Tech IT Easy » Performances

Management Innovation : problems, facts and 10 lessons for the future

ceciiil — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 07:16:06 +0000

God bless Jon Husband : he pointed me via a Twitter conversation to his telling blog post (Will Enterprise 2.0 drive management innovation) on Fast Forward blog, where he quotes Gary Hamel FAN-TAS-TIC book : The Future of Management.

To start with, Gary Hamel is not an obscure blogger or some kind of geek preparing the internet revolution. He has been ranked the most influential business thinker by the Wall Street Journal ahead of personalities such as Thomas Friedman or Bill Gates. Therefore, it won’t be as easy for corporate afficionados to dismiss his theories as it may be to dismiss Cluetrain Manifesto’s chapters by Chris Locke ou David Weinberger (regardless of how brilliant these are).

This is fascinating essay. Lucid, smart, driven by a relentless desire to find the truth and to help the reader find the one of his company.

Problems

Funnily enough, Gary Hamel asks the same question as Chris Locke : how relevant it is in the 21st century to use same management techniques defined by Taylor or Weber in a world where :

Change has never been so fast or happening to such a scale. Nowadays not only advantages erode rapidly but whole industries are crashing (airlines, music …)
Barriers of entry have never been so low because of deregulation and technologies. Therefore, companies are now facing ultra low cost competitors.
Internet offers a light speed disintermediation between producers and consumers
Strategy life cycle is shrinking. New Business is faster than ever
Customers (and employees !) have never been so well informed thanks to the internet and the amount of information available to them

Facts

Looking into these management issues, Gary Hamel analyses how management works today and how innovation prone it is. Well, not much since :

All companies gets obsessional about innovation and yet don’t apply any at management level
Right now, your company has 21st-century Internet-enabled business processes, mid-20th-century management processes, all built atop 19th-century management principles.
19th century management will just not work to manage knowledge workers in a world-changing at such breathtaking space.
Management is extremely conservative because it is based on unchallenged beliefs and politics of people willing to keep their status, power and benefits
The only solution to survive and succeed in an ever-changing business environment is to be adaptable
You can not be adaptable if the whole company is controlled by a heavy and fossilized hierarchical chain of command. Adaptable eco-systems (life, markets, cities) are not reduced to mere vertical top bottom flow of information and processes but on peer-to-peer democratized flat systems

Use cases

The Future Of Management goes through different real life use cases and tell the remarkable stories of enterprise very famous world-wide for their amazing innovation ability.

WL Gore

Bill Gore left DuPont in 1958 to create a company (WL Gore) based on Douglas McGregor book The Human Side of Enterprise. Motto : make money and have fun. Which reads in terms of organisation :

Small operating units
No bosses but leaders that get things done and are excelling in team building
Team free to fire its boss
High Trust / Low fear environment
Willing commitment instead of assignment
20% time to personal project.

In terms of quality of workplace :

For the 13th consecutive year, W. L. Gore & Associates has earned a spot on FORTUNE magazine’s list of the “100 Best Companies to Work For.” Only a dozen other workplaces have appeared in every edition of the rankings. The company, known for everything from waterproof, breathable GORE-TEX fabric to life-saving medical devices, is No. 13 on this year’s list, now posted at fortune.com/bestcompanies. (fibre2fashion)

Whole Food Market

WFM is the most profitable food retailer chain in the US according to their profit / sq foot ratio. 3000% increase in revenue between 1992 et 2007. Rules :

Small units (up to 8 people)
associates are empowered and accountable
Trust and equity : executive can not earn more than 19 times of the lowest salary
Strong purpose and common cause : quality and healthy food, local producers

Google

Again extremely innovative and rather successful company.

Network of lateral communication
Small work units (3 to 4)
Position and hierarchy don’t win an argument.
Grueling recruiting process
Collaborative tools (MOM, MiscList)

10 Lessons

Out of the real life stories above, Gary’s extracts the following lessons for management innovation :

