In at least two prior posts (here and here), I talked about the absence of blogs by those at traditional management consulting firms. Well I missed this one. It’s a blog by Michael McLaughlin, a principal with Deloitte Consulting LLP. Looks like a very good one that addresses guerrilla consulting (and guerrilla marketing for consultants).
Technology Executive And CIO Glass Ceilings?
This entry has been cross-posted at The CIO Weblog.
Kory/Ferry International, one of the well-known executive search firms, has an interesting article in Computerworld entitled, "Is There Really A Glass Ceiling For CIOs?" Probably interesting for all ambitious technology managers to reflect on. In the article (snipped a bit, ellipsis and bold added by me):
As more and more CIOs aspire to general management roles and to become chief operating officers or CEOs, it’s important to ask if there really is a glass ceiling arresting the upward mobility of technology executives …
As executive recruiters, we at Korn/Ferry International have so far found no hard evidence of a glass ceiling for CIOs … Our research has revealed important differences, as well as similarities, in the ways in which CIOs and CEOs approach critical leadership issues.
Here’s the some similarities and differences they found:
- CEOs and CIOs have similar leadership styles
- CIOs exhibit a more adaptive thinking style (CEOs tend to steer more than adapt)
- CIOs tend to demonstrate less tolerance for ambiguity than CEOs
- CIOs demonstrate (on average) noticeably less confidence than their CEO counterparts
Some random selections of things they say will help to further the cause of getting a CIO promoted:
- Move form cost-center to profit-center mentality
- Understand financial statements
- Bring in the money
With this as backdrop, would I conclude that there are no glass ceilings for CIOs as Korn/Ferry did? Perhaps. But unless a CIO is very proactive, the presence of the trench that CIOs are in is pretty close to a glass ceiling to me. Although its nice to talk about working on the three bullet points I’ve outlined above, many CIOs will have a hard time finding opportunities to really cut their teeth in these areas when they are nose deep in CIO stuff (for example, a proactive "bring in the money" angle could be tough). Perhaps getting CIOs more opportunities to work on boards would be a good step to increasing their global view.
Continue reading “Technology Executive And CIO Glass Ceilings?”
Free Whitepaper And Corporate Blogosphere (Corporate Intranet) Software
21Publish, a niche provider of blogging software for turnkey blogging communities (as contrasted to personal blogging platforms), has just released a free, new whitepaper (note: PDF file) on selecting software for corporate blogospheres (i.e., blog intranets).
Whitepapers are used to help people understand the tradeoffs when attacking certain problems, whether this is selecting an embedded database, email solution, or message queue vendor. Whitepapers try to do this with an unbiased approach as much as possible – the goal of a whitepaper is to show thought leadership and help people. Not to sell software directly. If it does, great.
In any case, in my work as a consultant to 21Publish, I’ve learned that there are different value propositions and functional features that one should look for in a community publishing solution as compared to personal blogging platforms, and such aspects are laid out in the whitepaper.
The whitepaper release is also on the heels of release of a new pricing plan that provides free use for communities of up to 100 users. I’ve started to suggest use of the software for certain classes, alumni groups, small companies, and schools as a communication platform. Take the step to introduce one of your non-profit or commercial communities to blogging. They may also find that the 21Publish solution is appropriate for their use. Help spread the word by emailing, talking, or blogging about it. Thanks!
On Benefits For Small Companies
Ross Mayfield has a great post that introduces the notion of a professional employer organization (PEO) like Administaff, and I wanted to add some caveats based on my experiences with small organizations.
Companies like Administaff provide a product that encompasses a number of things, one of the most beneficial things being that one can get lower rates for benefits (especially healthcare insurance) because Administaff essentially gets purchasing power discounts by aggregating employees into a larger pool. The mechanics of using a company like Administaff are such that employees essentially engage in dual-employment arrangements. For the purposes of cash payroll and benefits, the employees are employed by Administaff. For the purposes of stock option compensation, intellectual property and invention, etc. rights, employees have a co-existing, direct relationship with the small company. (As a note, when adding Administaff coverage, sometimes employers need to perfect pre-existing agreements or add additional agreements with employees – as examples, literally firing employees may trigger severance clauses & simply adding people to a form Administaff employment agreement may not cover special terms like performance and milestone bonuses, etc.).
