My First Digest

Increase profits by working less

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 04:25 GMT

What's taking up most of your working day?

Add up the time spent on the following:

Receiving tasks from superiors
Distributing tasks to subordinates
Discussing these tasks to get more knowledge and clarify
Emailing
Phone and Skype calls
Searching for information
Shuffling paper or looking for paper, documents and forms
Meetings (non-single task meetings)
Budgeting
Fretting over deadlines
Planning work
Updating plans
Reporting
Keeping to-do lists up to date

How many percent of your daily time would that be? 30%? 40%? 50%? 60%?

All of the above have no other purpose than "frameworking" you own (and sometimes other's) work flow. And that's a must, no flow of any kind can exist without a framework even if the framework is as iffy as a to-do list or yourself reminding you to answer some email. Like a river needs a riverbed you and your co-workers need some framework.

What if you had an alternative framework, like Thingamy (that's the essence of what it is, a framework for work flows and any other process), so all of the above Dilbertesque moments disappeared?

Less annoying and more meaningful work might ensue, but if you're a shareholder in a typical services firm (advertising, law, consulting, health) this will happen:

Assuming plentiful work and 20% profit margin your profit would increase as follows when work shifted to value creating work from different levels of time spent on "frameworking":

Time spent on frameworking	Increase in net profits
10%	29.6 %
20%	55.2 %
30%	77.4 %
40%	97.0 %
50%	114.3 %

And that's the annual gain even before you find out that you can change and better your business model!

What's your alternative ROIs by the way?

[30megs.com]

Solutions creates problems

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 05:48 GMT

Thingamy's first business task is to create problems.

Worse, Thingamy's business is to create problems for the daily work of most people!

Sounds like a rather bad business purpose or what?

Not so, it's more to it:

Solving problems is the foremost driver of new products, services and economic growth. That we're taught.

What nobody teaches you is that you need a solution before a state becomes a problem.

Do you wake up every day thinking "ouch, ouch, I'm going to die one day, must fix that problem!"?

You don't. That you eventually will die from old age has no solution hence is not a problem, just the inevitable fate of being human so enjoy it while it lasts.

Now, straight from the spiritual to the mundane - daily work:

Meetings, phone calls, budget processes, paper shuffling, firing up multiple applications, enter figures, travel - in short all that will bog down you and Dilbert every day. Is this a problem? Not really, just the inevitable nuisance of working in an organisation knowing that the only alternative is to go Bedouin and leave the cubicle farm.

Now add politics to meetings, wrong people at the wrong time on the line, lost papers, bugs to applications and cancelled flights - now we see problems! And of course such problems have solutions; focus on agenda, install CRM, KMS, support desks and conduct online meetings fixes problems.

But the meetings, phone calls etc. are still there taking up most of our days minimising our creative and work output while leaving a somewhat bitter aftertaste of much time lost. But that's as inevitable as death at a ripe old age leaving us to went the frustrations on Twitter and at the water cooler instead.

Enter Thingamy, it offers a real alternative by making much of those time-wasting issues moot.

There's the dilemma - this hugely counterproductive state is not seen as a problem so we have a solution to fate and not a problem!

Luckily there's a way out: Show the solution and the state of things becomes a highly visible problem!

So there we go building business flows disregarding how things are done today, show how it works as a natural flow without much use of meetings, phone calls, lost documents and other issues. Suddenly the inevitable becomes a visible problem that can be solved, not quite on par with an offer of eternal life but still extremely helpful to all.

Hence our initial business is to create problems.

http://30megs.com/

Stop managing

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 06:30 GMT

If you like the occasional blinding flash of the obvious there's a book out - Management rewired: Why feedback doesn't work and other surprising lessons from the latest brain science by Charles S. Jacobs. Basically takeaway is that the annual performance review is for the birds, and boss pressure is of dubious value. When I was involved in running companies I always found employees telling about their latest work successes and solutions like new algorithms or graphical UIs at lunch. Not bragging to a boss but discussing and getting much ahhs and ooohs from their peers. Peer strokes and peer pressure is good. Simple as that, it's pretty obvious and we know it. But alas most management experts don't for whatever reasons. Another issue is motivation. How come the military see their crew risk life and work long and hard hours? How come small startups have employees working nights and days without complaining? They have simple and clear goals, goals that are easy to understand and for some to get aligned with - purpose and belonging that at the end will entice us to give our utmost. What would be a common denominator for these obvious facts? Transparency. Let your peers see what you do and allow you to see what and why all is happening. Simple, obvious and presumably easy to implement even in a cubicle farm. Except of course, that current enterprise systems and even E 2.0 stuff are designed as tools for specific organisational and process silos. And as we all know, sitting inside a silo hampers transparency big time. So, silos away and let the sun shine on the workers again.

