Do it now - or kiss it good bye... learning from crashes

Osborne 1 "luggable" PC - crashed before takeoff to the IBM (DOS) wave [circa 1981]


I was reminded of a few personal crashes in life from the recent Wall Street crash (the one started by the Lehman Brothers closure). This phenomena of a sudden surprise from "nowhere" is not something unique to the tech business. But for us it is something that happens more often. The financial crash in US banks seem to happen every decade or so. Someone thinks of some scheme to sell you something. Someone tries it out and it works. Everyone else copies the first guy, and the party begins. A few months or years later, some wise guy suddenly notices that this is a scheme. Then some event causes a crash and it all ends in tears.

My first crash in the tech world was the Atari EPROM game event. I was at GI Micro in NY and you would not believe how quickly the place emptied out. But I was young and thought that this was "just this place". That gives away my age. I also remember the PC hardware crash. That was not fun to watch. There was a mini crash with printers, the dot impact kind which ended up with Epson taking the market and dominating it for a few years. When the laser printers came out you should have seen the dot impact printer crash. These technology waves are going to be with us and are pretty much the modus operandi. Just like a stock price will plummet when investors fear is stirred into a frenzy, technologists need to figure out what to do before and after the crash. It does not matter if the crash is due to financial, technology, market, or a combination of other factors. Once we crash the landscape changes radically and the nimble to change will survive.

These general observations of drastic change or a real crash are nice to talk about, but what is more useful is specific examples to what we could do about it. Crashes come to technology as financial changes, as see today with Lehman Brothers, Merill Lynch, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Lehman Brothers was one of the largest technology deal underwriting and negotiation firms on wall street. They have been doing it for a long time. Lehman was also a big Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) firm, which is one of the most used form of selling start-up companies. We will have to get used to smaller, newer firms, and maybe a smaller end market for new company stock. This will also affect spin-offs and acquisitions. But that is not the end of the world. Technologists are not going to stop inventing and creating new products.

Lehman Brothers' web site description of their technology financing expertise

In the mean time, the financial markets which "feeds" the technology sector will have to recover. Just like the Dot-Com bubble, it will take a little time for investors to gather back their trust in speculative technology investments. This will not take long, there is another Google and Facebook lurking somewhere, maybe not even in the US, but the money and know-how are still in New York's Wall Street and California's Silicon Valley. We technologists need first of all to take a good look of what it would take to ride out a period of financial drought. That does not mean stop developing, actually the opposite. Just figure out how to do things with less outside money. Maybe smaller steps which enable technologists to bring in revenue while they develop. Maybe more deals with larger partners, even outside the technology sector. Maybe even other ways to work. Remember, the Osbornes, Compaqs, and Apples of the early 1980's didn't have the big financial infrastructure that existed in the 1990's. Maybe that is a better way to start. Maybe without the eager speculators with "easy money" we will do things better and smarter. What do you think?

The business of technology: marketing, sales, support, promotion

Yahoo, a one time technology giant, is going through changes...

The business of technology is not discussed enough in terms of a "profession". Actually discussing business people in technology is not the problem, it's the work itself as a technology business professional that seem to be the culprit here. The technical aspect of technology has simply outpaced and ran over the business issues. There is not enough respect and balance to the none purely technical aspects. Because technology companies do not emphasize the areas which are not purely technical. When the business starts failing or simply starts slipping the technologists put in more effort and push the business people aside. This occurs even more in the planning and early stages of a product's market life. My observation over the years is that technology-business needs more professionalism. This means more training, more visibility, more tools, more standard processes, and more management. We simply do not know how to do things well enough and we are not able to convince anyone to give us the resources to develop our profession. So we need to do it ourselves "in our spare time".

You may want to disagree with me and say that there is plenty of "stuff" out there. There is plenty of material on finances (profits, investment), strategies (product position), and use of general business practices in the technology sector. But for all that technology business has done to our world there is very little specific work in writing, analysis, theories, practices, etc. JUST FOR TECHNOLOGY BUSINESS! Some of this can be attributed to the newness of the technology sector. But that could be said in other areas as well, such as international trade, travel, and leisure. The financial world has expanded for the most part due to the technological advanced in communication, data management, promotion, yet you can find many times more publications in that area than in the technology business world. I don't know why technologists do not want to invest in better business, but it seems to me that we simply need to sit down and roll up our sleeves. We know some things that are missing but we need to deeply study what has been done (both right and wrong), analyze what is going on today, and plan for the future. This is true on the micro scale with companies and trade organizations which represent a single product or a core technology. But more so in the macro scale in the way technology is influencing and shaping our social behavior, the economic state of our countries and regions, and finally the human experience both of the technology workers and the general population which uses technology.

I want to clarify a few things about my observation and the point I am making. There are many business fields which affect technology (specially in management). There are many books and theories about business and trends which are related to the technology world. The attention to change and the speed of diffusion of new ideas has interested business researchers and analysts for a long time. The same is true in project management and a new area of management of time and resources in small projects which is different from product management. There are many areas in finance which deal with resources and how to manage investments. But very few have researchers and practitioners have researched the actual work of technologists as "investors". Technologists control investments in product development, basic and applied technology research, marketing and promotion, and many other areas related to the product or service they product.

