Your data is your memory - we need to make it searchable

I confess, I’m a digital hoarder. I have back-up drives, copies of hard disks, I keep hard disks from old laptops and desktops, I have old SD cards from cameras, old USB sticks and even old floppy disks. I don’t want to let go: I feel that all those documents and files are a part of me somehow.

My memory is no longer solely in my brain, or written down on paper – it is almost entirely digital.

Add to this that I am now buying digital products through Amazon, iTunes, Sony and more, I realise that the scope and size of my digital identity is only going to grow. (Please see a prior post on what a digital identity is here.)

My underlying idea here is simple: humans mostly think in terms of relationships between data points, we don’t think in terms of structured database tables.  We remember things in terms of relationships, and often uncovering one memory triggers another whole set of associations that can lead you to the answer you want.

As an example, many people I know like to use archived emails to track down information because they remember a date or a person they associate with a piece of information (yes, I keep email archives going back 10 years just to do this.)

Use in the workplace

Let’s take a workplace example that I could use in my consulting practice.

I get a call from a client asking me to reissue several reports as well as tracking down the original source documents for assumptions.

I have a lot of clients, and despite best intentions, some files remain on emails, some in saved documents on my computer, some on the cloud, and some in notebooks.

What I’d love to do is to let the system know the name of a person, a year and month and the name of a project.

The system would then track down any documents with those parameters, then give me a search outcome. I could then choose a couple which were most relevant, then the system could go and complete the search.

What I would love to see is:

•    A list of folders with relevant files.
• The documents in those files.
• All email threads associated with the  project – starting with direct communication with that person, but also then expanding out to other people associated with the project.
• Any calendar entries associated with that project. It would be even better if I could click on a calendar event and then have documents created before and immediately after that calendar event show up in a list.
• Contact details for any person involved with that project.
• Could I even see when I was making calls or receiving calls from people involved with that project.

 Alright, this might be a bit much, but you get the idea.

Use on a personal level

You are at a dinner party with a friend and they are about to travel overseas to a country or city you have gone to before and they are asking for recommendations on where to stay, things to see, places to go, and places to eat.

Okay, this might seem a trite example, but wouldn’t it be cool to do a search based on August 2010 (when you went on that trip) and check your photos, check your itinerary on Google Maps (or equivalent), check your credit card or bank records for the name of the restaurant or other place, etc.

As a second example, let’s say you were really moved by a painting you saw when you visited an art gallery years ago. This isn’t as stupid an example as you might think. Let’s say you are in your 60’s,  you have terminal cancer and you want to relive some of the really positive experiences of your life (this example is near and dear to me at the moment as I just lost my mother to aggressive cancer at with little warning. I would have loved to have been able to help her remember some of her fondest experiences at the end.)

You would like to see the painting again, and want to find out the name of the painting and where it is now. Wouldn’t it be nice to see what shows were on display at the art gallery at the time, but wait… you only remember that it was in 2007 and you were on holiday in a certain city. What if you could easily track down where you visited in that city, then the few galleries in that area, then see what was on display, find the painting in question and then find out where it is today.

A third personal example would be trying to track down a song you really liked in 2005. Right now you can search for music released in 2005, you can search for the top 100 hits every week in 2005, but what we can’t do is search for a song we used to play all the time in Spring 2005, which may well be a song from the 1970’s.

I don’t know about you, but as my digital music collection grows, I am finding it harder and harder to make sense of my music collection. An album I liked 10 years ago may not be one I want to listen to now. On the other hand I may be nostalgic for music I liked 10 years ago.

We tend to remember music from times in our lives and relationships. It could have been a friend who introduced you to some classic jazz from the 1930’s, it could have been a particularly great Summer vacation, it could have been a song that helped you get through a painful breakup.

As a fourth personal example, this concept could be of use in budgeting, and other aspects of our lives.

These days we make most of our purchases using electronic banking. Accounting software already allows for transactions to be directly loaded from bank statements and credit card statements. On a personal level, some people may want to keep track of the same. This could also be taken to the next level.

What if by clicking on a transaction at a supermarket you could also get the itemised docket. You could check what you were buying, the price of it, how much of it you bought and even its nutritional value and calories.

This might sound over the top, but look at it another way, if you have ever met anyone trying to keep a food diary to lose weight, or to kick substance abuse (whether it’s alcohol, caffeine or sugar), you will know how hard it is. Not only do we all hate manually entering data, but one of the strongest characteristics of human beings is our ability to bullshit ourselves about what we are actually doing. You can’t improve without measurement.

Having this kind of data available for yourself or your doctor, or your accountant could be quite valuable.

We are reaching a threshold

Our lives are becoming more and more complicated and we are relying more and more on our digital memory, and I think it will become harder and harder for us to have that digital memory erased every time we delete a hard drive, or change over a phone or phone provider. That data should be ours, not that only that of the company that provided the service.

It’s only going to become more complicated: in the very near future we have the internet of things arriving where we will connect our household, workplaces and cars to the internet. Also we are entering the world of 3D printing for physical objects ranging from items we use daily, through building construction to now research is proving up printing replacement organs for our bodies, and even printing food (the US army is looking at this.)

Just as I write this blog, news has broken that Delaware has just passed laws allowing families to inherit digital assets. This is a great example of what is coming. Now family members are legally entitled to access all digital assets, including Facebook, Twitter, and I presume iTunes and Amazon, despite what the terms and conditions for those web sites are.

Yes, there are practical limits to this today in terms of cost, but given projected changes in the cost and capacity of digital storage and processor speeds over the next 5 to 10 years, this may all be closer than we think.

It’s also not like this is a totally new concept

Google has tried to expand its search capabilities from websites by including books, movies and music. They previously sold their search capabilities for internal use at companies where a rack mounted unit could classify all files in the company servers and make them searchable.

There are also a lot of efforts to make images searchable too (e.g. using a meta search like, Rembrandt, lady, small child, tree in background, or as another example, ocean view, Gold Coast, 1950’s).

Some of this technology is already coming of age through intelligence analysis, forensic accounting and legal discovery processes where the automation of all this can occur because the time, effort and costs of this are considered worth the benefits.