Go to market by Extreme Business Planning

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 03:23 GMT

Don't know if this is an effort to make own behaviour plausible, but so what...

When entering a market the GAMP (Generally Accepted Marketing Practices) has to be right, as in getting certain stuff right:

Target market
Price
Packaging
Channel
Story
And the rest of it

But one forgets, there are two ways to enter a market:

A. By GAMP

Spend days and weeks in the boardroom trying to outguess your potential customers as to who, how, what and when they will use your product.

Set the choices in stone, get the channel onboard, set the message and story, price it and colour your product.

Go.

Result? Binary. Uncontrolled and rigid outcome. But fast. Success or crash and burn in the fast lane.

B. By EBP (Extreme Business Planning)

Keep everything open with two exceptions; build your product so it can be changed and tweaked easily, ditto for your organisation and cash burn.

Go.

Let the potential customers decide who, how, what and when. Adjust accordingly.

Result? Analogue. Controlled and continuous movement. But slower. Slow and deliberate right hand lane driving.

Think I like B. better. Doable? But of course as long as you question the assumptions you do not know you're making.

Bonus question: Which method would the time-constrained VC board members push for?

The conceptual failure of business software and why nobody bothers

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 06:10 GMT

If you're in business you'll soon find the need for some business software...

When you forget to follow up potential clients that's when you find a need to "manage" your leads and call the CRM vendor.

When you need to know when and by whom to fill up your warehouse with bits, parts or whatever you invest in SCM and SRM. And so forth ad infinitum.

Now, imagine you're running a shipping company; your purpose is to deliver goods from Europe to the US, the economy is in shambles and you need to get better and earn more money.

There are two things you can do:

Make your ships faster and more economical, and/or
revisit your purpose, the core value delivered, and explore airfreight, logistics and more.

Now draw a parallel to your need for business software:

Analyse the specific needs of existing processes and tasks and invest to make those faster and more economical, or
revisit your purpose and explore different processes and tasks.

That would be theoretical. Airplane and truck makers exist so the shipper have the freedom to do what he wants, but the business software buyer will only be offered tools to make specific and existing processes more efficient. Not much software to enable easy change to his business are on offer. (Need proof? Read out loud the full names of CRM, SCM, HCM etc.. See? All process specific.)

This is when business get stuck and where software developers fail miserably.

Maybe the blame should be with the oft repeated advise to entrepreneurs to "find a need and offer a solution"? Do not offer him an alternative (an easy way to explore alternative processes) so he'll be stuck with simple needs to increase efficiency instead. And simple needs are easier to fix and to sell into. Bad laziness. Self fulfilling prophecy.

The vendor wins short term and the buyer loses long term.

The age of heretics and sceptics

Tue, 26 May 2009 03:14 GMT

Busy times on the Côte d'Azur. A 20 minutes bike ride along the coast towards west and I reach the Croisette and the glamour of the Cannes film festival, if I ride towards east I pass the Hotel du Cap after ten minutes and a pack of paparazzi sitting on their scooters smoking and chatting while waiting for some celebrity to go for a morning run. Do they do that?

Even more to the east, about 90 minutes ride, you get to Monaco and the F1 circus of last week.

The glamour, the expensive cars, the champagne, the often intended jaw dropping appearance of the opposite sex - all interesting to watch, all in all quite a contrarian display these days.

Nuff said, the more interesting issue was pointed out in NYT/IHT on Saturday - namely how the new and scrappy teams are beating the shit out of the well funded, well managed old teams. How Brawn and Toro Rosso beats the MacLarens, Williams and Ferraris.

In a way it's an image of how dramatic times changes the rules, in particular how the established and their ways that works like a dream during stable and good times then lets the heretics and sceptics win when the rules changes. And the rules are changing. Big time.

It's happening everywhere, just ask anybody at any big corporations. It's far beyond an issue of cutting costs and realigning, it's about much bigger changes. And for that we need sceptics and heretics.

Heretic - somebody holding an opinion at odds with what is generally accepted.