Management innovation is critical. Because systemic management brings advantages that are tough to replicate.
Principles matter. Whole Food Market is quite representative in this respect : love, community, trust transparency, mission are the principles the whole company has based its success on
The main obstacle to management innovation is the belief that there is no other way to manage an organisation. Ask : who benefits from the status quo ?
Management innovation redistributes power. When people are empowered (responsibilities, accountability) their job makes more sense and they are more likely to get more engaged and passionate about. And engaged and passionate people are happier and more productive
Costs of management innovation are more obvious than benefits. For instance, WL Gore cluster of factory plants sounds ridiculous in terms of costs savings for business orthodoxy. But in practice, it offers cross business learning to the people in the company. How to measure such intangible assets as adjacency, autonomy, agility, commitment ?
Management innovation that humanized work is irresistible : the three main case studies (Whole Food Market, WL Gore, Google) this book is based on are exhilarating examples on how empowering people fosters a grand slam in organisation success : innovation, profits, and employee engagement. This is leveraging Gary’s pyramid of human capabilities.
Experience managers are not the best in terms of innovation and MBA is an obstacle to management innovation. In all 3 real cases above, CEOs are graduated in computer science, philosophy and chemistry. As Gary Hamel puts it, not doing MBA, they are not been told what NOT to do. Which echoes the David Heinemeier Hansson presentation : Unlearn your MBA.
Small is the new big. All these companies have chosen to have small operating units
Manager is more a producer of the show rather than being the lead to quote Cristobal Conde.
Internet is the best metaphor of for 21st Century Management. This is where we go back to Jon’s insightful blog post :

Whether we like it or not, we are passing from an era in which things were assumed to be controllable, able to be deconstructed and then assembled into a clear, linear, always replicable and thus static form to an era characterized by a continuous flow of information. Because it feeds the conduct of organizations large and small, it is a flow that necessarily demands to be interpreted and shaped into useful inputs and outputs.

What’s next

If you have any interest in management, do yourself a real treat and read this book. It contains many questions that will help you rate your organization in terms of management innovation : very useful.

Surprisingly enough, this book concludes on the Internet as a metaphor for management. This is the perfect introduction to another Harvard Business Press release : Enterprise 2.0 new collaborative tools for your organization toughest challenges book by Andrew McAfee.

We are now faced with this chicken and egg question type of question : who was the first in the 2.0 landscape : Management 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 ? This has to be the subject of another blog post …

How to make the Browser a more Efficient OS

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 14:56:14 +0000

Briefly. With all this Chrome OS and HTML 5 talk, you’d think that we were already at the stage where we could run all apps in our browsers. Close, but one thing that I think is terrible about the current state of browsers is that they become so damn bloated the more you use them. Here’s Firefox, for instance, after just loading it and about 30 tabs:

My Macbook’s fans are running like crazy.

Apart from the obvious, that there needs to be better memory / processor management for tabs—optimally, unused tabs should use minimal percent of both—another big problem is the lack of visibility of what you have open in your browser. As soon as I have 10+ tabs open and a number disappear of the page or are in different browser-windows, I have no overview, not to mention little idea of what little flash- and other widgets are being opened in each page.

Some innovations, I’d like, are:

Grouping of tabs by domain-names, similarly to how Windows allows you to group windows by app.
The ability to control whether Flash is being loaded, what kind of flash, and what kind of other apps. Yes, I know about flash- and ad-blocking, but something more elaborate.
Better than 2, a common webpage standard for how much memory / processing a web-page should typically take. And perhaps a browser-imposed limit as to what pages get loaded or not.
An indication of where a tab is when I’m trying to load the same webpage or domain-page. E.g. I use Netvibes often, each of which has 5-15 widgets in each tab and thus consumes a fair amount of power. When I can’t find the right tab, I open multiple instances, which obviously slows down the browser some more.

All of this is relevant, I feel, both because of the “shift” we are seeing towards “Browser-OSs,” but also because there is a trend towards buying less powerful single-purpose machines often for use on the road. A bloated browser can use as much battery as running a game, the difference being that most mobile travellers know better than to run a game on the road.

Rant over. Would love to hear about Firefox extensions or Browser innovations that overcome some of these problems.

Vincent

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Art thoughts

Vincent van Wylick — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 08:16:22 +0000

I’m a little sick with the flu, hence a few days off blogging, but I just wanted to share this with you (the video from vbs.tv does not seem to show up in the rss-feed).