When exploring a company like Administaff, however, I think its also important to look at independent brokers that can get companies a mix of health insurance, dental, STD, 401(k), etc. In the end, Administaff (or another PEO) may make sense, but there are some other levers that I see for considering an independent broker:
- Who coverage is provided by – Companies like Administaff currently only provide health insurance via United Healthcare. Your employee base may have a preference for Blue Cross Blue Shield (perhaps because of coverage by state), and the company’s demographics (and foreseeable demographics for a year) may be such that marginal purchasing power benefits passed on to the small company are not that big.
- Tax and cash flow adjustments – If your company uses something like QuickBooks Payroll Service (where payroll and the accounting system are tightly coupled) and has an able finance person, your company can sometimes be more agile and flexibile in accelerating, decelerating, or changing benefits withholdings (e.g., 401(k) withholdings) across payroll periods. The end result could be substantial and creative tax savings (say $4K-$7K per employee/yr if one considers both 401k and Section 125 plan fringe cases) for both the employee and the company.
- Between bootstrap and having enough cash – Although companies like Administaff have different tiers of plans, beyond simply changing deductibles, etc. using benefits brokers one can literally form fit a plan into the demographics. For example, you may find that only health insurance, 401(k), and cafeteria plan (or whatever) have any meaning for the company. When using a particular PEO, you may be canned into a plan that throws in some extra stuff (e.g., dental, STD) that you don’t want $wise.
On yet the other hand, there are a lot of headaches that people can avoid by using something like an Administaff. When employees depart, for example, administering COBRA and/or continuance benefits come to the top of mind. It is a pain in the neck to manage yourself. Multi-state employees are also a pain, but some of the pain is alleviated when using QuickBooks deluxe payroll service (which I find that people rarely use, but I swear by it – just get it in early in an org and at the very beginning of a tax year).
Interesting Article On The Future Of PayPal
PayPal is a phenomena we’ve seen in the fairly recent past, but it’s interesting to think about the possibilities of significantly challenging Visa or MasterCard and moving beyond the traditional eBay markets. If one does a very crude compounded annual growth rate comparison using info in the attached BusinessWeek article, PayPal gets to be about 20% of the size (payment volume) of Visa in 15 years. From BW,
And more than ever,
PayPal is knocking elbows with Visa, MasterCard, and the banks that
issue their cards. It just passed American Express, the leading bank
card issuer. PayPal now has 72 million worldwide accounts, compared
with AmEx’s 65 million. Yet that pales next to card associations Visa
International and MasterCard International Inc., with 1 billion and 680
million cardholders, respectively. Likewise, PayPal’s $19 billion in
total payment volume last year falls far short of Visa’s $3 trillion
from all of its member banks. PayPal, however, is expanding much faster
— 44% last year, to Visa’s 14%.
Sure folks at Visa can claim that (per the article) "consumers want to put as much of their purchases [as they can] on the payment vehicle they know and trust." That said, PayPal is kind of different animal. In some ways, the PayPal vehicle can be thought of being beyond convenience. There’s some other key psychological marketing and use factors in play beyond just trust. Like the casino chips one gets in Las Vegas, people can both receive PayPal payments and make PayPal payments like it it is just funny money (or email). And there’s no negative association with credit card debt and high plastic fees with PayPal. I bet the marginal propensity to spend PayPal dollars could be much higher than Visa in some sectors … not that we want to increasing spending … but that is yet another story.
Analogy Between Entrepreneurship and Optimization Problems
Having both a business and engineering background, I have tendencies to try to think things out in advance very carefully. Perform strategic analyses, competitive assessments, comprehensive/near-exhaustive engineering analyses, etc. Although I’m exaggerating slightly, there’s a lot said for thinking "globally". Why be trained to think any other way?
But thinking globally can be overdone and is just one paradigm. Another option is to think more "locally", to see what is around you, to react to market demand, to see what positive and negative responses one gets when packaging products, and to be opportunistic and experimental. These latter two characteristics are very entrepreneurial in spirit.
