Turtles all the way down

It’s fairly well known that multitasking can be inefficient. Some of this inefficiency comes from task switching.

On a typical day I’m juggling 2-4 projects for work, as well as reading and assignments for 2-4 classes. I’m finding that, when switching between tasks, I use the “down time” to catch up on email, read online news, diddle with Facebook, and so on. Not good.

There are a few tricks that can overcome this loss of focus. Turning off email notifications. Actively avoiding “non-work” web sites. Having an ordered set of tasks that I’m going to work on also helps. Sometimes I can be very productive if I disconnect my computer from the network and thereby force myself to do just one thing. However that doesn’t work if I need the Internet to do research or access files.

Regardless I need to get better at task switching.

Last night, hurrying to a coach-pitch baseball game starring, among other small children, my son, I stop by a McDonalds for a quick iced coffee so that I can stave off the 85 degree heat.

They make me the coffee and I notice two things about it. First, they added cream, which I usually don’t bother with. And it was sweetened. My subsequent conversation with the McDonalds employee went something like this:

Me: “This coffee is sweetened.”
Her: Blank look.
Me: “I just asked for an iced coffee. I didn’t say anything about sweetener.”
Her: “But it is sugar-free sweetener.”
Me: “That’s not the point. I don’t like my coffee sweetened.”
Her: “But it is sugar-free sweetener.”
Me: “I don’t like the taste of sweetener.”
Her: “I can make another.”

She makes another. It’s sweetened. I give up and accept the inevitable fact that I’m going to be drinking a sweetened coffee whether I like it or not.

Starbucks has nothing to worry about.

Joel West writes about how large acquisitions rarely make sense.

I agree, especially having lived through two. There is a long list of so-called “mergers of equals,” or that of near-equals or just big mergers that failed spectacularly. Mergers Gone Bad, if you will.

3Com / US Robotics, Lucent / Ascend (and now Alcatel / Lucent), Nortel / Bay Networks to just list a few equipment providers in the mid 90’s.

The biggest problems are lack of focus, culture clash, overlapping products, overlapping IT infrastructure (read: inefficiency), and pressure to increase revenues for a company of a size that makes organic growth difficult.

I said that to a colleague a few months ago. I still can’t think of an exception to the rule.

In a way it’s not surprising. Firing employees is an unpleasant job and it is human nature to avoid unpleasantries. So we ignore our gut instincts and try to find a way to hang on to that troublesome employee.

We think that the underperformer just needs to be placed in the right job.

We think that the troublemaker needs the right outlet for his energies and is too smart to be without.

We think that manager who never delivers anything on time is having a run of bad luck with some difficult assignments.

But at some point we need to realize that it is not an employer’s duty to make employees better. An employer can only facilitate, not force, improvement. Most good employees just come that way. An employer can help improve an employee but probably cannot or should not try to rehabilitate one.

So bite the bullet and fire the employees that you need to get rid of. Your business will run smoother, other employees will be happier and more loyal, and you’ll live to not regret it.

Or at least that’s what a colleague once told me.

I think he was right. No matter what you do, if you’re going to do it right, there’s a lot of perspiration involved.

As a researcher, I had to read a lot of articles, run experiments, gather results, and write them up. As a manager I spent a lot of time in meetings. As an executive I spent more time in meetings, and stayed up late with Excel and Powerpoint trying to figure out how we’d make payroll and how we’d sell more stuff.

As a patent agent I spend more time than I’d like proofing my own work. As a law student I read a lot, and not all of it is particularly exciting.

Sure, each of these tasks has its pleasures, and sometimes are a lot of fun. But none are glamorous. Hard work and tedium are part of every job. Get used to it.

I’m surprised by how many industries and businesses thrive on this model. The idea is that rather than trying really hard to pick the winners in any field, you do some basic due diligence to weed out the obvious losers, and then build a portfolio with what is left. The odds are good that a relatively small fraction what is left will more than make up for any inadequacies in the portfolio.

This is the basic idea behind mutual funds, venture capital, the music industry, web and cellular application deployment, hiring in certain industries, and some companies use it to build up patent portfolios. Lately, everywhere I look, I see the crap / fertilizer model in action.

(Note that I’m being facetious about “crap”…you don’t want crap in your portfolio, but hey…it makes for a better by-line.)

With the present and future dominance of the long tail, will the crap / fertilizer model change? I see the interaction between the two like this:

• The long tail gives us more portfolio candidates to choose from, so it will be even harder to execute due diligence on each. Good for the crap / fertilizer model.
• “Hits” will be less common and of a smaller magnitude. Bad for the crap / fertilizer model.
• As the long tail reaches more niche markets, stuff that might have been crap a few years ago may turn out to be fertilizer for a small audience. Good for the crap / fertilizer model.