It’s the story of Carlos Amorales, a Mexican visual artist, who does some pretty interesting things, including: graphic design, installations, performance art, and co-founding a record-label. If you don’t have time to watch the whole thing (it’s only 14 min.!), worth checking out is:

01:15, when he shows how me makes his illustrations by keeping a digital database of images in different shapes. All in black, though he occasionally uses red. If you think these simplistic, then look at some of his installations (next point), and you see that these are just the beginning, really.
04:40, when he shows some of his installations and talks about how they give the audience the ability to enter the work. It made me think about how creative developers/artist can use the new technology of “augmented reality” to create layers above art-installations that take you more into the experience. Any museum I go to these days, I always get the audio-tour as it adds to my understanding of what I’m seeing. The same could apply to pointing your mobile camera at it and seeing a visual augmentation. Of course, this is where those infernal copyright laws come in; I think this is something that should be done first with certain avant garde / independent artist, to show-case the potential…
09:20, when he talks about his record label, Nuevos Ricos (turn down your speakers before clicking this link), for which they created a manifesto, which included giving all the music away for free. Instead the focus was on performance, on entertainment. I mean, well it’s completely ridiculous and you can see that it’s more of an experiment to understand youth culture. At the same time, it is something that many anti-copyright people (including me) have argued for, that music should be about the performance, not about making money from a shiny disc / digital file. But in the end, maybe music/art should be about self-expression and we all express ourselves in different ways. Some, like the clowns in the video, who have very little musical talent, will prefer showcasing themselves. Others will prefer to just make music and make a living from that. We live in a very nuanced world, after all…

End thoughts, hope to be back this Monday.

Vincent

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Keeping the job Fun by tracking your time

Vincent van Wylick — Mon, 25 May 2009 14:03:20 +0000

Working at a financial trust means that many companies that you meet make a bad first impression. Because they come in the shape of ca. 1-10 binders and unless you love handling paper, reading balance sheets and legal documents, and breathing dust, you just won’t like it much. Luckily, reading binders isn’t part of my job description, even though I do it because I want to understand how this business works from start to finish. But, to keep my sanity in check, I try to mix it up between a. doing the (boring) work, b. keeping the overview, and c. doing work that I love.

After writing my work-life balance post some weeks ago, I decided to do one thing from the start: I would keep track of all my professional activities in Excel. Another thing I did was to colour-code each activity and note down how much time I spend on it each day and week, in order to track patterns. I am now in week 7, meaning that I have some meaningful data about this.

While I’m not going to share this data with you because I think it’s entirely irrelevant to your life, I will share some lessons that I learned from my experience so far:

Tracking you time requires a certain kind of discipline, as well as a kind of heuristic thinking: a. you need to continuously do it; b. you don’t need to be entirely precise on whether you spend 15 min. more or less on something (I track each 15 min. in my sheet). P.S. Nothing inspires you to keep such a list as much as being paid by the hour (which is how I started with this habit).
Asking lot’s of questions is the single most useful thing to do if you want to improve your job-satisfaction: The last three weeks, I was busy analysing a number of companies through their documentation, in French. A complete Nightmare! However, spending just a few hours with someone that has been doing this for years, meant that I quickly learned what’s relevant and what isn’t.
A person is only really efficient a few hours per day: OK, I should already know this as a freelance consultant who charges by the hour, and you probably know this too. But seriously, track your time during one week and you’ll know this is absolutely true.
A person is more effective at doing the stuff he/she loves than the stuff he/she doesn’t: Again, kind of an obvious point, but I can see through my time-tracking that job-satisfaction goes down and procrastination goes up after just an hour or more spent on non-enjoyable activities. I, personally, hate admin work, but love anything involving creating or learning. Productivity adds more value to the company so try to find an alignment between the stuff that you love and projects for the company you work for. Outsource / delegate the stuff that you hate / dislike / makes you procrastinate more.
Expect a 30% return on investment on a todo-list: Meaning that for every 10 items you write down, you’ll probably manage 3 in the short-term. With a few exceptions, I generally find that those todo’s that don’t get handled are usually not that important anyway / sort themselves out automatically / have a longer due-date. P.S. I finish every day composing thoughts about what needs to be done the next day(s).
Pay attention to how you spend the rest of your time: Work isn’t life and life isn’t work. And how you spend you life will very much affect your work. Things to track include amount of sleep every day, exercise, diet, and learning. Regarding the latter, I keep track of the (study) books that I read, podcasts I listen to, and blog-posts I write. While diet, sleep, and exercise is relevant to productivity in the short-term (that day, that week, that month), learning affects the long-term. I think a good ratio is 10-20% of time that should be spent on the latter, of course mileage may vary.

That’s it for today, hope it added some value to your life and that it made you open an excel sheet to track your time. If you need a template for setting up your own schedule, drop a comment or send me a mail.

