MySpace, don't tell your employees one thing and your investors another

Two-Face by Logan Zawacki (LZ Creations) used under a Creative Commons License

At lunchtime today, I wrote about the MySpace layoffs. But there was something buried in my post that even I missed until later, after reading Paul Short's Inquisitr piece.

Layoffs are a tough thing and a trying time, and it's important to be as honest and forthright as possible with employees, both those who are leaving and those who are staying. At the same time, you need to motivate the remaining employees (and, for that matter, the departing ones). In my lunchtime post, I quoted from MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta's message to MySpace employees in which he attempted to accomplish these goals. This is part of what he said:

These decisions are difficult for everyone, but especially for our friends and colleagues who contributed to MySpace’s success and are directly affected by the changes. Through no fault of theirs our company’s size became unsustainable. The future success of MySpace is dependent upon us operating as a nimble and entrepreneurial company with the adaptive mentality of a start-up.

Friends. Colleagues. Language that suggests that the remaining employees, and even the departing ones, are valuable, wonderful people.

Did the MySpace employees believe Van Natta's words? Not if they heard what Van Latta and his boss Jon Miller were saying to outsiders:

“Simply put, our staffing levels were bloated and hindered our ability to be an efficient and nimble team-oriented company,” CEO Owen Van Natta said in a statement....

“MySpace grew too big considering the realities of today’s marketplace,” said Jon Miller, News Corporation’s (NWS) CEO of Digital Media.

Now the inside and outside statements are not factually contradictory, but there's a clear difference in tone.

What if you switched the statements around, and had Van Natta and Miller tell investors that they're jettisoning "friends and colleagues who contributed to MySpace's success," and then tell the MySpace employees that "staffing levels were bloated" and "MySpace grew too big"?

I haven't seen how MySpace employees have reacted to the difference in tone of the two messages, but someone clearly fumbled here. (And it appears that @kbardeesy at the Globe & Mail is trying to solicit messages from laid-off MySpace employees.)

You need to give the same message to ALL stakeholders.

If we do this again, the Canadians may stop being nice (Phoenix, Hamilton, and Winnipeg)

I have an imponderable question that I need to ponder at some point - when we refer to the "National Hockey League," what nation is being referenced? The NHL, like Major League Baseball, straddles two countries - the United States and Canada. And even though hockey is more of a passion to Canadians, teams have tended to move south to our side of the border.

There's been an attempt to move in another direction - an American National Hockey League team trying to move to Canada! - but an American judge has blocked the deal:

Jim Balsillie is considering a new bid for the Phoenix Coyotes hockey team after a bankruptcy court's decision that blocked the co-founder of Research in Motion from [moving] the NHL franchise to Canada.

Judge Redfield Baum ruled on Monday that a June 29 deadline proposed by Balsillie did not allow enough time to settle the complex case.

Balsillie was offering to buy the team for $212.5 million and move it to Hamilton, Ontario, located an hour southwest of Toronto.

The Coyotes actually began their existence as the Winnipeg Jets in 1972, moving to Phoenix in 1996. They were preceded in a southern move by the Quebec Nordiques, who became the Colorado Avalanche in 1995.

Now it has gone the other way. The Atlanta Flames moved to Calgary in 1980. And there have been other moves that haven't crossed national borders.

But for the moment Phoenix won't be joining them. Although there's one person that argues that if Phoenix moves north, Hamilton shouldn't be the destination:

While the idea of moving the team back to Canada is a good one, and Hamilton is a great place for an NHL team, we feel that Winnipeg is the true home of the team. If the team is going to be moved to Canada it should be moved to Winnipeg and renamed the Jets.

So we may have a Manitoba-Ontario smackdown in a few years. Well, not a smackdown, since Canadians presumably won't act like Marylanders act when the Indianapolis Colts come to town. But it could get not nice.

P.S. Not sure if my good friend Jeremy St. Louis has reacted to the news. I haven't had access to my TV lately, so I'm not sure what the Fox Soccer Report people are discussing to ward off the summer doldrums.

Tom must be bummed. He has fewer friends.

Back in April I wrote about Tom, who is one of my friends on MySpace.

Tom was the first friend that we ever had on MySpace. We didn't know a lot about Tom, and in fact we didn't even know how old he was, but he seemed to be a nice guy, and he'd always pass on messages to all of his friends, such as tips on new music and warnings about compromising the security of your account....

Well, our friend Tom was in the paper. Well, actually it's not a paper any more, it's more like electronic stuff, or at least that's where I saw the story. You see, Tom and his friend Chris are going to be doing some different things....

Yesterday I checked on Tom, and he must be feeling down. He hasn't updated his MySpace profile in a few days.

Today I found out why Tom might be bummed:

The social network MySpace is reducing its staff to cut costs in an effort to return to what it calls a “startup culture.”

MySpace, a division of News Corporation, said the layoffs would affect all American divisions of the company and lower the total number of staffers to around 1000.

And Owen said that Tom has too many friends.

These decisions are difficult for everyone, but especially for our friends and colleagues who contributed to MySpace’s success and are directly affected by the changes. Through no fault of theirs our company’s size became unsustainable. The future success of MySpace is dependent upon us operating as a nimble and entrepreneurial company with the adaptive mentality of a start-up.

And both Owen and Jon said that Tom was fat:

“Simply put, our staffing levels were bloated and hindered our ability to be an efficient and nimble team-oriented company,” CEO Owen Van Natta said in a statement....

“MySpace grew too big considering the realities of today’s marketplace,” said Jon Miller, News Corporation’s (NWS) CEO of Digital Media.

Maybe Tom can get a Facebook account and make new friends. Somehow I suspect that if Owen and Jon don't really like Tom any more, Rupert probably doesn't like him either.

Taking your company to the next stage

I didn't comment on this when it occurred, but given my interest in music I certainly noticed it. MediaMemo:

The founders of Last.fm, the London-based Web music start-up CBS snapped up for $280 million two years ago, are leaving the company. No word yet on whom CBS will appoint to replace the founding trio of Felix Miller, Richard Jones and Martin Stiksel, or what any of the men intend to do next–though Jones did tell users that the trio planned an “epic farewell party” and “a much needed holiday.”

You can also see the original message from the founders in the last.fm blog.

In the Inquisitr, Steven Hodson noted that this is not all that unusual:

It’s not all that unusual to see happen in the tech world. Startups – well start up, they get some big buzz, end up getting bought by a company with big wallets (if they don’t deadpool first) only to have the people who started the company decide it’s time for green pastures. Such is the case it would seem with the founders of Last.fm who have announced that they have resigned.

And this behavior predates the Web 2.0 and dot-com eras, although it used to be that the original company would NOT get sold, but that the founders would leave anyway. If you look at Apple, Steve Wozniak removed himself from day-to-day responsibilities (although John Sculley claimed he officially remained at Apple), and Steve Jobs was effectively forced out of Apple - although, of course, he returned a decade later.

The one notable exception to the "founders exit" behavior was Bill Gates, who remained at Microsoft as it grew from a small startup to a huge software company. For whatever reason (perhaps his upbringing, certainly not his formal education), Gates had the ability, drive, and desire to manage Microsoft through multiple stages of growth.

These colors don't fade, even during ocean transport

I guess you could call me a Wal-Mart supporter, based upon my opposition to anti Wal-Mart building measures, and my previous statements that Wal-Mart is only doing to the traditional supermarkets what the traditional supermarkets did to the older markets in the early 20th century. But even I have my limits.

When Wal-Marts initially appeared in my neck of the woods, they used to have banners that touted how Wal-Mart products were made in America, and how Wal-Mart was providing jobs to people in rural North Carolina or wherever.

After a couple of years, those banners disappeared from Wal-Mart stores. (And union members who make a big deal out of this are somewhat reluctant to publicly state where THEIR employers' products are manufactured.)

