Cook 'em Dan-O

How Not to Get the Sale

This happened to me on Saturday. I had just stepped out of my house and was walking down the street when I saw what I took to be a new neighbor, standing outside of his house, smoking a cigarette. After Jerry and I shook hands and said hello, we had this conversation:

Jerry: Do you need any yard work or gardening done? I could do that and I don’t charge much.

Me: No, I’m renting my house and they already have a gardener.

Jerry: How about hauling or other work? You might need that, being old and everything.

Me (smiling): No Thanks. But ask my neighbors, they own their houses so maybe they could use your help.

Jerry: OK, well let them know, OK?

If you’re going to attempt to sell something to me, make sure your selling point isn’t something I’d find insulting or at the least not true.

And if I offer you help in identifying sales prospects, don’t thank me by asking me to do more work for you.

Free at Last

Go to the Lincolm Memorial.
Walk to the top of the steps.
Turn around and look out across the reflecting pond.
Imagine seeing nothing but humanity, for as far as you can see.
Now imagine yourself as a young, black preacher about to make a speech that will change the world forever.

If that doesn't send chills up your spine, go to the ER and have them check to see if you're still alive.

When Bobby Kennedy was assasinated, I knew who he was, and what that meant.  No one had to tell me what that event was about.

When Dr. King was assasinated, I didn't know who he was.  All I knew was that Bennie Taylor, having heard that we would be getting the day off to pay respects to Dr. King, was running around the school yard shouting "free at last, free at last".

Over time I realized that those memories told me everything I needed to know about racial equality in America.

Goodbye to All That

Here is my annual listing of words, phrases, and ideas that have had their fifteen minutes of fame, and are now free to retire.

• Winning!
• Meme
• Fail
• Siri
• Stress Test
• Occupy _____
• Anything Kardashian
• Tiger Mom
• Tiger Blood
• Lockout
• 99%
• Gamification
• Onboarding
• Double Down
• Uber-anything
• Reach out

What's Your Passion?

There seems to be a question that's in vogue on the interviewing trail these days: "What are you passionate about?"  It's a good question, especially for startup hires.  You're going to work your tail off, so having the proper motivation is critical... and "I'm in it for the money" isn't going to cut it.

The preferred answer seems to be "I'm passionate about..." and then fill in the particular application or service the hiring company is built around.  I think this is misguided.  A better answer would be "I'm passionate about building a great business."

Why? Because most startup's don't succeed at whatever they started out doing.  Sometimes, what you thought was a product is really more of a feature (see this post from Mark Cuban for example). Often times, you're iterating toward the product or service that's going to resonate with the market.  So what happens when the thing you've identified as "your passion" isn't accepted in the market? Some would argue in favor of staying the course, figuring that the market will eventually understand the value of what you have to offer.  Maybe.  But more often than not, these are the people who believe in the phrase, "we didn't lose, we were just behind when time ran out."

The successful entrepreneurs are the ones that set aside their own feelings and read the market acceptance information for what it is.  They adapt their product vision to address the opportunities as presented by the market.  Are they passionate? Absolutely.  Are they obstinate? Not so much.

Thank a Veteran

The poem Death of the Ball Turret Gunner by Randall Jarrell made an impact on me, as it has for many readers. In my case, it was a little more personal.

Here's a photo of my father (on the left) with one of his high school buddies, Nathan Sanderson (on the right).  My father, Nathan and another buddy, Daniel, all enlisted together when the US got involved in World War II.  Norman and Nathan joined the Army Air Force (before the Air Force was a separate branch of the military).  Daniel joined the Navy.

 

My Dad's job was filming the B-17 bombing runs (I may have a reel of his footage).  It's not clear to me if he was in the plane (although his gear makes it look like he would have been) or just set up the cameras for some kind of automatic recording.

Nathan was a ball-turret gunner.  During the early part of the war, B-17's had to fly without fighter escort.  Since this made them sitting ducks for the Luftwaffe, the bombers were armed to to the teeth as a defensive measure.  (Formation flying also helped a great deal).  The ball-turret gunner sat in a bubble underneath the plane's fuselage, in a kind of baby-seat contraption, and handled two .50 caliber machine guns.

During one of the bombing missions, Nathan's B-17 was hit (either by flak or a German fighter plane).  The rest of the crew apparently was able to bail out, but Nathan was stuck in his turret and died when the plane hit the ground.

My Dad's other friend, Daniel, served on the USS Indianapolis.  He was one of the hundreds killed when the destroyer was torpedoed and sunk by a Japanese submarine.

Only some veterans fight, and only some of those are injured or killed.  But they all take on the job knowing that this could be their fate.  We owe them a lot, starting with "thanks".

What Do You Want From Life?

Department of Obscure References

I found this posting on Tech Crunch interesting, as it highlights one aspect of a decoupled mobile platform architecture:  managing OS updates.

