Constant Bearing, Decreasing Range

Anticipation building as a marketing tactic

2008-01-17T17:17:00.000-08:00

Apple's Macworld is a study in the art of extreme anticipation building. The level of anticipation is so great that Apple watchers obsessvively look for clues, scour leaks for authenticity and count down to the announcement of the next great product. The whole thing is more similar to recent movie marketing epitomized by JJ Abrams and his Cloverfield campaign ... engage enthusiasts through very controlled information delivery and then launch the product in a extremely hyped environment with minimal preview.

Apple's extreme anticipation building has clearly worked in the past (e.g., iPhone). Is it an approach that should be used as THE method for product launches? There isn't a clear cut answer, but there are some key questions that Apple must have considered to validate its current approach:

Share value: MacWorld creates a very compressed, binary event for investors. Apple stock is extremely volatile during Macworld. Would a more conservative product launch approach reduce stock volatility?

Revenue: Macworld clearly has many enthusiasts that want to purchase what is announced immediately. Would a more traditional product launch schedule be better attuned to products that are >$500 where some will buy based on research and others will buy based on brand?

Cost: Macworld must clearly be the key date in the life of many developers at Apple. Does this one year cycle put artificial constraints/deadlines on the R&D cycle and delay products coming to market?

Competitors: Macworld provides a point in time announcement that prevents competitors from scooping Apple. Is this advantage substantial or does it not matter given the prevalence of fast followers?

Everyone is Replaceable

2007-04-08T17:37:00.000-07:00

My company had a management shift recently when one of the executives decided to depart. The stock market cut through all the discussion about the departure and declared loud and clear that everyone is replaceable; the stock currently trades above the price when the departure was first announced.

Beyond all of the discussion, though, is the question of what any organization has to replace when a key personality leaves. Senior executives are usually one of three things:

"leaders" (they set the vision)
"managers" (they make sure things get done)
"evangelist" (they sell the company to customers, the markets and employers ... beyond the traditional definition of sales).

It is the rare individual who successfully embodies all three.

Which of the three is the hardest to replace? My initial answer was "leader". I reconsidered after reading the book "Halsey's Typhoon", by Drury and Clavin, which detailed how Admiral Halsey took his Third Fleet through a typhoon in WWII, losing close to 800 men. He clearly made mistakes, but wasn't relieved of command. Why? Well, it's not because he was the only "leader"; there were plenty of oversized personalities setting vision. It's not because he was the only "manager"; Admiral Spruance was arguably a more effective manager. I believe he wasn't relieved because he was the greatest "evangelist" of the US effort to both his sailors and the American public.

So, how does this translate into a lesson for the organization? As much as you have to have succession plans in place for leaders and managers, companies need to carefully monitor who becomes their chief evangelist as well. Having too much tied to one person doesn't mean they aren't replaceable, but the transition is easier when the responsibility is spread.

Search and Rescue, the US Coast Guard & Web 2.0

2007-02-04T14:22:00.000-08:00

Doctor Gray, a renown technologist, disappeared while sailing off Northern California. The Coast Guard did a thorough search before calling off the effort; most search and rescue stories would have unfortunately ended here. However, Doctor Gray's colleagues and the public mounted an impressive effort that put technology to work to continue the search. Those still hoping need only look to the pantheon of "survival at sea stories" for inspiration.

So, how is this effort actually helping the search? By working on some of the components of the search and rescue equation. Although there is some art to search and rescue, there is a lot of science as well. There is a basic equation that drives all search planning which I have paraphrased. More info is available.

The Probability that you are searching in the right area

The Probability that you will spot the survivor

The Probability of finding a survivor

The civilian effort supporting Doctor Gray improves The Probability that you are searching in the right area. It's not easy to find the right spot to search in a giant ocean. A Search and Rescue planner has to make a best estimate of where the mariner might be so that he/she can focus limited resources. By posting satellite images on Amazon's mechanical Turk that anyone can search, more bandwidth is being thrown at the problem; now you don't have to be constrained by searching a small area. This is what people are calling the Web 2.0 portion of this. Perhaps closer to open source, the modular and self contained nature of each satellite picture allows the overall effort to be divided up between many participants.

However, the civilian effort is still constrained by The Probability that you will spot the survivor. Although you might be looking at a satellite photo of the right area, cloud cover, inexperience, carelessness could prevent spotting the survivor. By having multiple people look at the same image, carelessness can be screened out, but the clarity of the photo is still a limiting factor. A survivor once told us a Coast Guard helicopter had flown right over him. Night, high seas and rain, though, lowered the The Probability that you will spot the survivor.