I suspect that the operational impact of the long tail will be that those using the crap / fertilizer model will reduce their level of due diligence even further and attempt to lower the barriers of entry into their portfolios. They will try to grow the size of their portfolios while push as much risk as possible back to the producer. This might be easy for say, the music industry or mutual funds, but hard for those building a patent portfolio, since there are fixed costs mandated by governments associated with patent prosecution (on the other hand, it might incentivize entities to buy other entities’ portfolio with less review).

Food for thought.

Successful people are often respected because of their success. That rich guy must be smart if he got so rich. That successful business woman must have superb business skill to become and executive.

Maybe. Maybe not.

My theory on success goes something like this. You can control some extent of your success. Maybe it’s 50%, maybe more or less. Within your domain of control is making your best decisions, working hard, purpose, desire, and so on. But not everything is in your control.

Life puts you in a place, whether by genetics or the fortune of being born into wealth or opportunity. Think of this as a fixed point on a planar surface. For example, Michael Jordan was born with good genes for slam dunking a basketball. He worked hard to get as good as he was, but he had some help. Someone who was born a foot shorter with weak legs might have to work significantly hard to achieve the same thing, or might not be able to do so at all. Likewise, being born into wealth will likely lead to you having a better education and therefore more doors of opportunity opening up for you.

I’ve observed that some people are able to move away from this place they are born into more easily than others. Think of this as a radius extending from the fixed point, proscribing a circle of possibilities. Attribute the ability to brainpower, motivation, work ethic or more dumb luck, some have improved their place in life. We all know of the rags-to-riches stories, as well as individuals who have come back from severe injuries or setbacks. Other folks seem to think that things are the way they are and they cannot do much, or anything at all, to improve upon their lot.

I knew a woman who insisted she did not have the capability to learn any language other than English. Her English skills were quite good, she was an avid reader, and had a decent vocabulary. More than likely, she convinced herself that she couldn’t learn other languages, or just did not want to put make the effort to do so. This individual did not, or could not move away from her place.

I know plenty of other people who have. Some who were born into middle class families and are now wealthy. Conversely, I’ve met more than my share of successful people who were remarkably dull, unobservant, and in some cases not particularly bright. And for a great deal of these people, success was not repeatable. (If you got rich during the dot-com boom and have been struggling ever since, I’m talking about you. Yeah we all made good money in the late 90’s because it was easier to do so. Don’t confuse access to opportunity with genius.)

Along with the place you’re born into and your ability to move from it, some people have the ability to extend the distance of their radius, thus expanding their possibilities. As time goes one, these folks learn that their radius is not a set length and they can make it grow. These people have the greatest opportunities to succeed regardless of their luck because they do not let themselves be artificially limited by where they start from.

A recent book explains how easy it is to confuse the randomness of luck with the virtues of intelligence, hard work, and motivation. However, despite my basically agreeing with many of these points, I firmly believe that we have the ability to make our own luck through these virtues. Also, I believe that raw talent is overrated and that those who are the best at what they do got there on a combination of luck and something else.

The first step to getting away from your fixed point? Stop complaining and start making it happen.

If I ever start a company, which is not looking likely right now, I hope to get it up and running and in the black without venture capital. However, if I do go the VC route, I’ll try to swing it such that the VC’s don’t have controlling interest.

The very nature of venture investing can run against the best interests of an individual company. For high tech, the rule of thumb is that out of 20 companies started, one might make it big, two to three do ok, and the rest fail. However, the VC’s make almost all of their profit on the company that makes it big, and they make very little or just manage their losses on the rest. Think of it like investing in a mutual fund with several hundred companies. If a few of the weaker ones go under, you might not even notice, care, nor will it even impact your bottom line. You just need enough of the companies to be successful so that your overall profits keep growing.

The magnitudes of success and failure are much greater for startup companies than established companies, so the VC’s need that one portfolio company to be really successful. One way that this can happen is if the startup takes extraordinary risks. Many successful companies took risks. However so did many unsuccessful-and-now-historical companies. VC’s might find themselves motivated to push their companies to take extraordinary risks because they have so much to gain and so little to lose by doing so. This is a great strategy for the VC’s, as they spread their risk throughout their portfolio, but it is probably not the best strategy for the startup.

VC’s also have a 3-7 year window in which they need a return on investment. In the mean time, you’re trying to build a good reputation that will last potentially much longer. Their time frame is different from yours (unless you’re trying to get rich fast, then your time frame might be shorter than theirs).

I’m not saying that all VC’s think like this, nor are they mean, heartless and cruel. Just that they have different motivating factors than the founders and employees of the startups.

So make sure you are in a position where you don’t have to listen to your VC’s. Don’t take on too much funding, spend too much money, or take extraordinary risks unless YOU think it is a good idea.

