Taking Risks

I was having lunch with Rick; one of our development managers (real name used so as to give credit where credit is due). He mentioned that one of his values is to encourage his team to embrace risks.

It was then I realized that I actually was in an organization which was not hypocritical. I had gotten used to working for people/companies which liked the buzz word of "smart risks" but did not quite understand what taking a risk means. In my past experience I was encouraged to take risks as long as we did not lose money, lose a sale or have a bad launch. ummmm hello :-) ...

Anyway, thanks Rick and woot! me that I work in an otufit which so far is rocking hard. I am looking forward to creating products which change lives and delight our market. Anything less is not good enough.

Ouch! perception is reality?

The title of this article indicates strong emotions -> "Doctors Outraged at Blue Cross Request". Even accounting for the fact that ABC.com might have a bias this is a disaster from the perspective of BCBS of California. What were they thinking?
My standing assumption is that managed health care started as an attempt to provide better health care to the majority of the population while bringing the transparency of an open market system to the process. It looks like the somewhere along way the way the second became more important than the first.
If this is not the case, then BCBS of Cali. better start doing some damage control or explain their intentions since this does not look good. I am not saying that their patients (or customers?) should get away with lying but the seemed to have dropped the ball in their search for a solution to the problem.

I am willing to give BCBS the benefit of the doubt, I am hoping that their initiative is to encourage their patients not to lie with them so they can do a better job of providing good care while keeping costs down. In either case they better clarify their motive before people start clarifying it for them.

Simple solutions that change the world

Came across this courtesy of Guy Kawasaki's blog. Beautiful :-) I am thinking of donating money to playpumps.

My alignment with the presidential hopefuls

My wife sent me this link to a poll that estimates how much my views align with a given presidential candidates. Thanks kim :-)

84% John McCain
81% Mitt Romney
74% Mike Huckabee
72% Rudy Giuliani
69% Fred Thompson
68% Tom Tancredo
58% Hillary Clinton
56% Ron Paul
56% Barack Obama
54% Bill Richardson
53% Chris Dodd
52% John Edwards
49% Joe Biden
30% Mike Gravel
29% Dennis Kucinich

2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz

Quotable - CK Prahalad

Entrepreneurs should use Price - Profit = Design as their guiding principle rather than the shortage economy paradigm of Cost + Profit = Price. "Challenge and change the price performance equations. If we can satisfy 500 million (poor) customers in India by producing world-class quality, then that can become the biggest export opportunity in the world," Prahalad said.

N. Gopalaswami, India's chief election commissioner, spoke about entrepreneurship in government. "The biggest enterprise in India is maintaining democracy. Our elections, involving 700 million voters, are the single largest event management exercise in the world,"

From the article ->C.K. Prahalad: 'The Poor Deserve World-Class Products and Services'

Know your buyer's dream not just the need

It is important for a company to not just think of its customers as people who get what they paid for but instead as people who get "the story" they paid for. This story (via kim) is a great example of that.

From consumerist.com:

Ritzy Fifth Avenue jeweler Tiffany & Co. failed to ship Chris' grandfather a bracelet for his wife in time for Christmas. We expect a certain level of service from high-end stores, but Tiffany's extravagant amends caught us by surprise.

My grandfather ordered an engraved Tiffany silver bracelet as a surprise Christmas gift for my grandmother. He had custom engraving put on the bracelet, and had arranged for the bracelet to be delivered to my house about 2 weeks before Christmas. Two weeks after the order (when we should've received the bracelet), there was no bracelet. We gave it another week, and the my grandfather emailed Tiffany customer support. He received an automated response stating that because of the overwhelming Christmas rush, he needed to contact customer support via their 800 number. Of course, the 800 number was impossible to get through to also.

My grandfather, being the laid back man that he is, wasn't really angry, but he wanted to know what was going on with the bracelet. Tiffany customer service ended up calling him on the Friday before Christmas. As luck would have it, he was out fishing, and my grandmother talked to them, thus ruining the surprise. When he returned home, he was able to actually get through to the rep who called him earlier. She informed him that because of a Christmas rush they were not expecting, the bracelet would not be arriving before Christmas. To make up for the fact that they had ruined the surprise and would not be getting the bracelet to my grandfather before Christmas, they would be giving him the order FREE. He asked to clarify, asking if they just meant the shipping or the engraving free, but no, the ENTIRE COST of the order was FREE. Of course, he was blown away (after all, this is a $255 bracelet, plus the cost of engraving and shipping).

Tiffany ended up shipping the bracelet on Saturday, overnighting it to my house where I received it on Monday. There was no invoice or such in the box, so we were still wondering IF the bracelet was actually going to be free (with the final call coming from the credit card bill). Sure enough, when the credit card bill came that would've contained the charge, there was absolutely no charges from Tiffany.