So, is there potential here for the Coast Guard? SETI is a proven distributed effort. Crowdsourcing is being considered as a viable solution. If the Coast Guard wants to extend and formalize this effort, there are a few next steps starting with proof of concept. I'm not sure if there is opportunity here, but I hope it is evaluated to find out.

Validate the ability to search using satellites photos. Can the average person spot a sailboat? Could a computer program be made to do it? How often will weather prevent a suitable picture?
Gauge the interest of the public to help more anonymous mariners. Would civilians mobilize to help out a mariner without a large public persona?
Evaluate how quickly people would mobilize. Help needs to begin immediately as the chance for survival is a function of time.

One more comment on this story. I've read a few comments that the Coast Guard gave up and that simply gives the wrong impression. Sometimes the duration of disappearance, weather conditions and other factors make survival unlikely. In those cases, the Coast Guard has to weigh the extreme unlikelihood of finding a survivor against the danger to its own crews and the need to perform other missions, which include search and rescue for someone else. Believe me, as someone who has had to inform people that the Coast Guard was suspending a search, you do everything possible. It's not an easy decision and it certainly is not giving up.

Baffling behavior in Boston ...

2007-02-01T20:37:00.000-08:00

The two men arrested for executing the viral marketing campaign that set off the Boston terror scare made truly baffling comments to the press after leaving the courthouse. The situation hasn't changed and the corporate sponsors still deserve the brunt of any consequences.

But any sympathy the city felt for those two has been squandered. Imagine how much different it would have been if they had expressed even a bit of contrition ... or even made a reasonable statement about how they felt they had been set up. It's such a dichotomy to think of the thousands of kids serving in the middle east compared to these two guys who don't even have enough respect for our society to make an intelligible statement.

Deconstructing A False Alarm: Boston invaded by Mooninites

2007-01-31T19:19:00.000-08:00

The Department of Homeland Security's color coded threat scheme has been the subject of jokes since introduction. Until today, I didn't have a better solution. Well, seeing the Boston politicians trip over themselves tonight to appear tough on the Cartoon Network's viral marketing campaign, it's clear what the new threat scheme should be. You could even use different color lights on the "mooninite" (the symbol for the Cartoon Network Show "Aqua Teen Hunger Force") to indicate threat severity.

It's easy to mistake nothing for something. About 10 years ago, I was involved with shutting down a major waterway because of a "suspicious device"; turned out to be an old microwave with some aluminum foil duct taped onto the top. False alarms are a fact of life. What matters is how quickly the system validates a threat. There is a lot of second guessing going on in Boston about why it took so long to invalidate the threat. Maybe there is some validity to this, but I give them the benefit of the doubt. Best case, maybe the city could have invalidated the threat a couple of hours earlier ... probably not worth quibbling about.

Just as important as response, though, is after action. How do you clean up the mess, how do you learn from the process, what do you tell the public. It's only been 5 hours, but I think the initial grade here is a "D". I had a visceral reaction to the politicians triumphantly announcing an arrest superimposed against footage of the downtrodden artist they arrested. After action is supposed to make citizens feel safer. Legality aside, his arrest made me feel like the city is petty and focused on the wrong things. Of course, I didn't sit in traffic for 4 hours because the roads were shut down ...

As for Turner, I don't know the details or legal issues so I'll keep my judgment in abeyance. I do think that the job of any product manager is to manage risk; I'd be surprised if risk wasn't considered before putting up 100+ signs in over 5 cities.

picture source: CNN, Cartoon Network

Abdicating Responsibility

2006-12-06T17:45:00.000-08:00

One of the byproducts of a safety net is that some people seek a free ride. There are those that truly need the safety net because of mistakes and those that purposefully use the safety net for their advantage. The latter type of person is a freeloader who is a drain on the entire system.

Last week I was in Nantucket reading the local paper and there was a picture of this kiteboarder who had gone out into the harbor in extreme weather. You have to wonder if he would have gone out into this extreme weather if there wasn't a Coast Guard available to back him up.

I have no idea if this guy consciously knew he was abdicating responsibility for his safety. What I do know, is that 7 years ago I had to plan a rescue mission for the same guy when he had gone out into a gale and gotten washed out to sea. At the time, I was in charge of Coast Guard resources from New Jersey to Maine. I had to order two boats and two helicopters to look for him which was risky, not to mention expensive. The cost of this freeloader got absorbed into the overall cost of the safety net.

