On consultants

From a piece written by Dr. Tom Sant. Presented without comment.

[I]t’s in the consultant’s self-interest to make the buying process as complex as possible and to minimize the meaningful differences among vendors. The consultants prefer to keep the vendors at arm’s length from the actual customer and to focus the customer’s attention mainly on the consultant’s ability to manipulate a huge amount of data. That’s why the RFPs they issue are so complex....

But what happens when a consultant is a recipient of an RFP? Geoffrey Day:

When seeking someone to solve a complex internal problem, attempts to standardize complicated, subjective qualities such as intuitiveness, decision-making prowess and other consultative intangibles, can cause project results to turn out less than adequate, even downright unacceptable. In fact, attempting to force narrow specifications on the process of finding or hiring a consultant can doom the chances of project success, souring such companies on consultants in general and further tightening their specifications for future projects.

That’s why in most cases the best response to the unsolicited RFP is to first scan it to see if you (the consultant) remotely qualify. Then (when you don’t) you should "respond" by tossing it away or sending it on to someone who does. In the event that you DO qualify, special steps can be taken to win the RFP, though these actions may well be outside the bounds of the conventional RFP process.

Again, presented without comment.

(empo-utoobd) When social companies become anti-social - who you gonna call at Google?

I've brought this up before, but it's relevant to bring it up again. When Google "permanently disabled" my YouTube account a few years ago, not only was I not informed why this was done, but I was offered no way to contact any real live person by phone, email, or whatever to find out why my account was permanently disabled.

However, in a way I can't be disappointed. As I myself have noted, I am not a Google customer. Google's customers are the advertisers that pay them money to advertise on the service. I don't pay them a dime, so I mean nothing to them.

But what of Google's true, paying customers? Let's take a look at the story of Pat Irwin Design:

While, as "Warren De Zeez" stated, there are Google 'freeloaders' in the world, there are also a very large number of legitimate, paying CUSTOMERS of Google who from time to time, need support which goes beyond a message board of other users looking for answers to the same problem, or an email form which only leads to a pre-formatted response and a link to the same, fruitless message boards.

I am responsible for twenty(+) clients who pay a very large amount of money to Google for Ad Words campaigns, totaling well over 40,000 per month. I personally use Google Checkout to process 15k a month in transactions, with Google taking a 2.9% cut off the top. In either case, I have NEVER been able to reach anyone at Google to resolve either technical or billing problems. It is irresponsible for a company, such as Google, to NOT provide at least a minimum amount of telephone support for customers who are actually making financial transactions with them.

In addition to not providing telephone support, it appears they intentionally make receiving ANY kind of support a laborous, frustrating and time consuming process. Do I really have to fill out three different forms, read eight different FAQ's and scroll through six different message boards to find a departmental email? Only to receive a form letter stating, "We're sorry you're having a problem with...."

Bullocks to Google!

This story was posted as a comment to a Los Angeles Times article that described the inability of others to talk to a real live person at Google. David Lazarus' article spent some time on the story of Steve Gillette, who was getting repeated text messages from Google that appeared to be part of an identity theft scam. Lazarus wanted to talk to someone at Google, but couldn't. In the end, the journalist Lazarus ended up making contact with a real person at Google (Jeff Pulver used similar pull to get his YouTube account restored), and discovered that someone had keyed in Gillette's mobile phone number by mistake. So the fact that Gillette couldn't contact someone about this is a failure, right? Wrong:

Once it became clear to Google's computers that the texts and calls were going unanswered, the company stopped bugging Gillette. In this way, Freund observed, all's well that ends well.

"The situation was self-resolving," she said.

Unfortunately for Google, some of these situations are self-resolving in other ways. Commenter Tony Lush:

Google has lots of employees, but no people, so I advertise with their competitors.

Incidentally, I originally discovered this Los Angeles Times story courtesy of a Lauren Weinstein share. Now Weinstein, who notes that many complaints about Google are actually misunderstandings, also notes that many people have difficult getting any type of answer from Google.

In many cases users claimed they had attempted to obtain clarification of their concerns from Google directly without receiving substantive replies, and/or had attempted to obtain information from Google Help Forums -- but received no answers, inadequate answers, or conflicting answers from Forum participants. Usually no official responses were forthcoming, according to these submissions

The irony of all this? Google, and its competitors such as Facebook (and no, you can't call Facebook either), are often classified as "social media" companies.

Yeah, social. Like people talking to each other.

Just don't have any expectations of being able to talk to the service provider.

Are you dedicated to your principles? The story of Stanley Moore

One day on the radio, Colin Cowherd was discussing a rumor that the Yankees were for sale. Cowherd noted that in the end, everything has its price. Perhaps not everything, but it's surprising to realize what we will do for financial or other gain, no matter how "principled" we may believe that we are. It should be noted that I personally believe in the concept of original sin, but even if you don't, you'll probably admit that at least some people will sell themselves out. I don't know if this story is true, but it illustrates the point:

At a dinner party one night, a drunk Churchill asked an attractive woman whether she would sleep with him for a million pounds. “Maybe,” the woman said coyly. “Would you sleep with me for one pound?” Churchill then asked. “Of course not, what kind of woman do you think I am?” the woman responded indignantly. “Madam, we’ve already established what kind of woman you are,” said Churchill, “now we’re just negotiating the price.”

Which brings me to Stanley Moore.

As a Reed College student, I had certainly heard of former Professor Stanley Moore. To Reed's credit, it didn't hush up the story - in fact, I was a student at the college when it formally apologized to Moore.

Why did Reed College apologize? Because it fired Moore during the McCarthy era. While many good people did bad things during the McCarthy era, this is especially troubling for a place such as Reed College. In fact, Reed's firing of Stanley Moore can be compared to the Los Angeles Lakers losing in the second round of the NBA playoffs two years in a row - excusable for others, but inexcusable for the Lakers, or Reed.

