitimate reasons?

I believe that as business people, if we enter into a contract with a customer, that the essence of that contract is to provide them with remarkable service, for an agreed price. If a customer complains, then as business people that complaint is an opportunity for us to learn more about our customers, or how we should perhaps be doing business differently and ultimately provide better service for the customer base as a whole.

If we all decided to fire the difficult customers, over time the social obligation would change, it would start to become the customers privilege to do business with us, not our privilege to serve them.

That seems like a very dangerous attitude change to me.

The letter sent to Sprint Customers.

Technorati Tags: commercial, getting things done, gtd, happiness, life, productivity, sprint, quality, seth godin

Some interesting facts and figures

Check this video out. It's called Shift Happens and it brings some interesting facts and figures into relief with some contrasting ideas.

It makes you think.

Technorati Tags: happiness, life, presentation, youtube

Stupid idea...or is it?

In this interview with Scott Berkun, Guy Kawasaki posed an interesting question about innovative ideas. He asked simply, "How do you know if you have a seemingly stupid idea according to the “experts” that will succeed or a stupid idea that is truly stupid?"

Berkun started his answer with "We can't know" and then qualified with a fairly lengthy statement. But I guess that's the real point, when do we ever really know which ideas are good one and which ideas are bad?

I suspect the trick is to develop every idea far enough that you can see the major potential and the major challenges and also to look at that idea with a combination of others that may well produce something really remarkable. At that point decisions can be made about the next steps (if any).

A little research shows that as innovators we have a very hit and miss track record of spotting that special idea. Rank Xerox for example were the first people to come up with the idea of a graphical user interface and a mouse for a computer, yet they didn't spot the potential for it commercially. DEC were a huge provider of Mainframe and Mini computers, yet they couldn't see the obvious potential for personal computers in the home. In fact, in 1977, Ken Olson said "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home". Here are some fun statistics, according to the US Census Bureau, 62% of US households have a personal computer. 18% have two or more. How silly does he feel now?

Is there any way to improve that track record? I believe so...and it seems like the folks over at Google are doing pretty well on that front. They do, however, spend huge amounts of money on R+D and they promote innovation internally and give their creative professionals the opportunity to develop their own ideas without question for 20% of their working week. Business Week wrote this Article about their creative process.

Guy Kawasaki was on the original development team for the Apple Macintosh and now owns his own venture capital firm. He writes an interesting blog called How to Change the World. Scott Burken was on the original development team for Microsofts Internet Explorer and has authored two books The Art of Project Management and The Myths of Innovation.

Technorati Tags: creativity, design, guy kawasaki, mac, pc, google, DEC, scott burken, software, software development

"Perfect" or "Good enough"?

So much of the time, so many of us are engaged in trying to attain a level of quality in our work product that is perfect. I wonder, however, if the level we should be trying for in most things is simply "good enough"?

For example, my chosen trade (for want of something better), is software engineering. We spend countless hours arguing over the most trivial things. Should a button be put here or there? Should this be an icon or piece of text? How big should this window be? Is any of this written down anywhere, even, how should it be written down?

This is all well and good, but at some point, you have to step back, look at the overall result of the work and make a judgment call. Is it good enough?

Most of the time it probably is. Sure, everything can be improved, made more elegant, made a little smaller or a little lighter, but ultimately, if the product answers the design need and seems to do it pretty well, then ship it, you can always do a version 1.1

Technorati Tags: commercial, creativity, good enough, happiness, mac, pc, productivity, quality, software, software development, tom demarco

Deliberate defiance and the 15% rule

I came across this article which talks about how some organizations promote an environment of deliberate contempt and disobedience in the workplace. Specifically it talks about that fact that in creative workplaces senior managers frequently don't recognize good ideas and then kill them, along with any potential revenues they may bring.

A perfect example of this can be seen in 3M's development of Masking Tape. The engineer working on the product, despite being told repeatedly to stop working on it and let it go, didn't, and the product is something we all know and love today.

An interesting offshoot from this event within the 3M organization, is that now the creative folks can spend 15% of the working time on whatever project or idea they choose, without question. What a great idea this is, I wonder how many interesting products have come out of that organization because of that rule? Seems like an awesome idea to me.

I remember reading a book many years ago Slack, Tom DeMarco) which talks through all of the benefits of leaving some open time in the working schedules of your employees, creativity is better, productivity is better and overall the results seem to favor happier, less burned out employees (as well as a better bottom line).

I have personally experienced the gambit of environments, from the insanely creative and employee driven, to the stereotypical pressure cooker where the only acceptable results were nothing more and nothing less than was originally requested. I can attest to the Slack theory and have seen the sorts of results that can come as a result of that. If we have worked together in any of these places, you have probably experienced what would be described at 3M as deliberate defiance. In the right environment, this has worked really well for me. The trick is to create the right environment I guess.

So many thing's go into the creation of the right environment. Godin writes about the various drivers that are often found at the root of an organizations being. I fully believe that an organization with the wrong driver at heart, will never create the right environment for its employees or customers. This organization WILL miss out on the big success that might otherwise await it.

On a completely separate note, this time to the ultimate destroyer of great corporate ideas: Happy 20th Birthday to Microsoft's PowerPoint. See my previous post with some ideas on how to make this better.

Technorati Tags: 3m, creativity, design, getting things done, gtd, happiness, lifehacks, productivity, seth godin, slack, tom demarco

Mac vs. PC Southpark style

On YouTube - South Park Mac vs. PC.

Enjoy.

Technorati Tags: apple, commercial, mac, pc