Experience that matters in corporate America

2006-10-31T19:10:00.000-08:00

I believe John Kerry when he said that he wasn't intending to insult those serving in military by calling them uneducated. Kerry is one of the few in the Senate who actually served in the military and I find it hard to believe he would purposefully insult the armed forces.

That said, Kerry's comments were misplaced and suggestive of a broader theme. There are a lot of preconceived notions in the private sector about how a military background measures up in the civilian sector. With the hindsight of now having more years in the corporate world than the military, I know that military experience can be a great contributor to business success. However, many young former military officers feel they need to minimize their military experience to appeal to those in corporate recruiting. I probably did a bit of the same thing.

I remember one dinner with an investment bank during Harvard's recruiting process. I was sitting next to a managing director who asked, "How would taking down a smuggling operation ever be useful to my firm? Frankly I don't see any way you could fit." Maybe it was a test and I probably should have had a better retort at the time. I would now. Leading a multi-national effort (US, Dutch, Colombian), across a matrixed organization (US State Department, US Navy), using unstructured data (intel, analysis,) in a high stress environment to a successful conclusion. How couldn't that experience be considered relevant? The rest of the stuff (high seas, night time boardings, etc) is just window dressing.

My advice today to an officer going through the experience is to not give any company the time of day that doesn't value your experience.

Google Groups Lacks Social Network Diagnostic Tools

2006-09-21T21:09:00.000-07:00

One of the best aspects about running groups online in a contained environment should be the ability to diagnose the groups using the ideas of social network analysis. Identifying who is central to the conversation, who is quiet but respected or who is a connector is fairly basic as long as you know who communicates with who and in what order. Google Groups unfortunately doesn't allow any of this basic analysis. The only information shared is the number of posts by each individual.

The social networking information is a fairly valuable dataset. I would be surprised if Google isn't analyzing this information on the backend and adding to its great store of data on the way we interact.

Splitting My Blog - One Enterprise Software, One Everything Else

2006-09-21T20:32:00.000-07:00

I am going to launch a new blog and will now have two:

New: Business Of Software with an explicit focus on enterprise software
Original (this blog): Constant Bearing, Decreasing Range with its more general focus

I will do dual posts while I get the word out. If you read me only for software, please update your feeds: http://businessofsoftware.blogspot.com/

I hope this brings a sharper focus, especially since I have had the opportunity to recently take the lead for a great enterprise focused strategy team.

Is that "business background" relevant?

2006-09-04T17:22:00.000-07:00

The upcoming Massachusetts Governor's election is the latest to host multiple candidates touting successful business careers as omens of success. I'm leery of the blanket "business background" is good mentality. You have to dive to the second-level questions to really understand whether a business background is relevant. Given what is important in Massachusetts, below are some relevant second order questions for the candidates:

Did you have P&L level responsibility (with P&L interpreted widely)?
Did you spend more than 70% of your time in business on execution as opposed to process (e.g., not HR, legal, finance., etc)
Were you in charge of the strategy for your business?
If you were on a board of directors, did you ever vote against the CEO and with the minority?

Frankly, if the answer to any of the above questions is no, their business background isn't that relevant to the needs of Massachusetts which needs a Governor that will give this state some vision, sign up for results and execute.

Why isn't the upperclass serving in the military?

2006-08-22T14:51:00.000-07:00

There is no shortage of people pointing out that today's upperclass are not serving in the military. Ben Stein just ran another piece about this in Sunday's NYT. And you consistently hear about how only a couple members of congress have children in the military. Why is this? There is a tendency to answer by pointing to a sense of declining national responsibility that hasn't been strong since Brokaw's "greatest generation". But this answer really doesn't hold up to scrutiny and we are past a period where national responsibility was defined by serving in the military.

So what are the structural reasons for declining upperclass representation in the military? The all encompassing, obvious answer is that the military isn't attractive to many upperclass youth when stacked up against other options. Although the leadership, management and crisis response lessons learned as a Junior Officer are second to none, the military often doesn't give people that same amount of entrepreneurial freedom found in the civilian world.

Should the nation be concerned? No. The military is going to function well no matter its makeup; it doesn't need upperclass representation to work better, an argument that in fact smacks of elitism. The one argument often used is the "I care about my own" argument which states that if more members of Congress had children serving, the debate around going to war would be more considered. However, war's cost and its impact on the balance of power are probably already enough to hold Congressional attention.

You thought your last product launch was complicated ...

2006-08-16T15:52:00.000-07:00

A US operation netted Mexico's most powerful drug cartel leader about 15 miles off the Baja coast today. He was a particular favorite of the US in the mid to late 90's when there were rumors he put a blanket bounty out for the death of US law enforcement officers.