The chart nicely illustrates the difference between the Android and iOS device platforms.  Apple regularly updates their iPhone devices with current versions of their iOS operating system.  Google?  Not so much.  In fact, the chart shows that some Android-based mobile devices ship with out-of-date versions of Android from the date of introduction.

You can imagine the company reactions.

Google: "Hey, what do you want? We just make the OS and ship it."

HTC/Samsung/Motorola et al:  "Hey, we just take the latest OS release, put it on the device, and ship it."

Verizon/Sprint/AT&T et al:  "We don't know how to keep devices current."

I'm not going to weigh in on whether Apple or Google's strategy is better (and for whom). But the situation does illustrate the choices you face as a device maker, OS provider, and mobile carrier.  If you're Apple, you've built a company that obsesses over every detail of a customer's experience with your product.  So naturally you're going to control both the hardware platform and the OS that drives it.  And you're going to spend more than a little time checking out the applications that other people are developing for your product, but that's another topic for another time.  If you're Google, your model is quite different.  You're trying to build share as quickly as possible, so you're going to give away the OS (subject to patent infringement limitations), kick-start the third-party applications community, and get your OS on as many smartphones as possible.  Since you're Google, you're going to bring out a new OS version every quarter (although the release schedule is anything but smooth, with six months between some releases and one month between other releases).  And since you're not in the hardware business, the need to test OS versions on a variety of current and recent devices is Someone Else's Problem.  If you're the mobile carrier, you may or may not care... but you're ill-equipped to manage this kind of hardware-software lineup.

When I worked at iPass, in order to aggregate and resell what we called "Mobile Data" services, we had to supply the 3G modem card along with the other bits that made up the service.  Suddenly, we were a hardware as well as a software company.  We had to manage inventories of modem cards... different cards for different mobile data networks, with different device and OS dependencies.  And this was our problem, because the mobile carriers were unable to manage it.  A mobile carrier might take six months or more to qualify a particular device, train its Sales and Support teams, and roll out the service.  In an Android type of world, this means the service would launch with an OS one or more releases behind the current version.  So we managed the lineup of OS releases and target devices, and in some cases provided the OS update function on behalf of the mobile carrier.

So what does this mean if you're Research in Motion, trying to maintain relevance in what people want to tag as a two-horse race between Apple and Google?  It means you can add value by 1) ensuring everyone knows what versions of OS work with what devices, and 2) making sure that you provide OS updates.  This doesn't put you ahead of Apple, but it does put you in a better position vs. Google.  Google would have a hard time keeping OS versions and devices straight, even if it wanted to do so (and it doesn't).  Apple will do this because they're Apple, so RIM has to find other ways to compete against them.

Some people would respond that keeping the OS on a device up to date doesn't matter, and they're right--until it does matter.  It's a bit like saying that insurance doesn't matter.  As a consumer, you want the device--including the applications you've downloaded onto the device--to just work.  You don't care how or why, just that everything works.  And if you're RIM, you're in the best position to make sure this happens.  And that's good for your customers, and good for you.

Great Presentation Advice

I saw this post on Forbes about presentations that I thought was great. The posting describes a simple test by Vinod Khosla:  show someone your slide for five seconds, then ask them to describe its content.  I had the good fortune to learn this from Yuri Shtivelman, when he and I worked at Nortel Networks.  Yuri would have me step through my slide presentation, spending a few seconds on each slide.  For each slide he would ask, "what's the message?".  Then we would write down each message, look at them in sequence, and determine whether they told the story we were trying to tell.  It was an approach that worked quite well, especially during strategic planning season.

What are the take-away's here?

• You have to create presentations for the right side of your audience's (collective) brain--the side that processes images and ideas vs. words and arguments.  That's because people don't read your slide, they absorb it.
• As the Forbes post describes, when you put up a slide people focus on it... and stop listening to you.  If you don't believe me, try putting a picture of a puppy in your presentation, in some random spot, and watch what happens.
• The presentation is for your audience, not you.  If you need cues to remember your key points, write them out on index cards.
• Tailor the slide material to the preferences of you audience.  Your CFO will want to see numbers in a table more than a chart.  Your CTO will want to see a diagram.
• As always, less is more.  Guy Kawasaki's 10/20/30 rule is still the best!

 

What 9/11 Taught Me

I was really dreading the run-up to the 10th anniversary of 9/11.  I was thinking that the emotions were still too raw, too unresolved... even after ten years.  Mostly, I was thinking that I didn't want to think about 9/11 as something that happened in the past. Because it's not really in the past.  It's like looking back on Pearl Harbor while World War II is still going on.

That said, I thought it would be valuable to ask, "what have I learned?".