So, it's nice to know that there are indeed some companies who want to keep their reputation that treat their customers well.

Sometimes you get the service you intended to pay for. For Tiffany, which stocks $210,000 bracelets, $255 isn't much to keep the customer happy and willing to consider larger purchases.

Good job Tiffany's.

History lessons from the family

My wife recently got a set of boxes containing stuff that belonged to her mom. As she was going through the contents she uncovered a couple of porcelain dolls of British soldiers. At the bottom they had the words "made in occupied Japan" printed on them. So I turned to the highly trusted Wikipedia as usual and found this ->

At the end of the Second World War, Japan was occupied by the Allied Powers, led by the United States with contributions from Australia, India, the United Kingdom and New Zealand. This was the first time since the unification of Japan that the island nation had been occupied by a foreign power. The San Francisco Peace Treaty, signed on September 8, 1951, marked the end of the Allied occupation, and when it went into effect on April 28, 1952, Japan was once again an independent state.

I am fascinated by this. It was less than an average human life span ago (55 years ago) that Japan was considered an "occupied nation". India contributed towards the occupation of Japan. I never knew that there was a window between India's slavery and freedom where it helped with the occupation of another country. There is more thought provoking material here.

What struck me most was the fact that living in a time of accelerated rate-of-change makes us give disproportionate importance to our local history over the past. Reminds me of the quote that talks about "people who don't know history are doomed to repeat it".

I think there is a lot to be gained from slowing down, and looking back to where we came from and drawing deep breaths. Slow down grasshopper slow down.

note: picture above is not of the actual doll we own but similar.

First looks can be deceptive

On first glance this post reads like a damning indictment. On second thoughts it may be a second (most like 999999th) chance for the outlook team. The fact that this user,

1. Continues to use outlook in spite of 67 "known" issues :)
2. Takes the time and energy to document and detail the known issues.

tells me that he gets enough value out of outlook not to walk away in apathy (or might be the company standard, blah blah. I get it I cannot positively conclude that outlook is adding value from this).

My point is simply just that Outlook has done a good job of solving the base problem. It is time for it to catch up with the myriad of usability and interaction issues defined here.

In other words the original user persona defined for Outlook has changed over time and it is the product's responsibility to keep up.

From the you have got to be kidding me department

"I don't want people to get the wrong idea. It's not that we're starting a swinger club in mid-air or something like that," he added. "We're a perfectly normal holiday company."

Clearly they seem to have redefined what "perfectly normal " means. The entire article -> "Fly naked on Germany's first nudist holiday flight".

Slow boil kills the frog

Both of these are headlines from yesterday's news

A computer tape containing personal data of 650,000 customers of about 230 retailers including J.C. Penney Co is missing, credit card issuer GE Money said on Friday.

and

A laptop containing the personal details of 600,000 new and prospective military recruits has been stolen, the Ministry of Defense said Friday, the latest in a series of government blunders over data.

230 retailers... what does that mean? Should I switch over to cash only. WT$%$ ! I assume yesterday was a normal news day. Should I just assume that these kind of gaffe's are the norm in the modern world or should i be worried?

I admit, I do not get my credit report from Equifax/Experian/Transunion every 4 months. I guess I will have to start doing that. The worrying part here is that as the financial industry works its darnest to make every person use their birth right to credit card, it continues to exacerbate the worst case scenario. The credit card user who does not pay his/her monthly bills in full is most likely also the user who has no idea of the risks he is being exposed to.

Anyways rants aside. Any suggestion for practical solutions to this problem, should I be looking into something like "lifelock" or is one of those long term attitude adjustment problems?

--Update--
I came across this recommendation to apply for a credit freeze with the three major credit bureaus. I am looking into this and if it is not a major hassle, I might go ahead and do this. I urge you to do the same :-) and keep me posted on anything you might find as well.

How not to title your article

I saw this title pop up on google news reader recently,

Crash Landing Pilot John Coward Is a Hero

:-) it is hard to imagine that this was not intentional.

America's most wired cities

Forbes published their list of America's top 25 most wired cities. I kind of lost interest when their definition of measurement metric started to go past 75 words. All I wanted to say was that here is another example of my instincts failing me, I was surprised to see Austin did not crack this list.
Forbes most wired cities.

Quotable - Yossi Vardi

“We have become two countries: a high-tech one with few children and very high incomes, and a poor one with lots of kids,”

“Three major viral products emerged from this part of the world: the Bible 2,700 years ago, Jesus 2,000 years ago and ICQ ten years ago,” he jokes. Search for ICQ using Google and there are 675m matches, he points out, compared with 160m for the Bible and 178m for Jesus."

Context - At the age of 27 he was appointed director-general of Israel's development ministry and then held a similar job at the energy ministry. Later he led or helped to found some 60 companies such as Israel Chemicals, the Israel Oil Company and ITL Optronics. Then, in 1996, he invested in his first internet start-up, Mirabilis, the company behind ICQ.