This stuck in my head as I read this New York Times article that documents how Old Navy and Wal Mart are dueling it out over the sale of U.S. patriotic t-shirts. The Times article documents how Old Navy is selling these t-shirts at a $5 price...while Wal Mart is selling them at a $3 price.

But as we don this patriotic apparel, there is one question that the New York Times article didn't answer - where are these particular t-shirts manufactured? I couldn't find any current information, but here was the score for patriotic apparel as of 2005, according to WCCO TV:

At Target, WCCO-TV found more than 80 pieces of patriotic clothing. Of all the items, only one T-shirt was made in the United States.

At Old Navy, WCCO-TV could not find any American-made patriotic apparel.

At Wal-Mart, more than 40 patriotic items were checked. Most were made in America, which is no accident. Wal-Mart has a policy where any item with an American flag on it must be made in the USA.

A blanket was the only flag item found by WCCO-TV that was not made in America. It was made in China.

And a 2009 check of the Old Navy website indicates that this $5.00 men's tee and this $5.00 women's tee is imported. I couldn't find the $3 tee on the Wal-Mart website, so I don't know if it's domestically made.

It's...just...a...tool...

On Sunday I had a little bit of fun with Robert Scoble and Steven Hodson regarding their "Twitter beats CNN" statements. However, both of them are level-headed people who realize that Twitter, or FriendFeed, or a blog, or whatever are truly just tools. And that a tool is not a way of life. But to some, Twitter IS a way of life.

Take the Twitter Chat Room post entitled The Twitter Way Of Life New Beginnings. And it's not just the idea of using Twitter a lot. This particular item states some so-called truisms about how the Twitter way of life should be lived. Here are a couple of examples:

3) You’ll lose followers if it’s not interesting

To be fair, there's another item related to followers:

10) It’s great to get followers but quality followers are what you need

Yup, the Twitter Way of Life seems to boil down to who's following you. That's why all the "social media experts" are out there, telling you how to get more followers. What they don't say is that many of the followers you get are...social media experts. Or at least until they unfollow you.

This reminded me of something Robert Scoble was preaching in 2008, and is still preaching in 2009, and presumably will preach in 2010. Here's how he put it in 2008:

I’ve gone through stages with Twitter. At some point I thought it was important to get lots of followers. But lately I’ve been telling people that the secret to Twitter isn’t how many followers you have, but how many people you are following....

what does following a lot of people say?

1. You’re trying to learn more.
2. You’re trying to meet more people.
3. You’re trying to be a better listener.
4. You’re communicating to the world that you’d like to be listened to (golden rule: treat people how you’d like to be treated).
5. You’re trying to find out about more stuff. More events. More stories.

Basically it boils down to whether you want to use Twitter as a megaphone, or Twitter as an information source, or both. And the same applies to any other tool, be it Facebook or email or the bulletin board with pushpins down at the laundromat.

Now there are times when you do want to use a social media service as a megaphone. And there are times when you want to use a social media service as an information source. And based upon what you're megaphoning or what you're trying to learn, you may want to use different tools at different times. Or, as Steven Hodson put it back in March:

Thank god we aren’t all the same or that we all use these services the same way. Thank goodness that we are learning new ways to do new things but in the end it is all about

Hodson then printed a picture with the caption

just havin' a shitload of fun on the Internet

And I hope that even the "social media experts" are having fun too.

But whatever tool or tools you use, remember that they're just tools...not a way of life.

The Amusement Park Recession Balancing Act

The New York Times and the Washington Post (H/T Outside the Beltway) reported that Six Flags has declared bankruptcy. The culprit? Debt. Here's how the Times puts it:

Six Flags, the theme park operator, filed for bankruptcy early Saturday in Delaware after failing to reach an agreement with lenders to reorganize its debt....The theme park operator, which had $2.4 billion in debt, faced nearly $300 million in payments to preferred stockholders due in August.

Investors, including Dan Snyder and Bill Gates, have been working for years to get the parks back on track by selling underperforming parks, improving the remaining ones, and securing corporate sponsorships. But even though the steps helped Six Flags to narrow their losses, they were still losing money, and the recession obviously wasn't helping matters. Lenders have agreed to eliminate some of the debt during this bankruptcy period.

James Joyner of Outside the Beltway observed:

What’s interesting is that attendance continues to boom. My first impression on reading the headline at Slate was that amusement parks may be, like the circus, a legacy of an era gone by. It would be easy to surmise that kids raised on video games, the Internet, and instant gratification would find standing in ridiculously long lines for a three minue ride boring. The attendance figures, however, would seem to belie that.

But when you consider amusement parks, you have to remember that they have two audiences - the vacationers, and the locals. And recessions do all sorts of things to these audience.

In the first stage of a recession, the vacationers decide that perhaps they're NOT going to drive all the way to the amusement park, and instead opt to do something back at home. Meanwhile the locals decide to scuttle their OWN vacation plans, and decide to just go to the local amusement park instead. So while the hotel owners will see a dip, the park itself won't be as badly affected since all the locals are flooding in.

But when you hit a deeper stage in the recession, then the locals decide to stay home too and watch videos or play Farm Town or whatever.

Obviously Dan Snyder and Bill Gates and the folks at Disney understand this and tailor programs for both vacationers and locals. But there are other things that can affect attendance, including accidents and not-so-accidentals such as planned demonstrations. Oh, and the weather. Regarding Six Flags, the Washington Post noted:

[I]ts summer 2007 attendance was slammed by bad weather in Georgia and Texas, and by an accident on a ride at its park in Kentucky.

Not quite the perfect storm, but a storm nevertheless. But it appears that the parks will get by.

Not that I'm rushing to Magic Mountain any time soon. It has a reputation for wild rides, and I have a reputation for not doing so well on wild rides. I'll stick to the Disneyland Railroad, thank you very much...

What you know isn't so - intuition, angioplasty, and colon cleansing

No matter what you're talking about, whatever you say is based upon an assumed body of knowledge. Sometimes our assumptions are wrong, and are challenged when we learn new stuff or re-learn old stuff. This is especially tough when you're talking about things that intuitively appear to be correct. However, our intuition is sometimes faulty, as BusinessWeek notes in discussing angioplasty.

Once hospitals have made big investments in the catheterization laboratories, where the procedures are done, they have every incentive to use them as much as possible. Plus, patients also have bought into the argument that clogged arteries should be propped open. "There is a huge demand from patients for quick dramatic fixes."...

But recent studies have cast doubt on this.

Several recent studies have found that angioplasty doesn't save lives or prevent heart attacks in patients with stable heart disease compared to treatment with drugs. And now, in a study presented at the American Diabetes Assn. meeting on June 7 (and published in the June 11 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine), the limitations of angioplasty are evident even when the procedures were performed on diabetics with heart disease. For those patients, "medical therapy [the use of drugs] rather than any intervention is an excellent first-line strategy," conclude Dr. William E. Boden of the State University of New York at Buffalo and Oxford University's Dr. David P. Taggart in an NEJM editorial.

But these studies have not only led people to question the procedure, but also some of the thoughts underlying the procedure - such as the whole idea of "clogged arteries":

Years ago, before angioplasty, one prominent idea was that heart attacks were not caused by gradually clogging arteries. Instead, the theory went, heart attacks occurred when unstable plaque in the artery suddenly ruptured, leading to dangerous or fatal clots. This idea lost favor once physicians had the ability to prop open or bypass those clogged arteries. Now the theory is coming back. And if unstable plaque is the real culprit, then drugs that reduce inflammation and clotting, including everything from ordinary aspirin to cholesterol-lowering statins from the likes of Pfizer (PFE), Merck (MRK), and AstraZeneca (AZN) make more medical sense than angioplasty does.

So this whole idea of clogged material within your body may be a bunch of B.S. (pending, of course, the next study).

Think about that the next time someone mentions colon cleansing to you. Note the snopes.com article on the topic that refutes claims that John Wayne and Elvis Presley had 40+ pounds of fecal matter in their colon when they died:

Anecdotes such as these are, in a word, crap.