• I learned who Al Qaeda was (and is)... and that there are still people in this world that can twist a religious belief into justification for imposing their will on others.
• I learned to hug my kids and my wife, every day.
• I learned to fear planes in the air, at least for a while.
• I wondered if Flight 93 would someday represent the beginning of the end for Al Qaeda.
• I added "how to respond to a terrorist attempt to take over the plane" to my mental pre-flight checklist while checking for the nearest exit.
• I got over my shyness about reporting suspicious packages in public places.
• I witnessed grass-roots patriotism as people bought or created US flags to tape to their car windows.
• I learned to cut people some slack as discussion and reaction flowed on the message boards and websites immediately after 9/11.
• I decided that I would not be intimidated.
• I embraced my Muslim friends.
• I dug into the history and politics of Central Asia.
• I tried to understand the daily life of people in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
• I said "thank you" to a New York cop.

There's no finishing thought, no dramatic conclusion where all the loose ends are tied up and we go to commercial.  And that's as it should be.  Because this story has not been fully told.

A Tweet-ful of DreamForce

I took advantage of a free offer (not offered by Groupon, FYI) to attend DreamForce, Salesforce.com's annual tradeshow and love-fest.  I've been thinking I have skills transferable to the SaaS industry (a view yet to be endorsed by hiring companies) and figured I would head up to San Francisco to see what companies were part of the salesforce "ecosystem".  Here are my observations, in tweet-sized bites.

• I'm glad I drove to Moscone Center, vs. taking the train.  Three hours of travel for an hour or so of walking around would have seemed like a waste.
• To the parking lots that doubled their rates this week:  way to keep it classy!
• It's always a treat to find free parking in San Francisco; my Dad would have been proud!
• You have to love Larry Ellison.  He hires people to walk around outside Moscone Center with cloud-shaped balloons proclaiming "Oracle, #1 in CRM".
• Confidential to Larry:  sorry about that $1.3B smack-down from the Court of Appeals.
• Apparently this is the ninth year of DreamForce, leading to the cute and inevitable "Welcome to Cloud 9".
• Salesforce's force.com, data.com, service.com and so on... very confusing.
• Interesting to attend a trade show with no Oracle, SAP, or Microsoft.
• BMC's "Remedy for Salesforce" or whatever it was called... why do I have the feeling this looks like the old DOS programs that ran in a Window?
• Accenture, Deloitte and CapGemini here looking for business.  That seems like a tough sell.
• iPads way outnumber laptops.
• Most of the exhibiting companies are involved in the various stages of the marketing-sales process:  quote, order, customer engagement, marketing analytics, customer service and so on.
• All my favorite Identity Management companies were there: Ping Identity, Okta, Symplified.  Still an idea looking for a market.
• Box.net exhibited, but not Dropbox.  I guess that confirms what market each company is targeting.
• Saw Neal Young on the rebroadcast of Benioff's keynote.  Don't know if that was hip or sad.
• Most over-the-top exhibit:  the guy dressed as the "For Dummies" character.  Second place: the exhibitors dressed with green wigs.
• Gamification... really?
• I finally understand that iPass isn't SaaS; it's IaaS.  Or MaaS (mobility-as-a-service) if you want to make up another acronym.
• A day like yesterday makes it easy to love working in San Francisco!

Change or Die

You hear the word "pivot" used a lot in start-up discussions these days.  What does the term mean?  "Pivot" is a fancier way of saying "change your direction".  It extends from Steve Blank's dictum that start-up's are "organizations in search of a repeatable and sustainable business model".  So "pivoting" means changing your business model when you've figured out that it's not going to get you where you want to be.

Pivoting requires that a company is a) paying attention to what's going on around it and b) willing to change course when circumstances warrant it.  Which brings us to Evergreen Solar and the news of its bankruptcy filing. Here's a link to the article.  What I found interesting was that the company's business model was based on two market conditions, both of which changed.

• Evergreen's solar cell design was intended to minimize use of polysilicon, offering producers a cost advantange.
• Photovoltaic demand was being encouraged by government subsidies in markets like Italy and Germany.

There's nothing wrong with betting on either of these market conditions... until they change.  Price decreases in polysilicon have driven down Evergreen's cost advantage.  And reduction of subsidies in Italy and Germany has driven down demand.  The combined effect has been a "perfect storm" of reduced demand and world over-supply.

I have no way of knowing if management at Evergreen did everything they could to change their business model, or were paying enough attention to market conditions, or tried to change their business model in a timely way.  It's an unfortunate ending for employees and investors, but it illustrates the importance of asking--on a regular basis--whether the assumptions of your company's business model still hold water.

When I worked at iPass, the business model was built on the assumption of a steady flow of revenue from dial-up Internet access users.  When that condition changed--and it did so quite rapidly--it left the company scrambling to replace the revenue that was being lost to broadband Internet access providers.  iPass eventually plugged that revenue hole by acquiring a managed broadband service provider, but it failed to recapture the growth that the company had when it went public.   Working through this transition at iPass taught me a lot about the importance of testing your strategic assumptions on a regular basis.