“PowerPoint presentations damage your brain—if you look at too many, you become immoral,”

“Happiness is relative, the more successful the high-tech sector, the more frustrated and unhappy the rest of society could become.”

The whole article runs the length of page and is available at the economist web site. It is worth a read, to me it is a good reminder that success is a healthy dose of luck combined with backing your strength and individuality. IOW, the fact that his profile is so different from your typical "US Entrepreneur" profile gives me lot of hope.

Product Management lessons from watching Season III of Food Networks "Next Big Star"

I just finished watching the marathon new years special by Food Network. They aired the entire season of Food Networks "Next Big Star". I surprisingly got into it. Let me clarify, I am not a fan of reality shows, they seem phony, pretentious, and if anything "un"real to me. They seem as far removed from real life as can be except for the oxymoron categorization. The only reality show I have watched is Project Runway (thanks to my lovely wife) and the season finale of "The Biggest Loser" both Bravo shows. I think I got into "Next Big Star" because it was surprisingly real, and it is to date the most unpretentious and honest reality show that I have watched. I was trying capture the elements that gave it credibility and I think there is a good lesson in product management here.

• Be very clear on your product's core competency - Food Network's product is NOT recipes, NOT travel, NOT anything else. It is television and the way to measure that is audience size and ratings. Their integrity to their product was very compelling to me. This reality show was a clear means to an end -> the end being identify the next personality who will contribute to Food Networks ratings and differentiations vs other TV stations involving food. The contest itself helped with a temporary ratings boost I am sure but the contest was not the end. This is an important distinction to make, with "The Apprentice" for instance the contest is the end and that reeks of make-believe crap. This is why this reality TV is so much better than "Top Chef"(Top Chef of what!?! - this is like getting the "world's greatest dad" mug from your kid and there is no context.)
  

• Make-believe is insulting to end-users. Don't "make" something believable if you can deliver the real thing. I was impressed that the judges for the show were Food TV's Senior VP of Programming and Production and its VP of marketing. These are people whose job it is to grow the product. This made it "real" because in the real world it is exactly these people who would be making these decisions. They did not bring random celebrities to judge the competition or random celebrities to pretend like they understand the product.
  

• You (yes you reading this) are not your product's typical end user: I understand that it is impossible to be a product manager unless you can abstract to some extent but there always will be differences in opinion amongst your user base on all aspects of the product. Accept it, learn from it, and most importantly grow your product through it. This point was struck home for me when I found myself thinking how unbelievably stupid the judges were being in eliminating Amy and retaining Jag and Rory. I was pissed! but thinking on why I was getting so pissed was what led to this point.
  

• Be prepared to be flexible: The judges thought they had picked the best two contestants for the finale (Jag and Rory). Jag was eliminated since he had fabricated history and so it was Rory vs Amy and Amy won. *knock knock* - man these guys are lucky. Americans picked the contestant they had previously eliminated (further confirming my instincts *grin*). Of course hindsight is 50/50 but my point here is that they responded to Jag's revelations admirably and ended up doing a better job than if there had been no bump in the road.
  

Any ways :-) I enjoyed this a lot. Happy 2008 to you and all your loved ones.

Business done differently

I have been wanting to blog about SmugMug, the online photo hosting site that my wife and I use. I was having a hard time articulating what I wanted to say about it. Fortunately for me, the LATimes solved that problem.
They have a great two page article on SmugMug and what makes it cool. Do check it out here.
I am pretty sure we under-utilize our smugmug page :-) We are not active on the message boards either but we are feeling pretty good that our pictures are in really good hands. If you don't have an online photo site or are in the market for one, do take a look at SmugMug, they are really passionate about what they do.

Some good quotes from the LA Times article:

The MacAskills are determined to retain control of their business, turning down all offers to invest in or buy the company. Employees, who include "sorcerers" (engineers) and "support heroes" (customer service staff), agree that SmugMug wouldn't be the same with outside influence.

SmugMug may have one of the most distinctive corporate characters in Silicon Valley. After all, this is the company that in January gave a couple, Naomi Smith and Roger Brimacombe from Fetlar, one of Scotland's Shetland islands, a lifetime SmugMug membership in exchange for a sheep. As part of the lighthearted deal, the ram, which remained on Fetlar, was christened Smuggy, and SmugMug's green smiley face logo was spray painted on his coat, where it remained until he was sheared this fall.


Sean Rogan, 33, was a SmugMug customer who used to keep readers of Chris' motorcycle forum on the edge of their seats with his tales of life on the road. While he was passing through San Francisco on his way to Guatemala, Chris surprised him by offering him a job as the company writer.

"I thought: Could this have really found me?" Rogan said.


