Archive for February, 2007
February 10th, 2007
I attended FASTforward ‘07, this week. There were some very interesting talks:
- John Battelle author of Searchblog: Search is a conversion. Search becomes a way to have a dialog with your customers. Interaction with your website should mirror a conversation. Batelle offered the New York Times site as an example of one that did not seem to value their customer’s contribution to the site.
- Jeannette Borzo of the Economist Intelligence Unit reported on a study on Web 2.0 . She delivered the most surprising news: CFO aren’t Web2.0 friendly. But CEO believe Web 2.0 will increase innovation as well as decrease innovation cost. It will be interesting to see the CEO and CFO’s views evolve.
- John Markus Lervik, Fast CEO, Search is connecting people with content. Results from a search might answers, concepts, people, or facts.
- Tim O’Reilly: Power of Web 2.0 is collective intelligence. The Internet is a platform. How do we turn data into knowledge?
- Zia Zarman, SVP at FAST: Search is about making connections and business decisions. It is about finding answers not results. An answer can be fellow expert or a better understanding of the problem you are trying to search for.
The conference expanded my thinking about about search technology and it’s impact on business. At the end of the day, there is still a huge difference between Internet search and enterprise search. On the Internet, authors spend a lot of time, money, and energy making their pages easily found. In the enterprise, authors spend little or no effort to make them found. Cleaning up data quality issues is still 2/3 the effort involved in making enterprise information searchable:
- Many documents are missing title, authors and other metatags.
- Often dates are the same on an entire set of documents.
- Because documents don’t cross-link as often, page rank and relevance algorithms give way to keyword counts that are not as useful. More effort is required to indicate valuable or useful reference material in the enterprise.
February 9th, 2007
Another excerpt from William Feather’s “The Business of Life“
From page 262, an entry entitled “A Conservative Club.”
More than forty-five years ago a group of men…organized a club for men of common intellectual interest. It was agreed that the membership would be limited to thirty, and that twelve meetings would be held each year in the fall and winter months. In rotation, each member would read a paper. Sole expense would be the price of a modest dinner and a fine of twenty-five cents [1949 dollars] for an absence, the revenue of the latter to pay the expense of sending notices of meetings.
Dinner, the founders decreed, should be served promptly at six, and the paper should be read at seven, or as soon thereafter as the business of the club could be disposed of. Adjournments should be at eight-thirty, discussion of the paper ending at the tick of the clock.
The survival of the club is testimony to the wisdom of the founders. The financial resources of the club are never more than twenty-five dollars, but the obligations are nothing, so that members are never pestered with financial worries.
Meetings are held in a private room of a downtown club. The membership comprises college professors in different departments of learning, lawyers, editors, and businessmen.
The attendance is rarely less than 75 percent of the membership. Withdrawals from membership seldom occur except from death or departure from the city.
Of particular interest is the amount of solid ground that can be covered in two and half hours when a meeting begins promptly and the discussion is held to the subjects of the paper.
Of even more interest is the simplicity of the organization. Most interesting groups are wrecked by ambitious go-getters who seek big memberships and expensive quarters and employ professional secretaries. Others are wrecked by the failure to set limits to the time, so that there are long monologues that become tiresome.
This sounds a little like Ben Franklin’s Junto (excerpt from his autobiography)
I should have mentioned before, that, in the autumn of the preceding year, [1727] I had form’d most of my ingenious acquaintance into a club of mutual improvement, which we called the Junto; we met on Friday evenings. The rules that I drew up required that every member, in his turn, should produce one or more queries on any point of Morals, Politics, or Natural Philosophy, to be discuss’d by the company; and once in three months produce and read an essay of his own writing, on any subject he pleased.
Our debates were to be under the direction of a president, and to be conducted in the sincere spirit of inquiry after truth, without fondness for dispute or desire of victory; and to prevent warmth, all expressions of positiveness in opinions, or direct contradiction, were after some time made contraband, and prohibited under small pecuniary penalties.
I have been in some meetings like this in the last few years. Some of our smaller SDForum Marketing meetings, notably “Internal Marketing–Fostering Technology Adoption” and “Building Strategy and Driving Consensus through Shared Mapping“, had a very free form discussion. But not often enough.
I welcome any suggestions for any serious “mutual improvement groups” that follow a formula similar to the one outlined above.
February 8th, 2007
Join other bootstrapping startup CEO’s, CTO’s, and founders for breakfast and discussion. We meet at different restaurants in Silicon Valley from 7:30-9AM, your only cost is your meal and a tip. Come compare notes on operational, development, and business issues with peers. If you are serious about your business and are open to discussing substantive issues and helping your peers, please use our Contact Form to indicate your interest.
