Anita Campbell has a very interesting post on pay per call advertising. I have never heard of this type of product before, but it definitely seems like something worthwhile to explore for small businesses (and businesses in general for that matter). This kind of product seems like it would help to eliminate click-through abuse as well as set the bar a little higher on screening customer prospects in certain biz models.
Merit Works In The Small But Not The Large
This is not a fact-based post. It is one based on opinion, anecdotal information, and little research. The post was triggered by a discussion I had with a close friend about advancing in a professional career within a larger organization.
We set the stage as follows. Should one rely on doing great or extraordinary work to advance, make sales, get recognized, etc.?
My general belief is that doing great work is necessary but not a sufficient condition. To win, one also needs to get the overall process and structure right. That’s why I say merit applies only in the small. You can win individual battles on the margin with merit. You have to get the structure right to win big, to win in the large.
As an example on career advancement and recognition, people should only plan on advancing so far with merit alone. At some point, a person needs to make deliberate efforts to factor politics, marketing, and sales into the equation. If a person doesn’t, of course he/she can still win, but I think a win in those circumstances would be in spite of an unfavorable structure. If a person doesn’t factor systemic items into the mix, he/she will be playing in the small and not maximizing the probability of success by playing in the large.
I’m not advocating playing politics or becoming a sleazy-style salesperson, but consider the following:
- a very exceptional but quiet performer progresses nicely in her career, but a more vocal and good performer gets promoted to senior status because that latter one started to get "marketing top-of-mind awareness" with the manager overseeing the promotion
- a salesperson selflessly helps a friend for many months, but never gets an introduction to the friend’s contact (who is desirable client prospect for the salesperson) simply because the salesperson did not follow a proactive, best-in-class process of asking to be introduced to the prospect
- a rising star makes tons of good friends with co-workers, but only spends once a year mingling with the managers that have a say on promotion opportunities
- another post I made which relates to the importance of structure over merit is here ("A Supportive Manager Outweighs All").
My recommendation is to preserve one’s key values but recognize when one is working in the small and ignoring the structure of a situation. Look for opportunities that are consistent with your value system and cultural norms but that align with the structure.
eBay Acquires Skype
From CEO Meg Whitman. Although I did not know there was 54 million Skype users (I neither follow Skype’s nor eBay’s operations closely), this number doesn’t change my initial impressions of the deal.
Update: Some financial info related to Skype in terms of 2004 and 2005 revenues. Pretty rapid growth in revenue since 2004 was $7M in revenue and 2005 is projected to be a $60M+ year.
Update: To clarify my position, I don’t buy the synergy play in terms of how the deal is valued and/or how financial value is created, but I do believe Skype is a great company. It is scary that the company could have been built that fast.
Update (9/13/05): Good analysis by Nivi on the eBay-Skype deal. As I mentioned before, I am on the same side of the fence that the deal is not about synergies (in the classic business use of the term). One question to ask though is whether there can actually be a VoIP monopoly that cannot be toppled. Consider how fast Skype rose to power. How big are the barriers to entry for this sort of thing? Can additional barriers be built up? What about raising the switching costs off of Skype? The Skype earnout (whether directly or indirectly) surely prices in some of the management team’s ability to create more barriers to competitors, but I’m not sure that’s the perfect insurance card for eBay. Did we manage to lock up all the smart Estonians in the deal too?
Update (9/13/05): Will Hsu (eBay) has a post on market reactions and movement related to the eBay-Skype deal. He also points me to a PDF that outlines eBay’s view on synergies. To be frank, I haven’t digested the file, listened to the press conference, etc. I did scan to see that the presentation draws a similarity of the acquisition to the PayPal deal which accelerated revenue by reducing buyer-seller friction. That said, I think that a lot of people were already using PayPal before the eBay deal hit, so the risks associated with acquisition were reduced and synergies could be "proven in" in some sense before a big chunk of change was plopped down. Plus, I think payment is a bit of a different animal, right?
Update (9/13/05): Good Infectious Greed summary of the eBay-Skype it slices, dices, chops thing.
Update (9/13/05): Phil Windley et. al. on eBay-Skype from slightly different angle on identity 2.0.
Update (9/23/05): Fred Wilson weighs in a third time.
Public Opinion Poll On eBay and Skype Rumor
Venture capitalist Fred Wilson has the popular opinion poll going on over at his blog about the eBay and Skype rumor. My comment is about the 23rd down on the list. Maybe it will be the dinner conversation piece Friday night with the i-bankers.
Professional Milestone: Arguing With Your Boss
Today I spent some time writing a blog entry targeted at those starting new careers. The entry is at a new blog (which is still under wraps), and it made me reflect on milestone that I crossed when cutting my teeth in management consulting and during business school.
The milestone is this: getting to a point where you are comfortable arguing with your boss.
This is not something that folks with Asian backgrounds (like myself) are culturally used to. Respect for elders and authority are something that is at the essence of these cultures, but some aspects of this culture breed overly passive behavior. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that arguing is disrespectful. Nor I’m a saying that it is OK to be disrespectful to elders and authority. What I am saying, is that when approached the right way and within cultural guidelines, when someone gets to a point that they are comfortable with arguing with the boss, it reflects confidence in one’s business and domain knowledge if nothing else. Of course, arguing has to be done in pragmatic and constructive ways. Arrogance is frequently frowned on. One should also use proper chain of command guidelines (e.g., disagreeing in private versus public). All said, I believe being able to argue with the boss, being able to take a position that may not be in agreement with the boss, etc. – these things mark the crossing of an important milestone in a professional career. Why? Because you have not only made yourself more valuable, but you’ve also made yourself more valuable to your boss. You are no longer part of the "yes man/woman" crowd. You become an interdependent thinker and can better serve the vision of the business.
