What I've Learned So Far

Peters isn’t a fan of “systems thinking,” as he explains in parts one, two, and three of a blog rant. He believes that too much emphasis on systems thinking saps the ability of a person or an organization to learn by doing — to move an idea quickly from the drawing board into the prototype stage, and then to experience the real-world feedback of a prototype that doesn’t work (or that doesn’t work completely, or that works but only in interesting/incomplete ways, etc.).

Me? I tend to be enamored of systems thinking . . . but then again I also tend not to accomplish/finish as much as I’d like.

Seems like it’s time for some quick-and-dirty prototyping . . .

In case you just can’t get enough of my bloggery, check out this post I wrote for Worldchanging Austin:

Memo to Vinod Khosla: Every Little Helps.

Dig me criticizing a billionaire, yo.

His advice on spot-micromanaging them — and on micromanaging in general — is outstanding.

Counterpoint: Ben Horowitz on micromanagement

Specifically, there are times and situations where micromanaging executives is not just ok, but also the right thing to do. Andy Grove has an excellent explanation of this in his classic book High Output Management, where he describes a concept called “Task Relevant Maturity”. Andy explains that employees who are immature in a given task require detailed training and instruction. They need to be micromanaged. On the other hand, if an employee is relatively mature in a task, then it is counterproductive and annoying to manage the details of their work.

Amen, sir.

Jeff Jarvis thinks so. I’m prone to agree.
I was talking a while back with a friend of mine who’s a veteran newspaper features writer. He’s very good and has umpteen thousand clips to his name, plus he’s an adaptive type, so he’ll be fine no matter what happens. But he admitted that he has no idea where his newspaper — or the broader newspaper business — will be in five or ten or twenty years.

If you’d like to know more about my view on this, check out this longer post on the Hoover’s BIZ blog.

My workmate Rocky brown is a Web designer, a sharp-eyed editor, and an all-around good guy. He and I were talking about the recent demise of his entrepreneurial venture, Dinner-and-a-Movie.com. (The link is so you can see what the site looks like; the service is no longer running.)

Rocky was nice enough to answer some questions I posed to him about what got him interested in entrepreneurship — which he does alongside a complex day job and a marriage — and where he sees it taking him next. (By the way, the “LOL” in his comments is legit: Rocky is one of the most upbeat guys you’ll ever meet.)
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Q: What made you want to start your own business? Is this the first time you tried to start a business?

A: After working for and getting laid off from three failed Internet start-ups (one who at the time held the record for the largest single round of funding in Austin history — $40 mil), I decided enough was enough and it was time for me to take control of my own job security. Having no real business experience and certainly no experience actually building a business from scratch, I decided to think long and hard about what kind of business I would start, knowing it would be something different than the norm. So one generous severance package and a partial 401(k) cash-out later, I was making moves left and right to get started.

Q: What’s the biggest lesson you learned from your experience with Dinner and a Movie?

A: Hmm … there are so many important and extremely valuable lessons learned from being with a business from its inception to its untimely demise, but if I had to choose one, I think it would be that no matter how confident you are in your abilities and how much you think you can multi-task, you absolutely cannot do everything yourself. It was quite exhilarating to be the head honcho and perform business functions that I really had no business doing, but I think wearing so many hats can leave someone vulnerable to missing some fairly obvious warning signs about the state of the business. You need help, no matter what you’re doing. One more quick lesson learned … try as hard as possible to use other people’s money to start a business … not your own. Don’t take on all the risk by yourself. LOL.

Q: What are you going to do next? Try another entrepreneurial venture?

A: I’m without a doubt trying again sometime in the very near future. I’ve been sitting on a nifty idea since I closed Dinner-and-a-Movie.com and now feel much more empowered by my experiences about what and what not to do the next time around. The wheels are well in motion on the next venture and I’m honestly surprised no one has thought of or executed the concept as of yet. With a namesake like Rocky, you know I’m not staying down for the count.

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Thanks to Rocky for his time and insights!

That’s the advice of Tom Peters. Mind you, he was trained as an engineer and he has lots and lots of thoughts about how to do things better, in business and in other settings. But strategic planning? Not so much. He quotes Michael Bloomberg:

“We made mistakes, of course. Most of them were omissions we didn’t think of when we initially wrote the software. We fixed them by doing it over and over, again and again. We do the same today. While our competitors are still sucking their thumbs trying to make the design perfect, we’re already on prototype version #5. By the time our rivals are ready with wires and screws, we are on version #10. It gets back to planning versus acting: We act from day one; others plan how to plan—for months.”