Here is the story of Stanley Moore, courtesy the Oregon Historical Society:

[T]he House Un-Americans Activities Committee (HUAC)...sought to expose American communists throughout the 1950s, and in 1954 Moore was subpoenaed along with other suspected leftists. In a public hearing in Portland, Moore pled the Fifth Amendment when queried by the committee about his political beliefs. His testimony resulted in his suspension from the Reed faculty. Moore criticized McCarthyism in an open letter to the public by arguing that academic independence and tenure should protect his job: “It is an abuse of power for an employer to question an employee about his politics. It is a travesty of justice to do so in an atmosphere created by pressure from influential demagogues.” Thanks to the support of his colleagues and students, the principle of academic freedom endured “the most definitive test during the entire McCarthy era.”

In August 1954, the college trustees held a hearing to decide Moore's fate. Under pressure from the media and the generally conservative population of Portland to punish Moore, the trustees contended that his refusal to answer charges amounted to professional misconduct. Moore replied that academic freedom meant employment criteria based on professional ability, not personal political beliefs. Moore contended that his promotions and reputation as a scholar and teacher proved he was a competent professor.

As he expected, Moore won the argument but lost his job.

After a period of Churchill-like wilderness years, Moore eventually joined the faculty at the University of California, San Diego. The university web site records the coda to the story of Moore:

Moore waited 24 years to surprise both sides by telling the Oregonian in 1978 that he had been a member of the Communist party when he came to Reed but that he had left it before the HUAC hearings began. While still describing himself as a Marxist (albeit a "more critical one") he said he quit the party 18 months before the HUAC hearings because, "I couldn't stomach the American organization's kowtowing to Moscow on the so-called 'doctor's plot,' which had been announced in January 1953 and was declared a 'fabrication' shortly after Stalin's death just two months later."

Thus, had Moore been willing to accept the authority of his interrogators, he could have passed the trustees' political test. That is, he could have told them, truthfully, that he was not now a Communist. But as he stated at the time, he had decided not to do so in order to help Reed defend its historical attachment to academic freedom "against the fickle tides" of public opinion.

So if Stanley Moore had just done what Lucille Ball did, he might have gotten off the hook. But he didn't.

Would I be willing to do that? Or, since I'm not a Marxist, would I be willing to do what Daniel did in Daniel chapter 6?

Does Sirius XM suffer from a lack of differentiation?

Television was supposed to be the technology that would liberate us from the base, crass banality of radio. Within a decade, however, television was described as a "vast wasteland."

Cable television was supposed to be the technology that would liberate us from the base, crass banality of over-the-air television. However, cable telvision's major "innovations" were HBO (slogan: "We say @#$%& a lot") and Showtime (slogan: "We say @#$%& more than HBO").

Which brings us to satellite radio, originally dominated by two competing firms, which eventually consolidated into a single firm. And Rocco Pendola isn't impressed with the result:

Mel [Karmazin] runs Sirius XM like a cluster of New York radio stations. He made the move from broadcast radio to satellite and, for all intents and purposes, got right to programming Sirius XM’s channels like the standard Clear Channel or CBS offering.

Karmazin hired loads of old terrestrial radio guys (some incredibly talented ones, for the record) and instituted the types of policies (e.g., voicetracking) that contributed to the almost-complete demise of the AM dial and FM radio’s pending extinction. The things Mel does with Sirius XM are the exact same types of things that caused your disenchantment with traditional radio and triggered your hatred for Clear Channel. Very little distinction exists between satellite radio and your run-of-the-mill terrestrial radio outlet.

An eHow article notes two positives of the Sirius XM experience. First, the stations are available over a wide area, without interference - an important point if you regularly drive from Los Angeles to Phoenix, but not as important if your commute takes you from San Bernardino to Orange County.

The second point?

Sirius ... also lacks censorship, because its listeners are all voluntary subscribers.

See my comments on HBO vs. Showtime, above. Now this presumably resulted in a difference in Howard Stern's show, but I wouldn't know - I haven't heard Howard Stern in years.

Which indicates another difference. You know how the New York Times and many other services are located behind a paywall and are therefore uncool? Well, Sirius XM is behind a paywall also, which means that more people hear Ryan Seacrest or Rush Limbaugh every morning than hear Howard Stern.

Now this isn't necessarily a bad thing, provided that the paid service offers a good deal of variety that makes up for its cost. However, even if you don't believe Rocco Pendola's negative outlook, I can obtain a much greater variety of sounds from a free service such as last.fm or Pandora than I can from Sirius XM. Now perhaps the threat is overstated - this was supposed to kill Sirius XM back in 2009 - but the threat is still there.

Why? Because Sirius XM shares one feature with terrestrial radio that even Mel Karmazin's worst enemy can't overcome - the concept of pre-programmed channels. No interactivity - you get what you get, and there are only 130 slots available to get it.

Even iHeart Radio, Clear Channel's online initiative, doesn't have such limitations. Sure, iHeart Radio allows you to listen to pre-programmed radio stations, but it also allows you to customize stations to your liking. So far I've programmed a Brian Eno station and a Royksopp station. Sirius XM wouldn't let me do that. I'm not sure how Clear Channel makes money off of its custom radio stations, but if nothing else they provide Clear Channel with a wealth of intelligence about listening habits.

(empo-plaaybizz) When you cannot play the game

Taking the lead from others, I've spent some time on this blog discussing how gaming mechanics can contribute to business. When a business introduces game mechanics, this gives certain people an incentive to buy additional products and services from the business. And I'm not just talking about Zynga; there are a number of companies that offer badges or points or things that you can earn by buying stuff or doing stuff that benefits the business in question.

But what when the game is broken, and the incentive is lost?

I'm not going to name the company, but its name rhymes with "bartrucks." This company offers a rewards program in which you can earn benefits as your purchases from the company are tracked. The company also offers smartphone apps which facilitate purchases - if you register a gift card with the company, you can use the app to use your smartphone to make purchases which are subtracted from the gift card.