So go pick a fight with your boss this Friday. Hey it will be a Friday, and he/she may be in a better mood for one thing.
Musings On The Initial Federal Response To Hurricane Katrina (Operations and Leadership)
Caveat: not fully thought through but based on digesting information passively over one week since Katrina hit.
I’m not sure that I’ve ever blogged about a public issue before, but the US response to Hurricane Katrina at the federal level touches on two areas that I have strong opinions on in the business world: these are roles of operations and leadership. There is another level to this that I am always at a heightened sense of awareness to – notably cases when an organization tries to effect change to both operations and leadership at the same time.
Operations structure plays a crucial role in the ability of an organization to respond. If there are too many layers or too many players that need to be involved, the cycle-time to respond will surely go up. Sometimes the response time can be part of an organization’s product or service by design. As an example in the business world, take Pearle Vision versus a high-end glasses manufacturer. Pearle Vision markets one-hour turnaround times from order until the customer has glasses. As a consequence of a strategic goal of a one-hour turnaround time, the operations are designed to facilitate speed. Put every type of glasses frames, lens, etc. (all the inventory and lab equipment) in all of the outlets so that everything can be done on the spot. This type of operations looks quite different from a high-end, customized glasses manufacturer that may have to send things out to a centralized laboratory with centralized, high-grade inventory and lab equipment. The high-end manufacturer will unlikely be able to service one-hour turnaround times.
What has been disturbing to me about the initial response to Katrina, while it has been truly a very difficult thing to respond to (no question), is that I cannot understand regardless of the operations structure as to how the initial response could have been so poor. Thousands of people in immediate need. Chaos everywhere. Looting. Shootings. Then, after what seems like an unacceptance response time later, the federal government sends in one boat. Surely you must be joking. Maybe I’m ignorant about how military responses would be off of our homeland, but it seems if this type of situation would have happened in a war zone, we would have been much quicker to respond. But even if we weren’t able to respond more quickly, surely we would have sent more resources in than one boat, right?
Now, as my wife reminds me, there are laws that separate military forces and the National Guard to prevent the occurence of coups, whereby a general could use the military to take over the US. OK. Let’s presume that operations and structure weren’t in our favor then. One has to fall back on the role of leadership. Only leadership and communication are left, right? So maybe that’s where the breakdown occurred.
But it seems like by the recent news to dismantle FEMA and turn things over to the Department of Homeland Security, we are changing both the operations structure and leadership. Sure. Maybe both are broken. I don’t know. But when you change both variables as opposed to changing one variable and holding the other constant, there’s an increased level of risk, risk that we’ll never know what was wrong about the past, or whether we are moving to something that is more right.
Sometimes when things are broken, you need to change everything. Gut the thing, change all the parts, etc. There’s little time for engineering. Get out the machette and triage. Desperate times call for desperate measures so to speak.
In business situations, before a team ever suggested something like a full changeout either in a management consulting engagement or with an internal management situation, we made sure to think things through (even with the Board) and that that process was transparent to the parties that needed to know. This becomes even more important if the person to be delegated to is not a proven rock star.
Hopefully we will be moving in the right direction with the forthcoming changes, but I have to say that as an outsider to this and whether the new steps are right, it seems like we may be skipping some steps in our appetite for change.
What’s Going On With User Interface To Del.icio.us?
I use del.icio.us as a filing system for things on the web. Today, the user interface for del.icio.us looks like the equiavlent to finding one’s file cabinet with no file folders and all the individual papers stacked in chronological order (but with little Post-It notes saying which file folder the paper belonged in). How useful is this latter filing system to me? Today I had to find something that I filed in del.icio.us, and now I can’t find it. I know that del.icio.us is a popularity tool to some, a wisdom of crowds things for others, but for me a big portion of del.icio.us is in its use as a productivity and organization tool. I even started to train some workers using del.icio.us (for knowledge sharing of things on the net). Is the definition of the tool changing? Or is it just a service issue or temporary bug? Or is it just a user interface change that I don’t understand?
RSS Used By Not Readers But Influencers
Yesterday I mentioned adding FeedBlitz to my blog to enable people to subscribe to blog updates via email. Was motivated to do this based on a hat tip from Fred Wilson. Bill Burnham weighs in on the whole "email is king" theme and also provides a case for using services like FeedBlitz and RSSFWD. The basic finding by most people is that RSS readership is low. Bill points to a post that indicates 11% of blog readers use RSS and 2/3rds of them don’t even know what RSS is.
I completely agree with this, which is why I added FeedBlitz in the first place.
That said, people should not forget that there may be some less developed research about the behavioral profile of those that use RSS (beyond traditional demographics of age, technological sophistication, etc.). An example study is here (hat tip: Robert Scoble) which says that 87% of "influencers" use RSS. In the study I point to here, influencers are defined as journalists, analysts, and bloggers. These are people that are in some sense promiscuous about spreading ideas … presumably to other readers. I speculate that the consequence of such a finding for personal versus corporate bloggers might vary.