For example, when doing an analysis of procurement fraud in a company it is possible to mine (where legal) facebook, Google+ and Linkedin contacts for an individual and see their relationships with suppliers. This can then be used to automatically sieve through the terabytes of data retained by a company to find the key documents to be used. Many instances of fraud aren’t terribly well disguised, and if someone is getting a clear benefit from a supplier in the form of kickbacks there is a pretty good chance that they will become friends online, if not in person.

The intelligence community is already using these methodologies to try and monitor for terrorism, organised crime and other forms of crime. Think of the NSA revelations that Snowden exposed. This is where the whole metadata question comes in: they want to keep record of what numbers you received calls from, and who you called, at what time, and the same for emails. They don’t necessarily keep the content of those calls or emails, but they can see the relationships. They have another layer where the system monitors phone calls and emails for keywords, and then starts mapping relationships between people when trigger events occur.

Lawyers on complex lawsuits are starting to trial the use of intelligent searching during the discovery phase of the lawsuit. What this means in practice is that you get given several terabytes of scanned documents and PDF’s that have been turned into images so the text isn’t searchable. Instead of paying a large team of junior people to spend months combing the files and creating a searchable database, the emphasis is now on making the files searchable through the use of optical character recognition, then running rules based searches to look for keywords, frequency of keywords, authors of documents, dates of documents, recipients of documents, etc. That is, the system maps the documents and you just perform a Google type search on the documents to pull up the relevant ones, and see relationships with other documents.

These systems exist, and they are expensive to run as they require an expert to use, and as you’d expect the real cost comes with finding the data, then formatting and reformatting the data into a form you can use (called ‘data munging’ or ‘data wrangling’), then linking the data correctly into the search program.

What I am talking about is bringing this to a personal level or a corporate level where you have greater control of providing permissions to your own private data sets.

I want the future now

There has to be a way to start stitching all this together as we go forward as part of our digital identity.

• We need standards on what data we own.
• We need to be able to retain our own data, and have strict permissions and access based on the who is trying to access it, and setting in stone privacy laws and rules. This gets weirdly complicated where your data and digital assets may be distributed among servers around the world.
• We need documents, files and digital data to have standards on tagging/metadata so that we don’t have to automate classification.
• Even keeping track of things like when I played a piece of music, or watched a movie, or read a book may be something we can keep track of. There will be a growing need for standards on this.

I wish I could live in the future, and I hope someone out there is working to make this happen. (I’d love to hear any examples of work in progress and ideas on other ways this could work.)

What risk will you take today?

I had this phrase put to me recently, and I have to say I like it. I have been spreading this as a meme, and I thought I’d share a few ideas with you all on ways of taking on risks.

1)      Ring a supplier and ask for a better deal.

You are probably paying too much for electricity, internet, phone plans, cloud software services, etc. Try ringing up and seeing what they can do for you.

I did this yesterday with my internet provider and they ended up apologising for slow data speeds lately and recalibrated their connection overnight – meaning that I don’t need to upgrade plans.

2)      Contact a customer you were always afraid of contacting.

We all have a major customer that we are afraid of making a mistake with, so we never call them.

This is also known as ‘No one asks out the pretty girl’. I used this analogy with a smart job-seeker a few years ago, and instead of using it to find work, he took it on himself to ask out only the prettiest women, to great success. He even had one lady sobbing as she said he was the first person to ask her out in four years – but she told him no anyway. Over the course of six months he kept me up to date with exactly how accurate the saying is (which I really didn’t need to know as I was still married at the time.)

I see this kind of thinking all the time. Smart people who want to work for a multinational but are afraid of rejection so apply to smaller companies instead and keep the multinational as a dream.

We all do it, and in business we often do it in our marketing efforts, ignoring alliances, and in winning new business. Go out and contact someone when you are afraid of rejection.

3)      Ask someone for suggestions

Whether we are talking about employees, co-workers, customers, suppliers, your wife or husband, or even your kids: find a way to ask them what you could be doing better, or what they would like more of in your relationship. We leave too many things left unsaid.

4)      Ask for a referral

Cold calling is hard and mostly doesn’t work. So how about asking somebody you know for a referral to a new customer. Conversely, think about someone you could introduce to one of your contacts.

5)      Take a day off

We all work too many hours, all too often sitting at our desks. Take some time off. It could be a simple as a walk around the block, eating lunch in a scenic park, or just going to work late after a nice sleep in.

Or you could completely take a day off. Spend some time with your family, go see a movie, drive to the beach, play golf, go shopping… whatever… take some time out.

By doing this you are directly challenging your own stress and anxiety level by proving that the world won’t come to an end by taking a day off.

Also, by relaxing, we can reduce our fixation on some areas of our business and are better placed to see things as a whole.

6)      Have a difficult conversation

Speaking from painful personal experience, I know that stress comes from your personal life as much as it does from co-workers, managers, employees, suppliers and customers.

We are all taught to be professional no matter what the circumstance, but this doesn’t change the fact that some relationships are just bad.

If you notice a growing distance in any relationships, an increase in snarkiness in responses, growing cynicism, delays in response to communication, or any unresolved tension, then you probably have miscommunication.

We can all avoid conflict at times, but often the solution is far less stressful than you think.

Go talk to someone, and go with an open mind and drop the defensiveness. Be prepared to talk about feelings.

Also, sometimes it is better to have no relationship than a permanently shitty relationship.

7)      Put yourself out of business

This isn’t a new idea. Drucker has been raving on about this for years.

Look at new ways to do things that reduce the time and effort to perform your business.

Look at disruptive technologies.

Look at competitors – figure out what is actually succeeding for them and ‘be inspired.’

Go look at a few competitor’s websites today.

Read some industry literature.

Ask contacts in other industries how they deal with the same problem.

8)      Do something at random

Many business owners are control freaks of one variety or another. It is good to learn to let go.

Start simply by changing preferences and routines.

• For example, try a new brand of deodorant or breakfast cereal every time you buy some.
• Try a new store to buy clothes, or a new place to get your haircut.
• Drive to a different shopping centre this week.
• Drink tea instead of coffee, or vice versa.
• Try different restaurants, cafes or takeaways to your normal fare.
• To practice this even further try going somewhere on the weekend by choosing which way to go at an intersection by flipping a coin.

This was taken to its peak by Dice Man who advocated making decisions by rolling a dice.

This is all about letting go of things you don’t need to control, busting out of a rut, and reducing fixation on your business.

9)      Take out a line of credit

We need money to grow. Most small businesses use personal loans and credit cards to fund their working capital.