For the last few months, I've been using the "bartrucks" gift card to track my purchases, and when I recently acquired a smartphone again, I began using the "bartrucks" Android app to make my purchases. To do this, I start the app, see how much credit I have on my gift card, and then press a button that reveals a barcode that the "bartrucks" employee scans to complete my purchase. I can then go to another tab on the app and see how I'm doing on earning my rewards.

Usually.

About a week or two ago, I went to look at my rewards, and I got a message saying that reward information was unavailable and to try again later. I tried a little while later, and still couldn't get my reward information. A day or two later rewards data was available again, but it really put a damper on the game when you didn't know your score.

But a few days ago it turned more serious. As I mentioned, the app allows you to see your gift card balance and make a purchase; after the purchase is made, your gift card balance is immediately updated.

Usually.

Over the weekend my wife and I walked into our local "bartrucks," each armed with our smartphones. (We are a smart family.) In turn, each of us walked up to the person behind the counter - I won't reveal what they're called, but it rhymes with "turista" (whoops, forget that) - and made our purchases.

After I made my purchase, I noticed that my displayed gift card balance wasn't updated. The same thing happened to my wife, so we both checked with the "turista" who confirmed that our purchases went through.

But I didn't know how much value I really had on my card.

At the same time, there was an outage on the rewards side of the app - another of those "reward information is unavailable" messages.

So now I don't know how I'm doing on my reward level, and I don't know how much money I have to make purchases. And because the amount of my purchase was almost as much as my gift card balance itself, I didn't know whether I even had enough money to buy one of the tiny products that "bartrucks" sells, much less one of their larger products.

So what happens when you don't know your score, and you don't know how much time is left on the clock?

You take a time-out. Don't play. Don't buy anything.

Thankfully, that outage cleared up a few days later.

But the game is certainly less fun when you can't play.

Expectations for the public Facebook

Perhaps you've seen the joke that states that Facebook has gone public because even THEY couldn't understand the privacy settings.

Well, that's not the exact reason, but as of now Facebook is a publicly-traded company, with shareholders - and with shareholder expectations.

For better or worse, our investment climate expects public companies to continue to make more money, to make more money than they did last year, to grow faster than they did last year, and to consistently beat expectations. If you do outstanding business one year, and then do the same outstanding business the next year, you're a failure.

So now that the public has a significant stake in Facebook's ownership, how will Facebook respond to these expectations?

Last Friday, Jody Swaney started a Google+ thread on this topic. Those of us who participated in the thread all agreed that Facebook needs new revenue streams to meet those shareholder expectations.

But where will Facebook get new revenue to pile on top of its existing revenue? Will it need to introduce a premium tier paid service to complement its free service? If so, what would be included in the premium tier? Will Facebook come up with new forms of advertising revenue? Will it come up with new ways to take a percentage of third party sales (Melina M) - perhaps with a "Facebook apps" store? Will it do other things in the mobile arena (Michael Sweeney) to increase revenue?

And if Facebook can come up with a new revenue stream from its userbase, remember that Facebook has a pretty big userbase. While I'm fond of saying that over 80% of the world is NOT on Facebook, the fact remains that there are around 900 billion Facebook accounts. Keith Tackel did the math - if you can get just $10 a year from 200 million of those accounts, "that is some serious money!"

Of course, it will remain to be seen if Facebook can be one of the few tech companies that benefits from consistent leadership and continued innovation - in other words, the next Microsoft. (Apple strikes out on the "consistent leadership" measurement.) But as a public company, Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of Facebook's team presumably realize that new rules now apply.

On rural sourcing

The pendulum swings, and some (not all) jobs that once went overseas are now coming back to my home country of the United States.

But they're coming back to rural areas, thanks to the rural sourcing movement. GigaOM wrote about this over a year ago:

Managers thinking of establishing virtual teams may have visions of the best and brightest in New York, San Francisco and Shanghai dancing in their heads. The untapped workers of rural places and small cities like Kanab, Utah or Augusta, Ga. probably feature less often. Now the proponents of a still embryonic but expanding trend known as “rural sourcing” are trying to change that....

While salaries in Milford, Penn. may not be as low as those in Mumbai, India, some often-overlooked costs associated with outsourcing abroad — such as greater management oversight, cultural miscues and occasional long-distance travel — are lower with rural-sourcing. Plus, many workers enjoy living in these slower-paced places, while bringing employment to struggling towns is sure to generate good will.

Plus, the workers can see horses from their "office" windows.

It turns out that Becky McCray has co-authored an entire book on modern small town business, which was reviewed at Business Insider:

Small Town Rules notes that the recent economic changes have altered the ways small businesses must operate to survive. The result is a new small town paradigm for businesses of all sizes, with advantages and disadvantages altered in illuminating ways. For example, [Barry] Moltz and McCray note that geographic location, once advantageous because “Craftspeople wanted to be located near raw materials.…Merchants had to be on the trade routes”, is an eliminated factor....

“Turning the disadvantage of a rural location into an advantage of lower cost, rural sourcing captures jobs that otherwise might be outsourced overseas. Rural service firms claim a number of advantages over global firms: shorter supply chains, better data security, intellectual property protection, cultural compatibility, and convenient time zones.”

However, I'd add the warning that complete cultural compatibility cannot be assumed. There are portions of this country in which Californians are regarded by some as aliens from another planet. Anyone from Silicon Valley, El-Lay, or even California's Inland Empire should keep this in mind when venturing forth to small towns in the Carolinas. Of course, the people in the Carolinas must also remember that the avocado-eating, latte-sipping Yankees are people too.

Why e e cummings wasn't involved in tech - capitalization is important!

I was reading an old software review of a business intelligence software package and was struck by the lack of capitalization in the web version of the review.

It integrates with J2EE application servers from ibm WebSphere and bea WebLogic...