I question the strategy behind our US drug policy, but that said, this operation was flawlessly executed. I don't have hard facts on success rates, but I estimate that maybe 1 in 20 operations are successful, let alone netting a target this high profile. The news report doesn't fully capture the coordination, planning, execution and luck that all had to fall in place to drive a win.

Planning & Coordination

The right intelligence sources had to be identified
The intelligence sources had to be able to collect the information ... probably a mix of human intelligence, signals intelligence and other things
The intelligence had to be analyzed and disseminated to the right operators
The inter-agency planners had to come up with a plan to execute & get multiple agencies to agree

Dumb Luck

The bad guys had to be outside of Mexican territorial seas (12 miles) for the US to be able to act under international law. It's likely the US couldn't have coordinated with Mexican officials quickly enough if he had stayed within Mexican waters

Execution

There had to be a US asset, in this case the Coast Guard Cutter Monsoon (picture below), within striking distance
The Coast Guard had to find these guys ... made significantly easier with technology, but its a big Ocean
The boarding teams had to be on their game to successfully bring them in
Prosecution ... we will see how this goes

Many military officers making the transition to a civilian business career are put on the hot seat about how their experiences apply to the business world. This operation would be a textbook answer to that question; the ability to drive complicated plans from development to completion, with all the facets that entails. There have been enough botched product launches, failed integrations and ineffective re-orgs to know this skill should be in high demand.

Function follows form in the command center

2006-08-15T13:35:00.000-07:00

I've posted in the past that the command center of reality is different from that of fiction. I'd be as motivated as Jack Bauer in "24" if I could work in that sweet command center he had.

Well, turns out I'm wrong. There are cool command centers. Check out this picture from the National Counterterrorism Center in McLean, Va (source: Evan Vucci/Associated Press).

The place has a cool look to it, at least from this camera angle. Although my experience was in a regional versus national command center, this one has everything we dreamt about:

The requisite two levels. If you are in charge, you can survey activity from the second level and run down the stairs in an emergency to get involved in the action ... (we had only one level and it was less dramatic to be called over when something was happening)
Large LCD map hanging on the walls to monitor activity ... (we had a 19 inch TV set which my Chief Petty Officer used to watch "Real TV")
Glassed in conference rooms ... (we had the typical corporate conference room)
Cool architecture ... (we had something that resembled a 70's classroom)
Three monitor work stations ... (we had two)
Some kind of flashing red status lights (we didn't have any although once a reporter mistook our flashing red phones for some kind of status light; I didn't correct her)

Seriously speaking, this is great. There is a bit of function following form when it comes to performance. Architecture and design has a huge impact on how one can feel about his/her job and can even improve focus and intensity. Who knows if they solved the age-old command center problem of field communications, but I'd want to work there.

Dell: What could have been learned from the 1982 Tylenol Recall

2006-08-15T10:21:00.000-07:00

One of business school's most touted leadership case studies is about J&J's 1982 Tylenol recall. J&J acted immediately and at a cost of over $100 million to pursue action in the best interest of the consumer. In the end, it was in the best interest of the Tylenol brand, which to this day remains a top global seller.

Dell could learn something from J&J's action. Although its battery problem has yet to completely play out, the defects and more importantly the response could further erode its customer service reputation. The take aways from J&J's crisis management actions were:

Declare a crisis to defuse a crisis: Doesn't matter whether the company believes something is a crisis or not ... if the customer believes it, it's true
Act immediately: Lead time between first report and action should be less than 72 hours
Act transparently: Tell everyone what you are doing
Take responsibility
Make it easy for the customer

It took awhile for Dell to respond as pictures of exploding batteries circulated virally. No doubt, Dell was examining the battery to determine if there actually was a problem. But that goes against the first rule "Declare a crisis to defuse a crisis". Action was slow. Time will tell whether customers find it easy to work with the recall.

Appropriate crisis management is not only responsible, it's also a sound business decision. Recalling 4.1 million batteries will likely cost Dell and Sony more than $100 million. However, with a slow response, Dell allowed negative publicity to steamroll. This actually could be costlier in the long run.

Debate Tactics Around The War

2006-08-03T18:28:00.000-07:00

There is a science to debating in which it's less about being right and more about outfoxing your opponents, painting them into a corner and forcing them to use their time to argue irrelevant points. Just watch "Meet The Press" on Sunday and you will see what I'm talking about. It's an effective tactic, but also infuriating to those who just want to drive a decision based on facts.

