Statistics. Picturing large numbers. Communicating numbers. Some of the numbers in this 11-minute talk are just amazing. He asks: "have we lost our sense of outrage?"
If the video here doesn't show up -- technical details -- the link is Picturing Excess. Or, alternatively, here is the video, from Chris Jordan, speaking at TED.
Once upon a time I worked for Larry Wells at Creative Strategies. He was president and founder. He was good to work for, a smart person, a fair and honest boss. I've fallen out of contact.
In the last two weeks I've aggressively cleared the clutter from my two main workspaces, my office at Palo Alto Software and my office at home. It was hard for me to do, but I was really longing for the great relief of cleared clutter. I took big boxes and emptied everything but the computers and their cables and speakers and monitors into them. All the drawers, shelves, and open desk spaces were cleared into boxes. Then, slowly, I replaced what I really needed, and threw out the rest.
Which reminded me of Larry's strategy to solve the same problem. Every six months or so he would have somebody clear out all the surfaces in his office and pack them into cardboard boxes, which were sealed, dated, and stored with large labels indicating the date. In between those anti-clutter orgies he would just leave everything piling up.
When he needed something that had been boxed and stored, he would guess the timeframe and have the boxes brought back temporarily, and he'd search them.
I think that worked for him.
And one final note: I'm tempted to become a clutter bigot, a reformed pack rat, but for two worries: first, I'll look like a real idiot when I get project oriented again and clutter up (far too likely, although I'm dead set against it); and second, I don't want to get into the pattern behavior of the reformed smoker.
That -- the title to this post -- might seem obvious, but we forget so easily, as we struggle to grow the business, and especially as we contemplate an economic downturn (free-fall?). The best ROI is selling more per customer to existing customers.
I think I learned this first back 15-20 years ago when I was working a lot with U.S. computer dealers, before the Internet took off, when many of the smaller home-grown resellers were getting squeezed by the growth of the office superstores.
It turned out, as we studied the situation, that they were leaving lots of money on the table, not taking care of existing customers. For example, one of the best promotions I ever saw was a smaller store getting back to all of its customers and offering them memory upgrades and hard disk upgrades as a special sale. It was an instant bottom line boost.
I was reminded of this last week by a post on Seth Godin's blog, The magic of low-hanging fruit. Here's a quote:
Simple example: It's way more profitable to encourage each of your existing customers to spend $3 than it is to get a stranger to spend $300. It's also more effective to get the 80% of your customer service people that are average to be a little better than it is to get the amazing ones to be better still.
Yes. And, particularly in a recession, it's really good business.
In today's New York Times, Steve Lohr writes:
"Google’s market power, it seems, is the economic equivalent of what in foreign affairs is called ‘soft power,’ a term coined by the political scientist Joseph S. Nye Jr. This is the power to co-opt rather than coerce."
That's in an analysis titled Google, Zen Master of the Market. Comparing Google's market success to Microsoft's, and then looking at possible antitrust implications, the piece starts with Microsoft and how Microsoft rode to power:
Microsoft was a master practitioner of “network effects,” the straightforward precept in economics that the value of a product or service often goes up as more people use it. There is nothing new about the concept. It was true of railways, telephones and fax machines, for example.
Microsoft, however, applied the power of network effects more lucratively than any company had done before it.
In context, he's talking about how in computers and software, you build the platform that everybody uses, and the world follows the bandwagon. DOS and Windows, then third-party software development, and then the whole world.
Google, in taking over the Internet like Microsoft took over the PC, is working in new ways in a new world, but also building on network effects.
Michael A. Cusumano, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sees the difference in terms of what he calls “direct network effects” and “indirect network effects.” The direct effects, he says, include software document formats and technology standards that are owned by one company and that are incompatible with a rival’s technology. The indirect effects, he adds, include large numbers of users, the ability to learn from those users, the power of a well-known brand and user inertia.
“For Google,” Mr. Cusumano said, “the indirect network effects are very powerful.”
Google, however, has learned from Microsoft, and is managing the potential antitrust implications skillfully. U.S. law generally looks at antitrust as having 70 percent of a market. Google has more than 60 percent of the search market and about 70 percent of the search ad market.
Still, dominance alone is not an antitrust problem. The issue is the powerful company’s behavior, says Andrew I. Gavil, a professor at the Howard University School of Law. “You have to be big and bad, not just big,” he said.
