Famine City

Problem solving is problem solving

At an agency, you are hired to solve problems; whatever the client brings your way, technical, strategic, creative and always be holistic (right?). I am a self-described tech guy, but my reading list isn't just the Google API manual, it's also great marketing books like Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This: A Guide to Creative Great Advertising. This is a great book on marketing and the creative process. I learn lessons from everywhere I can, and this book is no exception. Recently, there was a part of the text that came back to me when I was talking with one of my developers. It's the part about solving the client's issues, and how you prepare to actually do the work.

For this part, I'll paraphrase: "You fill up your brain with absolutely everything you want to know about the project. You then let your subconscious work on it. When you come back to the problem, whatever problem you're trying to solve, you'll be further along." There's a lot of other great content and points about the text, but the idea about allowing your subconscious to really work on something stuck with me.The writing in the text is much better than my paraphrasing. I'm about applying concepts and I still recalled it and am able to apply the lesson - not so shabby.

I was speaking to one of the developers on my team and he says to me, "You know sometimes I would like to be part of the process. I really don't even want to have any say-so or debate the (my words here) creative execution. I just want to see it before a few days before I start programming it."

What he was really asking for was time so that his brain could digest the information and begin to solve the problems prior to doing the development. There are specifications and so forth along with any design, but the actual coding of a site is a very creative problem solving process. After talking with him a bit more and really digging in to what he was saying, he was expressing that when he gets a problem to solve without the benefit of having time to allow his subconscious to work on it, he's not as efficient. The truth is that if you see a problem ahead of time, your mind goes to work on it. It plans out the next step, how to solve the problem.

We purposefully excluded developers from certain stages of projects because we wanted to protect their time to focus on solving problems. The issue we didn't anticipate is that they too needed the time to digest the information and come up with a mental game-plan on solving the development task at hand. I quickly thought of Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This and realized exactly what my developer was asking for: time to let his subconscious plan out the work. He's trying to be a creative problem solver.

I was simply awestruck by this insight. Isn't that the mark of great insight? It's so simple that you can't believe you didn't get that before. Yes, there's action for me out of this. We're going to see if we can get our developers in on some more design reviews to allow them to solve problems. I'm going to measure it and see if we can get some efficiency out of it too. I can't imagine that we won't.

Remember these two things:
1) A great insight is so simple it's like getting blindsided by a train.
2) Creative problem solving is different in the execution, but not preparing to solve the problem.

~marty

Cisco Fatty: Story shows power of Twitter

I've posted about it on this blog: The interwebs have a way of showing the "authentic you". When you live in an interconnected world, even a flippant comment has it's price. Read this story posted from CiscoFatty.com:

It's about a giirl who just got hired by Cisco.... 

---- Begin Post ----

A potential Cisco applicant ‘theconnor’ tweeted this earlier today:

Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.

Tim Levad at Cisco saw the Tweet, and he Tweeted back:

Who is the hiring manager. I’m sure they would love to know that you will hate the work. We here at Cisco are versed in the web.

The CF quickly set their account private,  but the Tweets are all still public for the world to enjoy.

---- End Post ----

On occasion I can understand the conflict between public and private you, but I'm not feeling too bad for Ms. Connor. I'm actually happy for Cisco they look immensely savvy.  This should be a good PR boon for them. They get to prevent a hire that may not want to do the work as well. That alone could be thousands of dollars in savings. 

While I'm somewhat empathetic to Ms. Connor that she probably made a comment that she really didn't mean, but we're all accountable. Whatever we say. Whenever we say it. However we say it. What channel we use to say it. If you choose to participate in the medium, you are accountable. It's no different than getting wasted at the office party and saying something stupid. Only in this case, the legacy isn't just folklore, it's indexed, reposted, retweeted and shared. 

I wonder what UC Berkeley is thinking about this? By this standard, they are going to catch a bit of shrapnel in the mix. Sad. One tweet, so much power. 

If there's a takeway for me. Be real certain about my tweets, posts and so forth. Be me. Be ready to be accountable for anything I post. If you tweet this up, make sure you #cisco it. 

So what's your take? Do you think that Cisco should hire this girl? 

Why do I have a desk-phone AND mobile (both for work)?

I want to apologize for my blogging absence in the last couple of weeks. I was on the road one week and last week left me down for about 5 days ill, not so much fun.

As I was starting to get back in the groove of things, I called and checked my voice-mail everywhere and realized, "you know what, I should be able to listen to that on the web instead of going through the gyrations. Then it hit me. Yes, I should really only have one number too." Technology solutions have been around for alternatives for some time.  

First, the office phone is a glaring reminder of how we try to compartmentalize our lives. There is no work-life balance. It's life balance. My life is integrated. Whether I'm blogging, at work, or social it's all me. The technologies and communication platforms I use cross all boundaries, but the office phone doesn't. I think this technology,for most companies, has overstayed the welcome and we have an opportunity to drive some new consumer behavior. 

Some practical reasons to send your office phones to the abyss:

• You don't need office based PBX systems for most businesses (see note below for customer service/call centers). You can setup a voice commanded, vector or decision-tree (dial 2 for sales) with an on-line system and send the calls directly to a cell phone or to India/Skype. Give yourself 100-minutes and a credit card to get started. See angel.com or voice.google.com for more information. 
• Compare how much time you spend on your cell versus your desk phone?  Which phone would you rather use?
• Desk phones are avoidance devices. People send voice-mails there for most folks they don't want to immediately talk to. In fact, a know at least three people that never take their phone off do not disturb. I'm guilty of this too. I should just pick up the phone and not let the issue revisit itself. 
• Ask how many people know how to program, transfer or store numbers on their desk phone. Then ask the same question of their cell phone. 
• Did I say all page? You know the ominous noise that emits from it at times summoning us to the ark.  
• A big expense of owning and maintenance.   
• Purchasing landlines is still expensive. 

