The Pamplona china shop, part II

The best side effect of having a dishwasher in the break-room is that hardly any plastic utensils end up in the landfill. I'd finished lunch using one of the honest-to-pete metal office forks, and found myself carrying it back to the kitchen dangling from a loosely pinched thumb and finger. That's how my first grade class was taught to carry scissors (even the rounded-end ones). Which directly countermanded the instructions of kindergarten, where we were supposed to clutch the pointy end in our hands in case we fell.

I don't suppose that in the grand scheme of things, the contradiction matters. In either case, the central tenet is to minimize the damage you do if you fall while holding them, even if you're so egregiously reckless as to be running at the time. I don't know how the current crop of kindergarten and first grade students are being instructed in proper scissor-holding, and I really don't care, so long as they're not taught to fear scissors. Apart from the fact that a phobia of plastic scissors with rounded ends with blades (specifically engineered to take away the forbidden pleasures of cutting cloth and hair) is just, well, lame, that's not the point.

The point, of course, is learning to recognized and respect the power and the drawbacks of any tools that come into your hands. It's not enough to memorize the rules. Before you can know when it's better to break them, you have to understand why and under what context the rules were made. And you have to have some idea of what happens after they're broken.

In the context of software development, I used to think that this largely applied to the folks who wrote the software, more so than their management/support. After all, if you make a point of hiring smart people, you won't have to worry about them making mistakes, right??? Well, then I completely deleted the production database by accident. Certainly I'm not as smart as I used to think. And when you tally the real brainiacs you know, you can probably think of at least one whose raw IQ and common sense are inversely proportional. Case in point: My husband's best friend in high school--the one who pulled a ridiculously high GPA, despite being half in the bag while doing his homework (he claimed Calculus made more sense that way)--also managed to run himself over with his own snowmobile. And that's not the only story I can tell, trust me.

But expecting policies and procedures to save the organization from big mistakes is equally far-fetched. When I begged the senior DBA to please take away the administrator rights for my regular login, he just laughed and said, "You won't do that again, will you?" He was of course right. That wasn't the end of "oopses" I've made with databases, but it hasn't been repeated.

The only silver bullet is to realize that there is no silver bullet, and simply have the means and know-how available when someone accidentally deletes data or screws up source code. Setting up situations where another set of eyes is involved can head off a world of hurt. Again from the software realm: Requiring (or heavily incentivizing) programmers to integrate their work with others' means that you'll see far more small yellow flags than red ones big enough to hang outside a Perkins.

I could go on, but instead I'll hope that I've made my point, that it's important to structure people, processes, and resources around the probability of failure at some point in production. I really wish that the famed Apollo 13 line had been, "Giving up is not an option," rather than "Failure is not an option." It's one thing to fire someone for laziness, shoddiness or willful ignorance. But failure on a managed (and hopefully small) scale should be merely the price of doing business. Particularly in industries like software (where we expect constant innovation), failure is largely an exercise in R&D. In that context, punishing failure is punishing the core process of trying new ideas, and it's the most self-defeating business practice I can think of.

Another "underground" economy

A friend in my old stomping grounds is part of a folk duet, and she and her vocal partner just had a great time donating their talents to a fundraiser. Rather like the belly-dancing ensemble here in La Crosse that has been a prodigious supporter of the American Cancer Society's Relay for Life over the years.

Volunteerism (in both the charitable as well as activist sense) is certainly nothing new. Off the top of my overeducated-and-inexcusably-eurocentric head, I can think of the charitable societies to which respectable women of (at least) the 18th century onward were more or less expected to belong, as well as the tight-knit klatsch that brought about end of slavery in the UK with nary so much as a shot fired. Doubtless, there are other examples, with varying degrees of selflessness and/or social coercion involved.

Anyone who's been personally involved with a cause--in terms of time and appreciable attention-span, rather than a monetary/in-kind donation or Facebook click--understands that that volunteers must be paid, somehow, in a coin that will satisfy them. No news flash there. However, this does hit home in the for-profit universe, particularly where a much more collaborative infrastructure --a.k.a. the internet--has deeper roots.

One early example is in software development. If computer programmers don't have to work within sneaker-netting distance of each other, that opens up all sorts of possibilities. When you throw in centralized locations for refreshing/holding/merging the code-base, those possibilities are exponential, particularly when the programmers in question have the intrinsic motivation to stick it to show off to other programmers and/or stick it to the suits who make their 8-to-8 lives so very frustrating.

One slightly more recent example is crowd-sourcing of content, whether it be news or T-shirt copy. I view the pre-emptive obituaries of the mainstream news with a certain amount of skepticism, but nevertheless, "citizen-journalism" has carved out a rather defensible niche for itself.

I suspect that any number of other industries that largely make their gelt on the creation and control of data/information/content are similarly in a state that ranges from "flux" to "turmoil." All of which indicates re-gearing, not only of the nitty-gritties like processing, but also of management. Think for a minute about why you do what you do to earn a living. Now contrast that with what you do when you're not in the office, either literally or virtually. Unless you're employed by what you're passionate about (and good on you if you are), I'm strongly guessing that these are two different things. In other words, managing the part of someone who's paying the bills is quite different from managing someone who's satisfying her/his other needs.

The folks who are looking to benefit from that second part of a person can't push the buttons on the first part of that person. As much as I dislike Apple in many respects, I will say that they seem to do a more-than-passable job pandering to both worlds. I.e., those who think they can make enough money from an iPhone application before Apple decides to muscle in, and those who give away their work purely for bragging rights. Booyah to Apple for understanding the motivational mix. Adobe, on the other hand, doesn't even rise to the standard of throwing crumbs to the peasants when it comes to involving the open source community in their Flex development platform. Personally, I stopped taking them seriously some time ago, but for the purposes of this post, bopped out to their Flex-for-Linux site just now, and discovered that they hadn't updated their release code in just over a year. Pathetic.

I might be doing a disservice to the folks who are all about "Leadership" or "Change management," but if the ivy-league MBA schools aren't requiring at least four credits at the 300-level that cover managing "volunteer" staff, they're doing a huge disservice to their customers--a.k.a. students. Because even hourly and salaried employees can appreciation "remuneration" like the the very public shout-out for a job well done, or the hand-written thank-you note or even the simple understanding of what's important to them. Things that a volunteer coordinator would instinctively understand.

I don't care what type of organization it is--everything from non-profit to for-profit--there is no such thing as pure capitalism. And the smart manager is has way, waaaaaay more motivational tools in her/his belt than just the annual review. And it's well past time that conventional wisdom caught up with the reality of this underground economy.

The Pamplona china shop *

Here's a visualization, somewhat math-oriented. Remember the X-axis and the Y-axis from Geometry and Algebra? Good. Now imagine the X-axis (the west-to-east one) as a spectrum of how much damage an organization can take before it crumbles. Now imagine the Y-axis (the south-to-north one) as the amount of damage that a single employee can do. We're talking about the lowest-common-denominator employee. Typically, that's the employee who answers phones or stands at a counter or knocks on doors.

"Wait. Why not the janitor or housekeeper?" some may wonder. That's because the folks who clean the toilets are probably contractors, not employees. I'm talking about people who are can be paid, trained, and informed at the minimum required level yet are still "important" enough from an organizational standpoint that some middle-management satrap can't bear the thought of not having them directly under her/his thumb from an org. chart standpoint.

Here's the memo that every suit working for a consumer-oriented business in any society affluent enough to support even cell-phone quality cameras and dial-up internet speeds needs to get: What would be known in geometry as the "origin"--i.e. (0, 0) or dead center--on that X-Y coordinate system has moved southwest faster than a sun-bird pointing an RV for Tempe, AZ in November. I'm not talking about PR debacles like Jimmy the Greek or Don Imus--both were too high-profile. I'm talking about people who have to wear a badge for the customer to know their name.

Now, however, it's not a matter of whether AP/Reuters decree that a slip-up (however public) is news. Witness the Domino's Pizza debacle. Or the Comcast technician falling asleep on the customer's couch. Both went viral on YouTube without the help of the gatekeepers of mainstream media.