The "support our troops" line of conversation can often be used as such a debate tactic. Most in the military like moral support, but what they really care about is good equipment, equitable pay and clear mission parameters. When most people say they "support our troops" they back it up with the same level of sacrifice they give when supporting the Red Sox or Yankees. There are obviously exceptions.; if you are one of them, this doesn't apply to you.

So, if most people don't actually make any substantial sacrifices, why do most debates about the Iraq War include a self conscious "support our troops" component? It actually sidetracks both war opponents and war proponents. War opponents have to craft troop support into their arguments. War proponents have to explain how the latest military scandal doesn't negate any value from the overall effort.

The current Middle East crisis, most directly involving Israel & Lebanon, has really driven this point home. Most there don't seem preoccupied with a military self-consciousness that side-tracks discussion, but are instead focused on debating whether or not a war should be pursued. This is likely because most of their citizens are personally impacted by the decision and can't afford to be distracted by debate tactics ... amazing how real sacrifice focuses a discussion. I hope future decisions in the US are as focused on the salient issues.

note: this post isn't a "for or against" post. It is a "how" post. At this point what matters is how we make the national decision regarding our next conflict.

Data and Social Policy

2006-07-07T01:38:00.000-07:00

I’ve been on a data kick lately focused mainly on corporations. Well, reality is corporations have decent data compared against the available data citizens and governments have around making certain social policy decisions. One such area I’ve been personally interested in is day care.

This area is charged and everyone is colored by the decisions they have already made. Ask parents who have sent their kid to day care and they will say it is a great thing for development. Ask parents who raised their kid at home and they will say it is a great thing for development. Neither wants to hear about “data” if it goes against the decision they already made.

So is there data on the impact of daycare on child development? In fact, there were two large studies in the last five years, one in the US and one in the UK. I haven’t digested the complete body of work, but in the sample of articles I have read the common theme is that kids under the age of three (and especially under the age of two) are negatively impacted by daycare; evaluators somehow rated these kids as more “anti-social” & “aggressive” and they scored ~3% lower on standardized tests than children raised at home. Now, at first glance this seems cut and dry, but there are some valid questions:

• Are the findings time-bound? So a kid did worse on a standardized test at age 6, but what happens at age 8? Age 15?
• Can I cut this multiple ways to see the impact of other variables?
• How is anti-social behavior determined? If it’s independence, this is not necessarily a bad thing. I’m sure it’s written up somewhere what the criteria were, but I haven’t found it yet. Anti-social is a strong worth with some pretty vivid implications and I don’t know if it’s warranted.
• What about the impact of limited daycare? Say 30 hours a week versus 50?

In the end, I don’t know if data would ever cut this Gordian Social knot … three desires that appear to be difficult to align, especially if the day care studies have valid findings:

• Parents want to earn a living and have kids
• Governments want both parents in the workforce to drive economic growth
• Society wants well adjusted kids who arguably turn into well adjusted, contributing adults

Right now, the government/business policy towards child rearing is not optimized. The US Family and Medial Leave Act guarantees 12 weeks off after giving birth and many companies provide pay during his period. But, 12 weeks only gives women time to recover, not to have significant impact on their child’s development. Businesses must balance those who take the maternity leave & pay and don’t return to work with those who want to return to work. Even those who want to return are usually forced to return fulltime within the first year. The tax incentives around child care are a mixed bag as well.

In a democracy, parents have the freedom to make their own decision. But as a society, the government can set policies that “nudge” these decisions one way or the other to promote overall security and growth. Right now these policies don’t make a forceful statement. In the end, though, a weak statement is better than codifying a bad statement.

Why is it so difficult to execute a data strategy?

2006-06-22T18:25:00.000-07:00

Jim Collins presented the keynote at IDC's forum last week. Jim is energetic and always has some great points. What struck me from his presentation was one quote. I don't have it exactly right, but he said something along the lines of, "Great companies have an unrelenting focus on the data." Data is important because it is turned into information which is used to optimize your company's operations and strategy.

I agree with Jim. Walmart has an unrelenting focus on data and is arguably a great company. However, the Walmart example is the exception and not the rule. Go into any leading strategy consulting company and ask the rank and file consultant what the bane of his/her existence is .... it's the lack of data at clients!

The focus, effort and budget necessary to collect good data are not immaterial. Below are the components necessary for a good, closed loop data strategy. Falling short on any of them torpedoes the whole effort:

identify what data is important to decision making
collect the important data
analyze the data to produce information
use this information in decision making

Even in a company that has the systems, process and headcount necessary to turn data into information, the biggest battle still exists - step 4 - getting executives to make decisions based on this data. Probably because of their experience, many senior executives trust gut more than analysis. In some cases they are probably right to do so, but a "pick and choose" data strategy can never be effective. A data strategy that is politicized will also fail.

