When I got overloaded at one job and was allowed to hire an assistant, I thought my troubles were over. But I had just pushed them onto my new hire, and they came back to me pretty soon.
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management, leadership, tasking, organizational behavior, Mistake Bank
On vacation, you’re supposed to catch up on your reading. But when you’re chasing five- and seven-year-old boys around all day–beach, fishing, mini-golfing, etc.–till they finally crash at 9pm, you get even further behind. Which is why it took me this long to get around to reading the recent New Yorker profile on wacky restaurateur David Chang (sorry, only abstract available on line).
What interest could he be to Shop Talk readers? For one, the author Larissa
MacFarquhar cannily focuses on Chang’s many eccentricities and (self-described) weaknesses. So much so that you wonder how he could manage to get out of bed in the morning, never mind start two (going on three) highly-successful New York restaurants.
Secondly, through his nearly nonstop chatter, Chang lets us in on his biggest secrets to success. Read this:
[Chang said,] In four years, we’ve gone from this small-ass Noodle Bar to this f-ing big restaurant, when the whole goal in the beginning was, let’s serve better food than that place across the street. I know we’ve won awards, but it’s not because we’re doing something special–I believe it’s really because we care more than the next guy.
And this:
[Chang said,] Recently, over at Ssam Bar, a sous-chef closed improperly, there were a lot of mistakes, and I was livid and I let this guy have it. About a week later, I found out that it wasn’t him, he wasn’t even at the restaurant that night. But what he said was, “I’m sorry, it will never happen again.” And you know what? I felt like an asshole for yelling at him, but, more important, I felt like, Wow, this is what we want to build our company around: guys that have this level of integrity…. If we start being accountable not only for our own actions but for everyone else’s actions, we’re gonna do some awesome s–t.
And this:
Cory Lane began setting up for service: a cork at each place to rest chopsticks on, then a folded napkin, then a menu tucked inside the napkin, then a water glass. He measured to make sure that each napkin was exactly one thumb-length from the edge of the counter. Then he crouched down at the end of the row and squinted to check that everything was lined up.
Managing the details, accountability, teamwork. It works in the restaurant industry. It works most everywhere.
(Photo: the interior of Ko, from the restaurant’s website.)
Traditionally, photography has been an edit-after-the-fact art form. In the film era, this meant taking lots and lots of pictures and discarding the ones that didn’t come out right. Early digital photography has used editing programs like Photoshop to eliminate red-eye or improve lighting after photos have been downloaded to a PC.
An innovative Irish company, FotoNation, has developed technology that allows photo improvement to occur before the picture is actually taken. As profiled in today’s Wall Street Journal, the company has developed a compact software program that eliminates red-eye in flash photographs before images are written to disk, among other innovations. Nikon and Kodak are building FotoNation’s technology into their digital cameras.
Another interesting point about FotoNation: despite being founded in Galway, Ireland, the founder is Israeli and the chief engineer is Romanian–another example of the growing heterogenizing of Ireland’s technology sector.
technology, innovation, software, photography, Wall Street Journal
The Mistake Bank is three weeks old tomorrow. And like any infant that age, it’s still hard to know what it will look like when it grows up. Yet there have been hundreds of visits, several dozen members joined, and nearly that many stories shared.
Many people I’ve talked to are intrigued, but a bit wary. What if I don’t have any stories to share?
Let me make it clear, then. With the Mistake Bank, lurkers are welcome. Please sign up and visit often. You never know what you’ll find. [Perhaps an embarrassing moment or two.]
If you want to share a story, but don’t know how, take a look at what’s already there to use as a model. Or do it your own way.
[If you happen to be at Wireless 2008 next week, and want to share a story, email me at inquiry (at) caddellinsightgroup (dot) com. I'll be there with my new Flip video camera and would be delighted to record it for you.]
The experiences, discussions and interactions I’ve had since the Mistake Bank went live have only reinforced my belief that we can build it into a useful, fun resource for all kinds of people.
Won’t you consider joining?
People have been wondering how the cable companies would establish a wireless presence (forget for a moment that they owned part of Sprint PCS but sold it off years ago). Several of them established the Pivot program, with Comcast, Time Warner, etc., acting as value-added resellers of Sprint’s network. But in my experience with the cable companies, they like to own the network. Leasing is not their cup of tea. Given that, it was a bit of a surprise that they chose not to bid in the recent 700MHz wireless auction.
Now comes the news that Time Warner, Comcast and Bright House Networks (three members of the Pivot consortium) are in discussions to invest in a Sprint-Clearwire WiMax joint venture. Rumors of a tie-up between the two most prominent WiMax service providers have swirled for months, especially given Sprint’s recent troubles.
This is a perfect situation for the cablecos, in my view. They get access to a full near-nationwide network, cost-sharing, and a bit of a head start on the big wireless players Verizon and AT&T on 4G.
Looks like there’s another nationwide broadband competitor. Hooray!
I’ve been reading a lot about the Wright Brothers this week, given our stopover at Kitty Hawk on the way to South Carolina for spring break. The novella-length Wikipedia entry was interesting reading on the Blackberry web browser while we headed toward North Carolina at 11pm. [As soon as I get a chance to edit the video I shot at Kitty Hawk, I'll post that as well.]