Empoprise-BI News - 14 June 2009

Empoprise-BI News

The news letter for Empoprise-BI - An Empoprises vertical information service for business news.

Welcome to Empoprise-BI News

Not that I've thought much about Empoprise-BI. Why not? Farm Town took up a bunch of my time.

In my non-trendy way, I hadn't even heard of Farm Town. When I noticed one of my co-workers mentioning it on her Facebook account, I asked her about it, since it sounded like a Second Life-ish sort of thing based on her description. If you haven't heard of it, Farm Town is a Facebook application that allows you to tend a farm, plant and harvest crops, and keep animals. As have others before me, I have found the game to be highly addictive, and reminiscent of the old SimPark game in some ways.

I haven't neglected sleep (yet), but I'm progressing through the game. If you're a FriendFeed user who is also interested in Farm Town, you may want to check my new FriendFeed group http://friendfeed.com/farm-town. I created it because I couldn't find an existing FriendFeed group for the game.

And no, I don't plan to start Empoprise-FT... :) But when I have some time, I have some observations on Farm Town monetization that I should put in blog form.

Behind the Scenes

While this blog (and my other blogs) may seem to be all across the board, in reality there are some recurrent themes in this blog. Since only one person is writing the blog, there can't help but be recurring themes; my writing is shaped by my life experiences, so my thoughts are going to permeate the blog whether I like it or not.

As part of my long-term plan for world domination, I am trying to explicitly state some of these recurrent themes in the blog. Perhaps you've seen my first such explicit statement, "a tool is not a way of life." I'm going to try to work this statement into the Empoprise-BI blog, and into other writings of mine, over the coming weeks and months. And perhaps I'll come up with other pithy phrases that lend themselves to such promotion.

Special Features

Since I've yammered (heh) about Farm Town, I'm not going to write about that here. In case you missed it, however, I did write what turned out to be a four-post series regarding certification in general and product management certification in particular. The first post can be found here.

Upcoming

Still working on the upcoming posts, but I do have a forthcoming one that references angioplasty, colon cleansing, and intuition. And yes, there's a business point to it.

If you disagree, or agree, or whatever, feel free to comment on the posts, or send comments to the empoprises account that Gmail hosts.

If Twitter beat CNN, then perhaps we should refer to Johnny Orangeseed

Apples & Oranges - They Don't Compare by Michael Johnson (TheBusyBrain) used under a Creative Commons License

As I read my feeds today, I see that both Robert Scoble and the Inquisitr's Steven Hodson are loudly proclaiming that Twitter beat CNN in Iranian election coverage. Not exactly. Perhaps it's my extensive experience in the Facebook application Farm Town, but it appears that I, unlike Scoble and Hodson, am able to tell the difference between an apple and an orange.

Not that I'm perfect. I'll admit that I really haven't been following coverage of the Iranian election. Part of the reason, however, is because I admit my ignorance in Iranian politics. While I'm sure that many Americans are of the opinion "Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is bad, get him out," I haven't followed Iranian politics closely enough to know if his main opponent is any better. For all I know, Ahmadinejad is perceived as a wishy-washy apostate in Iran because Israel hasn't been nuked into oblivion yet. So if the US were to back Ahmadinejad's opponents, there's no guarantee that things would work out better for us. Just to cite one example, when Iran took U.S. hostages in 1979, the US eventually came up with the bright idea of backing Saddam Hussein. As Kuwaitis (and others, including Americans) will tell you, that didn't work out so well.

But while I haven't followed the ins and outs of Iranian domestic affairs, Robert Scoble has. He has a personal interest in Iran, and was following the news of the Iranian election on Twitter. Scoble:

Yesterday is the day when Twitter thoroughly beat CNN. Badly beat CNN. Embarrassingly beat CNN. And most other USA-based media too.

Scoble then links to various FriendFeed discussions, then jumps into the fire. OK, he didn't jump into the fire, he walked to a fire pit near his home:

My friend Luke Kilpatrick (he lives a couple of blocks away from me) invited me down to the Ritz at about 9 p.m. tonight. He met up there with a couple of geeks....

It was dark, so I couldn’t see who else was there around the fire ring out back.

Anyway, I was pretty passionate about this CNN story, since every hour we had been turning through the channels trying to learn about Iranian news (my wife is Iranian and hadn’t been able to call her relatives in Tehran). So I was telling Luke about how Twitter was totally kicking ass over CNN (CNN, when I kept turning it on, had nothing on and, instead was playing shows like Larry King Live with a couple of guys who build motorcycles).

That’s when I heard a voice say “what are you saying about Twitter?” I looked up and it’s Evan Williams, founder/CEO of Twitter. Oh, hi!

Anyway, I congratulated him on kicking USA’s media’s behind (CNN wasn’t the only one who wasn’t covering the Iranian protests).

Hodson continued the "Twitter beat CNN" thread:

These days though [CNN] seems to be all about some dumb beauty queen having her crown taken way or some other mundane bland repetitive non-news.

A perfect example of this is the recent events in Iran where the people are literally rioting on behalf of Mir Hossein Mousavi because of his unexpected loss to sitting president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, In this case the most current and reliable source of news coming out of the region has been on Twitter. Along with passing along news as it was happening in Iran there was also a growing movement of people calling CNN to task over their coverage of what could be a world changing event.

However, it is NOT accurate to compare Twitter and CNN, because Twitter and CNN are two entirely different types of things.

CNN (the abbreviation stands for Cable News Network) is, as the name implies, a media company with a television network and additional outlets such as its websites, and staffed by "almost 4,000" people. For more information about CNN, go here.

Twitter is not a media network. Twitter is not "staffed." Twitter is a tool that is used by millions of people. In fact, as Ashton Kutcher and Oprah Winfrey will happily tell you, one of those Twitter users is...@cnn. And @cnnbrk.

So to say that "Twitter beat CNN" is misleading. Twitter is not a single organized news reporting entity. Twitter is several million services, a few of which were reporting news, some of which were reporting inane stuff, and many of which were not reporting at all. Perhaps it's more accurate to say that some Twitter users were reporting more accurate news than the two Twitter users @cnn and @cnnbrk.

But in a sense a comparison between the two is apt, if you consider CNN the "experts" and Twitter a collection of "the wisdom of the crowd." I talked about this before, and perhaps it's appropriate to return to the issues raised there. One example provided in the post was David Risley's decision to seek Better Business Bureau approval for his online business. And I noted that there are times that you seek an authoritative source, and times that you don't:

[W]e can't decide whether we should trust the wisdom of the crowds, or the wisdom of a selection process. Those who argue for the latter would say that I should check with an authoritative source before doing business with David Risley, I should seek someone employed as a music journalist to evaluate music, I'd better take my car to the dealer that's certified to maintain it, I'd better buy software from a company that screens its employees, and I should trust the elected legislature to make decisions on my behalf.

But what about news? I am not ready to say that Twitter (the crowds) is always better than CNN in terms of news. If I were to believe what I read on Twitter, then I would believe that amassing large numbers of Twitter followers is the way to make lots of money. After all, that's what a lot of the social media experts say on Twitter. CNN doesn't happen to be breaking that story, Robert and Steven. Did CNN miss the boat on this, too?

OK, let's rule out the SEO junk. One could claim that a number of independent tweets about an event seems to indicate that the event is true. But is it? If that's the case, then Patrick Swayze died last month. Here's what Gawker wrote on May 19:

Patrick Swayze is alive and well, his spokesman has confirmed. How did false reports of his passing consume the internet for several hours today? Through the false rumor's vehicle of choice: Twitter....

But there's something about Twitter. Just last week it was the hotbed of a gay-marriage hysteria that fooled even the Los Angeles Times. A month earlier, it was #amazonfail, outrage over a gay-book ban that wasn't. (Although, repetition on Twitter is so powerful that there are some who still think there was something to that.)