Understand that I'm not defending the Domino's...errr...amateur video-makers. I might have a teeny bit more sympathy for the Comcast guy, but not even that much. Ultimately, however, I feel zero sympathy for either Domino's or Comcast. In the case of Domino's: Welcome to the cost of winning the race to the bottom. In the case of Comcast, when one of your own technicians has to wait on the line for an hour, you're merely reaping what you sow. And good shuttance to the both of you and everyone like you who's called out on forgetting who actually pays the bills.

I'll admit that ten or so years ago, I fell for the Neiman-Marcus cookie recipe email hoax. The reason being that I trusted the person who had sent the email. The thing about YouTube, however, is that you don't have to receive an email; tagging and links and Tweets will do. And belief depends merely upon your determination of whether or not the video was faked. That's another dimension: The fakes are called out a lot more speedily than they were ten and fifteen years ago. Which is good news for the organizations being slandered. But the bad news for those that aren't is that merely firing the persons responsible and issuing an apology on the corporate website probably isn't enough to counteract the damage.

It basically points back to just doing things the right way in the first place. Once upon a time, it was merely a platitude to say that the customer is always right. But when the customer has a flip-cam and DSL? Well, that's where the rubber hits the road. The problem, IMO, is that most companies still think that it's a PR issue--i.e. a matter of spin. But we're only seeing the proverbial tip of the iceberg. You can only have the CEO fidgeting and reading a script in front of a video-cam so many times before it's evident that there's no commitment to making things right in any permanent sense.

In other words, any business that relies on consumers has to realize that it's a china shop in the city of bulls. Those that don't install bulletproof glass and blame the employees for the smashed china are pretty hard to feel sorry for when they go toes-up. (Not, of course, that they necessarily will: My own incompetent ISP--CenturyTel--is avoiding the consequences of its own suckiness by growing bigger--and presumably even more sucky and less responsive--with EMBARQ. At which point the hapless consumer either tries her/his luck with the other 800-lb. gorilla in town or hopes for disruptive technology to plant them both in the fiscal graveyard.)

---
* Apologies for the belated post: CenturyTel was sucking--on steroids--last nigh. Today started out at 55 mph and hasn't slowed down until now.

Frivolous Friday, 08.28.2009: Worst business titles ever

Purely fictitious, of course.

Got that, all you hack writers out there with your addiction to over-burdened metaphors and dilettente's grasp of history?! I'm kidding, yo! Kidding! You know, like "Ha-ha, funny!" Kidding. Seriously--kidding.

• Leadership Secrets of Lord Voldemort
• Think Yourself Rich!
• Princess Leia, CEO
  
• Fund Management for Dummies
• The Bohemian Club Book of Etiquette
• What Would Torquemada do?
• The Bailout Billionaire
  
• Swim with the Ramoras
• The 2010 Guide to Making a Fortune in Commercial Real Estate
• Rich Dad, Plutocrat Dad
• How to Survive the Coming Collapse of the Cheap Plastic Junk Market
  
• Chicken Soup for the Rock Star CEO Soul
  
• Story-telling Your Way to Success
• Investing with the Celtic Zodiac
  
• Everything I Need to Know about Management I Learned from my Cat
• The Art of the Screw-over
• The Club Fed Guide to Power-Networking
• The One-Minute Mogul (newly updated for Twitter)

(Please-oh-please-oh-please-oh-please-with-a side-of-fries just don't let me see these the next time I stroll through Barnes and Noble...)

Nerdiversity

There's this old, old joke:

Q: What's the difference between an introverted programmer and an extroverted programmer?
A: The extroverted programmer looks at your shoes.

[obligatory rim shot]

Needless to write, reality is considerably more nuanced than that. The reason largely being that "computers" are no longer multi-room behemoths that eat data by way of punch cards or tape and spit it up again--like some digital ruminant--in greenbar-paper reports. In other words, it's a lot easier to chat them up nowadays.

My boss proudly refers to us as "The Island of Misfit Toys," and that actually gives me warm fuzzies, even years on. Because it translates to the kind of place where the rules of the recess playground largely do not apply. Ultimately, that's one of the most efficient work environments I can think of, one where you're not distracted by having to put the periscope up every half-hour to see whether the alliances or pecking-orders have shifted. That's assuming you're not wasting even more energy and attention on trying to fathom them n the first place. Which would be me.

But as important as it is to be ruthless in hiring people who will fit into the overall culture--if you need a particular skill-set Right This Very Nanosecond, well, that's why consultants are made--it's important to understand what, personality-wise, the potential new hire is bringing to the mix. The last time I was hired by someone who didn't already know me, behavioral interviewing was only starting to come into cant use. In the years since my abysmal performance on the guinea-pig interview I did for the experience, I've arrived at a much higher appreciation of its nuances.

Hiring for skill is important, but for me, it comes in third after cultural fit and personality type. When I talk about personality type, I'm not talking about the Myers-Briggs or whatever pidgeon-holing glorified Facebook quizes are out there. (Although if someone is so reckless as to let me interview people again, I might not be above something like "Which Harry Potter character are you?" 'Cuz I'm just evil that way.) I'm more interested in specifics like

• What was the last thing they had to argue against their peers (or superiors) to have done a certain way?
• On a scale of 0% to 100% true, is "'Good' the enemy of 'Done'?"
• If we come to loggerheads, will they shoot me in the face or stab me in the back (metaphorically speaking)?
• What's their preferred learning style (structured classroom vs. O'Reilly University vs. Find something close on the internet)?
• What makes them "weird?"
• What was the last easy, medium, and hard problem they had to solve, and how did they attack the problems? How would the solve them more quickly/efficiently next time?
• Which professionally-germane columns or blogs do they keep going back to and why?
• What types of co-workers make them less effective?
• How many people could they be responsible for?
• Where do they fall on the doggedly single-minded vs. flibbertigibbet spectrum?
  

The list could go on, and it still wouldn't address the central issue of what holes need to be filled in the team at the moment. Do you have too many people willing to take orders and not enough willing to give them or vice-versa? Is the get-it-done-now faction outnumbered by the i-dotters and the t-crossers? Are the champions of shiny new things being unduly grounded by the Old Guard? Those sorts of things. And I don't think that it strictly applies to technical folks, either.

All of which makes me glad that I'm not in management, and thus can bloviate from the comfort and safety of my own untested opinions. (In the same spirit, can give reams of advice on child-rearing, too. Just ask my sister.)

"Sorry" on steroids

As a recovering Technical Writer, one of my top peeves--apart from the confusion of "its" and "it's"--is when instructions are just plain wrong.

My husband and I are filling out a big, nasty application, with all the hoop jumping you'd expect of anything that involves gate-keepers. But we're trying to be diligent so as not to throw off the timing--including not only reading the instructions on the printed portion of the application, but also the advisory "callout" info. that's embedded into the PDF document itself. So all the supporting info.'s been scraped together and everything bundled off for its once-over before it's officially submitted. No dice--it's batted back to me, directly contradicting the instructions in one of the call-outs.

That and the fact that the person "quality-checking" it referred by my husband by his middle name probably made my tone a trifle frosty when I suggested that perhaps they should change the call-out's wording to prevent future nuisance/delay. Surprisingly, I not only received an apology for the naming mix-up, but also a thank-you for pointing out the error in the instructions and the note that it will be corrected "immediately."

When's the last time you heard a front-line employee--i.e. someone who deals directly with the public all day--say something of that nature? A rather pathetic--if telling--commentary on the standard of "customer service," when a middle-class, middle-of-the-road person like me is actually blown back a little by a near-immediate fix to a problem.

Too many organizations, IMO, are afraid of their customers. Why? People have too many buttons, and they vary from person to person. And, worse, those buttons don't always do what their labels--if there's any label at all--says that they do. Worst of all, Marketing and Sales just want to know which ones make the wallet pop out and open. They just want to keep their lives simple by homing in on button-labels like "American Flag," "Kittens," "Christmas," "The Jones Don't Have This (Yet)," and "Does This Button Make Me Look Fat?" And they'll hammer 'em 'til they don't work anymore.