It all comes down to leadership. Unless the CEO and leadership team are the ones pushing the unrelenting focus on the data, a data strategy probably isn't going to be a very successful effort. It can't be a bottoms up effort.

Objects in the mirror may appear more Open Sourced than they actually are

2006-05-20T07:41:00.000-07:00

Over the last five years, I've done a few projects on Open Source, first at a strategy consultant firm and then for an enterprise software company. I've looked at Open Source from three primary frameworks: trying to describe it as an ecosystem, dissecting it as a business model and detailing it from a customer perspective. From these projects, its apparent that open source is not a monolith, it's different things to different people. This comment raises the hackles of some who object to the idea that Open Source is a "flavor" that can be injected into most anything a company does, not necessarily requiring an open source license.

Yes, I agree from a pure taxonomy standpoint, many of these things might not be "purely" Open Source. However, the Open Source label really doesn't mean much for a business or customer. Business or customers are after the results that open source can deliver to them, not open source itself.

Why this set-up? Because things aren't always what they seem. There are a lot of new companies out there branding themselves open source, but when you dissect their business model, they are really quite traditional. On the other hand, there are businesses out their that don't appear to embrace open source, but when you dissect their business models, they have surprising open source "flavor". If you heard there was a development community that had 500,000 members that contributed 80% of the content, you might think it was developed around an open source company? This actually referring to SAP's own development forum (SDN).

There is still a place to talk about open source as a classification. However, as a business or customer, the focus should be on the resulting benefits of open source. Business and customers are focused on development cost, quality, product cost, distribution, customization services, innovation and community support. In some cases, open source might be the best option, while in other cases traditional models are the right choice. The bottom line, though, is look beyond the models to what is actually delivered.

Can the government actually do anything useful with telephone data?

2006-05-12T09:21:00.000-07:00

Beyond the debate about whether the Government should be collecting phone record data is whether or not anything useful can come from the effort. An action can be right or wrong, independent of whether it is effective or ineffective. This post focuses on effectiveness; I'm not addressing legality.

A few years back, the idea of Total Information Awareness (TIA) was floated. The idea was shot down under the auspices of privacy, but many also felt that it was good in theory, but would yield limited practical results. This new data collection effort is a subset of what TIA aspired to do.

What the government seems to have collected from the phone companies is a lot of data around telephone calls ... Origin, destination, date/time and probably duration. This data in and of itself is not information. Information is the reduction of uncertainty that can be used in the decision making process. So what is the government doing with this data to turn it into information? The New York Times wrote, "Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., said the NSA was using the data to analyze calling patterns in order to detect and track suspected terrorist activity, according to information provided to him by the White House."

I assume the government is applying a sophisticated version of Social Network Analysis to all of the data. Social Network Analysis can provide both forward looking and backward looking information. Forward looking analysis would be used to develop intelligence to disrupt a future action. Backward looking analysis would be used to identify the participants in an action that already took place. Both are useful to our intelligence and law enforcement community, but forward looking, preventive intelligence is more important to most Americans.

For Social Network analyses to be forward looking you need to put some filters around the data to isolate the networks that are useful. Without some filters it would be hard to isolate any useful patterns. I can't imagine that there would be emergent patterns in the phone data to allow identification of a home-grown attack. Yes, if there are calls to foreign countries, these would trigger suspicion, but planning for an attack would probably fit the same profile of calls that take place around planning a trip or a wedding. Some piece of information beyond just the call data is needed.

Although the government may not have received any identity information from the phone companies, this doesn't prevent it from merging identify information from other government databases with the telephone numbers to provide a rich data set. If this isn't possible, then I don't understand how the data could provide any forward looking, actionable intelligence.

"Flash Blog" Experiment With The Boston Marathon

2006-05-01T09:21:00.000-07:00

The blogosphere, like most things, has taken on somewhat of a hierarchical structure. The A-list bloggers get most of the mindshare while most others are relegated to the "long tail". However, are there areas of the blogoshpere where A-list bloggers might not be in control of mindshare? The answer comes down to why people read blogs. The first reason is to be engaged in a community, whether it is around business or politics. A-list bloggers will probably always dominate this sphere. The second reason people read blogs is to find information on a specific topic. I believe it is here where the "long tail" can gain mindshare. To test this, I decided to run an experiment on something called a flash blog; a short-life blog on a limited topic. My hypothesis was that a short lifespan blog that provided real-time information around a time-limited event might grab some blogosphere mindshare.