That's Google, Zen Master of the Market. It's a good read.
I've been reading The Black Swan, by Nassim Taleb. If you care about understanding the difference between how little we really know and how much we think we know, you should read it. If you think we've figured out cause and effect, and you're interested in how that works, you'd like this book. And don't worry, as I use that bewildering subject matter to describe it; he's a much better writer than I am, he sprinkles liberally with interesting examples and useful stories. The book moves right along, easily.
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The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb Read more about this book... |
That, however, is not the main point of this post. It was just a reminder. The main point of this post is about whether or not business ethics is good business.
Is Good Business Ethics Good Business?
To me, the idea that business ethics is about good business makes so much sense it feels like it's intuitively obvious: ethical businesses do better over the long run. So business ethics isn't about being good so your soul goes to heaven, or so that you get reincarnated to a higher being, or other variations on that theme; no, I say, instead of that, business ethics will make your business perform better in the here and now, in this world.
What I'd like, however, is to be able to prove that. And, if I've understood the message of the Black Swan, I'll never be able to prove it. We can prove that ethically bad behavior has produced terrible business setbacks for the corporate culprits, over and over again; but we can't prove that bad behavior is bad business because our evidence is limited to companies that got caught. We can't know how many companies don't get caught.
I've been asking around on this issue. The best comment that came back to me, in my opinion, was from John Caddell, of Shoptalk -- Innovation, Marketing, and Alliances, who suggested that business ethics is like an insurance policy. It reduces risk.
But Really, How Would We Know?
Then we run into another problem, when people try to research business ethics, which is that we really have no standard for business success. The closest thing to it is sales growth and stock price appreciation, but there's so much noise in that data, it's almost useless. Over what time frame do we measure stock prices or valuations? And what if bad business ethics offers occasional (or random) short-term stock market gains, followed by long-term problems that the research time frame doesn't turn up?
Maybe this is just me, and if you don't give a damn about grammar, then I apologize, please skip the rest of this post. This is about a grammar rule that should change.
The proper English grammar is to put the period inside the quotation marks at the end of the sentence. But what if the quotation is something to search for, or type, like a password. For example, this sentence:
Your password is "password."
In this case, do you type "password" or do you type "password." before pressing the Enter key? That's confusing. Grammar is supposed to relieve confusion, not cause more confusion.
Here's another example:
Just search for "business plan software."
What do I type into the search engine, before I click? Do I type "business plan software" or do I type "business plan software." and there again, the grammar confuses the issue.
The solution is for us to get together with editors and style guides and establish that the quotation marks used to set off the keystrokes counts more than the normal quotation convention. So it should be
Your password is "password".
Search in Google for "business plan software".
And for those of you who couldn't care less about grammar technicalities, I apologize again. I realize most people couldn't care less. But some of us do care, and in my case I'm going over edits for my latest book, and this comes up more than once.
I always liked George Carlin, even if not every routine he ever had. I liked his off-kilter anti-establishment viewpoint. I think the world, and especially our world in the United States, needs dissenters. And it needs good writers. So I'm very sorry to see him go. 
Brian Clark at Copyblogger posted George Carlin on Writing, with a couple of good quotes from the much longer post George Carlin's Last Interview on Psychology Today Blogs. Here's one of the three Brian included:
“One of the voguish terms, which is so repellant to me, 'thinking outside the box.' To settle for that kind of language is embarrassing. But that’s a very useful picture. I try to come in through the side door, the side window, to come in from a direction they’re not expecting, to see something in a different way.”
Here's the link to the interview on Psychology Today.
This is a copy of an email I just sent to our internal tech support person at our company. I thought it might make an interesting short post, because what should be a no-brainer, upgrading my system, isn't really. Here's the email:
My Vista system is urging me to allow it to upgrade to SP1, but when I click through the details it wants me to back everything up, and warns me that if it screws me up it doesn't give a damn, it wasn't its fault. Do I trust it? Should I let it do SP1 on a perfectly good system? What should I back up first?
I might be too sensitive because last month an overnight nobody-asked-me upgrade of the Windows XP system on my tablet computer killed my system. We had to reformat it, losing all the data (it was pretty backed up, so no big deal ... but still!). On the other hand, I think it's remarkable that I have what I'm calling "a reasonable doubt" about upgrading the operating system.