But beyond that, what the other buttons do when unintentionally pushed by the product or service...well, that's Someone Else's problem. And that Someone Else probably works for a minimal salary with minimal training (because they'll just leave for something even slightly less sucky at the drop of a hat anyway, don't you know?) who is "empowered" merely to pop out apologies like a Pez dispenser pops out Kool-Aid-flavored chalk.

All of which carries a staggering opportunity cost. From the management side of things, I can't imagine any single better way of making sense of your customers' buttons than spending time doing customer service or tech. support. A few days' worth of time, even at management salaries, has to be less expensive than paying consultants to compile the latest Twitter or Google Ad Sense trends. Or for that matter, less expensive than losing customers over problems that no one was "empowered" enough to fix before they became a PR nightmare.

An overlooked fringe benefit

Some folks may prefer a highly structured work environment where what they do pretty well matches up with what they expect to do, even if it's the same thing week-in and week-out. Personally, I'm waaaay too much of a flibbertigibbit for that extreme. But, some people are happiest that way, and it's least disruptive (in the near- and nearer-terms) to keep them that way.

I would wager, though, that most folks like more variety, particularly the ones who are expected to create stuff, and I'm not strictly talking computer programming. Why, then, do we see management apply the Henry Ford assembly line specialization model to places that are supposed to produce innovative designs, techniques, content, solutions, what-have-you? If you have knowledge workers reporting to you, what brain-fever would prompt you to create an official R&D department?

Because when you make it official, you're doing two flavors of damage to the organization:

1. You're basically off a playground area and letting only a few kids in it, with no recess for the others. That's sheer poison by itself, let alone the damage even a single remark from the "privileged" kids to those slaving away in the coal mines and mills next door can wreak.
2. You're also teaching those in the playground that it's someone else's responsibility to sell the ideas to the rest of the organization, and to see them through actual implementation.
   

Short story: Don't be that manager. Yes, 3M and Google are famous for "giving" their employees a hefty amount of "play-time" (while, naturally, adopting their choice of the brain-children thus born). Not every firm can afford that. But equitably spreading the satisfaction (and responsibility) of creating "new" things among those who enjoy that sort of thing has another payoff beyond morale: If you require cross-clique collaboration as part of the process, you've removed some of the communication friction that normally builds up in organizations, particularly ones without a lot of churn. (That would be particularly true right now, when hiring is abysmal, and those who still have jobs are far more leery of jumping ship.)

Yes, it costs something (if only in terms of vigilance and, maybe, political capital) to gamble on an untried person or group. But I can pretty much guarantee you that doing anything else is most certainly not a gamble--it's a sure-fire loss in the long run.

When George Washington holds the picket sign

As much money as I've spent over the years on "cruelty-free" cosmetics and household cleaning supplies, I've never felt the need to send any donations to PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). I'm just not a fan of sensational PR stunts or near-hysterical rhetoric. (Meat is murder? Really? Odd, but most murders aren't committed with the intent of eating the victim. It's one thing to oppose factory farming--on top of baby veal and foie gras--but seriously...)

But my estimation of the organization--from a tactical standpoint, anyway--went up this morning when I read that they had switched from protesting Talbot's clothing stores to buying its stock. (Warning: photo in link somewhat graphic in nature.) The only other advocacy organization--that I know of, anyway--that works from an ownership angle is The Nature Conservancy.

For the sake of the notion of ownership advocacy, I hope that this is the warning shot across the proverbial bow to the mountaintop miners, the groundwater poisoners, the financiers of terrorist tactics throughout the un(der)-developed world, and the rest of the rogues' gallery.

And I can't help but wonder whether, in the long run, it's cheaper to simply buy a stake in the company/industry whose behavior you're trying to correct. Because for every dollar you--meaning the rabble-rouser-- spend on lobbying, the entrenched interests can likely spend ten, a hundred, or even thousands. But when you buy enough shares to allow you into the gated community that is the annual shareholder's meeting, you've effectively become a saboteur behind enemy lines.

That's power. Shouting from the outside can be ignored, but dead Presidents talk. When stocks are publicly-traded, anyone with enough Green Georges can buy their way into the country club and make life uncomfortable for the Judge Smailses of this world.

Personal branding from the WWII front

My husband, the resident WWII buff, left his copy of Stephen Ambrose's Citizen Soldiers on the couch, and flipping through the photo pages, I found a photo of a USO tour performance with the following caption:

Movie stars made tours to boost morale, but not many got near the front lines. Marlene Dietrich did. Here she sings for front-line infantry in a barn near Bixieres, France; the town was shelled during her performance.

What's striking about the photo is how comfortable Dietrich looks--hands in pockets, slouching slightly backward--in her makeshift limelight. A quick perusal of her biography (via IMDB and Wikipedia) reveals the reason: Her film-work was, speaking broadly, an aberration in a career that began and ended in cabaret singing.

One feature of Hollywood that is no longer familiar is that that "Golden Age" actors and directors were more often than not under long -term contract, meaning that they were paid to do a given number of films in a given time period. Under the "studio system," major film companies had a vested interest in the longevity of their acting "stable." That they were more than a trifle over-sensitive to fluctuations in popularity is not surprising. In fact, Dietrich, along with other notables such as Fred Astaire and Katherine Hepburn, were billed as "box office poison," which had a detrimental--if temporary--effect on their careers. (Ironically, Hepburn had then only won one of her record-setting four "Best Actress" awards, the rest coming when she was in her sixties and seventies.)

It may be too cynical to even imply that Dietrich was simply looking beyond her movie-star shelf-life. It may be that she simply relished interacting with human beings without a camera in the way. But one wonders how many former GIs went out of their way (geographically and financially) to attend a Marlene Dietrich performance in the years after the war. I feel pretty darned safe in betting that it was more than a handful. Indeed, her singing career ended when she was in her seventies, and then only after an onstage fall broke her leg.

When asked why she would risk performing within mere clicks of the Germans, she replied simply, "It was the decent thing to do." And she had extra incentive, having become a naturalized American citizen just a few years before. A life-long bisexual, she would not have fared well under the Third Reich, and her very public criticism of the Nazis was controversial in her native Berlin even after her death in the 1990s.

As much of a history freak as I am, I shouldn't be surprised to see "new" ideas popping up in decades, centuries, or even millenia past. To be sure, Hollywood stars of the silver screen era went out of their way to cultivate or even re-invent their "brands," some successfully negotiating from vaudeville to silent movies to "talkies" to television. No small accomplishment, that, but Dietrich's versatility as a gifted singer and actress and (most especially) brand manager make her stand out nevertheless.

The impossible CEO

Imagine a job with the following conditions:

• You are on call 24/7/365, no excuses.
• You are indirectly responsible for the allocation of billions of dollars, as well as millions of employees, some of whom will, as the cost of doing business, lose their lives working under you.
  
• You will be expected to travel frequently, at times on little-to-no notice.
  
• You will inevitably make (or have made for you) enough enemies that you will require round-the-clock protection from an elite security force.
• In all but your most closed-door moments, you will be expected to be more informed and more competent than anyone around you, and unfailingly polite to even your most vicious critics.
• Attempting to cover up your malfeasance can cost you your job.
  
• Regardless of the kind of job you do, you will be replaced eventually anyway.
  

Here are the benefits:

• You have the use of a private jet.
• Your living accommodations, including cleaning staff, private chef and gardener, are provided.
• You have access to top-of-the-line health care, which is guaranteed for life.
• You are also guaranteed a pension and security services following your retirement.
• Your base salary is approximately $400,000 a year. No stock options, no performance bonuses, and certainly no golden parachute.
  

As my gentle reader has already guessed, the "CEO" described is the President of the United States. But--regardless of what you think of past or present holders of that office--take a comparative look at the responsibility-to-reward ratio. How many heavy-roller CEOs would take on those demands, when the pay would put them in the mere upper 1% of U.S. wage-earners? I think I can safely say you'd be laughed out of darned near every corner office in the land if you walked in with a recruiting offer like that.

If that doesn't put some perspective on the fundamental disconnect between risk and reward within the fiction we call mega-capitalism, I don't know what will.

