I gave myself the “Getting Things Done” treatment in 2008 and really valued how David Allen’s approach helped me manage obligations to multiple clients and personal responsibilities as well. Most valuable to me was the “Someday/Maybe” list, which gave me a place to park ideas until there was a time or need to put them to work. Without fail, every couple of months a “Someday/Maybe” item graduates onto my current action list.

One obstacle in adopting the GTD methods was using an online task list. I didn’t want to buy a specialized program for this, so I tried to use Microsoft Entourage to manage the list. But Entourage couldn’t easily set up the (fairly simple) two-level hierarchy GTD defines. So I had to set up the main hierarchy using Entourage and then add the second level as a prefix to the task itself–such as “Online – email Brent congrats on new job,” or “Read/Review – Switch.” And the sort didn’t always work: all the “Read – Review” items were scattered on the list, not clustered together.

Recently I started using Google Calendar, and I’ve been impressed with how functional it is, and how easily it allows you to set up GTD-style task lists. I set up separate lists for “Next Actions,” “Waiting For,” and “Someday/Maybe.” Within the Next Actions list it’s straightforward to set up sections for “Online,” “Computer,” “Calls,” etc. In fact, Google Calendar allows you to add numerous hierarchy levels if you wish to.

Now I could be frustrated to think that a free tool is a lot better at helping me GTD than something I paid real money to Microsoft for. But I’m happy just to have found something that makes it easier for me to stay organized. Google Calendar is it.

Related posts:
The Getting Things Done Treatment

I was really disturbed last week to read in HBR.org Jeffrey Liker’s otherworldly appraisal of the Toyota situation (”The Wrong Lessons From Toyota – And the Truth“. Reading more like a paid advertisement than a blog post, Liker, the author of “The Toyota Way,” minimized the complaints of Toyota customers, wrote that 2 million recalls actually represented only 10 instances of problems, and, in general, made a reader feel Liker was from outer space, rather than the University of Michigan.

Thankfully, a few days later, also in HBR.org, Robert Coles eviscerated Liker’s account, point by point (”No Big Quality Problems at Toyota?“.

Finally, yesterday HBR.org published a post by Joel Kurtzman, a consultant who had worked with Toyota in the 1970s, as it was still establishing its North American business. In “Toyota’s Problems Start At The Top,” Kurtzman does not take on Liker’s post directly, but instead contrasts Toyota’s leadership today with what he knew from their earlier days.

This has been fascinating. Blogging has brought a spirited debate about an important business subject out into the open. If Liker’s post had instead been a New York Times op-ed, any response would have been a heavily condensed letter to the editor, not something of equal prominence. It certainly wouldn’t have spawned dozens of public comments. And by sharing multiple viewpoints of experts with varying experiences and specialties, HBR.org has shown why new media, rather than necessarily being watered down, sloppy and amateurish, is, in many cases, far superior to the old.

One of the newest projects to emerge from the Silicon Pasture community is Collectivus, currently “a test of a prototype before a beta.”

I’ve been playing with Collectivus for a couple of weeks now, and I can say this: it is location and check-in a la Foursquare, only people encounter “thingies” out in the world (see picture above) and register their encounters. Note that first-generation Thingies bear a strong resemblance to rubber ducks.

It goes something like this: someone finds or is given a “thingie,” registers it on the Collectivus website, optionally uploads a picture. Then, “Move me, give me or leave me somewhere,” says the instruction sticker on the thingie’s underside. You can subscribe to follow your thingie on its journeys, in which case you get a message when it resurfaces somewhere.

It’s like sending out a message in a bottle and see where it floats to. Times a thousand. One can imagine thingies crisscrossing the world, others immediately discarded, others staying in one place.

Many people I’ve described this to don’t get it. Probably a combination of my inarticulateness and the difficulty of putting this kind of complex, serendipitous, emergent experience into words (see above). In the end, Collectivus, as Twitter has demonstrated, will become what its users make it to be. The Collectivus team has created a wide-open platform to explore movement, giving, and attachment to objects. Time will tell how it ends up. Perhaps people will be registering encounters with battered thingies twenty years from now.

Collectivus is on its way to the South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin this week. If you’re there, keep your eyes open for thingies!

Related posts:
Silicon Pasture Week: The Meetup
Silicon Pasture Week: Update

Sunday’s NY Times article on the New York tech startup scene referenced a monthly series of gatherings, the New Tech Meetup, as an important part of the city’s entrepreneurial community:

A recent installment of…the New York Tech Meet-Up, held in Chelsea, drew 700 tech enthusiasts.

The buzz surrounding these gatherings is just the latest sign that a decade after the dot-com bust, the Internet economy in New York is springing back to life.