Once you have been in business for a while, you will find the banks amenable to providing working capital loans.

Is it time to have a few conversations with bankers about options.

10)   Hire a new employee

The old saying is that the best time to hire a new employee is when it hurts the most.

To grow you need more people.

Look at hiring some help today. Even if it is just for a day or a week, having an extra set of hands about might really help.

Deliberately plan a risk or two every day. They don’t have to be big, just risks that you normally don’t take.

New projects are always appealing, but should we do them?

CEO’s love them. Board’s love them. Banker’s love them. We all love new projects.

They hold the promise of being the long term solution to your company’s problems. A more productive workforce, less union problems, a new culture, a lower production cost, new equipment – you name it, we all see this as a good thing. However, after 15 years of doing valuations on new projects I am beginning to wonder if new projects are always good.

I now wonder if many new projects aren’t really just wishful thinking. Let me explain.

It is always but always hard to sort out existing operations. There is no easy solution. You have to spend more capital on an existing assets – which the Board is reluctant to do. Then you have to sort our culture issues, take on unions, fire people, take a financial hit as you pay out accrued entitlements such as leave, restructure, etc.

Even if you do all that, the turnaround time can be years, and your whole company can become demoralised for the period in the middle. Basically it sucks. It is hard work, and the reward is delayed.

Instead we focus on something new because we imagine it is starting with a blank slate and that none of the existing problems will occur. Trust me, those exact same problems will occur.

My thinking on this has been sparked by my own divorce. You reach a point in a relationship where things are just not working – just like a problematic asset. You are stuck in your ways, and you can’t see any way to fix up your existing relationship – just like existing operations. So you both find someone new.

Counsellors say that you need to understand your own issues and biases before forming a new relationship to avoid making the same mistakes. How many companies can say that they work through their own organisational issues before they embark on a new project?  Aren’t they just repeating the same mistakes on a new project by avoiding fixing up how the rest of the company works?

What this has really highlighted for me is that the job of turning things round and fixing up what you already have is really difficult and that most of us will do anything to avoid it.  As someone who consults specifically in the area of new major projects for major companies, I see this bias all the time. It’s subtle, pervasive and most people aren’t even aware that they are acting this way.  It’s taken me 15 years of working at the coal face of new projects to even find a way to describe it.

The challenge for all of us is to find ways to unlock the value in what we already have and bring out the best in people and operations as well as profit. That’s not to say that we don’t need new investments, but that they may not always be the best answer.

Auto-nagging and other ideas for the future of Google Glass

Since Google glasses came out I have been thinking a lot about the future of computing and apps. I think we are not far off turning science fiction technology into everyday reality.

The topic that got me started was thinking about friends with vision problems or impairments. Red Green colour blindness runs in my family and I was thinking – wouldn’t it be great if the glasses could identify a red light and flash “STOP” in your vision.

Of course I am not talking about Google Glasses as they are now, but a future device which is a powerful computer as well.

So – how about the following list of ideas.

Colour matcher for the colour blind (already an app for smartphones). Never buy a purple shirt again when you thought it was brown.

Facial recognition for the blind – hear their name. “Jessica has entered the room.” or “David is looking at you.”, or “a stranger is staring at you”.

Facial recognition for networking – see somebody and you can be reminded who they are, pull up notes from recent conversations, etc.

When travelling, see a translation of what you are hearing in a foreign language in English in your glasses.

See subtitles on a foreign language movie through fast translation.

Read a foreign language newspaper in English.

Pick out a face in a crowd – good for not only police looking for a suspect, but also at any time you are waiting for, or looking for someone – and can use the higher sensitivity of your camera than your eyes.

Lip reading – great for the deaf, but could also assist with translation too (yes, and of course spying too).

Look at an object in the shop and pull up comparative models from other brands, and pricing. “this model is available for $10 cheap within 500m of here”

Do I have any eggs left? Automatically see an image of what was in your fridge the last time you opened it.

Is my garage door shut? I can’t be the only person out there who leaves home in a hurry and then can’t remember if I shut the garage door. How about your glasses take an image and reminds you. Or it could be linked to a camera of the garage door.

Looking for directions. You are walking down the street and you see an arrow pointing you in the right direction. Or even better, it highlights your destination.

Visual groupon – walk down the street and see the deals of the day flashing in front of the shopfront.

Find your cat or dog. Not only put a little GPS tracker on your furry companion, but when the little bugger gets lost, you get visual directions to their location. You can see a flashing beacon or suchlike when you look in the direction that they are in.

Keep an eye on your kids or pets from another room.

Create a food diary that is 100% honest. Everytime you start chewing sensors pick up the vibrations and take a photo of what you eat. Never say “I forgot about the Mars bar” again.

Auto-nagging – my favourite idea and a few years off. Everytime you look at high calorie food it asks “Do you really need this today? Your calorie intake for the day is already too high. Think about your health.”

Keep track of your household budget – just look at your shopping docket (receipt) and the optical character recognition will add things up. Link it to your expenses and banking apps and you will get an alert in real time.

Recognising food for the blind – to a blind person cans and packages all tend to feel the same. How about optical character recognition reads out what food it is. This could be based on bar codes to start. They could use it while shopping to try new things, as well as to recognise food when they are home. Foodmakers could have their cooking/preparation instructions linked to a QRcode or something on the label.

Recipe suggester – don’t know what to cook tonight? Don’t want to go down the shops? How about you just have a look in the fridge and cupboard and a series of recipes come up based on what you already have. You could choose cuisine types “Indian please’, or how long it takes to cook, or recipes by famous chefs.

Reporting accidents – upload images and video to the government, police, emergency services, insurance provider, etc. It tags information with location, time stamp, and even licence plates of other vehicles.

Clothes shopping – See some clothes you like, then put them on your avatar to see how you’d look in them.

Buying new glasses or sunglasses – again, try them on your avatar and see how they fit your face. The makers would put the exact dimensions online so you’d see exactly how they fit.

For the nature lovers – how about recognition of birds, spiders, bugs, moths, etc. Not only can you find out which species it is, but you can record the date, time and location which will help all the ‘twitchers’ out there and gather data for science.

Virtual reality cenotaphs – when you visit places that you associate with the deceased, see photos or videos of them there with you.

Visible invisible friends – for the kids in all of us. Have an invisible friend that interacts in real time with objects and people around you.