Frivolous Friday, 08.21.2009, Content as an ecosystem

*** Cheesy metaphor alert ***

You remember middle school Biology, where they talked about the functions of ecosystems: 1.) Producers (plants), 2.) Consumers (animals), and 3.) Decomposers (mushrooms)? It occurs to me that ideas, art and other content form their own ecosystem within a culture, or even across cultures. Web 2.0, in my opinion, highlights this more starkly than the offline world.

The online ecosystem's roles function more or less along these lines:

1.) Producers are the bloggers and micro-bloggers, the folks uploading their photos and videos, adding and expanding Wikipedia entries, and so forth.

2.) Consumers are the search engines, the aggregators, the taggers, the portals, the re-tweeters and cross-posters, etc.

3.) Decomposers are the folks who blindly forward emails and links without checking their provenance, much less validate anything against snopes.com or factcheck.org. They're the ones who don't back up their assertions or "facts" in forum food fights or cite their sources in their own content. They can, at worst, strip all the nuance and/or context from a well-reasoned, well-grounded discussion.

If it sounds like I'm dogging on the Decomposers, I'm really not. Well, sorta-kinda not. Because most of us spend the bulk of our "communication" time in an off-the-cuff mode, relying on our personal credibility to set the value of the content we're creating or passing on. So, even in cases when the content is complete garbage (e.g. regurgitated talking points) or plagiarized, revisionist, or whatever, it trickles into the zeitgeist, where some of it is picked up in the next wave of content that's produced.

As the number of Producers (and content they produce) explodes, it will of course take more work to be a successful "Consumer" of information, particularly if you're looking to make your meals in that niche of the ecosystem.

Decomposing, on the other hand, just sort of happens, as if the concept of entropy from Physics also applies to information and entertainment. In any case, mushrooms are an acquired taste for me, so I'm sort of biased against that role anyway. ;-)

Of code. corks and corpses

Unless it's a trivial project, software is the work of many minds. The quality of even a single programmer's work can vary, depending on their familiarity with the technology before and after adding a feature/enhancement/fix/workaround/etc. or the tightness of the deadline or what-have-you. Now multiply that variability out by many programmers over many years: Some adding features, some fixing things, some even hardy enough to attempt rewriting or refactoring for longer-range objectives (such as improving performance, or making the code less spaghetti-like).

So, although it's a rather grim metaphor, you can understand the value of "knowing where the bodies are buried." Because when you have to spelunk in stuff that hasn't been touched in years, trying to add your bit of duct tape to other people's duct tape, it's all too reminiscent of the scene in Army of Darkness where Ash has to figure out which is the "real" Necronomicon, correctly speak the proper incantation, and schlep the book back to the wise man who can use it to rout the evil dead and send Ash back to the 20th Century. Well, "reminiscent" except for the fact that it's possible to screw up your quest even worse than Ash does his.

But for all the value of knowing where the bodies are buried sometimes it's more effective to have someone who just knows which cemetery to start looking in. This isn't merely the case in software, however: I ran up against it tonight when my husband and I stopped in to see The Wine Guys.

These folks have been rather good to me, so I don't like knocking their service, at least not without that disclaimer. I'd decided to splurge and roll the bones on a white wine called a Vouvray, which can be a real hit-or-miss proposition, because the vintners in that part of France typically harvest in November, which basically means they're playing Russian roulette with frost and the other hazards of a cold, dark, damp month. All the varieties on sale were from 2007, and I don't think I ever looked up which years were better than others. But I figured that the guy at the counter would know, so I asked. "Oh, I don't have time to keep up with all the vintages," he said.

[Blink]

[Blink]

Huh-whaaahh?

Now, I totally understand not being able to keep that kind of minutiae at your proverbial fingertips, not unless you're blessed with an eidetic memory. I don't pretend to know everything about anything: That's what reference books and websites like w3schools.com are for. So I was pretty flabbergasted, actually, that this kind of cheat-sheet wasn't lurking under the counter in a 3-ring binder or something. Heck, there are probably multiple iPhone apps for that. This page was the first result in a Google search on the words "vouvray best vintages." Granted, it was my third click (because other links looked more promising), but the bottom line is that I had the answer in fewer than five minutes. And I'm just a hobbiest who enjoys collecting this nerdy kind of trivia. My reputation as an "expert"--and by extension, my livelihood--is certainly not at stake here. But in real life, I can't begin to imagine telling my boss(es) or clients that I don't keep track of details. At worst, I will say something like, "Off the top of my head, I don't know. Let me do a little digging. You'll know as soon as I do."

Like I said, the folks have been really helpful in several other respects, so that just kind of blew me away. And, yes, I understand that a retailer has to keep wine on the shelves (regardless of the year), but if you call yourselves "The Wine Guyz" and talk about your "expertise" on your home page, I'd have to think that you'd at least have that information handy if it's not already in your brain. Again, you don't have to know where every body is buried; you just have to know in which graveyard to look; the rest is just reading headstones.

When liberal arts education goes awry

Why the MBAs of the 1980s wasted their time pretending to read Sun Tzu's The Art of War as a business book is still lost on me. Baldassare Castiglione's The Courtier would have been a much more practical choice.

I only wish I were exaggerating.

Guild-ing the lily?

Okay, so I'm outing myself as a poser here But it might just be worth the loss of my Secret Nerd-rune Decoder Ring, not to mention being unceremoniously escorted from the Geek's Treehouse. But the Do you wanna date my avatar? video, not to mention any mention of the internet comedy series The Guild only just hit my radar just last night. (Warning(s): The video might be be considered "safe" for work...largely depending on your definition of "safe." And "work." Everybody's clothed--but that's all I will guarantee. And as for getting the refrain out of your head within the next 24 hours: You're on your own, mate.)

Anyhoo, after stifling much snorty giggling at my cubicle this morning, I did some Wikipedia-surfing during lunch, and discovered that this is pure internet play, and an interesting business case besides. The series itself was the brain-child of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" alumnus Felicia Day, and has been alternately bootstrapped, donation-funded and "supported" by Microsoft (and Sprint, via advertisement and product placement).

The "interesting" part, to me, is that The Guild retains its intellectual property rights to the content. What Microsoft is effectively buying, via its "premiere rights," merely amounts to what would be known in journalism as "the scoop." In other words, they're what the comic book ads of my childhood hailed as "the first kid on the block" to have the cool stuff. After a contractually-set time-lapse, the content can be released at however The Guild sees fit.

Wow. I never thought I'd say this during the Ballmer-era Microsoft, but...dude!...that's actually...really...cool. No, I have no intention of rushing out to buy an XBox, Zune, etc. But it definitely raises my opinion of Microsoft as a corporate entity. Why? Because the absolutism is almost completely absent. (I trust that you recall Ballmer referring to open source as a "cancer," yes?) This species of content-licensing is furlong-strides away from the all-too-darned-apt "Borg" ethos. Seriously: Big, big ups to somebody, somewhere in the bowels of the Redmond Leviathon for "getting it."

In the longer term, I quite fervently hope that Ms. Day and company represent the short (as in "non-tall") end of the long tail of an inexorable trend away from lowest-common-denominator blockbusters (written and vetted by committee) and toward lean, smart, high production-value offerings.

Thanks for the @Kick(time) in the shins*

Confession time: I'm a coward. I've been avoiding writing about something that has occupied my thoughts for quite some time, and is business-related to boot. But I mentally tire of the hysteria and I am morally nauseated by the outright lies and bully-pulpit bullying. And I know I'm going to hear an earful--if not two--from at least one person about this. Yet, at some point, being fair and open to other viewpoints amounts to passivity which in turn amounts to capitulation, It's past time that I nailed my flag to the mast.

Normally, you'd expect someone interested in the workings of business to be against anything like a public option in health care. I don't fit that profile. And, in fact, I consider the lack of a public option to be doing a huge disservice to small entrepreneurs and their employees.

Before I go any further, I insist upon making the (rather substantial) distinction between "public option" (which I understand to be an individual health insurance plan purchased through a state or federal government, rather than an individual broker) and a state-run medical system. The fact that this is such a huge semantic gulf, yet people (deliberately or ignorantly) conflate the two is pathetic, really. So let's just get that out of the way and move on, okay?