They also reward customer loyalty. Two years ago, when SmugMug raised its prices, it grandfathered in all its current customers. Every year, SmugMug organizes "shootouts" for its customers: roving expeditions to national parks with expert instruction on how to get the perfect shot.

And once, as payment for photo services, the MacAskills accepted livestock.

Like I said, business done differently. I was pretty encouraged and inspired by their story. Let me know what you think.

Merriam-Webster word of the year 2007 (and fine print)

is ... drum rolls ... W00t! and yes I did not type Woot (I purposely used zeros instead of the letter o)

W00t (interjection):expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word "yay"

If I understand this correctly, the 2007 word of the year is a synonym for "yay". I cannot help but find this disturbingly amusing. Oh but wait, it gets better, here are some choice snippets from the web site.

Thousands of you took part in the search for Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year for 2007, and the vast majority of you chose a small word that packs a pretty big punch. The word you've selected hasn't found its way into a regular Merriam-Webster dictionary yet—

the exclamation is also known to be an acronym for "we owned the other team"—again stemming from the gaming community.

Merriam-Webster's #1 Word of the Year for 2007 based on votes from visitors to our Web site:

So, if I understand these findings. The 2007 word for the year is not found in the regular English dictionary and it is an acronym for "owning the other team" (talk about explaining theory A using an even more obscure theory B) and oh the result is based on votes from visitors to our website.

I do understand what W00t! means, I have used the word, the website and am quite aware of it. I have nothing against W00t. What I find troubling here is that a word with its primary relevance emanating from an extremely niche population (online gamers/gamers) has been chosen as the word of the year.

I find this similar to this imho classic post by Josh Kopelman who blogged about the techcrunch effect. The gist of the post is that, the 60+K (now maybe 100+K) users of techcrunch drink each others kool-aid in mass amounts and are freaked out by findings that the biggest priority of most Internet users is not switching from Word to Google Docs (gasp!).

I am sure there is a gamer somewhere who is thrilled to bits that W00t is the word of the year and cannot comprehend the fact that 95+% (i am guessing here) of the world's English speaking population has not heard of it.

IMO, the deeper problem here is that as the Internet makes communication quicker, easier and louder we are mistakenly associating the frequency of appearance of a thought/concept on the Internet as indicative of its prevalence or popularity. It is not and I am afraid some of the mistakes may be more costly than just a unknown word of the year.

But for now, hope you had a great 2007 and a big W00t! for 2008 ;-)

The top 10 words of 2007 can be found here

Prince Caspian Trailer

I am easing back into blog posting after a hiatus. I was busy for the past two months, starting a new job here. That left me in Chicago for 2.5 weeks in November, pictures here from when my wife joined me for the weekend. As you can tell, the 'Bean' fascinated us to no end *grin*

Then Kim and I were visiting Israel for two weeks and we had a wonderful time, pictures here (courtesy Kim again).

Anyways there was too much blog-backlog and I eventually stopped because the backlog was too daunting. I think the word "blog" above can be substituted with a lot of life activities and the statement would still ring true. For instance I can replace blog in that sentence with "exercise" or "reading my bible" or "phone calls to my parents" or "emails to friends" -- you get the idea. I am not going into deep introspection, just making an observation that this is a situation I find myself in quite often so learning to deal with it will probably help in more ways than one.

So here you go, I start by not worrying about the backlog and figure if something was worth blogging about or sharing about in the backlog the need will make itself clear.

Now for the title of the blog, the trailer for the next movie in the Narnia series is out. I found it here.

Perfect Business defined

I came across this post on Howard Lindzon's blog

...

Facebook and Google are just giant brains. No packaging, no shipping, no retail…in a word, perfect businesses. Google has proven out a revenue model and Facebook is on it’s way .

Both these businesses are creating their own global economies and it’s awesome to watch the leverage they are displaying...

I have an issue with the statement, "Perfect businesses" - no packaging, no shipping, no retail. This is ironic since these perfect businesses are advertisement vehicles/platforms.
In other words they exist solely to connect majority of their customers with products that require packaging, shipping and retail. So if every business decided to become perfect than *cough* *cough* google and facebook would have nothing to sell.

Myth turns into realilty

One of the first myths I remember when I started my career in software development was the one about the M$ janitor who became a millionaire.
It turns out that Google decide to create it own version only in this case it is for real - Google options make masseuse a multimillionaire (behind the walled garden - use bugmenot dot com).

Make of this what you will, etc.

Devil (or customer satisfaction) is in the details

I am in Chicago for two weeks. I happen to like this particular coffee shop (Bean) at the lobby of the building i am staying at. This morning the barista thanked me by name when i picked up the coffee. I was curious how she knew my namesince I am not from Chicago and I have been at the shop only once before. Turns out that the guy who took my order read my name from my credit card and passed it to the barista. Not a big deal but a great little habit to have if you are in the service industry :)