Today’s high tech job market in Chicago is frustrating and contradictory. The big companies have been laying people off, downsizing, outsourcing, off-shoring, and many people I know who are still at these companies want to leave. They are worried about losing their jobs. The startup market is pretty weak right now as well, with fewer entrepreneurs basing companies here.

However, if you do have an open position, it is very hard to find qualified talent. Post a job description and you’ll get 100 resumes, but only five of them worth following up on, and if you’re lucky, one worth interviewing. And when you find a good candidate, they will expect more compensation than you’d think they’re worth. Openings sit unfilled for months as managers try to find qualified candidates.

There seems to be a disconnect between those with talent and those looking for talent. The now-traditional way of getting your resume out there, via job sites like monster.com, is weak. It is too hard for the qualified applicant to stand out, and it is also too hard for the hiring manager to separate wheat from chaff.

Recruiters aren’t much better, as they tend to pigeonhole talent, and de-emphasize location. If you’re a great software development manager with experience in cellular user interfaces and you live in Chicago, you’ll get plenty of recruiting calls for similar positions on either coast, but will probably get passed over for a local job focused on software development in another area.

For various reasons many good job openings never get publicized. The job seeker needs to know the right people or be in the right place at the right time. The saying, “It’s not what you know but who you know,” is still very true today, but outside of the circle of people that you know may be the ideal match for the position you’re trying to fill. How do you find that person?

Jobs exist and the talent exists. We need a better way of putting them together. Perhaps this could be accomplished by having recruiting done by an individual with the appropriate technical and managerial experience. Perhaps job sites could do a better job pre-screening both openings and applicants. Perhaps the resume is a poor means for evaluating the scope of one’s talent and experience and a better alternative is needed.

Perhaps all of the above. There may be a lucrative opportunity for someone to crack this nut.

Most people’s first reaction would be that the programing is difficult because of limited memory and CPU resources. While its true that mobile phones typically have far less RAM and horsepower than, say, PCs, they still have quite a bit and their capabilities are growing every year. It is not uncommon for a device to have several megabytes of memory, and high end devices will have on the order of a gigabyte. Programming in low-memory devices is not that hard, but given the dominance of the PC world, most people graduating from CS or EE programs in the last ten years probably haven’t done much of it. You may have to pay a premium to hire experienced mobile developers.

The bigger issues are platform specific. Focusing on the most obvious example, every manufacturer of J2ME devices has multiple families of the platform, each with different levels of API support, and potentially different input modes, screen sizes, and screen resolutions. Some versions of the platforms will have bugs. You end up having to write device-specific code and build scripts. Along the way you’ll spend time discovering the quirks of each model.

Cross-platform issues are also a problem. Want to launch an application with Verizon Wireless? It has to be BREW. Want it on Sprint as well? It has to be J2ME. These two languages are different and you’ll be able to reuse very little code. Want it on high end Nokia phones as well? J2ME might work, but Symbian will work better. Symbian and BREW are both based on C++ but are different languages with their own APIs and unique challenges.

Then comes getting an operator to launch your application. For anything but something like a simple game, the operator might want to test and certify it on each device. This takes time and money, even if your code works properly on the first try. Then, for most platforms, you’ll need to have your application certified by a testing house, such as NSTL, before the operator puts it on their deck for download. Each pass through NSTL for each device can cost hundreds of dollars or more. If you are developing a branded application, such as a Yahoo instant messaging or email client, you’ll have to get it through their certification process as well. Again, more time and money.

Testing on real handsets becomes expensive as well. You can use an emulator, but emulators don’t emulate all phones properly, nor do they emulate some of the strangest quirks in each device. Buying phones and service plans can easily run into the tens of thousands of dollars.

Unlike a server based application or most PC client applications, once you have a mobile application out there and a bug is discovered, you have to go through the whole set of certification processes again. It may be a more cursory certification if the bug fix is relatively minor, but you still have to do it.

Another issue. Unless your application is integrated with the client firmware, it may not be able to run automatically upon launch. For communication applications, this is virtually a show stopper. Given the ridiculous menu navigation that most phone manufacturers have inflicted upon us, you’ll have to have a very compelling application if you expect users to click over to your application every time they boot the phone.

How to avoid all of this? Don’t develop a mobile application if you don’t absolutely have to. I’ve been saying the same thing for years about PC client applications. If you can make it web based, you get the “client” out there virtually for free and can focus on the much simpler task of writing a server-based application. WAP browsers are still pretty primitive but they are getting better each year. You’ll find making your site WAP-friendly much easier that developing a mobile client.

If you have to develop a mobile application, make sure it is a simple one. Otherwise you’ll quickly find yourself in porting hell.

This isn’t to say that it cannot be done. Some companies have made a successful business out of mobile application development as well as associated hosted services. My point is that it is just plain hard, especially given that to many peoples’ eyes, it looks deceptively easy.