Among the interesting resources I found was a fifty-year-old article in the Atlantic Monthly, which excerpts “Miracle at Kitty Hawk: The Letters of Orville and Wilbur Wright,” using a sample of the letters to outline the brothers’ career. The article says this, about the period when the Wrights discovered that certain aeronautical assumptions which they and others had taken for granted were invalid:
Wilbur Wright said, on their way home after the 1901 gliding experiments, that he didn’t think man would fly in a thousand years. In a way, though, as Orville Wright said long afterward, it was encouraging to learn that the work of predecessors could not be relied upon. It meant that more knowledge was needed, rather than that flight was impossible.
This passage stopped me in my tracks. Discovering that Lilienthal’s lift projections, on which they had based their glider designs for years, were erroneous did not discourage the Wrights–it did just the opposite.
Which is a brilliant summary of the entrepreneurial mind.
(Photo: the Wright Brothers’ 1901 glider. Courtesy of NASA.)
What do radio, mainframe computers and photocopiers have in common?
They were all predicted to die a quick death at the hands of a successor technology, and all are still here today.
The New York Times profiles the venerable IBM mainframe, still a multi-billion-dollar business (not that any CIO would admit publicly to buying one), which has hung on through the minicomputer revolution (remember DEC?), the PC revolution and the client-server revolution.
According to the Times article, “survivor technologies” retain certain compelling benefits that the successors do not offer. Hence, for certain niches, they continue to provide value. For radio, it is the idea of “audio wallpaper,” entertainment that’s less distracting than video–i.e., good while driving or working. For the mainframe, it was the ability to retain billions of dollars of software investment while taking advantage of hardware’s increased price-performance. Photocopiers offer easy-to-handle and share hardcopy documents that the paperless office can’t provide. (I worked for a year without a copier and was that ever a pain.)
So consider this: the next time you read that a certain technology will be obsolete within five years, you may want to buy some stock in the dinosaur.
(Photo: an IBM mainframe that is likely no longer in service.)
In March’s Harvard Business Review, Richard Harrington, CEO of Thomson Corporation, discusses how the large financial-media company reinvented its strategy (”Transforming Strategy One Customer At A Time” – free link). With his coauthor, Anthony Tjan of the Parthenon Group, Harrington shows how Thomson, by changing its focus from the standard segmentation used by its industry to that of specific end-users, was able to better understand its market position and identify attractive new product features.
This epiphany–innovation and differentiation through understanding how end-customers utilize a product and how they do their jobs–would not be surprising to Procter & Gamble, or to Clayton Christensen, who wrote about this back in 2005 (”Marketing Malpractice: The Cause and the Cure” link – $$).
One question is why this was so novel to Thomson. My guess is that it relates to how media companies view themselves. They have grown up as mass distributors, sending standardized product out to customers via newsstands, television, radio. Focusing on specific end-customer segments was time-consuming and unnecessary when there was always a new growth medium out there. Now, with growth stagnating for most media companies, they find they are no different from the packaged-goods manufacturers who sponsor their television programs.
To wit: they need customers, and customers need a job done.
Related:
How to market a product that isn’t a product
Shop Talk Podcast #4 – Tony Ulwick on Determining What Customers Really Want…
segmentation, media, innovation, marketing, Harvard Business Review
Exhibit A: A fellow I serve on a board with recently got a new job with a city government. I asked him for his updated contact information and he said, “I can’t give out my work email address. They don’t like anything that’s not 100% city business done on their computers.”
Exhibit B: another friend who works for a large telecom company tried to access my new site The Mistake Bank from work and found that corporate IT had blocked all social-networking sites.
Exhibit C (counter-example): Google’s CIO, interviewed in today’s Wall Street Journal, says the company’s policy allows users to download their own software, supports multiple operating systems and uses public resources (like their own blogger.com) for work-related activities.
Andrew McAfee, for one, has often pointed the finger at internal IT shops for inhibiting the adoption of transformative Enterprise 2.0 technologies. Accurately so, in my opinion.
Why? Reasonable concerns regarding security risks and productivity impacts have spawned draconian, corporate-wide policies that essentially prevent employees from learning anything except that which is corporately-sanctioned.
A company worrying about people frittering away time on Facebook simply closes off access–and thereby prevents employees from keeping track of and developing valuable contacts that can help them deliver better results in their jobs.
Obsessing over use of work IT resources only for work–such as the concern about non-work-related emails my friend encountered–forgets that more and more work concerns things outside the company–learning about the issues facing customers and partners, researching competitors, understanding innovation. It also conveniently forgets that knowledge work frequently spills over the boundaries of the work day–thereby forcing some non-work activities into the hours of 8-5.
In sum, while this throttling of external IT resources for more and more companies may or may not make them more secure and productive–it certainly limits the horizons of employees, depriving them of oxygen needed for learning, innovative thinking, and being a whole person.
And is that a reasonable price to pay?
Related:
How enterprise 2.0 adds value to the connections between workers
(Photo: Alcatraz Island from amagill via Flickr Creative Commons)
social networking, information technology, web2.0, enterprise2.0, productivity, security, innovation
Today I’m wearing a green rugby shirt with “IRELAND” emblazoned on the front. My parents gave it to me recently. As I went to put it on this morning, I looked at the tag. It read proudly, “100% unoriginal.” Very Irish.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day to all the Caddells, McShanes, Mallons, Reillys, McFaddens, McAndrews and O’Connells.
(Photo: the 100% original Irish rugby shirt)
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