To me, here's where a public option really hits home:

• How many Americans have been unemployed long enough for the limit on their skimpy stop-gap personal insurance policy to run out? I know I've come close.
  
• How many unemployed Americans had to take those policies (and pay the whole multi-month premium up-front at a time when they're clamping down on expenditures) because the COBRA premiums were insultingly high--what's known in any trade as "FU pricing?" I know I have.
  
• How many still employed Americans are holding on to rather sucky jobs because their spouse's employer doesn't offer health insurance coverage? I certainly wouldn't call my job "sucky," but it's preventing me from dropping my hours to pursue other activities.
• How many boot-strapped start-ups have lost (or missed the opportunity to hire) key talent because the insurance companies didn't want the bother of their chump-change business? I've worked for one, and I know another quite well.
• How many small companies or freelancers are being further squeezed (during a recession, no less) by spiking premiums? I know one whose individual family insurance policy is going up 64% in the next year.
• How much are you and I adding to our tax bill when mega-corporations push their low-wage employees onto public assistance because they won't use their considerable financial leverage to offer a reasonably-priced health plan? I think you know who I'm talking about.
  

The bottom line is that everyone needs health care, and we will pay the costs one way or another. In the cost of higher interest rates when a hospital bill forces consumers into bankruptcy. In the cost of higher crime rates when the mentally ill can't get treatment. In the cost of more sick days for us and our children when colds and the flu take a turn for the worse for lack of anti-biotics and are passed along. In higher medical/insurance costs in general, when skipped or skimped pre-natal care turns into underweight babies, or diabetes turns into amputations, or skipped physicals turn into rampant heart disease, cancer or anything else that's better caught early.

Let's face it: It's cheaper to treat a problem at the front end than it is at the back end. Anyone knows that. The interest on writing an IOU to your health is exorbitant, even by credit card standards.

All I'm asking for is the OPTION--and I cannot, for the life of me, believe how the word "option" is deliberately construed as "mandate"-- to purchase a comparable health insurance plan at somewhere close to what my employer and I, between us, are paying now. That's it. Surely, if you subscribe to "capitalism," you can't argue with the fact that economies of scale reduce prices. Were state or national plans to buy "blocks" of insurance policies and resell them, or to manage their own risk pools comprised of millions of individuals, shouldn't that help to keep a lid on administrative costs? And, of course, if you call yourself a capitalist, you have to agree that competition likewise brings down prices...riiiiiigt?

Obviously, offering that option can be done well, poorly or indifferently. If people could discuss this subject without the out-and-out lies about Stephen Hawking and "death panels," and packing heat and going all Godwin in the process, I'd call the passion productive. That's the infuriating nonsense I was weaseling out of by keeping my hands off the subject. But even some losing battles are worth the fighting. And as much as I dislike risking the bad opinion of people I like and look up to, I much prefer that to giving corporate and political interests that I utterly detest the consent of my silence.

---
*Many, many thanks to @KickTime for the shot of courage.

Back to the future for high-value information?

Awhile back--I remember neither when nor where--I read that musicians (the brand-name ones, anyway) are shifting toward concerts rather than music sales as their bread-and-butter. Naturally, the near-frictionless distribution of digitized music--or, more aptly, the willingness of people to steal bytes where they would not steal plastic nor vinyl--is driving that shift. Personally, I've generally been disappointed in concerts--seeing the person in front of me so stoned that she threw up on herself three songs into Pink Floyd's "Division Bell" tour didn't exactly gild the lily--so I'll be spending my music dollar on recordings for the foreseeable future.

But until just a few minutes back, I didn't recognize the same dynamic (apparently) happening in the software/business development space. With the death of publishing being proclaimed both widely and loudly, this parallel shouldn't be suprising. Particularly given that the "digital" folks are probably more apt than most to believe it.

A few times a year, I'll see an intriguing seminar offering, and the skirmish between ambition and frugality begins anew. It happens often enough that I almost have a "dream team" of presenters, for whom (were they all playing the same venue) I'd travel to the moon, if necessary. But that isn't likely, and in any case, I'd be a rank poser among my fellow attendees, and probably just slink away into a corner during the mixers.

And so we come to the eerie sense of time being circular. Back in the days when I was flailing in BASIC programming on TRS-80s and Apple IIs, the only sources of information that could be considered to have "searchability" and a reasonably intuitive user interface were my fellow students and the instructors. In other words, try asking a book "How do I...?" or "Is it possible to...?" or "What does that mean?" Not very effective, is it?

Of course, with the advent of search engines, user support forums (paid and gratis) and such, it's possible to at least tread water in the ever-rising sea of languages and technologies. Which raises the bar for "high-value" informatin for anyone who needs to step beyond chunking out code. Because now you're talking about the relevance of experience. It's the difference between knowing what the buttons do and knowing when it is and is not a good idea to push them.

That kind of "information" is anything cheap. It comes of years of mistake-making and being handed your head even when you did everything "right." And distilling all the war stories into general principles and rules of thumb takes yet more work and a flair for communication. Moreover, it's not what you'd call "reference" information (as opposed to a programming language book that you grab because it's easier than wading through Google results), so you're not likely to buy a copy to keep within arm's length. (Just try bringing a copy of Toxic Co-workers to thumb through during your next meeting.)

In that context, it makes perfect sense to see the "rock stars" of software business development (apparently) putting more of their effort into live performances over diminishing returns on the more "scalable" forms of disseminating their content.

Understand that I have absolutely no "data" beyond my purely subjective perception to support the "trend" that I think I see afoot here. I only know that I see familiar names popping up at software-related gatherings that aren't sponsored by a particular company or aren't glorified trade shows. But if I'm not completely talking out my ear, it's definitely a "back to the future" experience. Now, the presenters who are more conscious of personal brand will allow their spiels to be put online after the fact, which gives them a sort of Web 1.0 patina. But by relying on such alms, you (who did not see the show live) run the great risk that your special question won't be answered, either directly in the presentation, or by pure coincidence during Q&A.

I'm borrowing this adage from either Robert Townsend or Harvey Mackay (I read their best-sellers pretty much back-to-back, so they blur together sometimes): "When the person with money meets the person with experience, the person with the experience walks away with money, and the person with money walks away with the experience." That sort of sums up seminars in the equally proverbial nutshell. But, unlike the tribal elders from the morning of the PC era, at least these folks have many polite ways of telling you that you're an idiot for wanting to try something--and they might actually be right. That alone might be worth the price of admission.

A productive day spent on the couch

From a programming standpoint, anyway. The wrist of my dominant hand is carpal-tunnel achey, and my lap is warmer than if the cat had parked there for the day. But I think I've written more code in one day than I have in weeks. Of course, it's not a fair comparison, because the code's being done on my terms and my schedule.

I believe I've mentioned how non-programmers would be shocked at the relatively small fraction of time that programmers actually spend writing code. Quite a lot of the time, you (meaning the programmer) are just trying to figure out what, exactly, the final product's supposed to do. And that's even (sometimes especially) when you're working from specifications. But in today's case, I'm the adoptive mother of the code I'm trying to clone (and improve) in a more accommodating language. Thus, I don't have to step outside my own head, much less workstation, to figure out what needs to be done.

But for all that I understand that working from my couch vs. my pod-cube isn't even an apples-to-pineapples comparison, it does drive home the room for improvement in the way programmers and those who ride herd on them can manage interruptions. A few concrete suggestions:

• Meetings should be held in the early or late part of the workday.
• Change requests should be made via a bug-tracking system, not via email, phone, IM, or in-person.
• Senior technical staff (who are still required to go heads-down in design, development, or what-have-you) should establish scheduled blocks of the day when they will be responsible for troubleshooting, promoting code, etc., so as to free up the others--and also to discourage new/inexperienced staff from latching onto a single person.
• Setbacks to development created by poor communication should be noted for personnel reviews, in lieu of focusing solely on buzzword bingo.
• Time-wasters, politicizers, and developers who focus on finding problems to the exclusion of solving them should be fired as humanely and quickly as possible after hire.
• Telephone systems should be enabled with caller ID, even for inter- and intra-office calls, and front-line staff empowered to screen out the above time-wasters.
• Team leads and middle management should create the illusion that all decisions go through them, so as to forestall upper management from calling up their direct reports and demanding features/fixes ahead of schedule.
• And, for pete's sake, if nothing appreciable has been accomplished since the last status meeting, cancelling its calendar appointment with a note to that effect is a heck of a lot more efficient than dragging everyone into the same meeting to tell them that they don't need to be there. How tough is that to understand?!