BEA? Told you it was an old software review. Now I was able to figure out that the review was supposed to be talking about the acronym-using companies IBM and BEA. But this excerpt is a little more problematic.

Though WebFocus requires it planning and deployment...

If someone looked at that phrase in isolation, the person would probably conclude that the writer was not a native English speaker. When you realize, however, that "it" should be capitalized as "IT" (information technology), then the phrase has an entirely different meaning. Let's face it - delivery of lunch requires planning and deployment, but it doesn't necessarily require the type of specialized skills possessed by many...well, some information technology professionals.

P.S. I actually wrote this post a couple of months ago, but didn't publish it until now because...well, just because.

Pressure cooker

No, I haven't written anything in the Empoprise-BI business blog, or any of my other blogs, in the last few days. I'm involved in three major projects at work, and my brain has been pretty much incapable of conceptualizing or writing blog posts on top of that.

But it could be worse. I could be a short-order cook.

To make it as a short-order cook, you must be able to keep a half-dozen orders in your head while cracking eggs, flipping pancakes, working the counter, and refilling coffee cups.

And at a restaurant like the Tastee Diner, in Bethesda, Md., the orders come in verbally, not on a ticket.

Chocolate chip pancakes, scrambled with sausage, order of french fries, rye toast — they're small tasks. On a busy day, though, they add up to a tough job for Shawn Swinson.

"My first month here, I was ready to walk out the door," he said.

Asked what it feels like when he's in the middle of rush hour, Swinson said, "Like you're in an insane asylum. It's almost unbearable."

Swinson has learned to handle the pressure. He's an island of calm, even when the orders are flying. But Swinson's boss, manager Frank Long, says very few people can keep up without losing their cool.

"It's singularly the most difficult job in this type of operation," Long said. "Four cooks. Five waitresses. Bus staff. Host. Getting them in and out."

Speed and accuracy are at a premium — especially when the customers are multitasking, too. Lunchtime is the worst, Long said.

"People may have an errand to run. Maybe go to the bank and pick up dry cleaning, and eat. All within an hour, whatever time they have."

So the next time that I'm sitting at my desk, working in a (mostly) climate-controlled office, dealing with emails that arrive every few minutes...

I need to remember that it could be worse.

Dividing the cloud, and the Empoprises FECES Rule of Corporate Me-Tooism

Jesse Stay was not happy.

Don't get me wrong - I love Google, but what ever happened to, "Go Web"?

Jesse's comment was prompted by a Google Official Blog post entitled "Get stuff done in the cloud. Go Google."

Of course, Google isn't the only vendor claiming that they can provide the cloud. I've previously noted that Oracle defines "the cloud" as "the data that you can access on a machine running Oracle hardware and software." And, of course, you have SkyDrive (from Microsoft) and iCloud (from Apple) and IBM cloud products and Dropbox and everyone else.

And we thought that there was one cloud out there.

But this is what happens with your cool technology term of the data. Whenever a term becomes trendy - whether it's "cloud" or "Internet" or "integrated software," every marketer worth his or her marbles runs forward to claim that their company - and only their company - can provide the trendy buzzword that everyone's talking about.

In fact, I've developed the "FECES Rule" to explain this behavior - whoops, I should call that the "Empoprises FECES Rule." Or the "Empoprise FECES Rule of Corporate Me-Tooism." Here it is:

Trust me, if FECES suddenly became a trendy acronym that all the cool kids were talking about, then you would have Microsoft, Google, Apple, Oracle, IBM, and everyone else climbing over each other and loudly declaring, "We are FECES."

I then concluded:

And they would be correct. :)

Of course, there are disadvantages to jumping on the trendy bandwagon. What happens when the bandwagon is no longer trendy?

When I first started working in biometrics in the 1990s, the trendy term was "client-server." So you can bet that all of the stuff that I wrote talked about our client-server architecture.

But by the year 2000, things were changing, and all the cool kids stopped talking about "client-server" and started talking about "multi-tier." Around this time my employer changed its system architecture, and therefore you can bet that all of the stuff that I wrote talked about our multi-tier architecture.

At this point, I would become highly amused when I'd see something written by another company trumpeting its client-server architecture. This company had jumped into the trendy client-server pool a few years back, but hadn't yet realized that the pool was getting dirty and the lifeguards and swimmers were gravitating to the new pool next door.

And yes, I would laugh at those bozos who were still talking about client-server when everyone knew that multi-tier was the way to go. Yes, me - the non-trendy guy - would put others down for not being trendy.

And now the cycle is repeating itself again, as everyone fights to claim their own share of the cloud. Well, at least until the cloud becomes criticized for speed or security or other issues, and the pendulum swings back toward local management of your own data.

P.S. Please note that the Empoprise FECES Rule of Corporate Me-Tooism is copyright 2012 John E. Bredehoft, and that this FECES Rule is superior to all other supposed FECES Rules out there. This FECES Rule was specifically developed based on my early 1980s experience with "Paddy O'Futniture" jokes on USENET. Can Google or Pinterest claim that? I think not.

The book of Job as a business primer?

In an April post in my tymshft blog, I discussed the repurposing of Sun Tzu's The Art of War as a business book. In passing, I made the following statement:

Eventually I may look at whether the book of Ecclesiastes may be useful as a guide for business....

(If you're familiar with the tymshft blog, you know that it's all about a statement from Ecclesiastes, "There is nothing new under the sun.")

I haven't gotten around to writing my own take on Ecclesiastes as a business book, but this came to mind when I was reading an interview with Kim Reynolds. Reynolds, who has commented on this blog before, is the creator of QwikR.me, a site that actually does something useful with QR codes.

One of the interview questions asked Reynolds to recommend three books. Her response:

All three of my top book recommendations come from the Bible: Genesis (How it all began), Job (Perseverance in the face of adversity), and Revelations (How this chapter ends).

I'm going to concentrate on the middle recommendation - the book of Job.