It's not a technology barrier. It's a user-barrier. We are used to those antiquated phones in our homes and offices. They provide security at some level, but that security is going to get questioned in times of tough economies. Now is a perfect time to use the economy as an excuse to hatchet that old phone system, bills and drive NEW behavior. 

So what are the alternatives?

Visit Asterisk or Angel for software solutions and solves that existing outside owning a phone system. It's too easy. I started programming Merlin Legends in the 1990's. I remember my company paid approximately 65k for a PBX and a load of phones (approximately 50). It took weeks, user manuals and tons of tweaks to get it correct. Today, I can now create that same level of sophisticated call system within an hour on-line. 

After getting your software PBX setup, then have all your users use the Voice.google.com service, note it expect it be integrated with your gmail soon. All of your users have one number that directs to their cell. That's AWESOME. You can check your vmail on the web (or any connected device). When the person leaves a number, you can simply add it to your phone book. It will recognize calendar/time requests because it has a smart search engine. You simply add it to your calendar. It's all integrated with your Gmail software. End of story. Sign me up. 

Note: I would say that for customer support/consumer relations, perhaps you can keep your office phone. They are still practical for those applications. However, I'd move to soft (software based) phones. 

Rambling from the road

I am out in San Jose, California and I have been at a great training the past couple of days. I thought I'd write a post on the Treo with a few real quick thoughts in between flights.
- First I was bummed out to find racial slurs on the #skittles site. While I won't judge the site, they were trying to do something different. I love that. Some brand person will see a single toolbox make a bad comment and get cold feet when they see something interesting or different. Sometimes consumers are the disruptive force between innovation and the marketplace.
- Second I cannot believe how many digital agencies do not use digital technologies themselves. Perhaps it is not really required, but seems like a good idea.
-Third I have received some minor disagreement on viewpoints. That is awesome. I welcome divergent thinking. I asked them to respond on the blog and they shuddered as if I asked them to write a book report. It takes a lot more courage and discipline to post than to just verbally disagree-post your comments. We love them.
Lastly wish the weather was better.
-marty

My lessons from a startup

HardKnoxLife has a great piece on "Should brands start thinking like start-ups?".  This is perfect timing for me to read such a post.  This week I am attending a workshop out in California. I’m super-excited about the experience coming up. For the workshop I have to do an analysis on a business using Porter’s Five Forces. I’m going to look at a business I know well, a start-up academic publisher. I worked there for a few years and took a number of lessons with me. Dave’s post and the workshop coming up is a perfect time for me to reflect on the experience and some of my lessons from it.

1. Know who and what you are. Articulate your expertise in a sentence or less. We had a short-lived CEO that really did not concentrate on the business that we were. We were a publisher, not a software publisher, not a training company etc. We were an academic publisher.  By the time we discovered our inner-strength we were on the ropes financially.
2.  Make hard decisions quickly. There were many hard decisions that I believed lingered on way too long. See number 1 above. Seems elementary, but it’s not.
3. Stay lean. Know when to quit. We had too many people at the top from the old-world of publishing that were great publishers, but bad business people and certainly not great start-up people. I don’t think we cut bait often enough.
4. Find people that reflect your organizational equity. I think that we had too many people that did not reflect our values well.  
5. Place your bets wisely. I think we invested in too many core markets of publishing with established content.  We had a couple of stud textbooks that were the 80/20. Not sure that we invested in those enough.  I also think we competed in the assessment model too much.
6. Know your target. I think we had many elements of this model correct—we could find the individuals that would be willing to try our brand. Individuals did not move the need quite quickly enough financially. We did not ladder it up to organizations, like a University of Phoenix. Our message was very appealing to most students, but the instructors making the business decisions for the adoption of the text books did not see it the same way.
7. Consistent brand message. It’s a weird thing in academic publishing. Authors are the brand (say that five times quickly). Brands are not associated with a company, they are associated with individuals. We should have been bolder in our message to instructors. We did not do so.  
8. Competitive advantages. We thought we had competitive advantages. We actually did. Too bad instructors that shared that point of view were few and far between.   
9. Ill-fitted for VC funding. We had a promising business—we were growing consistently when I left (don’t know thereafter). We just didn’t have a business model that provided the explosive growth demanded by a VC fund.

At the heart of it, it was simple. We tried introducing a brand to a world where authors were brands. We weren’t bold enough and we sent a bunch of cash over the cliff with ill-fitted CEOs. Used book markets were completely flooded after a couple semesters of books and profit margins in the toilet for the publisher. To this day, I still appreciate the people that gave a ton of their time and passion.

One of the people that I admire the most is a good friend of mine, Chad. He fit the start-up better than anyone else that I know today. He knew when to quit. It was why he sold more books than the rest. He at the heart was what I believe a start-up should be. He knew exactly what we sold, when to up sell and when to quit.

At some level we succeeded. Even though the brand was picked up by one of the old publishing houses, as I call them, there is still some recognition of it in the industry. People still want an “under-dog” so to speak. We did not capitalize on it enough.

I can only hope that if my path(s) crosses a start-up again, I can take these points and act upon them, quickly, efficiently and with wisdom.

~marty