It's sad, really, the lengths that people in some offices have to go to simply to pitch their work out the door on time. I've even worked in a situation where we had to set up a "buddy system" to call each other's extensions when the local time-waster showed up to revel in the sound of his own voice. Sadder yet, I consider myself rather fortunate in the overall quality of folks I've called co-workers.

And it's also incumbent upon programmers to agitate for less time-wasting. Many perfectly reasonable measures don't cost a thin dime. They just take vigilance and a willingness to buck the corporate feudal system. But in this case, the recession that Those Who Know Best like to blame for all manner of suckitude can be an asset. After all warm & fuzzy pretenses to continuous improvement and scalability and sustainability and yadayadayada have been dropped in the name of keeping the wolf from from the door, it's pretty hard for them to argue against efficiency, particularly the kind that doesn't cost anything. At least, not anything more than the perogatives of pecking-order. Some will argue anyway, but they know that you know that it's complete claptrap. Which is your cue to spruce up your resume. Because you don't need to go down with that ship--much less swim with the rats who will be abandoning it when that happens.

Frivolous Friday, 08.15.2009: Clever Facebook meme

This one actually took some time and work, so I thought I'd cross-post it here to see if it would sprout in the internet-at-large. (The image of an invasive species springs to mind, but oh, well...)

My Life According to Mark Knopfler & The Dire Straits

Using only song names from ONE ARTIST, cleverly answer these questions. Pass it on and include me. You can't use the band I used. Try not to repeat a song title. It's a lot harder than you think! Repost as "My life according to (band name)."

Are you a male or female?
Lady writer

Describe yourself:
Coyote

How do you feel:
Whoop de doo

Describe where you currently live:
Do America

If you could go anywhere, where would you go:
Our Shangri-La

Your favorite form of transportation:
Walk of life

Your best friend is:
So far away

What's the weather like:
In the sky

Favorite time of day:
5:15 am (Not. Stop laughing, you!)

If your life was a TV show, what would it be called:
Money for nothing

What is life to you:
What it is

Your favorite color is:
Silvertown blues

Your fear:
Devil baby

Your relationship:
True love will never fade

What is the best advice you have to give:
Don't crash the ambulance

Thought for the Day:
You don't know you're born

How you would like to die:
Boom, like that

Soul's Present Condition:
The fizzy and the still

My motto:
Love over gold

The trick, I think, is to pick a band that has considerable history, the more esoteric the better. In any case, I thought it was cleverer than most of the navel-gazing memes I've been sent in over a decade on the internet, and so worth the time to fish out a handful of CDs and run with it.

Happy Friday night, all!

Push vs. pull in information

(Okay, it's not Frivolous Friday. But the Crazy Idea Factory in my head is a going concern, seven days a week. So here's another one.)

One of my co-workers, bless him, is good about documenting his work. This includes leaving comments in the source code itself (to describe what it does), as well as summarizing his changes each time he checks his work into the source code repository (a kind of digital vault that keeps copies of your work on file in case you--or someone else--borks it and you need to undo that). That alone entitles a programmer to a certain amount of moral superiority, at least in my highly biased little world.

However, the problem with keeping your fellow coders (who may be tripped up by your changes and/or trip you up with theirs) appraised of your doings is that they have to keep a constant eye on the change-log to know what's going on. Similarly, you must do the same for their work. And, even then, the change-logs only apply to source code; it does not apply to changes made to the database. (And don't get me started on the bane that is file permissions!)

Granted, the office has a homebrew mechanism that kicks out a cookie-cutter email when a change is promoted to certain systems, but it's more than a little kludgey. What would, IMO, be truly useful is the ability to subscribe to a service that pings all the folders/files/repositories/databases/etc. to which you subscribe, and--unobtrusively as possible--notifies you of changes.

What it boils down to is the difference between "pull" and "push." in terms of the way we (the programmers) interact with the information being generated by other programmers' work. In the "pull" paradigm, it is incumbent upon me to completely stop what I'm currently doing to keep abreast of changes. The "push" paradigm would automatically keep me supplied with a summary of those changes as part of the flow of information I already process in day-to-day work. If the interface is designed correctly, it can be done discreetly, perhaps similarly to the "toast" that appears in the lower right corner of your computer screen when you receive an email via the Thunderbird or Outlook programs.

Perhaps something like this already exists and I'm merely ignorant of it. In fact, I would be surprised if something has not already been written, particularly given that open-source software is so often written by multiple programmers working in multiple time zones on their own schedules. And open source programmers have this knack of scratching their own itches rather than waiting for some brand-name company to scratch it for them.

I'd dearly love to scratch this itch myself, because it's persistently annoying--not to mention that I was bitten by this species of "bug" yet again this morning. Alas, there are at least three projects standing between me taking care of it...not to mention the coding that I do for a living. So if anyone's in the market for a crazy idea to run with, consider it out in the public domain.

Fly, little crazy idea! Be free!

What does the glass have to do with it?

Half-empty, half-full: Does it matter unless what's actually in the glass is particularly good...or particularly bad...or, of course, if you're really, really thirsty?

I've taken to leaving my water bottle at home these days, instead using a glass from work. But the glass is, by intent, filled only to the half-way mark on most trips to the tap. This forces me to leave my chair more often. With even mediocre luck, I can make the round-trip between cube-pod and break room without being knocked out of the problem-solving "zone." And so can return to the problem(s) at hand with a slightly boosted heart rate and the means of staying hydrated (also good for staying alert) during the next interval.

Philosophical questions like half-empty vs. half-full are quite fun when you're in school or making cocktail party conversation. But I also appreciate how the workaday world adds dimensions--to quote Hamlet--"never dream't of in your philosophy."

When is it "vaporware"?

"Vaporware," loosely defined, is software that's been announced, but isn't actually on the market. There was a time when Microsoft could pre-announce a product--which, by pure lily-white coincidence, had just successfully been released or announced by a competitor--and put the competitor out of of the market. If not entirely out of business.

Microsoft doesn't get away with that any longer, of course, but that hasn't discouraged other software companies, particularly those in "gold rush" market niches, from trying the same tactic.

The precise distinction between pre-announcement vs. vaporware is up for debate, of course. You could make a case for any of the following points in the software's 1.0 life-cycle:

• When it's still in beta-testing
• When it's still pre-alpha
• During its design phase
• After it's written--preferably in blood and/or stone--into the budget for a future fiscal year
• When it's been more or less promised to a strategically-critical client, and sooner than later
• When the Powers That Be conclude that it could be a profitable venture
• When a competitor looks like they've already thought of it

Now, I'm not much for "slippery slope" arguments myself--not least of which because really and pig-ignorant and pig-illogical Nazi Germany analogies tend to be at the bottom of those arguments. But there is a distinct continuum or spectrum to the the notion of vaporware, as demonstrated above.

I do believe, too, that--regardless of which end of the spectrum it's on--vaporware is an admission of insecurity and me-too-ism. If your idea's been scooped, you're probably better off taking enough time to get it right, keeping your mouth shut, and coming out of nowhere with something that show just how much the original product sucks. Because, by that time, the original "crazy idea" turns out to be not-so-crazy after all. (That whole "second mouse gets the cheese" thing, y'know...)

Only a purist wants to be known as "the Carl Perkins of x," whatever "x" may be. I think I can safely say that the rest of us would be perfectly happy to be hailed as The King, baby.

Gift horses don't come with free hay

Okay, it's probably all my fault for creating a group membership account under one login and a blog under another. All the same, I find it quite annoying that I can't just bop into the group threads while blogging.

Honestly, I don't think that this is an entitlement mentality talking. In online existence, the facets of our interests and pursuits are thrown into a relief that they typically are not in face-to-face interaction. At least not my real-world interaction, anyway. In short, I can't imagine I'm the only one who multi-tasks online, or on popular platforms.