Sceptic - somebody inclined to question or doubt all accepted opinions.

Attitudes, both two sides of the same issue, that are made for times like these. Perhaps they're even instrumental in pushing the rule changes?

But as attitudes goes, attitude comes from the heart. A sceptic reacts instinctively, a heretic has no fear of being rebuffed. Nothing you can add to your personality palette by reading the latest "10 rules to...". A sceptic child is called quarrelsome, a heretic child is a disrespectful one. Some survive the attempts to being conditioned and good is that.

And the results of being a sceptic and heretic are well... eh... results. You cannot be say a contrarian, that would lead nowhere. It's the sceptic that might choose to act in a contrarian fashion and become a heretic. That's contrarianism with meaning. And only meaning gives... eh... meaning.

Too much saving caused the economic crisis

Tue, 19 May 2009 06:44 GMT

Let me expand on the claim by asking "what really is saving?"

Initially it was about stashing away some food for a rainy day. That the fresh meat could rot had to be accepted, losing some was still better than outright starving later.

On the other side, if there is an opportunity to invest in an increased output of useful products or services using less resources then a return could be negotiated. But if no increase in the rate of value creation is obtainable there is no need for funds nor would there be a yield to be had.

If I have 9 cows and a bull and the yield is 1 calf per year, year after year, there is no reason why I should borrow anything. But if, by building a shelter, I could increase that to 2 calves per year it would make sense to borrow and build. But only if interest, annual principal repayment and my living expenses added up to less than 2 calves.

You are at all times free to stash away for a rainy day, no return on those savings of course, most probably negative earnings. Still your sole prerogative.

But if you want a return on your savings you have to find somebody, directly or indirectly, that has a way to invest in increased rate of value creation. Such savings cannot be pushed, it has to be pulled, that privilege is the borrower's.

In other words saving is either:

Stashing away while accepting loss of value or
investment in increased output of useful products and services.

But at some point of time we got used to getting a return, to the point where we're now hardwired to believe that we can save at any time and get a return from the savings. But as opportunities to invest in increased value creation comes in leaps and bounds, like when a new technology or method is invented, saving with a return should not always to be had.

That opened for new professions to create "saving forms" decoupled from investing in increased value creation. In other words, savings that mostly could be termed humbug.

And the humbug could take three forms:

Investment in scarcity. Expensive watches, art, real estate, gold. Investing in a flat on Manhattan makes sense as long as there is increasing value creation elsewhere in the society, wealth that flows into New York eventually in the form of people moving there. But soon that could turn and the zero-sum game becomes a reality. And I'm not saying art and the other scarce products do not have a value, they have, but they do not increase the value creation and should not yield a real return. Having been conditioned to believe something does not necessarily make it true. "Gold? Dig it up, then bury it, then dig it up, and bury it again, so where's the value creation?"
Power leverage. You're sitting on excess funds today while the younger generation struggles. That creates an opportunity for you to lend it to the younger generation for their consumption today, then sit back and see them work twice as hard as you had to in order to pay back with interest. They have little choice, you can push through high interest, hence the power leverage. (In fact much of the scarcity investing is a version of this, sell your inflated value big house to a young family and you get the point.)
Schemes and fakes. Read any paper from last nine months and take your pick among the disaster "instruments" for further study.

There is only one way out of this crisis and the saving-investment need mismatch; find the balance. That can be had by less saving or increases in value creation. Everything else is a waste of time or at best band-aiding a broken leg.

In the latter part of the last century the US personal saving rate was much higher than today, but then it was a period of huge investment needs world-wide in infrastructure, new manufacturing methods and equipment including IT - all increasing the world's value creation. The last few years we've seen much lower saving rates, more matching the lack of opportunities to invest in value creation increases. But then, typically China and the oil producing countries saved huge amounts that increased the imbalance tremendously despite low saving rates in the US.

Good thing that the world's governments seems to be well underway to do their part in the investment bit, hope is that it's towards real increases in value creation. Bad thing is that saving is increasing as well.

At the end of the day, the way to find the balance is to remove the universal notion that we have a prerogative to save with a return while exposing the "humbug" saving for what it really is. That would be the only long term fix.

[Hat tip to my friend Pete (url free alas) who prompted the discussion.]

SAP and more on clarity

Thu, 14 May 2009 12:46 GMT

Léo Apotheker wrote an article in Forbes today where he calls for clarity - transparency, accountability and control.