This year's Boston Marathon provided a good base for the experiment. Wouldn't someone rather read a blog from a runner actually running the course than a journalist covering the event? The morning of the race, I launched a new blog with one introductory post. I then ran the marathon as a non-qualified runner (e.g., "bandit") and wrote 8 posts from my blackberry before and during the race. The day after the race, I posted a race wrap-up entry. Here is an analysis of the blog traffic, looking at returning visitors as a percentage of total visitors:

I did not completely "control" this experiment; I told four friends and co-workers about the blog, one who subsequently blogged about it on the day of the race and another who sent an email blast the day after the race. It's impossible for me to completely separate those who found this site through search versus those who were "pushed" the site, but from what I could tell, quite a few found the site through search. Here is what I took away from my quasi-experiment:

The blog's lifespan was intense and short. Traffic essentially dried up after the third day, with only sporadic visitors still coming. Readers understood the nature of the flash blog and its limited focus; they didn't come back expecting more content a week after the event.
Readers fell into either a "real-time" or "wrap-up" category. "Real-time" readers read posts on the day of the race and were engaged, with ~69% of them returning to follow the progress. "Wrap-up" readers read all the posts after the race in one sitting with less repeat traffic.
Reader commitment and participation was low. I believe that readers only wanted the "play by play" and nothing else. I received only a few comments and these were from acquaintances.
Legitimacy was achieved by the fact that I was "on the ground". There was no other reason for people to read my posts. I provided no biographical data.

So, with any experiment, the key question is, what can flash blogs be used for? Here are a two thoughts:

Provide focused, short term coverage with no commitment. Most blogs are perpetual and require some commitment from the writer and reader. Implicit in their build, flash blogs are casual and quick relationships, more akin to news articles. An individual can use them to provide one-off information on something he or she feels important about. A corporation can use them in its marketing plan for very short-term product launch coverage. To some extent, companies have been doing this.
Use mindshare from a flash blog as an on-ramp to a perpetual blog. Taking advantage of traffic around a certain event, an individual could funnel the traffic to a perpetual blog. Readers gain because they "try out" the content before becoming a perpetual reader.

I'm sure others have tested these concepts more thoroughly and likely have ideas; I'd be interested to hear them.

Strategy Consultants Strike Again? ... This time at eBay

2006-04-21T06:05:00.000-07:00

In today's WSJ story about Ebay's co-opetition dance with Microsoft, Yahoo and Google, consultants are given some responsibility for laying a faulty foundation that lead to Ebay's predicament

"Few at eBay initially saw reason to fear Google, say people at the company, in part because of a 2003 study it commissioned from McKinsey & Company concluded that Google wouldn't use its search capabilities to break into e-commerce. That made Google a manageable threat, say people familiar with the study."

Obviously, Ebay wants to put the blame for this on someone else; when in doubt blame the consultants. Good in theory, but seldom are strategy consulting recommendations baked without CONSIDERABLE input and direction from the client. I don't know the details of the Ebay study mentioned, but I bet it consisted of 3-4 consultants and 1-2 ebay employees. The findings were probably thoroughly baked with Ebay executives. I'm not defending a study that so obviously was incorrect. But as an Ebay shareholder, I hold management responsible for making that incorrect call. Consultants are, at best, a tool. Consultants are not responsible to share holders, most don't have equity ownership in their clients and most will not work at the same client more than once or twice.

Having been a strategy consultant and worked at companies that employ strategy consultants, I am amazed at how they are utilized. Fortune 500 companies would be well advised to have an internal consulting management group, which does nothing but manage consultanting engagements. The ROI of consulting projects is consistently under attack. Some of the problem lies with the consultants. Some of the problem lies with the executives who don't know how to engage with consultants, wasting considerable budget on their services.

The Art Of The Upsell

2006-04-08T09:49:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I was in a Blockbuster store and I heard the manager talking to his associate. The manager said, "The store looks pretty good, but you guys need to do more upselling at the cash register .... popcorn, gift certificates, whatever ... you need to do it." Unable to resist, I asked the manager how much additional revenue he brought in through the upsell. I got a polite, "I can't really say", but I'm not sure if he even knew. When I told him that in fact, I found the upsell so annoying that I would avoid stores that do it if I had a substitute, he thanked me for my advice. I doubt he spent last night building an excel model to balance the lifetime value of a customer versus the value of the upsell.