Night vision – need I say more. This would be awesome, and breakthroughs are starting to be made.

Black and white vision – this may not be an obvious one, but for visual artist seeing the value of a colour painting is important. Abstract artists could more easily create figure-ground effects. You could also do paintings with imposed colour blindness – which might seem stupid, but some artists seem fresh or unique because they see colours differently.

Guided tour around the Louvre – access the Louvre App when you are there and it will pull up details about the objects you are looking at. If you are short on time, it will provide guided tours by theme that lead you around the gallery.

Virtual cosplay (costume play)– lighten up your day. Get your Google Glasses equivalent to turn all your co-workers into cartoon characters. Your boss annoying you? Well turn him into the pointy-hair boss from Dilbert. Turn your team leader into a superhero or villain. Put Angeline Jolie’s face over the top of less attractive co-worker to make your life just that little bit visually pleasing. All done with facial recognition technology.

Coping with dementia – facial recognition of loved ones, a return home when lost navigation tool, set a geographic boundary that will trigger an alarm if they cross it and notify you where they are.

Tinder on steroids – imagine eHarmony or RSVP, or tinder for those more active types, using facial recognition. Highlight the faces in a crowd who might be compatible. Eliminate them by double blinking. Nothing new here. Fifteen years ago the Japanese had pagers with proximity sensors and fetishes loaded so people who met each other in public would know there was somebody else up for the same mischief nearby. This is just the updated version.

Trouble getting it up? – how about you overlay an attractive person’s face on your partner. Put your favourite movie actor or actresses face in place of theirs and performance is guaranteed. This could be the new way to spice up your sex life – take roleplaying to the next level.

Visual instructions – want to change the sparkplug on your mower. A visual overlay will guide you. Don’t know where the fuse box is in your car – let a visual overlay show you.

There are so many more ideas out there I know. This is just a selection of ideas that have come to me, and I am sure the rest of you have millions more.

I can’t wait for the future to happen.

Are universities taxpayer funded monopolies?

We live in the age of education democratisation. With the advent of online education providers, people can study the degree and the skills they like without having to go to campus.

We all love the idea. My issue is with how universities are funded and whether they have an unconscionable advantage over private sector training organisations – particularly here in Australia.

Australian tertiary institutions are largely funded by the Australian Government based on the number of students they have enrolled. They also receive grants from the State governments to set up new schools (which usually gets spent on new buildings, rather than academic and support staff, but that’s an issue for another time).

So, basically we have institutions where the physical buildings, the salaries and all other costs are funded by the taxpayer.

Let me give an example. Here in Queensland the State Government set up a training provider panel a couple of years ago to provide training to public employees.  The State Government has a budget attached to each employee of $5000 per year. The training panel criteria was that training could be provided at approximately $250 per person per day, and that all training would count as credit towards a university degree.

Even though the most effective forms of training for the public sector are likely to be vocational courses (i.e. applied skills) this move has provided two outcomes.

1)      The private sector can’t compete because universities are indirectly and/or directly subsidising courses through taxpayer funds, and

2)      Universities have expanded their role into vocational education, taking away a chunk of the market for private sector providers.

Yes, the State Government has saved costs, but it has also locked in a monopoly arrangement for universities – which in the current phase of democratisation of education seems quite short-sighted.

On top of this, we are seeing those same taxpayer funded resources used to set up online training.

In case you think I am blowing steam about a non-issue, let’s look at how government owned power generation companies are treated.

Government owned power generation companies have access to a lower cost of capital than their private sector competitors due to an implicit government backing. They also have access to large amounts of legacy assets which provide both the cash flows and the people to work on new power projects.

In recognition of the unfair advantage that government owned power generators have, they are now forced to use private sector equivalent pricing for their services and on new projects. They are legislated in black and white on these matters, and in some instances face a competitive neutrality fee to help enforce this.

Ports, rail and other government owned businesses face similar regulations.

To quote the Queensland Treasury - “Competitive neutrality means that government businesses should not enjoy any net competitive advantage over their competitors simply as a result of their public sector ownership.”

While we don’t call them government owned, given the funding model for them, aren’t universities really the same thing.

Could it be time to do something about this? Time to inject some competition I think.

Are you so smart you’re dumb?

High intelligence is not always an indicator of good ability in business. 

I have had the honour of working with many seriously smart people, those with an IQ of 140 - 160 or more, and it is breathtaking to see how some genuinely work at a few levels above the rest of us. When it works well these people make CEO or found successful companies in short order. However, it often goes wrong and I know too many otherwise smart people who are unemployable or in jobs they resent.

While the following apply to all of us, here are a few of my observations for the smarter set (and Engineers with borderline Aspergers too):

1.  In the end it’s all about people. Relationships are important. The ability to persuade others as to the course of action to take is vital. Understanding company politics is important. Many intelligent analytical types see an obvious answer and then get frustrated when others don’t listen. You need to learn to take others on the journey. You need to learn people skills. If you work in engineering, finance or investment banking then I am speaking to you in particular.
2. Learn to stop justifying your decisions, and make the right decision. Too often smart people use their knowledge and verbosity to justify and defend their decisions. I come across this all the time. They put up a bulletproof case for the actions they have taken. This is simply using your intellect to paper over your deficiencies. Learn to take your medicine, and shut up sometimes. 
3. Understand that best practice needs to apply to the average employee, not the smartest. Procedures and processes to run a company should be based on the needs of the average employee. That which may take you a few hours using the latest statistical data science techniques could take days for the average person, if they can do it at all (not that they would be expected to in most cases). Make sure you understand the expectations on the performance of the average employee. 
4. A company can’t run on its smartest people alone. By employing a few smart people a startup company can do a lot in a short period of time. However, for a larger, more mature company smarter people are actually a risk because it is harder to replace them. What a smarter person brings to a company (in theory) is higher productivity and greater understanding of more areas of the business. Any role for that person is by definition tailored to their ability. However, people with a high IQ also tend to get dissatisfied or bored easily and move on to other roles or companies. In other words higher staff turnover and instability often go hand in hand with high IQ employees. 
5. Being rational is not always rational. This is vital to understand. Society and culture run by sets of rules that are not rational. These rules are based on our non-rational side – otherwise known as human nature. The Ten Commandments are rational when you take human nature into account, but are not rational to someone who uses Boolean logic. I often find high IQ people making the equivalent to what I call the drug addict’s excuse  – “I’m just borrowing it, I’ll return it later.”  Remember the old saying that we judge ourselves by our intent and we judge others by their actions. If you rationalise everything you do rather than considering how it appears to others then you are going to piss off a lot of people and be deemed untrustworthy. Learn to do the right thing, not the rational thing. 
6. Learn to accept dumb decisions. Management get paid to call the shots. They may not get them right all the time, but they are accountable for their actions. Once a decision is made, it is made. I see far too many smart people unable to let go of the option they put up which in their mind was better than the option taken. At worst this turns into poisonous rancour and a real “I told you so” attitude at the slightest thing that goes wrong – I also see it as a root cause of depression in some of my smartest friends. Please learn to accept defeat with grace and then back the current course of action, and improve it where you can. You will earn more respect that way than by complaining about how stupid people are. 