Yes, I know: Gift horses and all that. The thing is, though, that even if you ultimately decide to take the horse back of the barn and shoot it, it still costs you something. The Knackerman's services don't come for free, after all. And in the context of "gift" software, neither does user time or goodwill.

Perhaps "enterprise" payware can act like it's the center of the universe. Mostly because those who sell it know very well that they're not marketing to the front-line grunts, but, rather, their managers and bean-counters. I don't have to like that reality to acknowlege it. "Free" software, though, doesn't have that disconnect. Which is something that the people who want to rent your thoughts to advertisers, content aggregators, and those who make their gelt off taking the pulse of the internet would be better off keeping in mind.

The next wave of product placement?

The 1990s was the heyday of submarine spyware bundling. For instance, you might want to add a little widget to your Netscape or Internet Explorer toolbar that tells you what the weather is when your little slice of Cubeville didn't have access to a window. Unbeknownst to you, when you installed said widget, one or more other programs--almost always spyware--were installed in the process.

Even reputable companies try to bundle software with downloads. For instance, iTunes will install Quicktime, and attempt to have you install Apple's Safari web browser. Similarly, the Yahoo! toolbar attempts to ride Adobe Acrobat Reader's coat-tails during the installation process. Ditto for Sun's Java, if I recall correctly.

The difference is that the reputable companies will make it pretty obvious when they bundle other software (third party or their own), although they are not above making that the default installation option. And the associations are pretty much no-brainers: Companies like Adobe, Sun, Yahoo and Apple are all gunning for the 8000-lb. Redmond gorilla, after all. You know: The enemy of my enemy and all that...

However, yesterday when I clicked the Windows system tray icon to update my version of Java, Sun offered me a free trial of another company's backup software. I'd never heard of either the company or its product, which--from my highly uninformed and thoroughly subjective standpoint--seems to be crossing a line from "strategic alliance" into "paid advertising." It's not at all hyperbole to say that Sun's emaciated corporate body is in the process of being swallowed by the Oracle anaconda. Thus, it could well be that the notion of companies buying ad space in the upgrade forms of other companies' software is merely an evolutionary dead end--McNealy and Schwartz's attempt to add that much more gilding to their parachutes, if you will.

For pete's sake, I hope so.

The "Duh" post

I'm losing my taste for fiction as I age, so seeing a movie isn't something I automatically do on a free Friday or Saturday night. Netflix may be changing that. Rather than arrange plans around showing times or carve out a lazy weekend for a movie "bender" (arranged around the rental "window"), DVDs just come and go via the regular mail.

No news of course--not even to me, who have been (justifiably) accused of living under a rock. But it's a lovely example of disruptive technology; the surprise is how long it's taken to go mainstream. But it's also a prime example of how business benefits by aligning its model with how people actually interact with the product. In retrospect, it should seem "obvious" that anyone in the movie rental business--even back in the days of VHS--should have grokked that a monthly subscription fee (a.k.a. capitalizing on inertia) would more than make up for unreturned movies.

"Obvious" except for our pesky reality, in which (as they say) history is lived forward and understood backward. The town where I grew up (Eau Claire, WI) sported a business that offered unlimited rentals for a flat monthly fee, back in the late 1980s. It turned out to be an elaborate scam, with the company in question decamping in the middle of the night.

The takeaway, however, transcends decade. The closer you can tie your business model to the reality of how people use your product or service, the more you stand to capitalize on that. Not a bad lesson for any industry, and something that should be a "Duh" kind of thing. But, sadly, too often it isn't.

Frivolous Friday, 08.07.2009: Give me the desk, and I shall give you the person

There's actually a semi-serious point to this navel-gazing, so kindly humor me.

Three addresses and fifteen years ago, I picked up a bottle of artist gilding paint at the local Ben Franklin ("local" if you lived in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, anyway). I noticed tonight that it had tipped over on my desk. Being alarmed that its solvents had leaked onto my desk, I removed the lid and inspected the contents. They were--quelle surprise--quite safely and solidly lodged in the bottom. And so that jar just served for basketball practice into the wastebasket, closely followed by the travel-tube of hand lotion whose contents may well have met the same evaporative doom.

Old-fashioned pencils that require sharpening, markers that may or may not have dried, masking tape (important at birthdays and Christmas), a stapler and other sundries reside--as they have for years--in a vase that looks suspiciously like a product of a college Art Dept. But it can't be tossed, because it's a 2nd-place trophy from a speech competition. That the "victory" it represents (in a largely snowed-out tournament) didn't mean much isn't at issue. Why? Because its slightly larger 1st place "sibling" (which *does* mean something, darnitalready) holds disintegrating roses once sent by my husband (and, of course, simply can't be thrown out until they're powder). One cut-glass fob from a chandelier--a token of my mother's faith that I would some day be successful enough to own a house grand enough for a whole chandelier--weighs down random scribbles which possibly hold intelligibility and/or value. The pen-holder assembled from various "gum nuts found in the Australian bush" holds calligraphy pens...and a particularly stubborn pistachio.

Small items--paper clips, binder rings, extra staples, push-pins, brittle rubber bands--and odder things--a tarnished ankle-bracelet, Canadian/British/Irish coins, mis-matched earrings--are distributed between containers as various as an old cold-cream jar, a pretentiously overpriced Neimann-Marcus potpourri jar, and a bit of "Chinese"-looking pottery that probably appealed by my husband's Grandmother because she married a Norwegian farmer, and thus didn't have a choice about taking the white-and-blue ethos to heart. The painted English teacup saucer that belonged to my father's mother holds the oddest assortment of sundries. I need to find a safer home for the origami frog from Geometry class and the origami tulip my husband made before he outgrew that hobby.

There's a dainty sterling pendant--another gift from my mother--in sore need of polishing, which keeps company with a glass trinket-necklace brought home by her father from his "Grand Tour" of France as a WWI "Doughboy." (Mind you, if the house catches fire, it's Grandpa's pendant--i.e. my talisman against whining--that will be saved if it's in my power to do so; Mom already abides with me, probably in more ways than either of us appreciates.)

The afore-mentioned "semi-serious point" of this, though, is to take a good hard look at the "clutter" of your desk. Not the one at work, the one in your "cave." Unless you're a complete neat-nik, it's the Archeology of You. The marginally-useful, and (most especially) the non-functional items are probably the most illustrative of where you came from...and maybe even who you've come to be. Because it's not premeditated, it's a good exercise in introspection, rather than narcissism. Trust me on this: It's worth your time.

The "flattening" of information (belated*)

The neighbor to the east is again (cough) "sharing" the classic rock from his radio with us tonight. It's the genre that gets me through most of my workdays, b/c I've listened to it so often that it's tantamount to "white noise." Some of it we own on CD; other stuff never made the leap from cassette. So I'm thinking that one benefit of owning music via download is that you'll probably be spared the experience of finding revenants of your music library in a decades-old box and being mortally embarrassed by your younger self's taste.

But for the most part, data--meaning digital music, video, as well as other kind of information--has become "shallower" than before. Lowell Thomas, Walter Cronkite, Barbara Walters, et. al., no longer need to be present with a posse of camera and sound technicians for something to be newsworthy. Photos and video captured by a cellphone can be around the globe in, quite literally, a matter of seconds. YouTube fads garner audience sizes that any ambitious content provider would sell a child for. Yet the breadth of content distribution has a flip-side, namely the 24/7/365 news and entertainment cycles. Increased competition for our attention spans means that the stories rise and fall in prominence more like a juggler's pins than the bulbs in a Galileo thermometer. In other words, wide distribution + short impact = shallow information.

This is hardly "news" to anyone who's been paying attention for the last decade or so. The impacts on marketing are, IMO, among the most symptomatic. At the knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing end of the gene pool, high bandwidth is used to scrape information about you off the web and blast it back in the form of spam or telemarketing. At the more developed end, companies attempt--with varying degrees of smarminess and success--to conscript their customers into "communities."