Vincent

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Some thoughts on Services-orientated Architecture (SOA)

Vincent van Wylick — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 12:56:30 +0000

Context: I’m currently in discussion with a number of companies that are involved with SOA-vending & -consulting. As a result, I’ve been studying up a little on this market and hope to learn more by writing about it. Note: Since I know, judging by the response to other articles on enterprise-software, this isn’t exactly the most sexy of topics, I expect the number of comments to be minimal.

Jeremy has already written about this topic (primarily in terms of Software-as-a-Service (Saas) and Software + Service (S+S)) before (here, here, and especially here), so I won’t go very deeply into it, but SOA is roughly defined as:

“guidelines that allow software developers to design systems in stand-alone chunks of computer code, each specifying the critical outcomes, performance metrics, and interfaces between a discrete activity and other services.” (Src: HBR, June 2008)

If that’s a little abstract, I see it as a selling you a ticket to Lego-land, where you can play with legos all you like, those lego-blocks representing individual applications that can be used by businesses through a web (SaaS) or hybrid (Software+Service) interface, and Lego-land being the SOA-system that integrates all of them for you. This is opposed to the historical approach of buying a lego-box, which you eventually replace by another and another (side-prediction: we will eventually see Lego-world online).

SOA’s value-proposition

While traditionally it has been so that in order to compete in a technological world, you have to be technological, the idea of SOA is to remove that element, instead allowing individuals and businesses to focus on what they do best. I, personally, like that very much.

Other, more measurable advantages are that it is dramatically more cost-efficient. If you imagine that 5+ years ago, every company had to either invest into a powerful wide-area network (WAN) to be able to centralise IT-services, or replicate islands of IT-systems for each business-location, SOA removes that idea entirely, using a freely available infrastructure, the internet, and removing the need to build IT anywhere, instead paying-as-you-go for singular services that an external provider hosts and distributes. Added to this is the idea that performance now becomes accountable, in the sense that it is covered by contracts (e.g. QoS or SLA), something that was much harder to do with a permanently employed IT-staff.

With all these advantages and several more, it is no surprise that, in 2007, over 50% of mission-critical IT-projects were estimated to be SOA-based, a figure which is believed to increase to 80% in 2010 (these figures are from Gartner and may be US-only).

SOA’s hurdles

While this sounds pretty great, anytime you’re talking about system-wide change, you have to consider that this will meet resistance and involve a great many stakeholders, i.e. take a lot of time. And the question is here, who will you talk to as an SOA-vendor? Will it be the business-side of your client, as you are selling easy-to-understand lego-blocks, or will it be the technology-side, as you are selling technology? This is a serious question, so please answer it in the comments!

Added to this, a SOA-deployment is a strategic issue for your customer, meaning that your selling-proposition will also need to include the option of strategic support, aka consulting-services. This means that technology-only SOA-providers (vendors) will likely have to work with third-party consultants that pick-and-choose the best SOA-package for their client.

Related to this, the lego-like quality of SOA, which promises values like agility, flexibility, price, and reuse, and several more, all very important in this recession-prone time, also mean that someone can quite easily replace your service with someone else’s legos. Arguably this is much less the case if you provide an architectural framework and focus on building ecosystems (create lock-ins). But that is easier said than done, and as such this is a field dominated by few big players that buy up smaller ones.

Some more things, which I haven’t researched, are the degree that open source is a factor/issue here, and different revenue-models.

Grasping the paradigm-change

On the customer-side, there’s two ways of seeing this trend. On the one hand, extreme efficiencies, which also follows Nick Carr’s view that IT is no longer a competitive advantage. On the other hand, you’re giving away a lot of responsibility, which can be bad in two ways.

One, you’re giving away a lot of power to an industry, which will continue to consolidate. It’s something that may not be a problem now, but may become one.

Two, delegating a problem does not necessarily solve it. Taking the retail-industry, the biggest problem here is logistical inefficiencies, caused by delays, unnecessary replication of processes, or otherwise. Here, SOA, as long as it spans across the value-chain of manufacturers-transport-retailers-customer, is clearly a good thing. But it still requires a solid understanding of how IT does and can help your supply chain reap better results, something an independent SOA-vendor may not do as well. My opinion here is purely hypothetical, but it may be worth investigating how the masters of retail (Wal-Mart, Tesco, Carrefour, etc.) solve it. And if this is a problem, I imagine it is elsewhere too.