Now I don't know if CNN reported the death of Patrick Swayze, or that Amazon banned gay books, or whatever. But Twitter, the same tool (and again, it's just a tool) that reported the Iranian riots, also reported the death of Patrick Swayze.

In essence, anyone can get the story wrong. CNN can get the story wrong, or thousands of Twitter users can get the story wrong. As Fox Mulder used to say, "Trust no one."

OK, Fox Mulder didn't say that. According to this source and this source, Deep Throat said it. But I'm not sure if the sources are correct.

It's all about the calculus - why Max Factor is leaving the United States

The Too-Much-Makeup Mannequin by Shawn Zehnder Lea (szlea) (Twitter) used under a Creative Commons License

I listen to a few podcasts here and there, but (with one exception - I mean two exceptions) the podcasts that I listen to are usually less than five minutes long. One of my favorite short podcasts is the early morning one from the Wall Street Journal, and they had an interesting story last Friday - Max Factor makeup will no longer be sold in the United States, but will continue to be sold in the rest of the world. Obviously a short podcast can't delve into the why's of something, but at least it alerts you to what's going on, which then allowed me to consult other sources, such as this Times of London post, which included a brief history of the company.

Max Factor himself was a Russian emigrant who created the makeup brand in 1909. The business remained in the Factor family until 1973, and Revlon sold Max Factor to Proctor & Gamble in 1991. However, two...um...factors are working against Max Factor in the United States these days:

Max Factor...unlike similarly priced rivals, is not stocked by big drug store chains, such as Walgreens and Rite Aid.

While you can buy cosmetics online, the product often tends to be sold in retail outlets. You have your department stores that sell the high-end cosmetics, with the people in white lab coats pushing whatever, and then you have the low end of the market, a segment where Max Factor apparently isn't participating.

Proctor & Gamble does offer another cosmetic line, Cover Girl. And Max Factor outsells Cover Girl in the United States. So why is P&G discontinuing the better-selling brand? Because, if you look at the trends (or, for techies, the calculus) of the two brands, Cover Girl appears to be the better long-term buy:

At present in the US, Max Factor outsells CoverGirl, with $1.2 billion in sales each year, against $1 billion for its newer rival. However, CoverGirl has increased its US market share every year for the past seven years while Max Factor has stagnated.

So what happens now? Do desperate American Max Factor fans write to their European fans and ask them to ship some cosmetics out our way? This is what the U.S. Food and Drug Administration says:

Cosmetic products imported into the United States are subject to the same laws and regulations as those produced in the United States. They must be safe for their intended uses and contain no prohibited ingredients, and all labeling and packaging must be informative and truthful, with the labeling information in English (or Spanish in Puerto Rico). All color additives must be approved by FDA; many cannot be used unless certified in FDA's own laboratories. If the product has an intended use that causes it to be considered a drug, it must comply with the requirements for drugs, it must comply with the requirements for drugs, including establishment registration and drug listing.

As long as P&G doesn't change the formula, and the FDA doesn't change the regulations, this in itself doesn't appear to be a problem. Something legally sold in the United States in 2009 should theoretically be legal to be sold in the United States in 2010. But the products have to get here, which means that an entity such as the U.S. Postal Service comes into play:

Hazardous materials come in a wide variety of forms and can be chemical, biological, radioactive, or a combination thereof. If a material or substance can cause harm to someone or something, it can be considered a hazardous material.

The Postal Service’s definition of a hazardous material includes many common household and consumer products. These items may not be hazardous during normal use or storage in your home but can present a significant hazard when placed in the mail due to vibration, temperature changes, and variations in atmospheric pressure.

The first two items on the Postal Services' list? Perfumes and nail polish.

Oops.

Thoughts on span of control

Free 3D Business Men Marching Concept by Scott Maxwell (lumaxart) (blog, web) used under a Creative Commons License

I know that a lot of people like to talk about Dunbar's number (and Scoble's number), but in business a much more important number is represented by the concept of span of control. A November 1993 article by George Hattrup defined the concept as follows:

The span of control, or span of management, refers to the number of persons who report to one superior and includes the functions of planning, organizing and leading.

One way to illustrate span of control is by looking at the organization of a football team. For simplicity's sake, let's concentrate on the players and the coaching staff. According to current NFL rules (again, made in 1993), an NFL roster consists of 53 players during the regular season - with fewer on game day, but for most of the week there are 53 players that need to be managed.

These are managed by a coaching staff. As I write this, the head coach of the Washington Redskins is Jim Zorn. But he's not entirely responsible for all 53 players; he has an offensive coordinator (Sherman Smith) and a defensive coordinator (Greg Blache). But that's not the entire coaching staff:

Jim Zorn Head Coach
Greg Blache Defensive Coordinator
Sherman Smith Offensive Coordinator
Joe Bugel Offensive Line
Stump Mitchell Assistant Head Coach / Running Backs
Stan Hixon Wide Receivers
Scott Wachenheim Tight Ends
Chris Meidt Offensive Assistant
John Palermo Defensive Line
Kirk Olivadotti Linebackers
Jerry Gray Secondary-Cornerbacks
Steve Jackson Safeties
Danny Smith Special Teams Coordinator
Bill Khayat Quality Control-Offense
Chip Garber Quality Control-Defense
John Hastings Head Strength/Conditioning
Bobby Crumpler Assistant Strength/Conditioning
Harrison Bernstein Assistant Strength/Conditioning

Now I don't have access to the Redskins' organizational chart, but I'm pretty sure that only some of these people report directly to Zorn - probably the offensive and defensive coordinators, the special teams coordinator, and the head of strength and conditioning. If my assumption is right (and it probably isn't), Zorn directly manages four people. At the same time Smith probably manages Bugel, Mitchell, Hixon, Wachenheim, Meidt, and possibly Khayat.

Is this the right number for a football head coach, or football offensive coordinator, to manage? People have thought about this in the general business environment, according to Hattrup:

Historically, the concern over span of control was based on the idea that some optimal number of manageable subordinates should exist. Researchers in the past, such as Col. Urwick, stated that the optimal span of control was five or six. This as based on the assumption that managers have a limited span of attention, energy and time. If a manager was responsible for more than five or six subordinates, it was felt that the manager would loose track of what was happening. This was illustrated mathematically by A. V. Graicumas, whose work indicated that the number of potential interactions with subordinates will increase geometrically with respect to the manager's increasing span of control. For example, the addition of a fifth subordinate raises potential interactions from 44 to 100. Likewise, the addition of an eighth subordinate moves the potential from 490 to 1,080.

But there have been other studies:

The results of a 1952 study done by the American Management Association indicate that the median span of control for presidents of large companies (over 5,000 employees) is eight to nine with a range of up to 24. Presidents of medium-sized firms (500 to 5,000 employees) were found to have a median span of control of about seven and the range varied from three to 17. However, another recent analysis discloses a much narrower span of control in the middle levels of management than at the top. The president of the United States has more than 100 people who supposedly report directly to him. Since history suggests that he does not always know what White House personnel are doing, this number appears to be too large.

Hattrup ends up questioning the idea of a single number, noting that effective spans of control can vary according to different situations (e.g. stable vs. dynamic environments, issues regarding certain professionals such as doctors and engineers, etc.). In addition, Hattrup noted that span of control choices also affect the overall organization (e.g. small spans of control lead to more management levels between the top and the bottom). And if you believe one study, it may also affect profitability (other than the increased costs from smaller spans of control):

A study done by Sears, Roebuck and Co. provides evidence to support [large spans of control]....At one group of stores, managers were assigned a relatively large number of subordinates by decreasing one level of middle management. Because of the large spans of control, detailed supervision was impossible. Analyses of sales volume, management competence, profit and morale all indicated that the stores with the wide span of control were superior in every way to those stores that were more conventionally organized.