For those who haven't read the book, it concerns a man named Job who experiences great calamities. By the middle of the second chapter, Job has lost his livestock, his sons, and his daughters, is covered with sores, and is scraping the sores with a piece of broken pottery.

And his wife is nagging him.

Sounds like the life of an entrepreneur, doesn't it?

While we tend to fix our eyes on the success stories, the truth is that most businesses fail, and those that don't fail often just plug along. We put everything into our businesses - Reynolds makes the point that an entrepreneur might as well just forget about the eight-hour day - and there are times when it all turns to ashes.

And perhaps as we walk away from the bank - or the bankruptcy court - some well-meaning friends come by and offer that dreaded advice - "you're doing it wrong." Why was the entrepreneur stupid enough to base a 2005 business plan on MySpace or Nokia?

Now perhaps the entrepreneur doesn't suddenly get a visit from the LORD like Job did in chapter 38, but at some point the entrepreneur takes a step backward, analyzes what happened to the business, realizes what he/she could have done, recognizes the things that he/she couldn't have foreseen, and then goes on to a new life.

When Braeburn Capital invested in Google - a fiction story (obviously)

[OCTOBER 1, 2012: THIS POST IS (POSSIBLY) FICTION. YOU'RE PROBABLY LOOKING FOR THIS.]

The activity in the second floor suite of a Reno, Nevada office building was a little unusual on the morning of April 31.

"Why do we need to have interns?" asked Gene in an exasperated tone.

"Because the parent company has to put them somewhere," replied Michael.

"I know." Gene was gathering his paperwork for the morning executive staff meeting at Braeburn Capital, an investment company based in Reno. "But they're so - interny."

"Tell me about it," replied Gary. "The last one arrived at the office dressed in black with stars in her eyes. Within five minutes she said that her life had been ruined."

Michael smiled. "Well, the new intern will last at least six minutes this time around. The first part of today's meeting will be about bowling night."

"Shh," whispered Gene. "I hear someone outside."






"Welcome to Braeburn Capital, Steve," said Michael as he shook the new intern's hand.

"Thank you, sir," replied the new intern. "This is - well, it's insanely great."

Gene managed to stifle a groan. "You're just in time for the morning staff meeting."

They filed into the small conference room, sparsely decorated with a few pictures of i-somethings and some paintings of the Nevada desert. Steve was excited, and was talking a mile a minute.

"I mean, I see this as the opportunity of a lifetime. My parents taught me about everything, and really instilled a love of design in me. My dad always said that he couldn't decide whether to name me Steve, or Steve." He chuckled. "And I'm ready to work 80 hours a week and love it for this internship."

"Well, Steve, we won't be flying a pirate flag here," replied Michael as he smiled. "But rest assured, your work for us this summer will be extremely important to the parent corporation. Even though Braeburn Capital is way out in Reno, Nevada, rest assured that our work here is very visible back at headquarters in Cupertino."






Having dispensed with the business about bowling night, as well as a request for someone to clean the espresso machine, Michael was ready to get down to business.

"Gary," asked Michael, "what are your recommendations for Braeburn's investment portfolio?"

Gary, usually brief and to the point, elaborated his words a little more this morning for the benefit of the intern. "Well, Michael," began Gary, "Braeburn Capital continues to manage the cash assets of Apple to the best of its ability, with the long-term goal of maximizing the cash position of the parent company. This allows Apple to continue to invest in research and development, acquisitions, and other expansion efforts."

Steve was listening intently.

"While Braeburn always works within the highest ethical standards of Apple and always works within the law, we also take pains to always maximize shareholder value. The very fact that Braeburn is located in Nevada, rather than California, is a testimony to our commitment to our shareholders."

Michael and Gene nodded approvingly. Steve was soaking it all in.

"Therefore," Gary continued, "I have just checked the markets, and I have come forth with a recommendation this morning. This recommendation, however, will need approval from Cupertino - we can't act on it alone."

Steve's eyes were wide open - as were Michael's and Gene's. They had no idea that Gary was planning on making a significant recommendation this morning - those happened only every so often, and usually after extensive consultation among the entire staff.

"Gentlemen," continued Gary as he handed out folders to the executives, "I am recommending that we forward a request to Tim Cook to significantly increase our position in Google."

A frown began to cross Steve's face, but Michael and Gene didn't notice.

"Increase our position in Google?" asked Gene. "Over a quarter of our funds are invested in Google already. Isn't it dangerous to put all our eggs in one basket?"

"How much of an increase?" asked Michael.

"Don't worry, Gene," replied Gary. "As long as I'm here, it would take a major rally for me to put more than forty percent of our funds into any company - even Google. But Michael, forty percent is precisely what I'm recommending. If you look at Table One in the handout, coupled with the anticipated growth in Figure One, I think that all of you will agree that this is the prudent action for Braeburn to take."

"Excuse me," said Steve quietly, as he left the room, went into the bathroom, and closed the door. The executives could hear Steve loudly sobbing.

Michael heaved a sigh of relief. "At least he didn't scream at us for abandoning the Macintosh Way."

Gene suddenly thought of something. "Michael, did we remember to have someone bolt the bathroom windows so they couldn't be opened?"

"I don't remember," replied Michael. "But the last intern to jump out the window only had a broken leg. I think this guy was a gymnast if I remember correctly - he'll be all right. But getting back to business," Michael continued, "I wonder if a forty-five percent investment would be the right thing to do in this circumstance...."







References: Entity Details, Braeburn Capital Inc., Nevada Secretary of State; Alex Scrivener Google+ post

Address the great engineering shortage of 2012 by promoting calligraphy (or something like it)

I ran across an interesting argument that was sabotaged by a really bad example.

Mari Thomas was among those who shared a TechCrunch post by Jon Bischke. The title of the post? "They Ain’t Making Any More of Them: The Great Engineering Shortage of 2012."