The SOA playing field

This post is getting a little long, so I’ll briefly go into this. Following Forrester-graphs show the players in the integrating corner of things (consultants) and, on the right, the vendors (also note the time-difference (the second one is Q4 2007) and region). You can find the originals here and here.

Clearly this industry is very layered, with some offering the complete package, including strategic assistance, and others providing either the SOA or a part of it (SaaS or similar). There is a lot of movement in this field with players buying each other out or moving into related industries, either on the hardware or software-side.

Final thoughts

Because I’m not a soft-/web-ware guy, I’m still very much undecided whether to head in the software-only direction myself, though I see much merit for an integrated business-consulting + software-deployment approach, and I also prefer selling Lego-blocks to rubber-trees. Feel free to convince me of your points of view.

All of this was initial thinking of course, and as such I’m happy to hear if you have anything to add or if I made some obvious mistakes. Again, considering the relative unsexiness of this area, I don’t expect too much

Vincent

A word to Jason on Mahalo's extravagant office

Jeremy Fain — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 03:12:01 +0000

Jason,

You sure don’t know me. I’m one of your anonymous 7,000 Twitter followers (my feed here), your whatever number of blog readers, and I’ve watched a serious number of podcasts featuring you. I think you do a fantastic job at sharing your passion for entrepreneurial adventures & your obvious will to change the world. I think Mahalo is a brilliant Wikipedia-style idea, and I have a lot of respect for your public speech & communication skills.

Same with your recent post on startup cost-killing rather modestly entitled 17 Really Good Tips to Save Money. Most of it was compelling, and I had all the office read it – I’m an entrepreneur too, I should’ve added before. We’ve decided on applying a number of them, starting with #3 ‘use lunchtime for meetings’, #2 on second monitors (especially to software developers), & most of the rest was already implemented but #4 & #12 which I fiercly disagree with.

Your tip #4 says that startups should spend about 600$ on chairs & 100$ on desks. To me, this looks extravagant. Take a look at the picture right here. The leather-style chair costs 59 USD, and the table in front of it another 59USD. That is about 120 USD per work station at my company Emerald Vision (don’t worry, we’re no competition: we do exciting enterprise software. And sorry, website still in French & workin’ on an English version) vs. 700USD at Mahalo. Are you guys extravagant on the West Coast or what? I should add that my chair is by far the most comfortable chair I’ve ever bought. FYI, & I’m not getting any rebate or commission, it’s all from Ikea.

Second and last (because, as I said, I loved your post – but a couple little things), tip #12 says startups should buy a 3K-5K USD coffee machine. Come on Jason, no one is making 5K / month in my company as a stipend, and you want me to spend 3 – 5K in a coffee machine? Makes no sense. Here’s our ‘Help Yourself’ space at Emerald Vision. We purchased a 25 bucks American-style coffee machine that’s up and running day & night; a 20USD kettle to drink tea or instant coffee; Xuoan (photo blog here), a web graphic designer & SEO specialist who rents office space from us (see, we had already applied tip #6), brought his good old 130$ espresso-machine that does pretty good coffee, thanks. That’s less than 200 USD overall, & less than 500 USD if you add the fridge & the microwave. 500 USD for a fully equipped ‘Help Yourself’ corner at Emerald Vision vs. 5000 USD for a coffee machine at Mahalo. I think you investors would love working with us.

Before I finish this post, I just wanted to state clearly that there’s nothing either sarcastic or personal in these remarks. These are just 2 plain, sincere feedbacks on your tips (15 of them were just great). For 600$ a chair & 5000$ a coffee machine, I would’ve either tried to quit the digital & Clean Tech business to enter the furniture market in Silicon Valley, or at least tried to buy second-hand Philip Stark design chairs & coffee machine on eBay or so, or most probably provision it for when times get worse on the Web to show how we value cash, or give it out to top performers in the team as a way to show how we care about people working on building the next big thing with us.

I still and more than ever enjoy looking at what you do on an hourly basis on Twitter, reading great startup fish on your blog (like larger monitor = better productivity; or these very interesting thoughts on work-life balance in startups - I needed it bad). I hope you don’t take this post personally, & that we’ll have the chance to meet you some day here or there. Maybe you’re okay for the two of us to sit at a table, discuss treasury management & compare burn rates – all things being equal (we’re a very early startup compared to you). At Le Web 3 (or 4?) in Paris next winter? You may even come to our office at the very center of Paris & try on our wonderful chairs. Keep me posted.