Build the company of now rather than the company of the future

I keep seeing criticism of companies for thinking short term and failing to act long term. There is a whole industry of consultants, analysts and authors berating us all for failing to think long term and the evils of short-termism.

If they are simply talking about the lack of planning and failure to take advantage of opportunities for company growth, then I have some sympathy, but if all the focus of your energies on is the future then you won’t eat today.

For example, here is a fictionalised example of a conversation between a friend who is the owner of an innovative web based business and his Board.

Board Member 1: “So, how are the plans going for expansion?”

Board Member 2: “Yes, we know how important it is to grow as soon as possible.”

CEO: “I’m not even looking at it for at least two weeks.”

Board Member 1: (now apoplectic) “What do you mean by that? How can we not be looking at the expansion plans?”

Board Member 2: (also apoplectic) “This is ridiculous. We’ve spent a lot of time developing these plans for you. You have to execute them.”

CEO (who is also the Chair): “Have you quite finished. Yes… thank you. The simple reason is that right now we don’t have the money to pay salaries next week. Our clients are paying late. Our single largest client is using the service but has decided not to pay because they don’t think the full feature set is there. We also got served with a Breach of IP notice by a competitor even though we have been in existence for 3 years longer than them and were using the IP in question before they even started. The tax office has asked for a formal audit starting tomorrow because we paid our tax bill one day late….. Now I’m working 90 hour weeks, I am taking care of all this shit, all the risk capital so far has been mine, despite the fact that you guys were brought onto the Board and given shares because of your ability to raise funds…… Got it? ….. So, when I say I won’t be looking at it for 2 weeks it isn’t a sign of weakness or my incompetence, it is a sign that there aren’t enough hours in the day. It is also a sign that we might not even have a fucking company in a few weeks if I don’t focus on today’s problems…… Now, do you have anything constructive to say at all? …No, I thought not.”

The reality of business is that you have limited resources in terms of time, people and money. By definition most of your decisions are short term and based in the present moment. Many advisors come from the privileged position of never having to make decisions with those serious constraints.

The key is to take advantage of the opportunities that come your way. You need to monetise opportunities. Over time you will see the market change and you will see the product/service needs change. The very best companies may see the big picture trends in advance and plan for it.

The world is now highly competitive and globalised. The good old days of planning long term as it existed in the 50’s and 60’s have been absolutely shattered by the reality of modern business. Or as I put it in another opinion piece – think long term, act short term.

The future is competitive, full of short term opportunities and transactions. It is also going to be a lot of fun. 

The psychology of bundling - Why I’m happy to pay for Cable TV, but I hate renting movies

I am feeling traumatised right now. Recently, in order to save on costs when I moved home, I let my all in one telephone, data and cable TV package lapse.  In my new house I went with a Naked DSL plan meaning that I have data only.

This means I use Skype for my phone calls, Apple TV for movie rentals, and when I am bored I go adventuring on YouTube. Hey, it fills the time – and there is an amazing array of content from talented people on YouTube if you go looking.

What is really getting to me is having to pay for movie rentals.

Don’t get me wrong, the rational part of me recognises that renting movies and buying TV series is actually cheaper than my old cable TV package, but somehow it feels painful. Every time I press the button to pay I wince – I can’t explain why, but it just feels awful. I am rethinking my purchase decision every time I buy something. This has me thinking about bundling services again, and what works, and what doesn’t.

I like Google Apps – pay $5 per user per month, and you have great functionality for a small business.

I like Vimeo - $199 a year for unlimited corporate video services.

I think whoever came up with ESRI’s payment system for using online GIS services needs a stern talking to for being an idiot. I do not want to buy a bunch of credits for a long list of services I don’t understand and spend them in ways I don’t understand. If ESRI were to give a packaged price (e.g. $50 per user per month, plus a bit more for really data intensive work) then I’d go for it. In the world of Big Data they are trying to serve, their pricing model is guaranteed to drive people away.

There’s a lesson in all this for our businesses. Customers like to know how much they are going to pay. Bundle your services and give fixed price packages, no more than two or three packages, and let your customer choose.

If Apple TV allowed me to pay $50 a month for a certain number of movies or TV shows, I’d feel fine.

Think of your bundling in terms of ease of use and certainty of pricing, rather than pricing up each individual service and offering completely flexible usage. The bundled package will fit their opportunity cost for accessing your service. You may be offering a cheaper product with completely flexible services, but you are forcing your clients to confront the buy decision each time they use your product, and that’s a major psychological barrier.

Support structure for entrepreneurs

Surrounding yourself with the right people is vital for anyone starting up a company. I can hear you all saying that this is patently obvious, tell us something new.

What I’d like to share are some generalised observations on exactly whom the right people based on my experience and what I see and hear from others.

Family

Let’s start with family. The best we can hope for from our partners is that they understand we need emotional support and encouragement to keep going.

I learned early on with my former and current partners that if I actually shared my day to day pressures that they just about imploded from the stress of it all. It’s bad enough that one of you goes into meltdown, but if the person supporting you also melts down then you have no support.

What has worked well for me is to share the dilemmas I am facing and ask for a common sense view on the situation. E.g. what should I do in this situation with a supplier, investor or employee.

If your partner can’t stand the idea of not having regular income and hates that you are taking risks that put their future plans, or plans of your children in peril, then to be brutally honest there is a fairly high chance that you are going to lose your marriage. You have a stark choice between your own ambitions and keeping the stability your partner craves. Good luck.

Friends

Friends are at the same time best and the worst supporters you can have.