It's clear that Harttrup is a fan of larger spans of control, and from his perspective in 1993, he predicted "[s]pans of control reaching 50 to 70 will not be uncommon." Well, that was 1993. I haven't seen such spans of control in practice (granted, I've worked for somewhat traditional companies), and we've already seen that the Washington Redskins team doesn't have such a span of control. Then again, I'm forced to admit that the Redskins have not ben excelling as of late...

Can certification DECREASE salaries? (part three)

Follow-up.

We've seen that as a certification becomes more common in an industry, hiring managers begin to assume that the certification is present, and the additional value of the certification decreases. Perhaps this can be illustrated by the following timeline:

• Initially, when Joe says, "I have the X Certification!" hiring managers will say "The what?"


• Eventually, the HR magazines or consultants will start talking about the importance of the X Certification, so when Joe says, "I have the X Certification!" hiring managers will say "WOW!" and start to drool.


• Time passes, everyone gets the X Certification, and it becomes commoditized. Now, when Joe says, "I have the X Certification!" hiring managers will simply nod, "That's nice."


• Eventually the X Certification becomes yesterday's news, and is even considered irrelevant by some. Now, when Joe says, "I have the X Certification!" hiring managers will reply, "And I have a quill pen. Why did you waste your time getting the X Certification? You do have the Y Certification, don't you?"

Of course, any commoditization of a certification takes some time, so it's a matter of judging where you are on the timeline. Is certification X a relatively new cert that few people have, or is it a cert that everyone has?

Now regarding product management certifications, one can argue that they're relatively new, and that certification is therefore early on the timeline. However, Marty Cagan claims that it's TOO early to start certifying product managers, at least in technical fields:

I believe it is premature to have certification for our field, and that having a certification at this stage actually hinders the progress that is so critically needed. I have five key reasons for this view:

First, let’s please all admit that as an industry and a profession, product management is nowhere near the science that we wish it was....

Second, internet software product management is not like product management for a new type of laundry soap....Too many people mistakenly believe that they can leverage the same tools and processes from the packaged goods world....

Third, I argue that there is no single product management model that makes sense for all product software companies....A certification that effectively encourages a product manager to try to fit a square peg in a round hole is not helpful to the team or the product manager.

Fourth, mostly these certifications aren’t even covering product management in the sense that tech companies need, which is all about product discovery; instead they’re really much more about what most Internet companies would consider product marketing....

Finally, and most important, I argue that teaching and certification of old and failed techniques simply works to institutionalize the bad practices.

Reasonable people can disagree over whether a product management certification, or any certification, provides true value to an organization.

Can certification DECREASE salaries? (part two)

Follow-up.

In a comment to a prior post on the ROI of certification for product managers, David Locke proceeded through a scenario regarding the ROI. After noting that certification can establish itself in an industry, become a minimum requirement to work in the industry, and prevent otherwise talented people from working in the industry, Locke continued to explore the ramifications of this.

Eventually, the PM job will move overseas.

Well, why not? If product management expertise is captured by a set of quantifiable certification requirements, and if someone in Beijing or Bangalore meets the same requirements as someone in Brea or Beverly Hills, wouldn't it make sense to hire the lower-cost worker who equally satisfies the requirements?

Locke continues:

So goes commoditization, which certification is a sure sign of. "Hey, I passed the test, so I'm a PM," NOT.

Locke then states:

Looking at the PMI cert, it certainly commoditized project managers.

A lot of this depends upon supply and demand, but this 2007 item from Monster indicates that project management certifications may be a commodity:

According to a survey by Foote Partners, a management consultancy and IT workforce research firm, pay for 143 IT certifications continued a downward slide, falling an average of 2 percent in the six months ending December 31, 2006. That was compared to pay for 127 noncertified IT skills, which increased 2.3 percent over the same period.

“Pay for certifications has been on the decline for some time,” says David Foote, CEO and chief research officer for Foote Partners. “It’s not that employers aren’t willing to pay a premium for them, but instead, the prices they are willing to pay versus noncertified skills is nowhere near the levels of one to two years ago, or even six months ago for that matter.”...

For 2006, the survey found pay premiums increasing for certifications in Web development (up 3.6 percent), but declining for certifications in databases (down 4.6 percent), project management (down 2.7 percent), system administration and engineering/network operating systems (down 1.9 percent), and applications and programming languages (down 3.6 percent)....

Supply and demand may also play a role in determining what a certification is worth on the job market. Jim Henderson, who writes a blog on certification and serves as the global manager of instructor programs at Novell, says that if too many people hold a certification, that certification may become a commodity and lose value. “Being one of a million is a way of getting your foot in the door,” he says. “Being one in a million is a way to actually get the job.” Noting that his views are his own and do not reflect Novell’s official position, he adds, “If a certification sets a high bar, then it helps you stand out from the pack.”

Dice records the results of a subsequent Foote survey:

On average, premium pay for more than160 types of IT certification skills declined for the seventh straight period in the first quarter of 2008, according to David Foote, chief research officer for Foote Partners LLC. The Vero Beach, Fla., research firm's quarterly IT Skills and Certifications Pay Index examines compensation for individual IT skills and certifications earned by about 22,000 professionals in the U.S. and Canada.

The company found the average premium for certifications showed an overall decline of 1.6 percent during the six months ending March 2008, and a 2.9 percent year-on-year decrease.

And Dice noted that one hiring manager was moving away from certifications, and toward the old minimum requirement - a college education:

Linda Carey Johnson, CIO for Sacramento's Municipal Utility District, says some workers entered the technology industry during the dot-com boom without college degrees, using certifications as a counterbalance. "I just had someone with a ton of certifications and we said, 'You have to earn a degree,'" she says. "We focus more on degrees than certifications."

So what does this mean?

Continued.

Can certification DECREASE salaries? (part one)

This is a follow-up to a post that I wrote following a webinar that examined product management. The webinar, delivered by Therese Padilla of the Association of International Product Marketing & Management (AIPMM), covered a lot of territory, but briefly touched on the issue of product management certification. As I noted in the earlier post, Trevor Rotzein asked if there was any statistical evidence supporting a positive return on investment (ROI) for product management certification.

When discussing the topic, I noted that it's important to distinguish the ROI that you're examining. There is the ROI for a product manager that pays for certification, and there's the ROI for an organization that pays to get its product managers certified. At the time, I assumed (based upon personal experience) that certification provides a positive ROI for a product manager, but that it was unclear whether an organization could realize (or even identify) benefits from certified product managers.

David Locke (@davidwlocke) provided a comment that got my mental wheels turning. Here are portions of Locke's comment:

A PM certification will be the keyword that HR latches on to. So eventually, all PMs will be certified.

This type of behavior is not surprising. The main job of HR is to whittle down a stack of hundreds or thousands of applications to something more reasonable, and the best way to do that is to set minimum criteria for the job. Don't have a college degree? Don't have five years' experience? Don't have a PM certification? Well, that narrows down the pile of resumes.

Ideally, one could argue that the minimum job criteria are critical to the job, and that it makes sense to disqualify people who don't meet the minimum criteria.

Back to Locke.

In the meantime, some very good PMs will not find work absent the keyword.

The hope, of course, is that you've chosen the right minimum job criteria. And an argument can be made that a "very good PM" who isn't certified may not be so good after all. One of Padilla's four points about certification is that certification indicates proof of commitment - if I don't bother to get certified, does that indicate that I don't really care about my job? That I don't adapt to changing circumstances?

So, eventually certification takes hold and becomes a minimum requirement for a product management job. Locke then made a statement that threw me...

Continued.

Nothing is real? Behind the reality show business, and revisiting a reality show pioneer

View behind the Camera by Tahmid Munaz (~{Imaginative Dreamer™}~) used under a Creative Commons License

As television networks have encountering mounting production costs, one of the programming alternatives which has been attractive has been reality shows. But in France, the costs of the reality shows, both from a monetary and a perception point of view, have just gotten higher:

The highest court in France ruled last week that contestants on the French version of the reality television show “Temptation Island” were entitled to employment contracts and financial compensation — just as professional actors would be....

