Steve Shu – Page 58 – Stephen Shu, PhD

March 2, 2005

Credit Wars, Juice Wars, Corporate Blog Book Wars, Hype, and Talking Over One Another

The back and forth between John Robb, Dave Winer, Robert Scoble, and Shel Israel continues. John hints that the deal he was not party to included a massive advance of money. Scoble hints that John is looking to do a separate book deal. Who knows what is fact, but this we can be sure of. There will be a book or books on corporate blogging hitting the market by the end of 2005 or begining of 2006. It indicates a trend that while there may be a ton of information on the Internet on the subject, there is still a gap of bridging blogosphere knowledge to those on the outside. The value of bridging that gap (to all parties) is likely tremendous.

Regardless of what each party argues, I cannot begin to imagine how high the emotions must be. I hope that they can work this out. Perhaps a subcontracting, side agreement, or value-added arrangement can be made, but this seems far off from where the parties are currently at.

Update (3/2/05): Robert Scoble posts "The emotions aren’t high on my side of things. Sorry if it came across that way."

March 2, 2005

The Sand Hill Group Has A New Blog

The Sand Hill Group, which provides venture investments and management advice to emerging enterprise technology leaders, has launched a new blog. Turns out that in addition to my blogging at The CIO Weblog I will be providing posts at The SandHill.com Blog from time to time as one of the resident bloggers. I’ve only interacted with Madhavan "M.R." Rangaswami via email so far, but I am looking forward to the opportunity. This "blogging stuff" is definitely different than the traditional management consulting I’ve typically done. Right now, I’m just kind of going with the flow in terms of where the market is taking me in terms of corporate blogging.

Steve Shu
Managing Director, S4 Management Group

March 2, 2005

PRTM Founder Takes Helm At Dallas-Based i2

The troubled supply chain software company i2 has a new CEO from my alma mater at Pittiglio Rabin Todd & McGrath. The new CEO and President is Michael McGrath, also known to people at the Firm as the "M" in PRTM and one of the founders of the company.

One of my former colleagues still with PRTM said that this is one *heck* of a way to spend retirement. It will be a tough slog. At least it is couched as an interim CEO/management deal. Interim management is something that PRTM has also been known for (where consultants have, in cases, played roles as both temporary managers or traditional consultants within client firms).

Steve Shu
Managing Director, S4 Management Group

March 1, 2005

In Search of Better Ways to Measure the ROI of Blogging

I was motivated to write this post based on some discussion at the CEO Bloggers’ Club.

I contend that the investment by most companies in blogging has been minuscule to date. Plus the number of companies making investments is minuscule. When corporate blogging does become more prevalent, I think more sophisticated frameworks for measuring ROI will evolve. These frameworks could be based on models from online marketing, accounting, or finance theory.

So what can one do today to get a grasp on ROI?

Rather than getting caught up in the minutia and complexity of trying to measure returns directly, here might be another way to think about this. It applies the concept of opportunity cost from economics.

Given certain conditions (e.g., no blogging fatigue, no blogging addiction), bloggers may tend to ante up more when the returns are sufficiently positive. When the returns are negative (not sufficiently positive), they tend to take money (i.e., blogging time) off the table and perform other things (this relates to the concept of opportunity cost).

Thus, if you can measure the returns on the activity that you’ve switched to (presuming you’ve switched away from blogging), then you can presume that your blogging return is not more than the activity you’ve switched to.

A little abstract, but here’s another way of coming at it. One could hypothetically say, how much $$ (or $$/hr) would it take you to switch away from blogging entirely (or for an hour, a year, or all of the above, say)? As you go through the complex process of thinking through this, you get an idea of time invested (which is the primary investment for most) versus the minimum return you require to stay with blogging.

If that number turns out to be less than or equal to $0, well then you are either a blogging addict or being coerced by your employer.

So rather than looking at blogging ROI, what’s your blogging opportunity cost?

Steve Shu
Managing Director, S4 Management Group

February 28, 2005

Is Corporate Blogging a Skillset Yet?

In the past, I’ve used Monster.com to do some unorthodox things:

serve as a data point to find out where early-adopters are with respect to a technology
provide a sanity check on how much a particular technology has dispersed
figure out where labor demand is (e.g., Sarbanes-Oxley).

Now to give a little context on how this might work over time, back in 2000 I was chartered to find customers and partners that were ripe for extensible markup language (XML) technologies (I actually secured a six-figure $$, early adopter customer using laser sighting techniques and based on what they posted on the job boards). Anyway, if I recall back in 2000 when I did a search on Monster, there might have been 20 job postings returned max. Now it is 2005, and the number of postings matching XML exceed 1000, and Monster cannot return all of the results it is so many.

With that as backdrop, is blogging an actual skillset? Well, here’s an excerpt from an actual marketing job posting by Working Assets:

"The ideal candidate is the kind of person who:
• has a gmail account
• reads at least two of the following blogs daily (talkingpointsmemo,
dailykos, atrios, juan cole, wonkette, instapundit, brad Delong, MyDD)
• took time off from your job to volunteer during the election campaign
(or tried but couldn’t get anyone to call you back).
• Maybe never bothered to finish the Cluetrain Manifesto but you got the
point."