Let's get right to the issue. If we need to get business practices and tools developed for technology it will take resources and most of all time. Once we figure out what needs to be done and what can be done someone will have to put in some free time to get started. I am going to look at areas related to technology and see what we can buy, borrow, and steal. I also have interest in taking some technology management tools and practices and molding them to the business side. What has been done recently in project management is interesting. There is also a great deal of material in product management from recent work. Some material from what I have seen can be used as-is, maybe a few changes in terminology. But most material and tools I have seen needs to include more specific technology material.

Well, I hope this makes sense to some of you. Also, I hope some of you who are not as familiar with the great business starvation in the tech sector will come and read about it in the future.

Develop a good presentation with blog and Web2.0 (digg, reddit)

Digg results for "DSP"

A good presenter needs a good presentation. There is no way of getting aroud the subject. If you don't have an exciting presentation you are going to give a boring one.

Yesterday I saw a bland presentation. We all know that a great presenter can spice-up any topic. But in the technical world this is not enough. I noticed the the most important aspect is how the presentation fits the topic. This means, if you set the topic as an "application examples" people are going to be expecting and interested in that topic, doing anything else will throw off the audience. This means give a presentation that has good content, has a good flow, gives new information (remember this is tech!) AND is exciting.

One of the best way to do this is by searching on blogs, wikis, and web sites. Than take a look at Digg.com, Stumbleupon.com, reddit, Technorati.com and other "social bookmarking and sharing" sites. Here you will find top stories and sites which have at least gotten votes. If you are doing something complicated remember that it's VERY HARD to keep people's attention without doing something that involves them. In the talk I went to see software demos which worked but did not show anything beyond symbol boxes, dialog boxes, and menus put people to sleep. The truth is, most engineers are not excited about watching someone plopping boxes on a blank page, no matter how good the program works.

Thinking about this issue on the way back I would suggest to any presenter to do the following:

• Highlight clearly what is new and exciting about your presentation.
• In marketing and sales they use to talk about "features and benefits". This is not enough in today's world. Show someting that is interesting to the audience. If you show a design, show how it is done, assume a wide range of knoledge and ask what people know and what they want to see.
• Do not go into a "script" that is longer than 5 minutes. If you are going to show a "how to" imagine that you are on a TV cooking show. When the chef is done kneeding the doug he "magically" pulls out a fully finished cake. They don't do it on TV just because it's TV, they have lost lots of audiences on shows and they know how to make thigs "move along".
• Pick one, ONLY ONE, main message. Don't try to show 5 things. Even if you have all day, leave one impression. Even if what you want to say is not super exciting. Three "messages" are too confusing to people who are not familiar with the topic.
• Put in something "sexy" that is not 100% related to the technical topic. Show a new product (iPhone, digital camera, etc.)
• Finally, be flexible, if you hear snoring from the back of the room, move to the next section.

Once you got a presentation, if you are going to make it to an audience of 50 people, test it! Make it better and TEST IT AGAIN! if you don't have time, go over it yourself and let someone else go over it. You will never think that your material is boring or trivial. Nobody does. So you need to figure out how solicit crituque on your material. Remember, this is not your presentation ability, it is the MATERIAL! Anyone can sit in front of your slides and talk to you on the phone. Good luck and make your presentaitons count.

A super inpirational [TECHY] talk - Randy Pausch on life

An opportunity like this only comes once in a few years, maybe even once in a few decades. An example of a really inspirational talk by a G E E K ! NOT A MARKETER! not a salesman! A real technologists and in addition a college professor. If you are a technologists or an engineer turned marketer here is a great example of how to talk and get not just interest but respect and admiration.

See on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

Summary: Randy Pausch was a VR (virtual reality) professor at Carnegie Mellon. This puts him in the Uber-Geek category in my book. In 2007 he was diagnosed with terminal cancer and as the tradition in academia goes he was asked to give "the last lecture". This is a tradition of retiring professors imparting their last bit of wisdom to their students. But this is the last bit of tradition and sentimentality in this story.

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Randy Pausch although an accomplished technologist talked more about his life than what he has done in life technically. The sub-title to his talk is "Achieving your childhood dreams". He does mention quite a bit of history about his career mostly in personal terms. If you are a technologists and you give talks this is one of the best examples of how to "sneak in" personal and emotional material to technical subjects. I will not mention more about the talk, see it for yourself.
Next time I will look at some of the techniques and observations about the lecture and some of the other talks from people mentioned so far. Please e-Mail me if you have a favorite speaker or a lecture about technology or marketing of technology. Thanks...

Big picture: quality vs. speed in product management

Summary: open source and proprietary software products are used as example for quality vs. speed in product management. Every manager and professional has a choice to "get something out - quick and dirty" or "we don't ship it until it's good". In the history of technology business you can find many examples of both cases. Even ones that you can use to compare between speed and quality. You better think about this before you start. AND KEEP IT IN MIND WHILE YOU WORK - do you need to change tactics??