That’s a big chunk of what made Bloomberg his fortune. It’s the same thing that made Winston Churchill’s career so scintillating, for better and for worse: he was beholden to the “bias for action” that Peters has been preaching for 25+ years.

Are you planning on maybe-someday-somehow doing something . . . or are you doing something?

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman often frustrates me with his breathless pronouncements, but in this long article, published back in April, he offers more than enough cogent points to make up for it.

The Power of Green

The whole piece is well worth reading, but I’ll summarize it briefly. Friedman’s principal goal here is to show how assertive U.S. action toward environmental sustainability will help the United States not just to combat global warming, but to improve the U.S. and global economy, and combat terrorism. Read the rest of this entry »

An infographic on “The Wealthiest Americans Ever” at the New York Times. Fun! Informational!

(Ongoing subtext: History is your friend!)

(Hat tip: John Holbo.)

My friend Redneck Mother has some strong words after watching the new film Sicko:

We’ve been told our system has to be the way it is. It doesn’t. And by the measures that matter — overall quality of health, infant mortality and longevity — it shouldn’t be the way it is.

Amen, sister.

You get a call from your p.r. firm: “Can you be on ‘Morning Call’ tomorrow around 9 a.m.?” The answer to this question, unless you will be on an airplane at that time, is “Yes.” Dentist appointments, meetings with the CEO, whatever — it all gets rescheduled for that t.v. slot.

If you’re lucky, the topic under discussion is one you already know a lot about — like the business of Blackstone, say. You talk to the segment producer, who writes down a lot of what you say to frame the conversation you’ll have with the anchor tomorrow. Sometimes, you talk or trade e-mails with the anchor ahead of time, which gives you a chance to hammer out a specific order for specific questions to be asked. Sometimes, you just have a general idea of what to work on.

You tell some of your co-workers, you send a few e-mails to family. Then you start reading everything you can — way too much — in hopes that you’ll cover everything you need to in time for your spot. You stop reading when you already know everything contained in the nth story you read on the topic.

Long after you meant to, and hours after you went to bed, you finally fall asleep. You probably wake up too early, too. You try to avoid drinking too much coffee, and take an unusual amount of interest in your grooming habits and the wrinkles in your nice shirt. You care more than usual about how quickly you make it through the long string of traffic lights on your way downtown.

You’re relieved to find a good parking place just across the street from the studio, and relieved that you remembered to load up on quarters from the change jar at home. You pump in two hours’ worth of quarters into the meter, even though you know you’ll never need that long.

When you get upstairs, you catch up with your ultracool camera-operator/producer pal — it’s been a year since you’ve seen him, but it’s like nothing’s changed. Use the head, get some powder on your face, change into your nice shirt, drink water. Your friend sits you in the chair, adjusts the lights and the camera, rigs you up with an earpiece and a mic. You both crack jokes. You wait. You hope you’ve prepared enough.

Ten minutes before your spot, you start hearing the show live over your earpiece. You turn down the volume a bit and go back to chatting with your friend. A few minutes later, a disembodied voice breaks in over the t.v. chatter, talking to you directly. She says you look great (you can’t see her, or a monitor of yourself), and then asks you to count to ten. She tells you which anchor will be talking with you, and when you ask her if there’s another guest on, she tells you the name of somebody like, oh, this guy. No pressure.

The time comes, and you smile while you stare at the camera, which is tougher to do because you’ve had your glasses off for 15 minutes. The anchor asks you a question, which you try to answer using the clever phrases you thought up last night and early this morning. You’re relieved when you find that your view basically agrees with the other expert’s, because there won’t be a rivalry between you during the spot. You listen to his answer, then shift back into gear when it’s your turn to talk. You try to sound like you know what you’re talking about, even when you know you know what you’re talking about.

And then it’s over. You sit still until the mic and camera are dead, then you wipe off the makeup, change shirts, shoot the bull with your buddy for a couple of minutes, and go get lunch. You wait for (hope for) the hero’s welcome when you get back to the office.  And then you go on with your real life.