Cheers,

Jeremy Fain

PS1: On #17, come on, do you really need a PR firm? A 15K USD / months one? or even 3 times 15K USD / year one? You, Jason Calacanis? You do more PR than all European startups together (I’m based in Paris, France). Save on this too, or be tough-as-nails bargaining every 6 months or so (tip #15) because they’re definitely not using so much bandwidth with you.

PS2: another French blogger, Hervé Kabla, wrote pretty interesting complementary remarks on his blog here - however it’s in French only, sorry about that.

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10 reasons you should start a startup before turning 25

Jeremy Fain — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 04:26:43 +0000

After two months in my new life as an entrepreneur, having turned my back to the corporate world, all I can say is that it’s been so much fun – & hard work, that I believe, & I know that I made the right decision. Let alone that I strongly advocate all my mates to forget about six figure salaries costing them their souls and go it alone with the best people they’ve ever worked with, like I did with a team of guys a thousand times more talented than I am, to try and change the world. Becoming an entrepreneur when you’re still very young is, I think, the best way to become successful and to make your stakeholders (employees, clients, suppliers, investors) happy.

I’m turning 25 today, a good enough window of opportunity to provide you with 10 good enough reasons you should start a startup before turning 25. There you go. Before turning 25..

You have no fancy habits: I’ve never, or hardly, ever been spoiled by perks like a corporate car, four-star hotels on business trips, & unlimited long distance phone calls. My lifestyle is still the one of the student I used to be until June 07: in many ways very inexpensive. And I don’t mind spending 100 hours working-sleeping-living in a room with a bunch of brilliant minds eating pizzas. If you’ve recognized yourself in this pattern, then this is the first reason you should consider starting a company.
It is easier to raise business angel money: as a young entrepreneur, especially in Europe, raising VC money can prove extremely time-consuming and challenging. The venture capital crowd is an elitist herd that needs to show its limited partners (institutional investors providing them with the funds later invested in startups) a serious track record for the entrepreneurs they’ve bet on, just in case things turn wrong with their investees. Turning to business angels, whose decisions rely on a simpler governance since they invest their own money, is therefore the most viable option on the condition that you treat business angels like a VC – that is to say like a tough-minded, selective investor. By & large, there are two kinds of business angels: successful entrepreneurs, & successful executives who never found the time or will to start their own company. I regard being young when trying to raise angel money as a huge asset: angels want to have an impact, and the chance they’ll make the difference with a younger, more flexible mind is larger than with a seasoned former large-corp executive. Business angel are more likely to patronage youngsters than grey hairs.
You most of the time have no family to take care of: before turning 25, you should still have at least a couple years to go before having babies and all that jazz. So, from a personal risk standpoint, taking professional risks is not risky. On top of this, you don’t have too tight a deadline to start getting a decent salary. Last, at the end of the day, hunger seriously makes you bootstrap your butt off.
You face less social pressure: few of your former classmates but the entrepreneurs already make millions so you don’t feel like the tramp in the room at alumni reunions & events; today, you all eat pasta & rice, but when the time comes some of them will be reasonably wealthy (most probably those working in investment banking, market & risk finance & real estate), you’ll be the one with two exits on the tally.
You haven’t been corrupted by ill corporate habits taken from procedural organization: politics, unethical struggles for promotion, pyramidal hierarchies, etc. I don’t know anything (almost; for instance in my last corporate experience, I was told ‘white’ on the one day, and ‘black’ on the other: it’s okay except when it’s about your career. So I started wondering whether people really cared, and I want no one except myself to take care about my career anymore) about it and feel good about being certain not to reproduce such wrong behavioral patterns in my startup.
Ignorance is bliss…No fear, can-do attitude. That’s you. Same for us: we’re running for the next big thing: high risk, high return. We’re not there to play pussies & since the opportunity is huge, the chance that we have an impact on the world is significant. We deeply want to make of the world a better place. We’re embedding meaning in our quest. That may sound naive, but as Mahatma Gandhi once said: “Almost everything you do will seem insignificant, but it is important that you do it”.
You have no regret for a job as an apparatchik in a large corp, since you don’t know how comfortable it can be & how hard it can be to find the guts to say “good bye” to.
You have plenty of time to do it again: being an entrepreneur isn’t a job. It is a state of mind. Once you become an entrepreneur, you’re an entrepreneur for an entire lifetime. I can picture so many first time entrepreneurs who, in their fifties or even forties, know they’ll have time to build only one success story on their own – if not zero. This is a very frustrating situation because those who succeed most, financially speaking, are repeat entrepreneurs. Because repeat entrepreneurs learn not to repeat their mistakes and hence do things everyday better. As far as I’m concerned, I see starting young as a huge asset because I’ll have time to build a number of companies (say 5) over time.
Your cost of failure is zero, not to say negative; say you fail and don’t want to do it again (which is unlikely) then you’re off to the job market at a premium because everybody’s looking for entrepreneur-minded people. An experience, be it a failure or a success, as an entrepreneur is worth every MBA-trained strategy consultants altogether. Your cost of failure may, depending on your cost of opportunity & the necessarily small amount of money you invested in your own venture, actually even be negative: failed entrepreneurs are a scarce resource on the job market. Those with large corp experiences are largely commiditized against those with startup ones.
You will get rich faster than if you had worn dark suits because you’re working and hence creating value for yourself rather than for someone else.