[T]he decision prompted laments from French broadcasters, worried that it might put a damper on reality television and other programs that rely on amateurs, like talent shows or game shows, by making them more costly and cumbersome to produce.

The producer of the show in question (which ended in 2008) had a solution for the cost issue:

Edouard Boccon-Gibod, president of the production arm of TF1, the channel that produced and broadcast “L’Isle de la Tentation,” said that paying performers would not be a big problem for producers, because they could be given the minimum wage.

Now if I recall correctly, contestants on American reality shows ARE paid some type of minimal stipend. But there's a bit of a wrinkle in French employment law that not only causes trouble for French reality show producers, but also exposes a bit about so-called reality shows:

A bigger problem may be abiding by strict French work rules. Reality-show participants, he said, will now be limited to 48 hours of work a week. The country’s 35-hour workweek can be exceeded for short periods.

During the 12 days in which “L’Isle de la Tentation” took place, participants supposedly were being monitored by cameras nonstop, though Mr. Boccon-Gibod said that in fact they were expected to be available for only four to seven hours a day.

“Nobody worked 24 hours a day,” he said. “They were resting and having fun on the beach.”

So something that is presented as continuous gamesmanship is anything but. However, Big Brother USA live feed purchasers, and those who read the transcripts of live feeds, know that the same thing happens here. For example, here are some jokersupdates.com comments about something said by one of the house guests on August 21, 2002:

Aug 21 2002 18:22, Wed Lola Forum: 082102 Post: 55849

M just said address www.arlenewilson.com, FOH for sec, then it comes back and hd says I need bookings NT

For those who have never read Big Brother live feeds, I should explain that "FOH" means "front of house." Basically, if you paid the money to get the Big Brother live feeds, that didn't guarantee that you'd get every single thing that went on in the house. Big Brother producers would occasionally cut the feed, switching to a view of the front of the Big Brother house. So why did this particular conversation get edited?

Aug 21 2002 19:28, Wed ballistic Forum: 082102 Post: 56004

Arlene Wilson's is a modeling/talent agency based in the midwest. They book throughout Wisconsin and Illinois. More.

A little showbiz tidbit about Ms. Wilson and her family. She is(was)Kiefer Sutherland's mother-in-law. I believe Kiefer divorced Ms. Stoddardt(daughter of Milwaukee T.V. personality Hank Stoddard and Arlene Wilson.

Yup, the contestants on reality shows - you know, Bill the ex-Marine from Tampa or whatever - actually spend some of their time talking about agents, their next gig, or whatever. Let's face it, the only people who are going to put themselves through a reality show experience are those who want to make a career out of it. For example, here are excerpts from a where are they now page regarding several of the Big Brother USA Season 2 houseguests:

Sheryl Braxton battled her cancer and won, and is now looking to pursue a career in entertainment, in front or behind the camera....

Mike Malin (Carri)...recently appeared on Battle of the Network Reality Stars and lost. He appeared on Big Brother All-Stars and won.

Krista Stegall...moved to Beverly Hills for a year. She landed a commercial with Nextel, so she stayed for a while. Next, she moved to Lafayette, LA to do a morning show at KSMB...."I will also be in Nashville and Coco Beach and then in Canada, then I'm going to be in a reality horror film."

Hardy-Ames Hill recently appeared in "Cross Bones", a movie populated by reality TV stars, and was previously in "Summer Desire" (porn). He also has been acting on TV shows in smaller parts....He was seen on "South Beach" on January 11th, 2006.

Monica Bailey is still pursuing an acting career in N.Y. and L.A. and has been seen "behind the scenes" doing other work as well. She was co-host of Rent Wars, a TV show. She left to "go back to Hollywood".

Nicole Nilson-Schaffrich...was working on...a cooking show with Jason Guy named "Reality Dish", which I don't think it ever made it to air, and she was working as a disc jockey at Q100 in Atlanta, but apparently isn't any longer.

But the one who really used his fame was Big Brother 2's winner, Dr. Will Kirby. He's certainly done his reality bit:

[Kirby] has been pitching reality show ideas, appeared on Battle of the Network Reality Stars, hosted a reality show originally named "Love Shack" but later renamed "Perfect Partners" (which never aired in the US), was a medical correspondent for eXTRA, appeared on lots of reality TV "expose" shows, appeared as himself on "Cold Turkey"....He recently appeared on Battle of the Network Reality Stars and lost.

But Kirby, who of course had a career as a doctor, has continued to pursue that line of work.

[He] is still a doctor in California and Florida (in fact he's Chief Resident in CA and a AOCD Koprince Award Winner and has been writing articles for dermatalogical publications).

I assume that it's common knowledge that a good portion of reality show contestants had entertainment careers before joining reality shows, and that many more of them pursued entertainment careers after leaving reality shows. As you can see above, some of them end up having a reality show career for a while.

But most of the original reality show family, the Loud family, took a different route - at least as of 1990, seventeen years after "An American Family" originaly aired in 1973. Current.org:

"I'm amused,'' said Lance Loud, who now lives in Los Angeles. "It's no big deal. We have nothing to sell or promote because of it,'' he said, adding that he has not seen the 12-hour documentary since its original broadcast on public television....

The members of the Loud family reacted differently to the pending re-broadcast, Raymond said. Pat and younger sons Grant and Kevin are "very distraught,'' he said. Lance is pleased, while Bill and daughters Michelle and Delilah "don't care one way or another,'' he added.

The series "seems to have had a traumatic effect'' on Pat Loud, Raymond said. "If she had the chance to do it again, she would not do it,'' he said.

Now it should be noted that the Loud family were pioneers in this sort of thing, and hardly anybody realized exactly what could happen. Certainly someone in 1973 wouldn't think about making a career out of reality shows, because you couldn't make a career out of reality shows. Well, one person did sort of pursue an entertainment career: Lance Loud, the eldest son who came out during filming. PBS:

Having his life scrutinized on television had its benefits and it burdens. Loud, emerging as a gay icon overnight, became a television star simply by being himself, and for a time he reaped the benefits of fame, becoming a rock and roll performer and, later, a writer and columnist for Interview, American Film, Details and The Advocate. On the other hand, Loud's most famous quote was "Television ate my family," referring to scars left on the Louds after having their lives laid bare before a national audience. In the end, Loud reportedly found that celebrity was hollow. Nothing could ever measure up to that initial burst of notoriety and he spent years trying to find himself again, struggling through substance abuse and other dark episodes.

Fast-forward to the 21st century, when Lance Loud contracted both hepatitis and HIV. It was a different world, and Lance decided to go before the cameras again with a different message.

Several months before his death, Loud asked Alan and Susan Raymond, the Academy Award-winning filmmakers of the original An American Family series, to film a final episode in the Loud story. The Raymonds had remained friends with the Loud family after the 1973 series and a 1983 follow-up, American Family Revisited. The Raymonds' new film, Lance Loud! A Death In An American Family, both commemorates the 30th anniversary of the original series broadcast and explores Loud's legacy by looking back at scenes from the original documentary, examining the intervening years of Loud's life and spending time with him in his final months.

So why did Lance Loud, and (with one exception) the rest of his family appear before the cameras one more time?

Near the end of his life he wrote, "Make no mistake. This is not to emphasize the sadness of my demise but rather emphasize the love of my family and friends. When my time comes up, I want to be filmed because life this past year has taught me so much. I also stand as a role model as to what not to do in one's life."

Sometimes reality television can be real.

Sweet! (CHAD Sweet.) Revisiting the Chertoff Group

Homeland Security by Derek Purdy used under a Creative Commons License

My analytics show a spike in hits related to Chad Sweet, who is an associate of former U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. I blogged about Sweet and Chertoff's new venture on March 30, but at the time the Chertoff Group's website was not ready for prime time (or, for security folks, "3 am"). It is now.