This is one of those posts that you'll see in tech publications that talk about the United States' need for engineers. These posts usually talk about modifying the foreign visa requirements or modifying the American educational system. Bischke looks at the latter, and quotes from Alex Tabarrok:

In 2009 the U.S. graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts, more than in computer science, math and chemical engineering combined and more than double the number of visual and performing arts graduates in 1985.

So what wisdom does Bischke derive from this information?

We are raising a generation of American Idols and So You Think You Can Dancers when what we really need is a generation of Gateses and Zuckerbergs.

And with that one sentence, Bischke pretty much invalidated every single thought in his post about engineering education.

Why? Because the underlying thought behind the sentence is that college students, instead of majoring in the visual and performing arts, should instead major in computer science.

But let's look at the two examples he cited. What type of degree did Bill Gates earn?

Um...he never graduated from college.

What type of degree did Mark Zuckerberg earn?

Um...he never graduated from college.

Let's throw a third name in there. What type of degree did Steve Jobs earn?

Um...he never graduated from college.

Now all three of these people went to college, and derived some knowledge out of college. But they all left before they got that college degree that everyone is talking about so much.

Why? Because they wanted to "make stuff" - something that Tom Scott discussed recently (see the postscript to this Empoprise-BI post).

If Gates, Zuckerberg, and Jobs had graduated, they could have gotten their degrees in computer science or physics or interpretive dance or even (horrors) economics. Wouldn't have made a bit of difference.

Actually, the stuff that you study in college can make a huge difference. Steve Jobs didn't spend a lot of time at Reed College, but he did learn one thing at Reed that literally changed the world of computing forever, shaping the destiny of not only Apple but also Microsoft and just about every other computer company out there.

So what am I talking about? Pascal programming? Reed's nuclear reactor? Laser experimentation?

Nope. I'm talking about something that I blogged about last August, just before Steve Jobs passed away. At the time, a lot of people were understandably drawn to Jobs' 2005 speech at Stanford University - a speech that I blogged about in 2006 - and in that speech Jobs talked about one thing that he learned about at Reed College.

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

So don't come arguing that we're going to produce the next Jobs, Gates, or Zuckerberg by increasing the number of college graduates in the hard sciences. Perhaps you can get some skilled people who can crank out code for you, but you're not going to get a Jobs, Gates, or Zuckerberg.

And before you start slamming the irrelevance of "So You Think You Can Dance" and those types of shows, don't forget this dancer:

He travels the world, dances on TV, tinkers with hardware—oh, and designed the Apple I & II personal computers. Steve Wozniak answers our questions and shares his hacker-ish means of getting things done.

Now unlike Jobs, Gates, and Zuckerberg, Steve Wozniak actually has a degree in electrical engineering and computer sciences...which he completed in 1986. Needless to say, his lack of a degree didn't hinder him in the preceding years.

Why a talking lamb is more impressive than a high Klout score

I've always known that I am not trendy, but apparently there are a lot of other people who are also not trendy, because I've seen two mentions of Klout in the last two days.

On Friday afternoon, Kimberly Reynolds shared a Mashable story about Tom Scott's new site Klouchebag. Yes, that's a combination of the words "Klout" and "douchebag." Scott's site looks at the kinds of things that you tweet and assigns a Klouchebag score. Of course I got my own score:

Klouchebag score for @empoprises: 38, or 'a bit of a prat'.

Be sure to check your own.

The other Klout-related item that I've seen comes from a Loren Feldman share of a Jeremiah Owyang post. It's fair to say that Feldman does not necessarily agree with Owyang's view.

Owyang starts with the premise that the facial recognition algorithms that are being incorporated into Google and Facebook can be used to bring up other information that is associated with the person that is identified. As some of you know, I work in biometrics, and the available facial recognition algorithms have become appreciably better over the years - when used with a small database size, such as a list of Facebook friends, there is a good chance that you can identify someone, despite all of the background noise in the pictures.

(Biometric aside: When your mugshot - whoops, I mean facial image - is taken for identification purposes, you usually face forward, refrain from smiling, and stand in front of an 18% gray backdrop. This is usually not the case for your typical Facebook party picture, unless you're arrested a lot.)

I'll buy that it's likely that your face will be used as a starting point to get information about you. But what information?

According to Owyang:

Logic tells us that new mobile applications will emerge that will allow digital content about us, in fact, we should expect apps to emerge that instantly allow us to tell one’s Twitter follower count, Klout score, and Facebook fans.

So Owyang would have us believe that the nearly 1 billion people in Facebook will use this technology to find a stranger's...KLOUT SCORE?

Unfortunately, Owyang found an example of someone who has a higher regard for the almighty Klout score than Tom Scott. Wired:

Last spring Sam Fiorella was recruited for a VP position at a large Toronto marketing agency. With 15 years of experience consulting for major brands like AOL, Ford, and Kraft, Fiorella felt confident in his qualifications. But midway through the interview, he was caught off guard when his interviewer asked him for his Klout score. Fiorella hesitated awkwardly before confessing that he had no idea what a Klout score was.

The interviewer pulled up the web page for Klout.com—a service that purports to measure users’ online influence on a scale from 1 to 100—and angled the monitor so that Fiorella could see the humbling result for himself: His score was 34. “He cut the interview short pretty soon after that,” Fiorella says. Later he learned that he’d been eliminated as a candidate specifically because his Klout score was too low. “They hired a guy whose score was 67.”

Yes, Fiorella is in marketing, and you could claim that Fiorella needs to market himself. But a human resources department spending more time looking at a Klout score than at a list of accomplishments at AOL, Ford, and Kraft? That sounds like an HR department that doesn't want to do its homework. Erik Kain of Forbes agrees:

I can understand on one level why a marketing firm might want someone with social media influence, but simply having a decent Klout score doesn’t mean you’re any good at marketing. I can pretty much guarantee that Fiorella’s 15 years of marketing experience make him a better candidate than me, for instance, with my zero years of marketing experience.