We have one of those here in Silicon Pasture too: the New Tech Meetup of Central PA. Each month a group of tech enthusiasts – developers, marketers, attorneys, etc. – gets together to watch 10-minute demonstrations of new products and presentations on topics of interest to entrepreneurs. We get slightly fewer than 700 attendees to our monthly gatherings (more like 20-40), but, nonetheless, the group is creating its own buzz. (A company that started out in Hershey, CoTweet, the CEO of which began our New Tech Meetup, was sold last week to Exact Target, an email marketing company, for an undisclosed sum.)

Why, given that technology that makes location irrelevant is cheap and widely available, are in-person gatherings important to tech startups?

Fellow traveler syndrome: simply sharing war stories can make the work involved in developing a new tech product and bringing it to market a little less lonely.

Sharing ideas: discussion can unstick problems you’ve wrestled with unsuccessfully on your own.

Finding collaborators: sometimes tech people have an idea but not a concept of the market. Sometimes businesspeople have an idea for a tech product but need someone to write the code. The Meetup can help bring these people together with others who can help them.

Serendipity: this may be the most important factor. By putting people together in a room to talk about what they do, sparks can result. Like what? You’ll have to come to the Meetup to find out.

The April 2010 New Tech Meetup will be held on April 5, at 7pm, at Wagman Construction in York. Interested? Sign up here.

[Disclosure: I am the organizer of the New Tech Meetup of Central PA]

Related posts:
Report from Silicon Pasture 2

It was energizing to read yesterday’s NYT piece on the New York startup scene, & it got me motivated to revisit our startup community here in Silicon Pasture – Harrisburg-Lancaster-York, PA. This is the first in a week of posts about entrepreneurial activity in our area.

First, let’s look at some of the resources available to Silicon Pasture entrepreneurs:

Murata Business Center – a business incubator located in Carlisle, Murata offers startups subsidized office space, mentoring and networking opportunities. It’s an offshoot of the Capital Region Economic Development Council (CREDC). Led by the energetic Karen Gunnison, Murata is a very important energizer for the local tech startup community. Resident companies include WorkXpress, Cruzstar, DMT Studio, TexVisions and WebpageFX.

If you’re interesting in exploring Murata further, read this description of their process.

Ben Franklin Technology Partners - a venture investment and support organization that operates statewide. Ben Franklin offers, in addition to funding, the Transformations Business Services Network. This is a group of seasoned business people who can help Ben Franklin funded companies with everything from office procedures to strategic thinking, at no cost.

Ben Franklin also offers the Venture Investment Forum, which runs relevant seminars, business plan contests and also acts as a conduit to local investment organizations.

Ben Franklin in Harrisburg is associated with the ITN (Innovation Transfer Network) which works with thirteen of the universities in and around the area to identify ongoing research and to connect university research with potential commercialization opportunities.

Harrisburg University of Science & Technology – less than ten years since it was conceived, HU has become an innovation hub in the midstate. The university hosts the local instance of the BarCamp unconference and the Learning and Entertainment Evolution Forum (LEEF), and runs frequent seminars on topics ranging from management practices to how to launch a video game company.

The Hershey Center for Applied Research (HCAR) – supports the life sciences industry and high technology companies through access to business and research resources, including wet and dry lab facilities and office space. HCAR also provides access to business services and research resources available through Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center. HCAR tenants include Apogee Biotechnology Corporation, Apeliotus Vision Science and Better Bowls.

Disclosure: HCAR and Harrisburg University have hosted the New Tech Meetup of Central PA, which I help organize, and I’ve met the management of the Murata Center and Ben Franklin.

You may remember my project The Mistake Bank. It’s on hiatus now (isn’t that what broken-up bands say?), and someday soon I’ll be putting up a post on what I learned from that project. (Thanking Cynthia Kurtz for that idea.)

In the meantime, people are still screwing up and, thankfully, learning from those experiences. Most recently there was this post from Scott Berkun: “My Biggest Mistakes.”

Scott, in addition to being a great speaker and blogger, is a first-class mistake learner. His post “How to Learn From Your Mistakes” was an early entry in the Mistake Bank. It’s gratifying to see that he still appreciates the value of reflecting on his past actions, and retains the sense of humor that allows him to do so.

Related post:
Scott Berkun on learning from mistakes

Last December, as we prepared to leave for a Christmas trip, my wife rushed to put together small gift packages for the teachers & staff at our sons’ schools.

As I drove around that afternoon dropping off some of the gifts, I would rather have been doing something else–packing, suspending the newspaper, etc. But there are certain things–OK, well, lots of things–where her instincts are sharp & mine are nonexistent. Thinking about small tokens of recognition is one of them.