I really dislike the upsell around ubiquitous, commodity products. If I wanted popcorn, I probably could have gauged and responded to that desire on my own. I only appreciate the upsell when it is a value play for the customer where the customer either

saves money (e.g., supersize this) or
where the product has some unknown or confusing features (e.g., sommelier who says try this pinot noir instead of that one because it better matches the food, even though it is more expensive) or
where the customer doesn't know about an option (e.g. navigation system on a car)

When the upsell is only around making more money for the business, it is so blatant that I could actually see it driving some customers away ... it has a negative impact on the brand. I think this principle is probably true no matter what you are selling .... cars, movies, enterprise software, whatever.

The old saying, though, about never projecting your own thoughts onto the whole customer base holds true. I'd be curious to see some numbers on this to determine if there is sizable revenue bump from the commodity upsell. Maybe more people than I think actually appreciate being reminded to buy popcorn.

Information Overload - from a decision perspective

2006-04-06T10:51:00.000-07:00

I had an interesting discussion yesterday about information overload. The framework, though, was from a decision perspective: What percentage of decisions made are based on what percentage of information collected.

In my own life, I hypothesize that easily 80% of decisions I make are based on 20% of information I take in. In other words, 80% of what I read has no real bearing on what I choose to do.

Daily, I daily read the WSJ and various websites/blogs. Weekly, I read the Sunday NYT, Economist and a book or two. There is not only a lot of redundant information there, but a lot of information that is never even applied to a decision. That's not to say I'm going to stop reading all those sources. There is a lot of satisfaction in "knowledge for knowledge's sake". There is also social and entertainment value derived from information independent of its use in decision making.

For corporations or governments, however, where each piece of information carries a cost in either time or money, that 80% of information needs to be cut back. What form does it take? Unnecessary consulting reports, overlapping group output, unnecessary email trains, decks with no impact on a decision, etc.

How do corporations and governments solve this? Some of it is tools. Our group is using Wiki's which cuts down on unnecessary information such as vapid email trains. However, I think a lot of this is cultural. You need strong leadership that is able to say, "No, we aren't paying for another consulting report, we have all the information we need." That is really difficult to do. You can't expect someone who appreciates "knowledge for knowledge's sake" to suddenly flip a switch and be a different person at work where information is purely utilitarian.

The 57 flavors of Open Source business models

2006-04-05T14:50:00.000-07:00

Last month I wrote that open source isn't a monolith ... it's different things to different people. With this framework in mind, it was interesting to hear THE open source business model practitioners discuss the topic on a panel at Linux World. Included were Marten Mickos from MySQL, John Roberts from SugarCRM, Marc Fleury from JBoss and Peter Levine from Zensource.

Each of the CEO's had a different view about the key driver in an open source business model; some were focused on the increased quality assurance in the development cycle while others were focused on the distribution aspects. I had the sense that these open source companies have more elements of a traditional business model than one would first guess.

It's too early to draw any broad conclusions from the few open source business models that exist. Given the variations in their focus, though, it's clear that open source isn't a cookie cutter business model that can be wrapped around any business. As for the threat to enterprise business models? It looks like a slow death. The panel had a general belief that the Open Source business model would squeeze traditional software companies, but within some debated 5-50 year time frame.

At the end of the discussion Peter Levine said something along the lines of, "You don't invest in something because it's Open Source. You invest in it because it provides a valuable service." That is the takeaway - Open source is only important to the extent that it provides things of value to a customer & company such as low cost, adaptability, speed to innovation, etc.

note: my post was from the viewpoint of a capitalist. Things get interesting when you consider groups that deploy Open Source in its "purest" form, as a means of production without a business model but instead to fill some communal need.

Command Center Reality

2006-04-04T07:35:00.000-07:00

I had heard from some friends that Secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, loves the Fox television show "24". An interview in the New York Times confirms this. Given his role, I always found this interesting, but now I know why. He has command center envy. Compared to what he deals with in reality, the command centers on "24" are things of beauty.

I remember about 7 years ago I had to give a reporter a tour of a command center after a newsworthy event in the Northeast. The tour started out great. The reporter loved the requisite security checks and security cameras. We had this cool vault like room for communications. Everything fit that "command center feeling" .... then we got to the command center itself. Apparently four computers, scattered communication gear, paper charts and a dirty coffee pot didn't quite fit the image. She was completely let down. What finally made it to the news? A shot of a Senior Chief using the phone system. Apparently, its sleek black console and 30+ buttons at least looked cool.

In any command center, there are legacy systems that don't talk to each other and communication always blunted by static. Information is rarely real time and decisions are made on 70% information at best. The lifeblood of these places isn't equipment or systems, its people who can execute.