Convincing enough?

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The Euro vs. Dollar double gambetto for high tech corporations

Jeremy Fain — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 23:51:50 +0000

In chess, a gambetto – say it with an Italian accent, consists in sacrificing a piece at the beginning of a game to gain a competitive position on the exchequer – for example through the control of the center of the chessboard or one of the long diagonals.

Getting back to business (we’ll get back to the gambetto later), it is very common to say that the state of an economy is reflected by the strength of its currency when the Euro currency is weak – and hence that the economy of the EU are in poor shape. However, when the Euro gets stronger, companies and officials claim that corporations are constrained in their efforts to export goods and services and that the situation should be reversed or the EU will soon enter an economic turmoil.

I think this is all too easy and bullshit.

God Dollar used to be the only viable currency in international trade, until the Euro came out of nowhere in January 2000 (2001 for actual pocket coins and bills). The European Union is the world’s largest consumer market, and a gateway to the Middle East and Africa for American companies. Although the Dollar still dominates international transactions of goods (slightly) and financial transactions (easily), the Euro has emerged as a tangible alternative considering the political stability of the region.

Consequently, the Euro vs. US Dollar exchange rate has kept growing insanely from 1 EUR = USD 0.85 in mid 2000 (1 EUR = 1.19 USD on January 1st 2000) to 1 EURO = USD 1.47 USD today. Althoug I acknowledge the trickiness of the situation for export businesses, high tech or not, I see very few corporations have implemented hedging strategies or make proper use of forward contracts – which is a shame. Still, instead of lamenting, I believe economic decision makers of both the US and the EU should roll up their sleeves and act in such a way (hell yeah I’m even givin’ lessons now, love blogging…):

For US High Tech companies: go for internationalization. Acquiring hardware, software, telco devices, consumer electronics and services labeled in USD has never been cheaper. So why wait? I’m pretty sure any potential buyer would understand this reasoning. A weak USD is a fantastic opportunity for American exporters to thrive abroad, and win strategic, long-term projects. It doesn’t matter whether the profitability of these projects is low: what matters is to build reputation on new markets, or to highlight your competitive advantage against local players. Remember, the gambetto? Be ready to sacrifice a few cents today (anyways, the dollar rates so low that it’s no big loss whatsoever) to be in the real race when that moment comes.

For European high tech ventures: shop for intellectual property and talents in the US since the Euro has never been so strong against the US Dollar – which will make acquiring quality companies cheap, and build production capability in China and India (or go and get cheap but excellent developers in Eastern Europe, before the Euro comes there, or Israel) to reduce the cost of goods sold, enhance their competitiveness and therefore be ready for a shift during harsher economic times or win back market share on their competitors’ behalf. EU corporations, especially the big ones, find it hard to tear the P&L from the balance sheet and should learn to make better investments. Remember when the VCs said that few large European high tech corporations had a real, sound external growth strategy? Even though making the quarter may seem tough because of a strong Euro, acquiring today technologies that will generate tomorrow’s revenues boils down to ‘sacrificing’ a small slice of the pie to weaken the competition, and build a better product offer for tomorrow. Gambetto again.

Now waiting for the Chinese Yuan to offer a third way…

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High Availability Architectures (3/4) – Performances

ceciiil — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 08:31:25 +0000

In the previous posts of this serie we’ve addressed the availability and scalability aspects of high availability systems. In this (rather lengthy) one we’ll focus on the performance side of things.