When you first start out a lot of friends will be giving you unasked for advice on things.

You might get told that the finished product you are already selling after a large and expensive production run is crap and that it needs to be redone.

You might be told that you’ll never make it – the market is terrible, there’s no money in it, you have no ability to manage, etc.

Please forgive your friends. What they are really talking about are their own fears. They are projecting all the reasons they’d never start a business on to you. Just pat them on the back and tell them that it’ll be all right, and avoid talking about your business with them.

You might also get some friends who admire what you are doing and offer you moral support. Best of all, some of your friends will act like nothing has changed and catch up as per normal.

What many of us find is that your closest friends change over time, and those who can’t get over the negativity end up moving out of your inner circle.

Seasoned veterans

When it comes to obtaining mentorship/advisors to help guide the business then the well trodden path of contacting respected senior managers or retired executives with the experience and connections to help.

I have seen this both work well and go horribly wrong.

The nub of the issue is that you are bringing on board a bunch of grey hairs who have been managing others rather than doing the work themselves for years if not decades.

In other words, they are likely out of touch with the current market and how things have changed (and trading conditions, marketing, etc. always change). As generalist advisors they are great, but on specific matters they may not be the godsend you thought they were. They may in fact be giving you advice that worked in the mid-90s but is completely ineffective now.

The worst mistake I have seen is to put these seasoned businesspeople on the Board, in which case they can ending up becoming armchair generals of the most pernicious variety. Sure give them some shares, but keep them in a separate advisory panel for your own sake.

Professionals

Accountants, lawyers and professional business advisors are an interesting breed. There are good and bad in here.

The plus side is that they have seen the inside of a lot of businesses and can help you navigate the pitfalls of your particular industry and increase your chance of lasting a few years.

The limitation of any professionals as advisors is that they do not have any startup/entrepreneurial DNA.

The worst will tell you to have a BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) or to buy low, sell high and stick to your strategy. This is just like saying you should eat a good breakfast and exercise three to five times a week – absolutely correct and of no actual use.

For example, let’s say you are down to your last few dollars, you have 3 big customers who are delaying payment by a couple of weeks, your payroll is due in 2 days and your staff have indicated they will resign en masse if you miss another payroll. In this case the above professional advice is absolutely useless.

Your focus is on the day to day matters, hopefully all working to a bigger strategy. You’d love to work on the business and not in the business – but that is a luxury, not a day to day reality for most.

In fact, if you ever meet a CEO who tells you that their company is running smoothly and that they have plenty of time to work on strategic matters you know they are heading for trouble.

Fellow Entrepreneurs

I think that I have learned more from my relationships with other entrepreneurs than all the others, including my university studies.

I finally crossed the line into starting up a business by being mentored by entrepreneurs. What I learned was how to see the world in terms of the opportunities available, how much effort would be involved and what the margins might be to make it work. Not even the best MBA in the world can give you what spending hours talking to experienced entrepreneurs can give.

Seasoned entrepreneurs can teach you how to think, and can point you in the right direction on what you need to do.

However, as an entrepreneur myself I  know my own time is limited and that I can’t share everything with those who want it. Nowadays I often find myself in the position of meeting a bright, passionate and amazing younger entrepreneur, but I can’t give them too much time as they have so much to learn that I’d have no time left  to run my own business if I did. They are going to have to learn a lot of things the hard way, just like the rest of us do. This is especially true of those who won’t listen to advice but keep coming back to ask how to make their business model work.

The best situation is to find a group of fellow entrepreneurs who are at about the same point in company development as you. You are dealing with roughly the same issues at the same time and by pooling your experiences you will learn an enormous amount.

The Perils of Overdesigning your Product

It is starting to become painfully obvious that car and appliance manufacturers are going to have to relearn the hard way some of the lessons from the world of design from the 20^th century.

For example, between the 1930’s and 1960’s there were a number of attempts to design the perfect kitchen.  The premise was simple – a specific place for everything you had. There was a place to put the cereal box, the sugar jar, the flour jar, the pots, the pans, the kettle, the bread and so on.

I know what you are thinking “But that’s what I have in my kitchen now isn’t it?”  Not quite. You see, what the designers did was to find out the dimensions of the average item in each category and design a specific storage space just to fit that item.

What this meant was that for a year or two the kitchen was paradise and everything fitted where it belonged. However, things change. New appliances are invented and introduced to the kitchen. Packaging for products change. The type of products change. Old appliances need to be replaced and the replacement doesn’t fit in the space of the old one.

Do you get it yet? They designed the kitchen to match a static point of time – no allowance was given for change and after a few years people found their perfect kitchen was annoying and restrictive. Which is why your current kitchen has cupboards, big drawers for pots and pans, smaller drawers for cutlery and big benchtop space. Basically they provide storage spaces which you can put whatever you like in to suit yourself as needed.

Another example of overdesign would be the massive corner TV cabinets that many people bought at the end of the cathode ray tube era and still haven’t replaced. They take up too much room in the house and now you can get a flat screen TV that is too big for the TV cabinet for only a couple of hundred dollars. I see educational institutions and corporates making the same mistake again by building casing for wall mounted screens for sizes that are no longer even available 18 months later.

Which brings us back to car and appliance manufacturers.

Let’s start with appliances and my favourite example which seems to resurrect itself every couple of years – smart fridges. I am incredibly wary about having a touchscreen computer in my fridge.  What’s it going to run on - Android? How do I update it. How do I buy Apps for it? How do I get it fixed if it doesn’t work anymore. How do I update the software? Does the fridge work fully without it? (as in do I still have manual controls?) 

The simple answer for me is that if you really want a touchscreen for your fridge, can somebody please invent a fridge mount for my iPad or other tablet computer – that way I never worry about obsolescence.

Likewise cars. Somewhere in the last few decade the IT guys have been let loose in car design. The traditional designers who understand the driver and their family needs very well gave a nice looking spot on the dashboard for the screen, and somehow all adult supervision ended at that point. BMW and a couple of the other early adopters were infamous for how bad their systems were. The in-car systems were so flexible and had so many options you almost needed a computer degree to turn on your air conditioning.

I actually met a member of the BMW interface IT team – he moved to Australia and became a pipeline welding inspector working in remote areas in his early 30’s. Perhaps it was to escape any potential awkward conversations with irate BMW drivers.