Nice one and quite their new tag line worthy.

I of course, would suggest he forgot two core issues; less complexity and time to dump double-entry bookkeeping.

Until that happens clarity will only become slightly less opaque...

Sapphire 09 from afar

Thu, 14 May 2009 09:47 GMT

First time in years that I missed this despite SAP being so kind to invite me again. Too much busyness on my side I'm afraid.

Kind of interesting not to be there, sitting here slurping live videos, sniffing at tweets and reading blog posts by my friends.

Did I learn anything? Well, I definitely and sorely missed being there and seeing all my friends, but still, here are a few takeaways from afar:

SAP shows the usual tenacity in regards Business By Design, and I applaud them. Here my fellow Irregular Josh debunks a critic with aplomb giving you the gist of how they proceed and accept reality despite what I could imagine being cries of desperation from a marketing department.

SAP has no qualms about telling it as it is. In the otherwise very geeky and highly enjoyable keynote by Professor Plattner he even showed how the sales curve hit the wall last year, even telling about customers who acted up and said things along the line of "sure we have a contract but we will never pay".

By the way, Professor Plattner stressed that he was not speaking as an employee, merely an academic, then merrily using "we" about SAP in every other sentence. Quite the natural thing to do, humanised keynote behaviour we all know to appreciate.

SAP know what they want. Despite crisis, despite competitors acquiring each others, SAP shows the long term commitment to enterprises despite any small stuff a nitpicking critic can dig up. And that long term attitude is what makes a difference. Here's Pascal Brosset, as good as always, explaining another EI friend, Vinnie, what SAP's vision of the future is.

And last but not least, it seems we can say good bye to the "The best-run companies run SAP" on a full size image of some anonymous person at all European airports. Now it's "Clear New World". And I have to admit I like it. Oops seems the old one has been relocated to fine print next to the logo, ah well...

But they got it right with the new tag line, IT means less resource use if used right and that ends up not only on the bottom line, but used to full extent it can move any corporation closer to sustainability. I've been chirping on that theme since my very first post herein more than four years ago so how could I not like it?

Have to admit my first thought was to rip their new tag line and tweak it to "Brave New World" for my own enterprise framework, but after remembering the somewhat warped content of Mr. Huxley's book I had second thoughts :)

Breaking down corporate brick walls?

Tue, 12 May 2009 02:42 GMT

My good friend and fellow Enterprise Irregular Dennis Howlett raised an issue in regards adoption of (or lack thereof) Enterprise 2.0 software:

"my experience suggests that while there are plenty of gr8 ideas 'enterprise' represents a daunting brick wall for many entrepreneurs. I'd like to help break that down if I can."

Two important terms should be noted; "brick wall" and "break that down".

The wall is there for a reason; to defend status quo and keep things quiet so we can leave our offices early and in general have as little upheaval as possible.

That said, fellows like Dennis and myself are of the kind that immediately want to break down stupid walls, good for us, but there are smarter ways:

Mr. Tzu (first name Sun) would have told us to avoid the wall. That's built to defend. Walk around it. Avoid it altogether.

Secondly Mr. Tzu would have said something along the lines of "if you want to avoid detection and move quietly around the defence you must not approach with drums and flags and masses of troops".

Did large corporate sales departments knock on CEO doors supported by big noisy campaigns trying to push e-mail to the corporate world? Quiet, bottom up, around-the-wall, don't ask for permission easier to ask for forgiveness, under the radar, back door - that worked without a word in the papers.

In practice:

One must solicit the aid of those who's daily life is bettered and not ask the powers for permission.
Implementation must be incremental.
Costs must be under-the-radar and coffee budget sized.

In other words, getting new stuff that would challenge the status quo into corporations requires such to be designed following these rules:

Deliver instant and daily value for the end user. Forget about ROI and other mumbo-jumbo meant for the higher ups. Instant value for me as a user rules. (See e-mail example).
Start small anywhere, grow in any direction at any time whenever the users are ready for it. Up front analysis by armies of consultants and any whiff of waterfall will hit the wall.
Puny per user costs, no binding, not even contracts to be signed is ideal. Let the growth in number of users take care of income over time. Heck I could live nicely on the coffee budget of a corporate conference or any Wall Street HQ.

My two cents (that I have to live by) knowing very well about the solid brick walls called "official IT policy" and such...

Don't fight anything, make the defence irrelevant, that option is yours!