Cool. That’s pretty darn specific about blogging, so this might lead
one to believe that blogging as a skill set is really coming into its
own.

If one looks further though, searches for "blog", "blogs", "blogging",
etc. all seem to return from 10-30 job postings. Most of the jobs are
technical or product management jobs that match the tech players in the
aggregation space and list of major software vendors that blog (as
cited by Dave Sifry’s study
of the corporate blogosphere) – this are companies like Macromedia,
Microsoft, etc. Plus the job skill is a "desired" skill. That said,
many of the non-technical jobs involving blogging surround community
development (e.g., ESPN, AOL).

Couldn’t find postings for premo, hired guns positions (like evangelist Robert Scoble).

Maybe we’ll have to check the executive recruiter databases next … 😉

Steve Shu
Managing Director, S4 Management Group

February 28, 2005

MBA Degrees Cause Corruption … What The Bleep?

I respect the Economist. I am on totally on its side on this article. But I don’t understand why it is an article at all. The article leads off …

"SEVERAL of the
corporate scandals that took place in the early years of this decade
are currently being replayed in courtrooms from New York to Alabama.
The trials of top executives at HealthSouth, Tyco International and
WorldCom are reminding the public how unethical was the behaviour of
some of the nation’s top managers only a few short years ago.

The finger of blame for this behaviour is sometimes pointed at the MBA …"

In my mind, an MBA provides a number of things:

training on latest, best practice management and business theories
frameworks for tackling business problems
in some disciplines, explicit trade skills (areas like finance and accounting)
a language for dealing with other business people (just like French is a language)
networks of contacts
a brand and degree reflecting committment to business in of its own right.

The MBA is not a substitute for real-world experience.

It does not provide training in corruption.

That said (and perhaps I will weaken my case here a bit), and MBA can teach one how to recognize corruption or at least recognize where financial numbers are being played with.

To blame the MBA on corruption in the business world is ridiculous. This is somewhat like blaming those who have pursued engineering or science degrees on the atrocities of war and the machines and mechanisms used by governments to conduct war.

The reponsibility of proper behavior ultimately lies with the individual.

In the case of corruption during the bubble era, I think the problems lie in people’s appetite and greed. I am appalled by how some CEOs in that era could have received total compensation in the top 20 of all CEOs (we’re talking $50M+ per year) and destroyed shareholder value by 10x+.

Steve Shu
Managing Director, S4 Management Group

February 27, 2005

Chapter 1 of Business Blogging Book By Shel Israel and Robert Scoble Posted

Shel Israel and Robert Scoble have released Chapter 1 of their forthcoming book on business blogging. For those that have not been following that closely, the book will be one of the largest authoring collaborations on the Internet as it will draw on experiences and feedback from the blogosphere at The Red Couch. Very unique means for building the book, and the structure of the book looks great so far. Even with the knowledge and power of Scoble, it would be impossible to write a book covering the subject without considering the rest of the blogosphere. The first proposal for Israel and Scoble’s book was produced in December, and the authors cut a (speculative) lucrative book deal with Wiley earlier this month. There is also a lot of hot of the presses drama behind the scenes associated with pioneers Dave Winer and John Robb being excluded from the deal. You can view some of it here (Scoble), here (Winer), and here (Robb).

Steve Shu
Managing Director, S4 Management Group

February 26, 2005

Big Brother’s Watching Your Email and Blogs

Some of the same filtering technologies that block SPAM from getting to you will now be applied to keeping your ~~trap~~ mouth shut. (Hey, we’ve trained the SPAM technologies so well they will be getting used against us!) Blog readers of Jeff Nolan saw first hand reporting of these types of company products at the annual Demo conference in Scottsdale, Arizona. With respect to this particular subject, you can look here, here, and here on Jeff’s blog.

Ephraim Schwartz has an article just yesterday portraying his impressions of the growing trend underlying these products. Schwartz writes,

"This year’s show heightened my awareness to one trend in particular: high anxiety over what employees can publish in both
e-mail and blogs. There was a slew of products that monitor employee communications in one way or another, mapping them to
corporate policy on everything from offensive language and sexual harassment to outright prohibition of personal e-mail."

So if companies can’t get comfortable with their corporate policies on blogging, soon there will be no need to express the rules. Just encode the rules explicitly in monitoring software or train the devices using language processing and Bayesian rules like some SPAM filters. Based on Schwartz’s article, imagine:

pop-up windows appearing on employees’ screens telling them to reconsider what they are typing at any given moment,
managers getting scorecards of how many email and blog infractions an employee has, or
the legal department being automatically tied in the loop to approve what people write.

Blogging is big, but Big Brother is not too far off.

Steve Shu
Managing Director, S4 Management Group