What? Is gender bias still an issue? Is there anybody out there who wouldn't argue that it's basically stupid? Apparently.
Over the weekend I picked up on Is Gender Bias Undermining Your Company? on the Harvard Business Online's HBR Editors' Blog. Aside from the fact that it's a good post, and an important topic, I followed some of the links, which lead to some pretty amazing -- and disturbing -- opinions.
One led me to Your Comments on Women and Technology, posted last week by Sylvia Ann Hewett, also on the Harvard Business Review site; which is a follow-up on her post in May titled Women and Technology: the Ugly Truth. Her truth is ugly enough ...
A new study—which I co-authored—to be published next month by the Harvard Business Review (see “The Athena Factor: Reversing the Brain Drain in Science, Engineering, and Technology”) demonstrates that over 40% of highly qualified scientists, engineers and technologists on the lower rungs of corporate career ladders are now female. In pharmaceuticals, high tech, petro-chemicals, and aerospace, young women are making impressive strides – and garnering rave performance reviews.
This rosy picture is spoiled by one calamitous fact. A little ways down the road, more than half of these women drop out—pushed and shoved by macho work environments, serious isolation, and extreme job pressures.
... but the comments, the subject of the second post, are startling:
The many comments responding to my piece of May 16th read like postcards from the 1970s – from the early bitter edge of the gender wars. I was beginning to absorb this material, figuring out how to respond when I was hit by another deluge—200 comments that came in over a 24 period in reaction to a Q&A in Computerworld.
Both waves of reaction provide deep confirmation of my main finding—that the problems faced by female scientists, engineers, and technologists are enormously serious. These blogs and posts show that women around the country see SET workplace cultures as hostile, predatory and demeaning. They can hardly contain their disillusionment and despair. Take Jessica, Diane, and Anonymous:
“I work with ten forty-something men who work 12 hours a day, read tech magazines for fun, and bond at Hooters….If I counted the number of times I have been sexually harassed, you’d gasp.”
- Jessica“I am the only woman in a technical position in my company. Many of [our clients] think I’m in the meetings to take notes for the men. Some even apologize for boring me with technical discussions, assuming I have no idea what they’re talking about. Imagine if men had to put up with this on top of the stress and pressures of an IT career!
- DianeAs a female in IT for over 10 years and managed to work my way to the executive level, I‘ve experienced sexual harassment on a quarterly basis. At all levels of the corporate ladder I was propositioned. Me, a married, never “fooled around” on my husband, Brooks Brother suit executive had to fight off male employees at every turn. A male superior even went so far as to place a bet with a male subordinate who would sleep with me first.
- Anonymous
Wow. I'm sorry, I would have thought this stuff was, as she suggests, from the distant past (I know, I'm naive on this respect, perhaps wildly optimistic), but, damn!
So, turning back to the original question is gender bias undermining your company? Here are some suggestions, from Is Gender Bias Undermining Your Company? on the Harvard Business Online's HBR Editors' Blog.
If you’re a male manager, here are a few small, but important, ways to acknowledge your female colleagues' contributions to your organization:
Notice how you interact. When you’re in a small group, do you tend to exchange more eye contact with the men in it? Do you speak more often to men than to women? If you do notice a bias toward men, try shifting your attention slightly. Shake the woman’s hand, and exchange eye contact with her even if she's not talking. If she's being quiet, ask for her thoughts. (Don’t overdo all this, though, as you could raise the discomfort level.)
Actively listen. It’s easy to ‘hear past’ someone who is talking. (Our minds work about five times the speed of our mouths. In our rush to finish the speaker’s thought and put our own two cents in, we shut the other person down.) If you have a bias, it’s even easier to want to interrupt. Slow down and listen. If your response demonstrates that you've heard what she's said, she'll feel more enabled to contribute more fully to your organization.
Do you notice unspoken gender biases in your company? What are you doing, on a personal level, to help address them?
I've realized lately that for most of my adult life I've gone through some wide slow swings from morning person to night person. I swing back and forth sometimes for as much as 2-3 years, sometimes just a few months.
As a morning person, I'm generally more productive.
As a night person, I'm generally more creative.
And if I try to be both --staying up late working, and then also getting up early for working -- I'm told I'm a royal pain to all around me. So apparently I'm better off being either morning or night, but not both.
The Plan-As-You-Go Business Plan is out! ...