February 7th, 2007
Greg Knauss was a guest blogger on kottke last year and ended his two week stint with this observation:
There are two kinds of bloggers, referential and experiential.
[…]
The referential blogger uses the link as his fundamental unit of currency, building posts around ideas and experiences spawned elsewhere: Look at this. Referential bloggers are reporters, delivering pointers to and snippets of information, insight or entertainment happening out there, on the Intraweb. They can, and do, add their own information, insight and entertainment to the links they
unearth — extrapolations, juxtapositions, even lengthy and personal anecdotes — but the outward direction of their focus remains their distinguishing feature.
The experiential blogger is inwardly directed, drawing entries from personal experience and opinion: How about this. They are storytellers (and/or bores), drawing whatever they have to offer from their own perspective. They can, and do, add links to supporting or explanatory information, even unique and undercited external sources. But their
motivation, their impetus, comes from a desire to supply narrative, not reference it.
I think we tend to blend these two styles. We do a fair amount of “reporting” on events that we attend, particularly when we think we heard something useful worth sharing and the event was lightly covered, if at all, by other bloggers or press. To the extent that we are trying to offer advice, we try and back up our prescriptions with reference to both supporting and contrasting perspectives in the blogosphere or in other reference material.
As you think about your own blog for your startup I think it becomes more compelling to the extent that you talk about real experiences with customers, prospects, internal issues, the decisions you’ve reached and while you’ve reached them, the decisions you’ve revisited and why you’ve revisited them, etc..
February 2nd, 2007
More quotes from William Feather’s “The Business of Life“
In “Perseverance Rewarded” William Feather offers some good advice for getting started. Many folks succeed because they don’t realize how hard it is to accomplish what they have set out to do (of course several orders of magnitude more fail).
Too many of us wait to do the perfect thing, with the result that we do nothing. […] No one gets anywhere until he gets rid of the idea that his first effort is going to startle the world.
The way to get ahead is to start now. If you start now, you will know a lot next year that you don’t know now and that you wouldn’t know next year if you had waited. While a lot of us are waiting until conditions are just right before we go ahead, others are stumbling along, fortunately ignorant of the dangers that beset them. By the time that we, in our superior wisdom, decide to make a start, we discover that the fools, in their blundering way, have travelled quite a distance.
Every man who makes unusual progress seems to have been something of a fool, by which I mean that he undertook things no solidly sensible fellow would attempt. I hear startling confessions from men who quit good jobs with sure pay to tackle insecure jobs with uncertain pay. Men go into business ventures with little but hope to sustain and feed them, and twenty years later you hear they have been ordered by their doctor to take a trip around the world.
None of these men would dare to live their lives over again. Success hung on too thin a thread. In retrospect, they know the dangerous passes through which they traveled, but in the excitement of the chase they were spared all doubts. They simply plunged forward, protected by their very ignorance and assurance.
[…]
The men who, ten or twenty years from now, will be the envy of the rest of us are this minute beating their way through the brambles of the world’s indifference. They are not doing much, but they are doing something, making a little progress each day. Out of the experience they are gaining they will someday do the perfect or near perfect thing, and thus command the world’s admiration.
February 1st, 2007
The Annual Stanford Entrepreneurship Conference featured Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios, as its keynote speaker. Ed gave a great presentation on lessons learned from structurally organizing a company for effective communication across its departments.
In the beginning, Ed believed they had created a very strong culture at Pixar. They had paired up programmers and animators as peers. Other companies had one group clearly dominant: either a technical culture or an animation culture. He believed that the artists, the technical people, and the production managers were all interacting well. He felt that it was a fun, energetic, and social work environment. Pixar’s open door policy of “necessary honesty” meant anyone could talk to anyone at anytime.
In actuality, this was far from the truth. After Toy Story’s great success, Ed called for a company post mortem. He discovered that there were major disconnects among different staff members. The artists and the technical people felt like the production managers got in the way and slowed down production. The production managers felt like they were treated as second class citizens.
Ed asked himself how he had missed these problems and came to the conclusion that Pixar’s success had masked them. Ed found out that the production managers put up with the situation because overall they loved working on a ground breaking project with a great leader. Ultimately if the project was not so productive and rewarding, he would have lost some valuable employees along the way. Ed key insight was that
Often, companies tend to focus on “what’s working” vs. trying to figure out “why is this not working?”
This is why the post mortem is so important. Pixar has incorporated the post mortem process at the end of every project. The challenge is getting each person to be completely honest and share intimate details about their experience. The post mortem is a grueling process that everyone hates. For the most part everyone is tired, burned out, and has no patience to reflect on everything that has gone wrong. The things that went well are usually obvious so they spend a majority of the time trying to figure out what needs improvement
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