And yet, my Klout score tends to hover around 64, a full 30 points above Fiorella’s. That hardly makes me a better marketing employee than him, however, though it does mean that I’ve done passably well when it comes to marketing myself on social media.

People get caught up in someone's Klout score of Alexa ranking or Wonderlic score or SAT score or whatever. Why? Because it's a single number, and it supposedly easy to use as a pass-fail item. But humans are more complex than that, and can't be evaluted based upon a single item.

But you can evaluate lambs based upon a single item. And at the end of the day, that's what is important. I found another share - this one from Richard Walker - of a YouTube video of a lamb who says "yeah."



Now this lamb may have a Klout score of 0. And this lamb may have a Wonderlic score of 0. But this lamb provides more wisdom than Tom Scott and Loren Feldman and Jeremiah Owyang and myself combined.

P.S. Actually, I was wrong in one thing. Tom Scott has as much wisdom as the lamb. I was intrigued about the guy who created Klouchebag - I had never heard of him (perhaps his Klout score isn't that high) - and I ended up reading this essay that Scott wrote. It begins as follows:

I'm not a particularly good programmer. I never studied computer science at school or university, the same way Charles never studied electronics and Colin never studied mechanical engineering. My degree's in linguistics - and if I'm honest, I didn't really go to university to study.

I'm competent, don't get me wrong: but I didn't learn the academic theory of programming. I couldn't tell you what a pointer does; I can't solve a memory leak other than by rebooting; and I couldn't write an efficient sort algorithm if my life depended on it. I can't code in any variant of C, and I don't think I've ever chosen one compiler over another.

What I can do is make things.

And that's important: there are plenty of computer science graduates who are fully versed in theory but completely unable to actually make things. That's fine if they're angling for certain industry jobs - but I never wanted to work with computers for a living. Programming was a means to an end: I had an idea; I wanted to make it; therefore I had to learn to code.

Read the rest here.

What can I say? "Yeah."

(empo-plaaybizz) News FTW?!?

I was visiting my Google News page, and I noticed that I had earned a basketball badge.

A badge? For news?

Yes:

The U.S. Edition of Google News now lets you collect private, sharable badges for your favorite topics. The more articles you read on Google News, the more your badges level up: you can reach Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and finally Ultimate. Keep your badges to yourself, or show them off to your friends.

The default behavior is to hide a badge, but you can hover over the badge and choose to share it.

I admit that badges and sharing can motivate people to do things, but this is sounding a little ridiculous even for me. I was about to joke about the IRS issuing an "I paid my taxes" badge...until I remembered that my tax preparation software gave me the option of sharing my tax completion on Facebook.

I guess now the question is as follows: what actions CANNOT succumb to the badge frenzy?

I challenge you to think of one.

Data myths - can the IRS do your taxes?

Jesse Harris alerted me to a story about the U.S. Internal Revenue Service and the entities surrounding it. While the story touched upon a number of interesting topics - for example, the fact that tax preparation firms want to reduce competition (surprise), the story also raised the question - could the IRS do our taxes for us, saving us the trouble?

Matthew Yglesias:

Why don’t you just lie on your taxes? You don’t lie because you’re worried that the IRS will catch you. And why do you worry about that? Because all the various entities who’ve paid you over the course of the past year have to submit paperwork about your income. Your employer, your bank, your stock broker, etc.—record and transmit almost all relevant information about your money to the IRS, meaning that if you lie you’ll get caught. But by the same token, the IRS could simply collect all this information and send you a tax bill. You could read it over, sign at the bottom, and either include a check or wait for your refund. It wouldn’t be fun, exactly, but it would sure be simple.

Could the IRS "simply collect all this information" and compile it into a tax form that you could sign?

Let me tell you a story. Many years ago, I was unable to pay my taxes on time. I talked to someone at the IRS and worked out a payment schedule. The person at the IRS told me, "Every month our computer system will print out a nasty letter. Ignore it." Sure enough, I got a few of those nasty letters before I paid off my tax debt. Why? Because the IRS computers at the time were not designed to accommodate payment plans.

Now I'll grant that this was some time ago, and we all know that the IRS has implemented vastly improved software that can properly handle every contingency, and that can easily accommodate new changes such as a need for the IRS to generate tax forms for us. How do we know this? Because the General Services Administration is looking out for our interests, and has spent a lot of money to make sure that the IRS can handle future needs...wait a minute, the General Services Administration has spent a lot of money, but for other purposes.

Remember that just because the IRS has data doesn't mean that it can be converted into knowledge. I'll grant that I don't know the internal workings of the IRS, but chances are high that the IRS has a system to get information from employers, then another system to get information from banks, and still another system to get information from stock sales. And all of these bits of data are identified by taxpayer identification numbers. Great - that's like finding three needles in a haystack.

The supposedly "simple" process of the IRS preparing our tax returns for us would require the IRS to create yet another system - one that would extract data from the other IRS systems, format it into the proper forms, and send the completed forms to us for our review.

How much time and money would it take to get such a system working? Probably a few years and a few billion dollars.

Which, of course, means that we'd have to pay more taxes...

The Road More Traveled (Jan Babiak)

LadyRomp recently shared the news of Jan Babiak's appointment to Walgreens' Board of Directors as an independent director. As I was reading her biography, I became fascinated.

Babiak recently retired from Ernst & Young, where she spent nearly three decades. And she has literally been everywhere during that time.

She joined Ernst & Young in Oklahoma City, after receiving her degree from the University of Oklahoma. A few years later, she found herself in Ohio, where she was working in Ernst & Young's Cleveland office while earning her MBA. One year after completing her MBA, she transferred again - to London. That's when her career really took off:

Babiak was founder and managing partner of Ernst &Young’s fastest growing and most profitable UK practice, which provided IT security, transformation, program management and advisory and assurance services. With full P&L and operational responsibility, she grew the technology security and risk services practice in the United Kingdom, later adding Northern Europe, Middle East, India and Africa (NEMIA), for more than 10 years while also serving on Ernst & Young’s UK operating board.

