The Internet is inherently seditious. It undermines unthinking respect for centralized authority, whether that “authority” is the neatly homogenized voice of broadcast advertising or the smarmy rhetoric of the corporate annual report.
No, this isn’t new. And no, it isn’t the first time I’ve read it. But I’m reading it again, and this sentence (again) resonated with me as I read it.
J Allard in Business Week:
“The only way to change the world is to imagine it different than the way it is today,” he says. “Apply too much of the wisdom and knowledge that got us here, and you end up right where you started. Take a fresh look from a new perspective, and get a new result.”
Now, to be clear, at 6′2″, 250 lbs, I’m at least 35-55 lbs overweight (depending on the standard of measurement). I guess it’s something akin to black people being allowed to say the “n” word.
This highlights a style of software design shared by Microsoft and the open source movement, in both cases driven by a desire for consensus and for “Making Everybody Happy,” but it’s based on the misconceived notion that lots of choices make people happy, which we really need to rethink.
…too many managers appear too threatened to figure out whether their trouble-maker is the one person who can really push things forward, or the one who simply thrives on being disruptive.
I wonder if it’s possible for the answer to be some of both ;).
When I last discussed corporate dress codes, I argued that the whole “Dress For Success” argument was crap. I realized a few days later that I was wrong…sort of.
Read Dress Code Redux
Before you embrace your wonderful solution to the marketplace’s problem, first decide how many of consumers are choosing to listen to messages like yours. Are they listening in a medium you can afford?
Brad Garlinghouse (Yahoo Senior VP) from an internal memo published in the WSJ:
I believe we must embrace our problems and challenges and that we must take decisive action. We have the opportunity - in fact the invitation - to send a strong, clear and powerful message to our shareholders and Wall Street, to our advertisers and our partners, to our employees (both current and future), and to our users. They are all begging for a signal that we recognize and understand our problems, and that we are charting a course for fundamental change, Our current course and speed simply will not get us there. Short-term band-aids will not get us there.
Paul Graham on the income gap:
When we say that one kind of work is overpaid and another underpaid, what are we really saying? In a free market, prices are determined by what buyers want. People like baseball more than poetry, so baseball players make more than poets. To say that a certain kind of work is underpaid is thus identical with saying that people want the wrong things.
The whole essay is excellent, even if it is a few years old. Should definitely check it out. The principles behind it seem to overlap with Robert Kiyosaki’s book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money–That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not!, however, it is focused more on why the gap is a good thing and less on how to jump the gap.
The principles from the essay can readily be extrapolated to other semi-related topics, including relative value of employees to an organization.
Seth Godin on customer service:
Either you’re going to make someone happy or you’re not. Doing the ‘right’ thing is irrelevant.
At least if it means not making them happy, anyway. As far as they’re concerned, the ‘right’ thing is to make them happy.
It struck me that someone who complains constantly should be marked down as remarkably optimistic. The complainer believes that people actually might care.
I liked this quote, but I’m not sure I entirely agree with the rest of his sentiment, which is that the most pessimistic people are the non-complainers. I imagine a large group of the non-complainers are pessimists, but there’s a sizable group of non-complainers that are just unaware that something is wrong. A smaller group of non-complainers is also made up of discouraged former complainers (but still optimists at heart), bitter and jaded that nobody ever listens.
…[I]f you want to be successful in the software business, you have to have a management team that thoroughly understands and loves programming, but they have to understand and love business, too. Finding a leader with strong aptitude in both dimensions is difficult, but it’s the only way to avoid making one of those fatal mistakes…
It’s an old article, but it fits with the theme of stuff I’ve been thinking about lately.
I’ve heard it said many times that the march of progress means that business people take over from the pioneers, but I’ve observed the opposite. When the boom is finished, the technology will still be here, and while progress may have suffered during the euphoria (the money is rarely used to fund new ideas), the ball never really stops rolling while everyone is focused on the money-obsessed. When the boom is over, we’ll still be here, pushing new ideas forward.
In the internet age, one happy customer might make a note in their blog or forward an email. An unhappy customer, starts a blog, writes about how unhappy they are, takes out an ad on search engines to let people who are looking for the product know how made they are, starts an email forwarding chain asking people to boycott the product, does a Youtube video about it and games Youtube to make it one of the top 10 most viewed videos…
It’s easy to fall in love with every aspect of your brand and your story, even when your future customers wish you were something else. While it’s often better to ’stay the course’, it’s never a good idea to do so just because you can’t consider the alternatives.
So why were we afraid? We felt we were good at programming, but we lacked confidence in our ability to do a mysterious, undifferentiated thing we called “business.” In fact there is no such thing as “business.” There’s selling, promotion, figuring out what people want, deciding how much to charge, customer support, paying your bills, getting customers to pay you, getting incorporated, raising money, and so on. And the combination is not as hard as it seems, because some tasks (like raising money and getting incorporated) are an O(1) pain in the ass, whether you’re big or small, and others (like selling and promotion) depend more on energy and imagination than any kind of special training.
If I could get one idea through to people who write about the business people as if they were the Hank Aarons and Ty Cobbs of software, that would be it. You had to love baseball to love Pete Rose, but there’s a bit of his spirit in every winning idea in software. And sure, some people don’t like Pete Rose, but then what do they know about baseball?
I’ve often wondered why companies implement dress codes for employees that rarely interact with customers face-to-face. I’m sure there are a number of different types of such companies, but the ones closest to my heart are software companies. What possible value add comes from making programmers and other technical staff at software companies wear khakis and collared shirts? If anyone has a good answer to this question, I’m all ears. The reasons I’ve typically heard or read are junk.
TUAW:
All Apple employees getting an iPod shuffle morale booster from Uncle Steve
The last company I worked for gave everyone 10GB 2nd gen iPods with our names engraved on the back one year, and iPod Nanos a couple of years later.
Cameron lives in Bellingham, WA with his wife Betsy, sons Sean & Caleb, and Sam, the family dog.