To get a little deep and techie for a moment, in engineering disciplines such as signal processing, data compression, and neural networks, there are a variety of optimization problems where things like training a digital machine to make predictions about what type of audio sound signal to send out through set of speakers (say to cancel out road noise within the interior of a car but not the CD music coming out of the speakers) are achieved in a large part by measuring the error in the results and providing feedback to the digital machine (which is trying to learn to achieve its task). The scope of error can be thought of as a "surface", much like the terrain in mountainous areas like the western region of the US. Sometimes the digital machine will make an error that is higher or lower depending on what is going into the machine.
There are at least two ways for these machines to adapt, and these are like the global and local concepts I referred to at the beginning of this post.
A global engineering technique to updating the machine could be analogous to flying over the terrain of western region of the US and getting a look at the low spots. Since we are trying to minimize the "error" by finding the lowest spot possible, this more global view has the benefit of looking at all of the data. Renting a helicopter can be expensive though. Additionally, a global look may not always be a GLOBAL look. There could be lower spots on the other side of a mountain right in front of you. Additionally because one is so far from the surface, it is possible that perspective you hold is distorted – you cannot actually see the true contour of the terrain by being so high up (to use an often used business phrase … "to be at the 50,000 foot-level").
A local engineering technique (one case being called a "gradient descent algorithm") is where you start in one spot (say at the top of the mountain or at a randomized point) and you look for the steepest slope downward. You then walk a little bit in that direction. If you walk too fast, you can wipe out and the situation becomes unstable. Although this technique may result in a local minimum (i.e., not the lowest spot on the terrain), it can be an effective technique for moving forward. Other techniques (cheaper than renting a helicopter) to finding low spots may be to have multiple people dropped off in different spots and communicating via walkie talkie. Hybrid global and local techniques also work.
In any case, I am all for global thinking, but often it is refreshing to think about things more locally. For one thing, you are well grounded in reality and have a structured method for moving forward. As long as one can step back from time to time and look out at the horizon and to see whether the global goals are being met, it is another way of achieving some balance.
Update (5/18/05): Speaking of optimization problems and neural nets, if you haven’t tried this neural net based site for the game twenty questions, it is pretty remarkable. Quite a body of knowledge captured within. More info also here at Marginal Revolution.
Update (5/22/05): And in honor of Darth Vadar … try the Sith version …
Seeking Information On International Venture Mechanics
In my past experience, I’ve worked with legal, tax, and accounting infrastructure mechanics surrounding C Corps, S Corps, proprietorships, and LLCs and the part and parcel that comes along such as articles, amendments to articles, board governance, investors rights, stock option plans and (subforms for directors, advisors, employees, etc.), interstate filings, etc. within the US. To date I’ve had little experience with international infrastructure, corporate structures, and civil codes as connected to those that work (at closer than arms-length) in the States for those international companies or may raise capital in the future within the States. Kind of obscure and not very focused, but does anyone know of good sources of information on the web related to best practices or personal experiences for such areas (e.g., mechanics on how might typical European companies expand into the US and prepare by putting in place the most optimal infrastructure for US-based stock options, capital raises, etc.)? Right now I’m just extrapolating from the control structures I’ve seen in the US …
I’ll try to share with others any general information that I learn …
Update (5/18/05, not to be construed as legal advice): Some organizational structures outside the US appear to have only common shares. Additional organizational structures may be layered in to create tiers. Not yet clear on if there are any norms on how investors rights between the organizational structures work.
CMP To Embrace Blogging Even More As Part of News?
Snip from email/blog post from Tom Smith at CMP (InformationWeek is CMP publication, emphasis added by me):
Based on that experience, here are a few observations worth sharing on how
our blog presence is affecting our Web products (and therefore you): Readers are
distinguishing less and less between our blogs and our more traditional news
coverage. I’m not sure I agree with that or even think it’s the right set of
distinctions to be blurring, but we’re striving to embrace–rather than
fight–the trend.Moreover, it’s becoming clear that the blog is a preferred means of
interacting with us. We’ve operated forums for years, but the ability for all of
you to write to us in the context of a blog–and see your comments right
alongside ours–seems to be fueling more of your feedback, which we appreciate.
The trend is your friend, especially since this seems to be a case where it fits into operational workflow.