One of the key design features for a car is that the driver should be able to find a knob or switch on the dashboard by touch and from the feel of it know what function it has. For the core car controls this should always remain the case. Having to look at, navigate and select functions on screen is a fundamental safety hazard as the driver takes their eyes off the screen. Even having a screen next to the speedometer with controls on the steering wheel doesn’t improve things very much.

Then we get to in-car GPS systems. Put it this way, a new standalone GPS system with Bluetooth voice for your phone is only about $100 to $200. That is a fraction of the cost of the manufacturer’s system and allows you to put in the latest and greatest every couple of years. If I own a car for 5 to 10 years, the last thing I want is a really old computer system in my car that I have to interact with.

In our corporate lives we also experience the overdesign and overcustomisation phenomenon with ERP other major pieces of software.

My key advice would be to produce a product that allows the customer to decide how and where to use it in their lives. You take care of usability and functionality and leave the rest to them. 

Less is more

You’ve heard the saying all your life, but the truth of it comes home to you in the oddest of times. For me, that was when I started online dating after divorce and it was a brutal and unforgiving lesson that less truly is more. There is nothing more personal than marketing yourself!

To put it simply, the more detail provided in a lady’s profile, the more likely I was to reject the person. What was happening?

What I found was that as I read through the detail I was actually going through what in any other context would be called the buying process. You look at a person’s likes, dislikes, favourite TV shows, etc. and see if you match up. The more specific they were, the more likely I was to rule them out.

Let me give you a couple of example profile– totally made up, based on the many I saw of course – so you can see what I mean.

Female 35, never married, no children. Non-smoker, social drinker.

I am looking for the love of my life. I look forward to spending our evenings and weekends together, going hiking, skiing and to add a bit of spice to a relationship for the occasional burlesque show.

I enjoy travel, and have been to 32 countries so far. My favourite places to visit are Bangkok and Paris. I could spend several weeks each year taking in the lifestyle in the Loire Valley or at Lake Como.

I speak four foreign languages (French, Italian, Spanish and Swahili) as well as playing the guitar and the piano.

I like going to art galleries when it is raining, and will always be found in the sun when it isn’t raining. Do you like extreme sports? I do.

I like catching up with friends, and having pets as a part of my life is a must. You have to like cats to be part of my life.

I go to the gym several times a week, and am considered an awesome aunt by my 15 nephews and nieces.

I look forward to meeting you soon.

See what I mean with this one. The ‘hypothetical’ lady in question is putting up information that relates to her lifestyle as a single, things she did when she was younger that she might no longer do, and several contradictory messages. She may be even putting up things she has tried once or likes the idea of but which aren’t part of her life. I am sure the male equivalents were doing the same.

While it is pretty easy to screen this person out, however, they may in fact be quite different to their profile and highly compatible with you.

Try this one instead.

Female 35, never married, no children. Non-smoker, social drinker.

I’m looking for a companion for life. Someone to be there when I come home from a hard day at work. Someone to care for me and someone for me to care for no matter what comes.

I am interested in starting a family if I can and am looking for the same in a partner. I would be pleased to hear from you if you have children.

I look forward to hearing from you

This could be the same person, but without all the verbiage. What this gets right is the core values and wishes, and recognises that the detail is something you will work out when you meet the person. Compatibility isn’t reduced to a list of attributes.

Simply put, when there is less of a description, you imagine the rest, and are a bit intrigued to know more.

The same applies to business and marketing.

I am fascinated by the websites of top cloud services such as Dropbox and Asana. They have a simple splash page, very little description, and a few FAQ, plus pricing. Basically they want you to try it, so give you enough detail to think that their product might be good for your purposes, but not so much that you don’t try it out.

Your customers are also looking at you in the same way. They will look for certain categories of service or products, but then if you provide too much detail they will go to an alternate vendor.

What you want your client to do is to get in touch and initiate the sales and negotiation process. You might well be able to fulfill their needs, but if your website or promo literature has specific lists and you don’t mention what they want they are more likely to dismiss your company.

When the customer gets in touch you can have more technical details or information available to suit their questions. But, don’t give that all upfront. Make it implicit in the fact that your company offers services or products in that category.

A good example I know from a highly experienced architecture and construction company is that they never put concept drawings or any form of visualisation into the tender package for any bid they enter. The reason is simple, the client may hate the building concept, and then reject a perfectly good bid.

Another trick is to bundling services and only providing a few choices for your customers. Web developers do this. They bundle graphic design and web hosting as a compulsory component, then base the pricing on the level of graphic design and feature sets. By limiting choices you make things simple and may elicit a buy response in the face of confusing offerings from competitors.

For service companies, I’d recommend online profiles of your people be limited to a description of one paragraph at most, and consider eliminating profiles altogether as it makes you look like a small company. That plus customers may read your profile and decide they don’t like you.

Make your marketing about the product or service and what it means for the client. You are not important except that you will need to deliver and may need to prove your ability and bona fides later in the buying process.

The three key outcomes you achieve with the less is more approach are:

• You retain the flexibility to offer solutions that match their needs by not being prescriptive.
• You don’t ‘talk back the sale’ through excessive detail, and you keep choices simple.
• It can funnel customers into engaging with you in the sales process rather than making up their minds without getting in touch.

Destined to learn things the hard way

The longer I am in business and working with many different companies, the more I am convinced that most of us are destined to learn things the hard way – from our own mistakes and those of others.

Text books are full of the wisdom and knowledge of those who have learned the hard way, but it seems that despite all our studies those lessons aren’t fully taken on board. It is one thing to say how something works in principle, but it is much harder to apply that to your day to day working life.

Likewise, by instituting best practice systems and processes you are assuming that all the knowledge of what works and what doesn’t is in the system. However, if your people don’t understand this, then their motivation becomes gaming the system to get the outcomes they see as best, rather than using the system to achieve the best outcomes for the company.

Have a look around and you too will recognise learning by doing is one of the fundamental paths to becoming good at what you do. That’s all good and well I can hear you say, but how can we take this approach and put it into practice.

The fundamental step is to recognise that when we start our careers we see parts of the job, but not the whole, and we definitely don’t understand how it all comes together. I know one international construction firm that explicitly recognises this.

This firm puts its new staff in at the deep end. They use these new staff to provide all the disciplines required for a job, but they put them on a small job worth a few million dollars as opposed to the hundreds of millions to billions for a major role. By being given responsibility, accountability and support/mentoring these junior staff rapidly learn how to, and how not to do things. They mature faster and understand how everything fits together faster.