Yet it's a huge mistake to confuse the distribution of information with the creation of information--or, more to the point, to confuse their costs. For all the "race to the bottom" mentality driven by cellphones and portable media devices and wireless internet hotspots, collecting data, contextualizing it via cross-checking and verification, and formatting it into something digestible, well, that takes human-hours. "Boots on the ground," as they say in the military. I don't want to think of how many sales my day-job firm loses immediately after the would-be client understands that merely tipping their messed up data into our platform is not going to sort it out. I very much doubt that my firm's an anomoly among hosted software. Because the reality is that data points by themselves are useless. It's like that episode of The X-Files where the little boy filled sheet after sheet of paper with random sequences of ones and zeros--random, that is, until Mulder climbed the staircase to view the sheets tiled on the floor below and the ones and zeroes coalesced into a drawing of the boy's vanished sister.

This has at least two ramifications. The first has been covered by others, namely the prediction that information consumers will increasingly rely on others to filter and prioritize it for them. The second, however, is that the next revolution in information technology will be a "race to the bottom" for the collecting of data and/or its near-instantaneous transformation into usable information, even by those who don't know the first thing about relational databases or pivot tables or what-have-you. Personally, I have no interest in being a tastemaker. But I've had to sort out enough screwed-up data (my own and other people's) that the second possibility is far more exciting.

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* Apologies for the delay due to last night's internet connection speeds that ranged from nil to, shall we say, "vintage" at best

If you give a gnome a cookie...

The original plan was to spend the annual vacation budget to replace the much-abused carpeting and kitchen flooring. But since my husband suggested an extended weekend in Canada's Maritime Provinces (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island), the idea won't let me alone. I inched a little further down the primrose path of temptation yesterday when I dorked around on Travelocity to price-shop equivalent jaunts to NYC and Halifax.

I haven't closed Firefox since, and now I'm being stalked by the Travelocity garden gnome. It's not coincidence, either: The ads are pitching fares between La Crosse and Halifax. Clearly, the travelocity.com servers are accessing browser cookies that would have been automatically flushed if I'd closed Firefox in the interrim.

For all that I know exactly what's going on here, I will confess that it's still kind of creepy being stalked across various websites (Yahoo, GMail). Pity that tonight's already spoken for; otherwise I'd plan to watch Amelie in the spirit of "hair of the dog." I can only wonder what would-be Travelocity users less familiar with the inner workings of their browers feel like...

Oi, Travelocity: Probably not the brightest marketing tactic, that. Just sayin'.

Learning and meta-learning

To my way of thinking, one of the first casualties of our politically polarized culture is the ability to learn from those we don't particularly like. Liking someone and respecting someone's talents don't necessarily go hand-in-hand. One of the things that appeals to me about working in technology is that it's easier to spot someone who's attempting to get by on buzzwords and glad-handing. It's not that those folks are necessarily unnecessary: In fact, they can be extremely useful as "buffer states" between the people who actually add value and the martinets/gatekeepers/empire-builders/sychophants/flunkies/loose-cannons and other organzational parasites. As long as they're functioning in that capacity, no self-respecting, self-aware geek should object to their place on the team--all other things being equal, of course.

I've been fortunate to work among more people that I've liked than I've disliked, and the number I've actively despised would probably fill two hands' worth of fingers, if that. But if you're stuck working for or with someone you have come to thoroughly despise, you can work on takin away something that might come in handy after you've figured out how to extricate yourself from that situation. Otherwise, it's just wasted time. And who, really, has time to waste? Learning how to work through the resentment/frustration/anger/outrage enough to learn that "something" is the meta-lesson. That which you actually take away from the experience is the lesson itself. Even when the lesson involves very detailed instruction in how not to be that person, it's still a lesson. That means you (ultimately) win. It may be the only victory, and it may be a tad on the Pyhrric side, but it still parks in the "W" column.

(In case it matters, I'm talking from past, rather than present experience just now. In other words, this isn't venting in disguise.)

Technology "generation gaps" can run both ways

For the second year running, the La Crosse area's Relay for Life was held at Logan High School, on the practice field. I can't speak for the mens' room of course, but the ladies' room in the concession building is in amazing shape, considering some of the vintage features that give away it age. In particular is the large semi-circular "fountain" sink, whose water is turned on and off by means of a likewise semi-circular foot-rail.

I had just turned up my jacket sleeves to wash my hands when I noticed a lady of roughly high-school age waving her hands in the air next to the fountain holes. For a second, I wondered why she wasn't washing her hands instead. Then the light-bulb went on: "You step on the bar below," I said, and pressed it down with my foot. Her laugh was embarrassed, so I tried to be reassuring: "If I hadn't gone to a high school that was built in the Fifties, I probably wouldn't know that either."

At such times, it's rewarding to be a bridge. But given the boundless creativity my nieces and nephews show in informing me how old and unfashionable I am, I won't say that I didn't enjoy that for other reasons.

Book report

My geography skills are so appalling that it's almost laughable. Which is ironic, being married to a truck driver's kid (who inherited a better-than-average sense of direction and an almost preternatural sense of knowing when he's been some place before). So when my best friend gave me Brian Sommers' The Geography of Wine as a gift, I started reading it while covetously eying her copy of The Billionaire's Vinegar, which (being historical) is more my style.

If we--meaning my husband and I--have enough of the appropriate real estate to grow some of our own wine grapes, the first part of the book will definitely merit a second reading--one admittedly more intensive than the first. But they otherwise didn't make as great an impression on me as they should have.

The really meaty parts of the book--meaning the reasons why it (IMO) merits banging on about--revolve around the economic dimension of the wine industry.We'd like to believe that consumers and producers act in rational ways, yet the history of winemaking solidly demonstrates the fallacy of this assumption. Moreover, the economic "dimension" is itself incredibly multi-faceted. Colonial imperialism, communism, war, nationalism, disease, fashion, and mere accidents of geography have left deep marks on why so many assumptions are bottled with that liquid.

It's those niches of economic history that I think make the book valuable, even if you personally consider wine complicated, ovenuesver-romanticized, and possibly even snooty. Because fads, counterfeiting, trademark squabbles, incomprehensible regulatory fiat (think Prohibition), globalization, marketing gimmicks, commoditization, distribution channels, etc. affect far more industries than the one that peddles fermented grape juice. For that reason alone, its 272 pages are an edifying read, and I can recommend them to folks who aren't even half so nerdy about the stuff as I am.

Something I wonder about every year

Why do non-profits seem to have a pecking order? Moreover, what determines it from year to year? I'm prompted to to speculate on that during the opening ceremonies of the American Cancer Society's "Relay for Life" that wound down this morning. What brings out the mayors of both La Crosse and Onalaska to give their spiels? More importantly, from a practical standpoint, what prompts local businesses (who probably field dozens, if not hundreds of such requests each year) to donate cash, goods or services to one cause and not another?

The non-profits (that I've encountered, anyway) seem to be driven by a small nucleus, with the difference in tactical success seeming to hinge on how well it can assimilate a sudden influx of support labor (and, perhaps, the mixed blessing of political attention). But on the larger, strategic level, I'm still as mystified by the dynamics of the "popularity contest" as I was back on the recess playground.

Please understand that I'm not knocking the ACS. To say that the faces of cancer are legion is not purple-inked hyperbole. In personal terms, I've lost grandparents, uncles and an aunt--on both sides of the family. It made my husband an orphan at the age 32. Effectively battling an enemy so prevalent and so hydra-headed can only be done from a national level. Ditto other multi-faceted problem-solvers such as the Red Cross.

Normally, though, the Who's Who list of top-grossing non-profits strikes me as inefficient at best. Why can't the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts and Girls Inc. and the Boys and Girls Clubs merge and capitalize on economies of scale? Why the purdah of separating the YMCA and the YWCA in this age of unisex rest-rooms? And why do social aid organizations have to come in different religious flavors? I'm not being facetious, either. Well, not too much, anyway.

Ultimately, however, all the world's misery is local, and requires local brains and creativity and face-to-face interaction to ameliorate. And I would hate to think that local efforts hinge so much on which charities host the best mixers in Georgetown, or which have the most ex-congresscritters (or their spouses) on payroll.