Interestingly enough, the contents of the website are very compartmentalized. Rather than getting one view of the services they provide, you need to go to separate pages for risk management, crisis management, and merger and acquisition advice. Similarly, there are separate biographies for each of the principals. I wonder if this website organization is a holdover from the principals' security experience, in which people are only told what they need to know and operations are kept separate to prevent leaks and contamination.

So anyways, since my readers seem to be interested in Chad C. Sweet, I took a peek at his biography. Excerpts:

At the Department of Homeland Security, Chad Sweet worked directly with Secretary Michael Chertoff to restructure and optimize the flow of information between the CIA, FBI and other members of the national security community and DHS. Mr. Sweet also supported the Secretary during numerous operations to detect, disrupt and respond to terrorist plots both in the United States and overseas, including the August 2006 US/UK liquid explosives plot, the March 2007 Fort Dix Six plot, the June 2007 JFK Aiport plot and other incidents that remain classified.

No mention of the Madrid train bombing, but that investigation was not primarily a DHS one, but one from another agency. But his earlier resume is interesting. Check this:

After having helped to fight the threat of Communism during his tenure at the CIA, Mr. Sweet left the Agency in the early 90s and began a career in finance.

I'll grant that Sweet left finance several years ago, but there's a bit of irony inasmuch as the finance sector is becoming significantly dependent on government handouts. For purist capitalists, that sounds like Communism invading the country from within.

Back to today. I never did figure out why there was a sudden surge of interest in Chad Sweet, but I did find this April interview with Michael Chertoff in which he discussed the Chertoff Group.

[R]ight now it’s myself as chairman and founding principal, Mike Hayden, Paul Schneider who was, as you know, my deputy before that was head of acquisition for NSA and the Navy in the Clinton administration, Admiral Jay Cohen, who was head of technology and before that head of technology for the Navy, and Charlie Allen, of course, who was our head of intelligence and before that was pretty much head of everything you could be for the CIA and was head of national collections. Finally, Chad Sweet, who was my chief of staff, a former Goldman Sachs banker and before that a government person, is our chief operating officer. A person who is hands-on and chief of operations.

The idea is that we wanted to bring together a really unparalleled team of experienced homeland security architects and people who could look at the issue of homeland security as broadly as possible, including the intelligence side, the acquisition side, the technology side, the policy side and the operations side. And among the six of us we pretty much have all of those things in DHS, in DoD, and the Department of Justice, law enforcement and finally, in the intelligence community. So we have pretty much every element of homeland security covered.

Well, every element of homeland security except for private sector experience - it appears that Sweet is the only one with significant private sector knowledge, and even that was only gained in a decade between two government stints. Let's face it - it sounds like I have more homeland security private sector experience than any one principal in the Chertoff Group. (Not that I'm submitting my resume to them or anything.)

But then again, that's how the government game is played these days - when dealing with the government, experience in working with the government is much more important than experience in working with the private sector.

Again, for purist capitalists, that sounds like Communism invading the country from within.

From #pmv #prodmgmt seminar, preliminary thoughts on the returns on investment on certification

Jotting down quick thoughts, will probably assemble into something more coherent later -

I attended a webinar by Therese Padilla of the Association of International Product Marketing & Management (AIPMM) which discussed, among other things, the benefits of certification for product managers. While Padilla was not solely speaking about AIPMM certification, it's obvious that Padilla would be positively inclined toward a certification process, in the same way that Jack Welch (we'll see him later) would be positively inclined toward light bulbs.

However, on Twitter, Trevor Rotzien raised a question regarding certification:

#pmv However, I've not seen statistical evidence for the ROI of certification in #prodmgmt. Anyone out there who has?

Here's Val Workman's reply:

@trevorrotzien I have never read a book that I didn't get an ROI from #pmv #prodmgmt

And Matt Shandera also weighed in:

@trevorrotzien Great question. I have seen several job posts requesting #prodmgmt certs and the value personally for me #pmv

But these examples talk about personal ROI. I tweeted about another aspect of ROI that should be considered:

@trevorrotzien re roi of certification, i assume you're talking about roi to organization. roi to person is positive. #pmv #prodmgmt

And perhaps I'm assuming too much about a positive personal ROI of certification, but I've experienced this in my own life - the first example that comes to mind was the job interview (and job) that I got because of my MBA.

But does an ORGANIZATION benefit from having a certified product manager? And if it does, how do you quantify this for the organization's benefit? (Remember that these are the same organizations that are cutting travel, something that some product managers feel is cutting them off from vital information from their customers.)

But back to the ROI of product management certification. Mack McCoy linked to a discussion of this topic. I'll follow up on this when I get a chance.

To be continued...

P.S. As long as I'm mentioning Mack McCoy, I want to think him for sending me the link to a Jack Welch quote that was briefly referenced by Therese Padilla in her webinar. The quote:

Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.

P.P.S. Here is the text that I submitted in the post-webinar evaluation:

The webinar worked well. My only problems were problems that were inherent in Twitter itself. However, while other applications (e.g. FriendFeed) are better suited to conversations, one can't argue against Twitter's popularity.

[8:15 PM - I DELVED INTO THIS A LITTLE MORE. PARTS ONE, TWO, AND THREE.]

Big companies have a lot of stuff - more details about Oracle and Sun

Proving again how little I know, this Oracle-Sun deal continues to turn up potential issues.

When I first blogged about this on April 20, I noted:

Perhaps Oracle has acquired a hardware vendor before and I've missed it, but this is still unusual. More importantly than hardware, however, Oracle now owns Java.

A little later, someone mentioned that Oracle would now potentially own MySQL. Now this got interesting.

Fast-forward to June 9, and Brian "Bex" Huff pointed out another ramification:

Oracle -- as you know -- plans on purchasing Sun and all their Java-licious technology. This includes the open source Glassfish application server, which is a free competitor to Weblogic, which Oracle obtained in the Sun acquisition... and they both competed with OC4J, which was Oracle's application server prior to 2008.

Huff then made the understatement of the year - well, the understatement of the moment, until Oracle acquires Microsoft or Canada or something:

I -- along with everybody else -- am very curious to see how all this plays out...

Indeed.

This is a truism whenever a large company acquires another large company - or, for that matter, even when a small company acquires another small company. The acquiring entity is interested in the acquisition for reason X, but also knows, even before the acquisition, that there are some side effects to the acquisition. And AFTER the acquisition, when the two entities are free to talk to each other, is when you REALLY learn all sorts of stuff.

Perhaps Charles Phillips and Safra Katz didn't realize that Glassfish would be part of the deal. Perhaps they didn't care and figured they'd work it out later. Or perhaps they have a super-secret plan to rebrand MySQL and Glassfish as some type of entry-level suite.

So what's a lower grade of oracle - a soothsayer?

Why blogging when you know nothing is good

John Banner as Schultz via Wikipedia

If you haven't figured it out already, a lot of my blogging concerns things that I know nothing, or hardly anything, about. As I learn a little bit about the stuff, I write about it and share it with you. For example, I have written about the mechanics of podcasting, content filtering software, Better Business Bureau accreditation, and Rajeev Motwani, all within the last few days. But I learned through the act of writing, and hopefully some of my readers did also.

It's good to know that I'm not the only person using a blog as an exploratory vehicle. Dave Winer recently announced that he was co-founding a blog entitled In Berkeley. When Winer described the new venture in a post in his blog, he said something that I found interesting:

To me, having lived here only three years, most of what I know about Berkeley is how much I don't know about Berkeley. But having a blank page to fill in is one of my favorite things.

When someone approaches the situation with a fresh set of eyes, the reader gets to share in the joy (or sorrow) that the writer is experiencing. As long as the writer doesn't try to claim expertise that he/she doesn't have, everyone can benefit from the writing/reading experience.