By giving such trust to your people you are also encouraging them to be high performers. You also have the added benefit of creating a team who can progress together through the organisation.

The key lesson from this is that to help your people develop mastery of their profession provide a safe way for them to learn – a sandpit to play in if you like.

This lesson is lost when there is a lot of work on. This is particularly evident in Australia right now where a variant of learning by doing is in place – survival of the fittest.

Given the large amount of resource industry projects happening in Australia at the moment and the shortage in skilled and professional workers, there is a tendency to grab anyone who looks competent and throw them straight in the deep end by putting them in charge of a job. All too often these well-meaning people are performing to the best of their ability, but they have limited skills in management, budgeting, project controls, legals, commercials and all the other skills they need. Such skillsets are acquired through learning and practice and are often far outside the experiences of most people. Universities are manifestly failing to produce graduates with such skillsets.

In such situations you get bad commercial outcomes, poor project delivery, cost and time blowouts, and a failure to recognise your own commercial rights and claim them. The human capital damage is pretty high too. I have seen good people have breakdowns at being given responsibility. The higher the budget they are responsible for, the worse their anxiety and performance becomes. Even worse, those who tend to fearlessly thrive in such an environment are sociopathic by inclination which may not work out well for your company as such characters tend to ruthlessly overwork their own team and destroy relations with contractors and the client.

Survival of the fittest can work to a degree, but it ignores the fact that if you train people up over time, then you can have a lot more competent people available in the workforce than if you just throw people into major jobs in a situation that is beyond their capability.

If you really can’t afford to take the time to train your own people up, then I recommend that if you have critical role then hire for people who have a proven record in that area. Enthusiasm, qualifications and a can do attitude are manifestly inadequate.

Further steps would also include the following.

Mini-startups - Be brave, consider setting up a mini-startup in your company. Give the vision, budget and resources to a group to try something new, or to deliver a project. They will learn more from that process than all the procedure manuals in the world.

Strong leadership is vital - Make sure your team pulls together instead of going off in their own directions. High performing teams tend to be full of strong minded individuals. You need strong leadership in place to keep them going in the same direction and keep them from taking an axe to each other.

Provide optimism and hope - There is not a project or product development in the world that doesn’t hit rough patches. You may know from experience that you can get through it, however, less experienced staff may look at the amount of work to be done before a deadline and simply give up, or go off on a tangent. Destructive mentalities and gossip can start. Even worse, the blame game can commence. You should provide that overarching calming effect rather than engaging in a “Lord of the Flies” type experiment.

Vocational training is important - University education is good, however, vocational training is every bit as important. Competencies in job roles, software usage or other areas important for productivity and job mastery need to be learned through vocational training. Universities don’t teach this stuff, and you shouldn’t rely on people teaching themselves these skills.  As part of your training and development plan I would highly recommend the inclusion of vocational training providers.

Recognising that our working lives involve constantly acquiring new skills in order to be productive and implementing training and initiatives to allow learning by doing is an important first step for your company’s growth.

Start planning for the futility of planning

Planning is essential for the survival of companies. It helps set the course for the company and provides a template for how to retain customers and hopefully grow the business. Unfortunately, a lot of planning is around resource allocation and communication, which is fine in itself, but doesn’t take into account the most important issues in long term survival, which are mostly beyond the control of the company.

The things we don’t talk about are exemplified by the following.

Technical obsolescence - a new technology or process is available that undercuts your company’s products.

Change in competitor landscape - unforseen competition from larger competitors – domestic or international.

For example, during times of economic downturn many large consulting and professional services firms start taking on the jobs that small firms would normally do at the cost of keeping their staff employed. This effectively kills many small firms.

Alternatively, a well established player from another market (e.g. China, India, Brazil, etc.) can come in to your market and upset things.

Slump in demand – e.g. demand is weak due to the state of the economy, or customers saving rather than spending due to a fear of losing their jobs in a recession.

Political risk - Regulatory interference is another killer. Projects take longer to be approved. More administration is required for compliance leading to higher costs. Your industry sector could be specifically targeted by government. Legal rulings can have a similar effect.

Unknown unknowns - totally unforeseen and non-predictable events can also kill a company. For example, with the recent revelations that the US NSA is effectively spying on a lot of global internet traffic, many non-US users of US cloud based services are rethinking their patronage of such services. In this case a sudden drop in customer numbers could kill a good company almost overnight.

Mixed in with all the above is a decent amount of research which tends to show that the survival of a company over a 10 year period is a random outcome so long as the company has passed through the formative years of startup.

To put that in its starkest form, it is the factors beyond your control that will make or break your company in most circumstances. All the systems and the process you have in place are about delivering what products and services you already have profitably. Research shows that better systems and processes are really about fiddling the edges. You may achieve slightly better results than your competitors but it isn’t a major factor in the longevity of your company.

So, having said all that, what can we do? How do we plan for things we can’t plan for.

Establishing resilience is the recent terminology being used. Obviously it consists of simple things like having enough savings to push on through a downturn and having a broad enough customer base to lose some and keep going.

Less obviously, resilience also means evolution – adapting to a change in environment. Plan for obsolescence. Set up a group of thirty somethings with the task of working out how to put your current business out of business. Then when they work it out, make that your new business strategy, and consider putting them in charge.

Work your senior management and Board hard. They have learned how to do business based on the conditions that occurred in the past. Many will have little ability to deal with the rapid changes in technology and marketplace occurring now and could insist on staying the course when they shouldn’t. A good example here in Australia was the utter failure of the Fairfax media group to come to grips with internet based competition.

While business common sense is hard won over many years, your leadership team may no longer understand the business and economic environment they are applying that common sense to.

You will need to educate them, and dare I say it, you will need to plan to replace them as the business changes. If they don’t get it they shouldn’t stay in the role. Having grey haired figures on the Board may make bankers and pension fund investors happy, but it may also be the seed that kills your company.

Scenario planning is another good option. Have a think about what would happen if things dramatically changed for your market or your business. What could you do about it? Can you plan for some of those things now? Work out where you are most fragile and look to fix that if you can.

There are no easy answers and much of the above goes against human nature- which is to not admit anything is wrong until it has happened, but it is worth at least planning for some time to think about that which can’t be planned for.