Again, performance is something to be contextually defined quite early in the project. For instance a requirement such as “3s response time” is not precise enough. “3s response time with 200 simultaneous users” is a valid requirement.

History

Performance has been a common issue for the last decade or so with the emergence of multi-tier IT systems. It has not been such a problem in the past or rather it has been addressed as the core issue and fixed once for all during the mainframe years (65-89). It also has been skipped during the client-servers years (90’s) as no real software architecture was in place. Back then, no-one would react if SQL code was found in the presentation layer.

Nowadays, the standard 5 layer software architecture (Client, Application, Business, Integration and Resources) has naturally emerged as the de facto solution. The basic principle is to ensure for isolation between layers to provide the software architecture with a greater modularity and robustness. With the considerable litterature available, architecture software development constraints are much more pregnant – and that’s an excellent thing.

However, such complex software architecture requires to be extremely cautious from the very early stage of architecture and design as a laidback appoach can prove to be quite expensive in terms of performance.

Usual Suspects

From experience, when it comes to performance, the usual suspects in this 5 layers architecture are :

Integration tier
Database tier : Execution plans, indexes, table schemes, DBA early in the process
Business and Application tier : Algorithm, transactions, resource connections and APIs

Integration tier

Java Enterprise frameworks (Hibernate, Entity Beans) have been developed to abstract data persistence from the application developer. On one hand that’s a good thing : application developers can then focus on their own business problems and forget about SQL.

As a result these frameworks usage may not optimised and it could happen that application developers lose control on what they actually do, the number of objects in memory etc … The solution is to keep a fine grained control on these frameworks and the SQL that is actually generated and executed behind the scene. A close collaboration with a experience DBA (Database Administrator) is strongly recommended here, from the early steps of design.

For information, it’s worth mentionning that big internet giant such as Amazon for instance just don’t use such frameworks in order not to lose control on piece of processing that actually is critical in terms of performance. Read this article on that very subject.

Databases tier

Another drawback is that SQL not being at the center of development concerns, we may end up with applications that are not really optimised from the database perspective : database schema and queries execution plans are inappropriate and inefficient.

Then again it is recommended to have a DBA involved from the very early stage of the project (architecture and design) to validate the database schema and suggest execution plan to optimise the database usage.

Stored Procedures

At first, stored procedures may be considered as antiquities inheritated from the client/server years, souding like heretic software components from the 5 layer perspective.

However, from a genuine performance perspective they still are top drawer solutions. Data handling on the server allow to save a lot of time for applications and on the network.

The aim here is obviously not to develop the whole business layer as sored procedures but, rather, to optimise a few heavy process. Besides it proves to be an excellent antidote to the “DB request machin-gun” anti-pattern.

Application and business tier

There are a few standards Java dos and don’t to improve algorithm path length and CPU/memory usage.

The most important ones though regard sessions, transactions, APIs and resource connection

Avoid stateful component whenever possible (EJB Stateful sessions are performance killers). Whenever handling sessions (e.g HTTP Session) make sure they don’t contains too many objects.
Transactions must be kept as short as possible.
Resource connections are very precious asset. There use should be optimised to the actual need and kept as short as possible.
Whenever developing services API, always develop both unitary treatment service (i.e perform one action for one given item) and multiple treatments interface (i.e execute multiple request with multiple inputs and return multiple replies). This basic principle allows to save a lot of time by avoiding machin-gun request to the service.

Lastly, whenever building a new enterprise system using platform such as JEE or .Net, we need to keep in mind that these were made for real time process, not for long process. So if the application you are developing takes times (i.e above 5 sec), this component must not be deployed on the application server : it will uses precious resources for long process that are not used in the meatime to serve real-time services. Such a component should be deployed as a stand-alone server instead.

The Asynchronous trick

This is a great tool to load balance. Whenever addressing long process issue, it always is worth considering deploying it as an asynchonous service. This is a very natural and elegant load balancer mechanism that does not impact real time service QOS.

The biggest problem here is to convinced the business to accept to implement some asynchronous solution for rather peripheral services (e.g Reporting).

JMS is the natural solution whenever developing asynchronous solution in the Java world. One has still to be careful when choosing a JMS implementation.

A basic rule of thumb is that whenever you’re dealing with transactional messages with high availability and robustness concerns, you should rule out JMS implementation without persistence mechanism. JBoss JMS for instance is not as mature as JBoss Servlet or EJB implementation. Today the best solution on the market for JMS is SonicMQ.

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