So don't wait until you're an expert before you write something. Trust me, if people waited to acquire expertise, our libraries would mostly be empty.

Rob Salkowitz and FriendFeed's "sketchy" future - is the sky falling?

If you want to get someone's attention, tell them something that affects them deeply. Tell an Apple lover that the iPhone will have new features when/if AT&T gets around to allowing them. Tell a Dodgers fan that Manny Ramirez is on maternity leave. Tell me that FriendFeed's future is "sketchy."

That word was used in an email that I received from Internet Evolution.

Social aggregators like Friendfeed offer unprecedented convenience, but their future in the social media ecosystem is sketchy

The email linked to the June 3 post Social Aggregators: Web 2.0's New Trick. The series examines not only FriendFeed, but also Ping.fm, MyBlogLog, and Plaxo. Concentrating on the aggregation facilities (rather than the community facilities) and also throwing Google Wave into the mix, the post concentrates on the ease of creating an aggregation facility:

Technologically, many aggregator sites are little more than glorified RSS feedreaders, cobbling together a bunch of APIs to push and pull content from the underlying services inside a configurable Web interface. This simplicity means that the opportunity to compete on unique features for more than an instant is practically nil, and there is no ability to lock users into the platform in any meaningful way.

And if you follow Rob Salkowitz's argument that the real value in aggregators is in data mining, then it makes sense to go to the biggest data mine - in this case, Facebook. Or the most-connected one:

[I]f the aggregator landscape sorts itself out and Google doesn't crush everything in its path, the winning aggregator will probably enter into agreements with the underlying providers that protect its dominant position in exchange for revenue sharing. The dominant aggregator will probably also be a prime target for acquisition by Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) or a big media company -- assuming it is not owned by one of them already.

Now my initial reaction as a FriendFeed fanboy is to stand on my soapbox and scream, "FRIENDFEED IS NOT AN AGGREGATOR! FRIENDFEED IS A HOST OF COMMUNITIES! FRIENDFEED SUPPORTS DISCUSSION!" And, if I were honest with myself, most if not all of the other services are also more than simple aggregators, allowing different types of user interaction with the material from the feeds. But can you make money off of interaction and discussion? Perhaps you can if the eyeballs somehow fit into your monetization plan.

Ah, FriendFeed's monetization plan. I addressed that in my contrarian post of May 26:

Many people, myself included, have been critical of Twitter's delay in announcing its monetization strategy. I have maintained that a monetization strategy needs to be addressed quickly, since monetization affects many other issues. A Twitter subscription service, for example, would dictate lower traffic than a free-to-use Twitter service funded by advertisements. Yet while people have been complaining up and down about Twitter's failure to monetize itself, there has been a strange silence about FriendFeed's monetization plans, if any. Are they going to wait a few years before they hire a product manager to figure a monetization strategy out?

I should note the reply from Rob Nelson (guruvan):

monetization - it has been a long standing tradition in the internet industry to wait to announce a monetization strategy until a dedicated userbase has been established. Why should FriendFeed be any different than, say, Google? (from which the founders come!)

If Nelson is correct, then FriendFeed (and, for that matter, the other services) still have some time to announce their monetization strategies. But if Salkowitz is correct, then the "aggregation" service that jumps out ahead with a working monetization strategy will leave the others in the dust.

So...who's right?

Listener, you need to turn down your radio! Observing the mechanics of podcasting

I have reached new heights of wishi-washiness, as it were. I won't get into the details now, but one of the themes that has been emphasized in MANY of my blogs is that it's best not to make a definitive statement, because a few minutes after you make that definitive statement, it will immediately become invalid. But now I've reached new heights - a statement has become invalid before I technically made it in the first place.

As I've mentioned previously, I often write posts in advance and schedule them for later posting. In one of these future posts, I originally wrote:

I listen to a few podcasts here and there, but (with one exception) the podcasts that I listen to are usually less than five minutes long.

By the time you actually see the post, that "one exception" will become "two exceptions." (Of course, by the time you see the post, it may have become three....)

Late Sunday night/Monday morning, Jesse Stay shared this post at his Stay N' Alive blog:

I’ve finally decided to bite the bullet and go forward with a dream I’ve had for awhile. Monday (today), June 8, 2009 at 8:30PM [MDT] I’ll be recording my first, yet-to-be-named podcast under the Stay N’ Alive Productions umbrella. We’ll broadcast the recording live on Ustream on my SocialGeek channel at http://ustream.tv/channel/thesocialgeek.

I'm not going to discuss the content of the podcast here (which was good - Jesse had some good guests, including Louis Gray and Kirk Yuhnke, Tech Junkie). I'm going to talk about the mechanics of a live podcast. Because, while I've been known to opine about podcast playback software, I don't know anything about actually PRODUCING a podcast. Live. And in that respect, Stay's experience was educational for me.

First off, this was (to my recollection) the first time that I had ever watched a live podcast, with the exception of those that are produced by people who do this for a living. (Because Ffundercats' live show occurs while I am commuting, I listen to it after the fact.) While Stay is a respected technologist, he is not a podcaster by trade. And he bit off a lot in his first podcast, when you think about it:

• First off, you need the local setup so that the viewers can see and hear you. Stay had a camera and a microphone. Check.


• Next, you need the software that captures your image and voice. I'm not sure what Stay ended up using, but he obviously had that.


• Third, you need a service that will allow the rest of us to see and hear what's going on. Stay uses Ustream, as he noted in his blog post.

Sounds easy, huh? Well, let's throw something else into the equation.

• Kirk Yuhnke was also involved in the podcast, and he was at another location in the Salt Lake City area. So he had to have the audio and video setup, and he and Jesse needed a service that would allow Kirk's audio and video to be accessible to Stay.


• Stay then needed to bring Yuhnke's audio into the podcast.


• Plus, at selected times, Stay needed to insert Yuhnke's video - for example, when Kirk was holding his new Palm Pre.

Oh, and as they DIDN'T say at the Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, "one more thing":

• Louis Gray was also involved in the podcast, and he was way over here California way. Audio video, share with Jesse, bla bla bla.


• Bring the Gray audio in, bla bla bla.


• So now that you have three people in the podcast, it would be great if you could integrate video from all three of them into the podcast at the same time.

Again, all of this is no sweat if you do this for a living. When Yuhnke goes to work, they do this all the time. When Leo LaPorte wants to do this, he's had a ton of experience in it.

Well, as it turns out, the audience for Stay's podcast consisted of technologists and semi-technologists, people who realized all the work that goes into this. And some of them sympathized - nay, emphasized - with Stay as it took him a few minutes to get everything up and running. (jeff)isageek, for one, realized that the mechanics of a podcast are not a trivial matter:

we are bearing - (jeff)isageek

it happens to everyone jesse - (jeff)isageek

skype decides to always mess up when you really need it to work :) i have learned doing the social geeks podcast - (jeff)isageek

must feel good to hang up on louis gray :) - (jeff)isageek

everyone knows what louis gray looks like we dont need to see his face :) - (jeff)isageek

But after a few minutes everything was set, all were on audio, Stay was fading in images of Gray and Yuhnke as needed, and he even showed a video during the podcast (the Palm Pre Part 2 video that you can see here).

Now a confession of my own - I couldn't figure out how to link directly to that video. But Stay was linked to it during the podcast (he brought it up to show it). But I think this is it.



If this is the wrong video, then I guess I'll have to edit this post again.

Now I've spent a lot of time discussing the mechanics of the podcast, but the most important part of any podcast is the content. In this case, Stay, Yuhnke, and Gray discussed the launch of the Palm Pre, as well as Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference. Stay tuned to http://staynalive.com/ to find out when the edited version of the podcast is available. The unedited version is available here.

P.S. The phrase "Listener, you need to turn down your radio!" has nothing to do with Jesse Stay, Kirk Yuhnke, or Louis Gray. It was taken from another podcast.