Last Friday, my wife couldn’t find her mobile phone. She had run a lot of errands that afternoon & couldn’t remember where she might have left it.

On Monday, as I was dropping our 9-year-old off at school, the crossing guard waved & motioned to me to open my window.

“They found your wife’s phone!” he said, momentarily ignoring the kids waiting to cross. “It’s in the office.” And so it was.

All day I puzzled over how they found the phone & knew it was my wife’s. But this puzzlement morphed into wonder–wondering how much that small Christmas gift helped return my wife’s phone to her.

Behavioral economists will tell you that reciprocity is a powerful force in human motivation. The desire to repay a favor or a debt leads to many good things in society (and not a few bad things).

Done appropriately, though, the sharing of small gifts connects people who otherwise would be afterthoughts to you (and vice versa). This connection, when prompted, can provide a spark, a desire to take action, to see someone else’s urgent situation as one of your own.

In selling we must take account of this human motivation. While being respectful of boundaries, rules and regulations, more of us should act like my wife: share small courtesies with the people we encounter because it’s the right thing to do. It’s not about expecting any one gift to lead to a repayment, but instead understanding that making a habit of recognizing people who are part of our lives, even fleetingly, is in the long run karmic.

Commoditization is a word that sends chills up the spines of CEOs worldwide. A commodity is a completely replaceable, fungible item, purchased from any of many suppliers, with prices depressed to not much above the variable cost of production. Yuck!

The strategies that companies have used to battle commoditization, like product differentiation and bundling, are themselves being commoditized. Private-label copycats and new competition from emerging markets are increasing the forces of commoditization. With all this comes the need to look at the problem anew.

Richard A. d’Aveni of Darmouth’s Tuck School of Business has produced a slim volume entitled, “Beating the Commodity Trap: How to Maximize Your Competitive Position and Increase Your Pricing Power,” that performs just such a task. The best part of the book is the framework it lays out for thinking about commoditization; the three “traps”:

Deterioration – in which competitors duplicate some or all of your value proposition at a lower price

Proliferation – in which various firms serve business niches that eat away at your market

Escalation – in which competitors increase value and reduce cost at the same time

d’Aveni goes on to describe various strategies to use if you find yourself in one of these traps. Probably the most successful example cited is Microsoft’s response to a proliferation trap, in which smaller competitors created add-ons to Windows to provide capabilities like media management, virus protection and (the most famous case) web browsing. Microsoft used its monopoly power to duplicate these features and include them in Windows for free, both making Windows more valuable and eliminating the market potential for these competitors (”overwhelming” the trap, in d’Aveni’s parlance).

Of course, despite d’Aveni’s rigorous analytical approach and his numerous examples of successful counter-commoditizing, reading about the many ways commoditizers attack industry leaders in “Beating the Commodity Trap” may leave you with the feeling you have when you watch “Night of the Living Dead.” Even when you think the zombies are defeated, more always emerge from the shadows.

I finally got a chance to check out “Undercover Boss” this week, after being curious about it since first hearing about it at the Super Bowl. It follows many reality show conventions, including dramatic music, montages and strategic repetition (I heard, “Those items are supposed to be going to charity!” at least three times).

Why, though, is “Undercover Boss” dramatic? In short, it’s based on an assumption that big-company CEOs are completely disconnected from the front lines of their businesses. Only by the CEOs being out of touch can these shows create the surprise and drama they depend on. Seeing Joe DePinto, CEO of 7-11, struggling to make coffee is funny, but it’s also telling. Selling coffee is how 7-11 makes money. According to DePinto, the store he works in serves 2500 cups per day. DePinto spends his days attending meetings and reading reports, not making coffee, and it shows.

I saw a terribly sad example of the “undercover boss” last week while watching “The Hurt Locker.” One of the soldiers meets with a psychologist colonel who is counseling him for his stress-related illness, caused by his daily encounters with IEDs and their carnage. The soldier teases the colonel that he doesn’t know what it’s like out on the streets. The colonel replies that he’s been out on the front lines earlier in his career. One morning, surprisingly, the colonel shows up and offers to accompany the group on their daily missions. The tragic ending of this amazing scene really struck me and pointed up in an extreme way the costs of the out-of-touch boss. How can one lead when he has no idea what it’s like where the rubber meets the road?

Related posts:
Business Book Hall of Fame: War & Peace
Time to start listening to front-line employees
A method for gathering and using insight from front-line staff

For the past year, I’ve collected a photo history of two local sites undergoing what Joseph Schumpeter would call “creative destruction.” I’ve collected the various photos into a set of slide shows. Here’s the second:

[A collection of all the Creative Destruction posts can be found here, and here is the first slide show.]