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Full moon over old TV antennas - Ramat Gan, Israel
      I recently got a new customer who needs to raise money. When I first started with him it was described as research and write a business plan, target investors, make presentations, and negotiate the terms. A year ago I had another customer that wanted to redesign his business to make more money. He had an open source product which was used to sell services and customization. Both companies are small and both somewhat profitable. Both understood that they didn't manage their products well enough to become really profitable. Like most small technology company managers, both CEOS knew that they needed help and they had lots of ideas. One actually started writing a document with observations, ideas, plans, and alike. But with his erratic schedule he could not take the time to really organize a plan. The other had lots of little notes on everything from Post-It Notes to back of utility bill envelopes (no kidding here!). The big difference was the actual product. The first was an industrial-commercial service CRM system. It was small in comparison to the large scale enterprise systems, runs on PCS, written in Microsoft Visual Basic, and is very reliable (this application requires reliability). The open source application was medium size and was written by a loose group of dedicated programmers. The company selling the service had done some development and debug work but overall was mostly a support organization (installation and configuration, training, maintenance, etc.)
      The difference between open source and proprietary product is what I want to talk about. I do not mean the business model or technology methodology (shared open development vs. close back room secrecy), but the way companies behave because of their products. Most people seem to think that if you have a certain product you also have to run your company in the way other do. Or worst, they think that once a methodology has been established you can't change it. This is a recipe for disaster in the business of technology product management. We can't get stuck just in one mode. Open source companies tend to rely on the technological capability. They also tend to think in terms of how to use technology for features and capabilities. The proprietary side of software development seem to think more in terms of a complete solution. Maybe there is a shift in thinking once in a while but I think that looking at the way the two sides work can help most managers make better decisions. Actually, open source companies are starting to see how stitching together complete solutions with support, training, and even hosted operation can make good business sense. (I need to write about this next, this is something that very few people take into account and they are leaving lots of money on the table).
      One of the advantages a consultant (they call us coaches now - the sports analogies never stop) is an fresh outside perspective. We come in and do not have the mindset of someone on the inside. This is one of the most powerful tool a CEO can have. While going about "regular business" fundamental changes are not going to be made. Sometimes this is what can bring a product and a company down. One very noticeable difference between these two organizations was the speed vs. quality. In everything that small proprietary company was doing -- QUALITY is JOB 1 (remember the Ford tag line?). The open source company was speed -- fix it and get it out. Figure out what is wrong and get the customer the solution -- e-Mail a response before he even needs it. But life unfortunately can not be run in a single mode. Actually, every product manager needs to modulate and decide what needs time and polish and what needs fast response. This is certainly true in software development and hardware design. This is even more true in product planning and marketing. There are way too many confusing strategies, missing features, and minor revision releases.
      The point is: don't make your work totally uniform in methodology. If you need help deciding how to do things, get help from the outside. Otherwise you will end up somewhere between a "rut" and "unchanging" modus operandi. The "rut" is doing things but the same way as if you were on a train going only where the tracks take you. While trains are nice way to travel, there is much more to life than train stations and big cities. The "train" (your way of working) will get you just close but not where you need to go. People who do not appreciate American country music hear every song as a mini soap opera with a cheating wife (or husband), a dog, and a pickup truck.

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Is your strategic planning system a 3M product in 3" X 3" format?
      The "unchanging" is not doing anything. Analyzing, researching, prototyping, testing... you do all the work to try to get as "good results" as you have now. Companies which are very successful tend to do this all the time. Microsoft is now being called a "has been". In the grand scheme of things, they still want to do Windows and Office as they have done for almost 20 years. The problem with this is worst than the "rut". Here you don't even "write more cheating wife, sad dog, and pickup truck" songs any more. Microsoft has not put out a decent big product in so long, nobody even expect it! Their last thing is probably the X-BOX. Compare this to Apple who was almost dead just a few years ago. Apple has taken a lesson from the old Microsoft. They get out a product and get it redesigned over and over again. Essentially the "cannibalize" their own products. But this is what Microsoft was doing all through the 1980's and 1990's. But don't just look at the big companies. Sometimes their business situation is too complex, so be careful here. I think that Microsoft is trying to do things in certain directions, essentially using their existing successful products as launching points for "bigger and better". In the windows world they are trying to integrate new ideas like the SharePoint server (essentially a combination of Web2.0 + Apache + Office + more). That was a great strategy in the days where Windows was a fairly new and dynamic product. Remember that Microsoft was sued by Netscape for putting Internet Explorer into a windows release? That was controversial!
      The good thing about looking at others, like Microsoft and Apple, is learning to look, analyze, think, come to conclusions. So what if you can't do anything about it. BUT you can use the same techniques on your own work. Even if you have a bunch of Post-It notes for observation this is a good start. Take the time to look at what your competitors are doing (and NOT doing). Take the time to observe if you are a "quality" organization and if this is useful for different type of tasks. Look at how "quickly" things are done. Do you have to hold on to customer issues and analyze them? Can you just fire off an answer and get them going even 70% of the time? Well, I hope this has given you some ideas on how to look at your work and organizations.