Following her success in these roles, Babiak was appointed in 2006 to the NEMIA executive management board and as managing partner for regulatory and public policy in NEMIA, and was the board level sponsor leading all services related to climate change and sustainability across the NEMIA area.

In 2008 she created a new practice as Ernst & Young’s global leader for climate change & sustainability services, operating from the firm’s London headquarters. She was responsible for the strategy and delivery of commercially focused climate change transformation and sustainability services to clients, as well as providing coordination with government offices, regulatory bodies, national professional bodies and other stakeholders. She has led teams delivering advisory, assurance, tax and transaction services focused on clean tech, renewable energy, carbon trading, environmental policy and taxation, green building, green supply chain, carbon measurement and modeling.

However, her career could have taken an entirely different term. According to Babiak's public LinkedIn profile, she was working as a dispatcher in Norman, Oklahoma while attending college. But she left that job after graduating, and public safety's loss was Ernst & Young's gain.

And the gain of other companies. After retiring from Ernst & Young, she set about with her new career:

Now building a full time board portfolio focused on large global public companies where a diverse combination of leadership roles will provide value on a wide range of strategic and commercial considerations as well as delivering practical global experience as a member of Board Committees such as Audit, Finance, Technology, Governance, Risk, Compensation and/or Sustainability.

The first component of Babiak's "board portfolio" was a position on the Board of Directors of UK-based Logica, which she joined in 2010. Now she's accepted her second position, with Deerfield, Illinois-based Walgreens.

So how does she participate in an American company after living in the UK for over twenty years? Well, according to her LinkedIn profile, she now lives in the United States. Not in Oklahoma, not in Cleveland - but in the Nashville, Tennessee area.

I wonder if Babiak can get decent fish and chips in Nashville. If not, the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin's David Allen notes that Babiak can come to Ontario, California to get some.

Who are you facing when you give a presentation?

Beth MacNeil Stinson wrote a recent post about a presentation gone awry. I encourage you to read her post, which detailed a number of issues with the presentation in question - the presenter was making negative comments about the attendees' employers, the demonstration was unscripted, the demonstration didn't work, and the balance of lecture vs. demo was wrong.

But I want to concentrate on one of the problems with the presentation.

The presenter sat with her back to the audience to drive the avatar during the demo, so her voice was muffled. The audience immediately tuned out and the presenter had no way of knowing that most of us were now checking email and whispering back and forth.

The entire day was devoted to virtual worlds, and it appears that the presenter was well versed in the topic. Perhaps too well versed, when you consider that the presenter was paying attention to the virtual world rather than the physical world around her.

This is a common issue in presentations. Presenters, including myself, often want to focus our attention on the demonstration, or on the slides (the dreaded "slide reading"). But we forget that we are presenting to people.

I recently wrote about churches that perform to the camera rather than directly to the people in the church, but at least in that instance the goal of the church is to present to the people - just through an intermediate means.

It's better to turn your face to a camera than to turn to a projected PowerPoint slide or to a computer screen.

P.S. Speaking of presentations, you might want to check out the work of Michael Alley. I mentioned him in this post.

Ireland - where trendy figures go to get killed by trains

What's going on in Ireland?

Over the last few days, there's been a brouhaha about Galway's plan to honor Ernesto "Che" Guevara with a monument (Guevara has Irish ancestry). While this has resulted in an expected outcry from countries such as the United States, the outcry has actually been a longstanding one, and there are those within Ireland who have opposed the plan.

[B]usinessman Declan Ganley described the plan as having the potential to “damage the reputation of Galway around the world”....

Businessman Declan Ganley criticised the decision to honour a man he describes as a “mass murderer” and said that it could “damage the reputation of Galway around the world.”

But while the Cuban exile community in Miami is probably content to stop there, I have to join with Keelan Foley in questioning a rail safety ad that is airing in Ireland.

I spotted this television ad last summer and haven’t stopped laughing since. I know this sounds odd seeing as I am talking about a rail safety advertisement. But If you watch it I’m sure you’ll be laughing for the next few mouths also.

But judge for yourself.

(empo-utoobd) The short shelf life of videos

As you may know, I have been blogging since 2003, and have created a number of blogs over the last nine years.

For five months in 2006 and 2007, I authored a blog entitled KOET Synthetica Television Transcripts. The premise of this was that I (in my then-online identity of Ontario Emperor) was running a television station based in Guasti, California, and that the blog posts documented things that I broadcasted on my television station. (I had done something similar with a previous blog, KOER Synthetica Radio Transcripts.)

During the period that the KOET blog was active, I wrote a number of posts that linked to YouTube videos. The videos covered a wide range of topics: the Cure's song "A Forest"; Dana Carvey's impersonation of Tom Brokaw reading pre-recorded obituaries for Gerald Ford; some Kiira Korpi skating videos; and several other things that I found on YouTube.

I recently revisted that blog and discovered something interesting - every one of the videos that I linked to in 2006-2007 is no longer on YouTube.

A variety of reasons are given for the deletions of the videos, but the two major reasons for removal were copyright claims from various content providers, and termination of various accounts by YouTube. (I don't know if the accounts were "permanently disabled," or literally terminated.)

Since the KOET blog consisted solely of YouTube videos, this means that the KOET blog is today devoid of meaningful content. Compare this to my text-based blogs, some of which date back to 2003. They are also devoid of meaningful content, but at least there is some content there. (It's just not all that meaningful.)

And it's just not my blog that's affected. Check this 2009 post from Sparkups. And here's a 2006 post from Videomixer that can't be viewed in the United States. And check out this expired video.

For a variety of reasons, I prefer text posts to video posts. One of those reasons is evident here - why create a video post when it probably won't survive for more than a couple of years?