Being Mark Cohen

There’s an old analogy about how to cook a frog that I first heard (as far as I can recall, only maybe correctly) when a mate of mine mentioned it at my previous work, quite a while ago.  It became a highly recycled story in it’s own right.  I’m going to breathe a little more life into it yet once more with a slightly different angle (with apologies in advance )

The story goes that if you put a frog in hot water, he’lll jump straight out.  But if you put him in warm water, he’ll relax and stay put.  Then you gradually apply more and more heat until the water is scalding hot.  Because the temperature increase is gradual the frog doesn’t jump out and before he knows it he’s cooked.

This analogy can be applied to change management with regard to the people it affects, and I recently had a couple of conversations which reminded me of this.  If one’s environment gradually moves away from where one would like it, it can often happen slowly enough to not cause any immediate alarm.  Until one day a person wakes up and discovers they are living with unmanageable stress that can take it’s toll in worse ways than just the day job component of life.

It’s worth asking yourself if the heat is pleasant or if it’s cooking you, and to reassess often.  If it’s cooking you (we’l take that as bad in this case), you have a few options.  You can try cool things down.  You can shout out for help.  You can get out the water for a break or forever.  Or you can cook.  

Ultimately each of us is responsible for looking after ourselves. And in my humble opinion if you plan on being useful for a long time, “cooking” is probably not the best of the options.

I was lucky enough to be one of the 200 people who gathered at The Wesley centre today to hear Garr do a presentation on Presentation Zen.  I think the entire presentation can be summed up as follows:  Your slides must look professional and be simple, clean and elegant.  You must know your material well.  You are not there to talk to your powerpoint or show what the technology can do.  You’re there to tell a story.

As Garr said, most of his content is already available through the website, my notes follow:

Intro

• Currently living in Japan. Some humorous talk about “Garr”
• From the US originally, from Oregon
• Touches on Manga and Kawaii culture
• Talks about the clutter and how busy things look in Japan, and contrasts buying a fridge which is so covered in promo material with buying a desk, where oyu can see the whole thing
• On ABC Radio National at 09h00 tomorrow (Saturday 5 July – I recomend tuning in to listen) 
• Used to work for Sumitomo Electric – A global Japanese corporation
• Today, he is a tenured professor of management at Kansai Gaidai University
• Also Runs “design matters” design group  in Osaka, like a mini-TED
• Also a Musician, plays in a jazz band for fun.
• Quotes Sir Ken Robinson “I always think of public speaking as a little bit like playing Jazz”
• Worked at Apple.  Learned to prepare his presentations away the computer there.  

On presentation, quotes: “Presentation is the ‘Killer Skill’ we take into the real world. It’s almost an unfair advantage” - Quoted from The McKinsey Mind

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I had an interesting chat about culture and changing the system recently, and Hugh at GapingVoid (one of my favourite blogs, marketing meets business meets art) nailed it with his humour and art. George is changing the system from the inside In his post Hugh talks about large tech companies and responds to a question about the cultural problems that accompany growth with

It’s not the sum of their parts that is the problem; it’s the way human beings relate with each other, interact with each other, that is causing the problem.

This is an interesting (and I believe accurate) observation, and he alludes to an effect which is in essence that as the number of people that are involved in something increases so too does the number of people that each person has to negotiate with. It’s an O(n^2) problem  [Edit: It's actually on Wikipedia and described as Metcalfe's Law] Every stakeholder you add to a situation increases the management complexity (and cost and risk) exponentially.  I believe this is key to why entrepeneurialism thrives with less than ten stakeholders and dies with much more As hugh says in closing,

The sad truth remains that everything in business is about people, their interactions with each other and the ideas and assumptions that shape those interactions.

And right there he’s hit the nail on the head.  It’s not about resources or heads or hands or bums on seats.  It’s about people.  It’s about empowering, trusting, delegating and supporting.  It’s about asking how the weekend was and chatting for a few minutes between crises.  I’ve had my share of underperforming teams in the past and the easiest way to fix them is by restructuring or restaffing them.  That’s good management.  But it says nothing about my leadership.  Leadership is about providing the inspiration – not just the vision. An inspired person can change the system from the inside because he feels like he’s soaring above the crowd.  when an inspired person works until midnight it is not because he’s trying to get ahead.  It’s because he wants his team to win.

I have an iinet adsl2+ service at home. I’ve been a happy client for years. Only their voip quality of service has gone down the gurgler lately. People say it sounds like we’re underwater. So I just called the support desk to try resolve the issue and the call system told me the expected wait was 30 minutes. 30 minutes! That’s not support. Who on earth has 30 minutes to sit on hold for tech support. That is just plain disappointing.

If you want to keep your customers try not to alienate them – especially when they are having issues with your service.

Seth Godin is great. I love his work, it’s inspiring. Today, though, was the first time I read anything he’d written and he lost me at his first point.

Google announced an open interchange that allows users to take their social graph with them from one site to another. MySpace just joined in. This changes the rules for FaceBook, because now users have a choice of picking from dozens, soon to be hundreds of open sites… or just one closed one.

Let me make my point using find-and-replace. Google –> *nix, MySpace –> IBM, FaceBook –> Microsoft. open sites –> operating systems.

[*nix] announced an open interchange that allows users to take their social graph with them from one [operating system] to another. [IBM] just joined in. This changes the rules for [Microsoft], because now users have a choice of picking from dozens, soon to be hundreds of [operating systems]… or just one closed one.

See the flaw here? If you read The Dip (by Seth Godin) you might look at this and think “meh”. Still not no 1. It doesn’t change the game if every second-tier player adopts an open standard. It doesn’t change the game. All that it means now is that All the long tail players make it easier for their audience to move between themselves.

My bet would be (unless there’s some license restriction against it) it will only be a matter of time before someone writes a “FaceBook Container app” that loads into this new open platform, and hosts Facebook apps inside itself. Voila! Uberdominance for Facebook. Checkmate.

In my opinion, changing the game is not tweaking the game. It’s about the big guns. Its the “go big or go home”. Not the “meh”.

I found an interesting “test” related to branding / marketing this evening, via the Never Eat Alone blog. It’s called “Whats Your BQ?” (brand quotient) and relates to a book of the same name, by Sandra Sellani. Ms Sellani’s homepage features her two golden rules of branding:

Rule #1: Anyone who sells commodities must have a branding strategy to survive
Rule #2: Everyone sells commodities

I love the truth of what she says, and the “brand quotient” test is a real eye-opener.

Seth Godin has a great post today titled The 80:1 Freakonomics Paradox. The principle could be extended to say that in a small ecosystem the dominant player gets bigger and stronger. This is just as evident in the online world. In a (relatively) small community this often plays out quickly. Consider myhome.com.au’s failure to penetrate the Australian online real estate market. Realestate.com.au have most of the agents in Australia, and they claim over three million UB’s a month – and continue to grow. They go from strength to strength. Same applies to Seek in the job market. Same applied to CarSales in the car classifieds market. Same applies to eBay in the online auctions market.

The essence of what Seth is saying is that being a “me too” is almost always going to offer diminishing returns for each successive “me too”. So how can someone succeed in the same market? Assume you can’t. Then what do you do? Go somewhere else. Or better still, change the market. Disrupt it. Change the boundaries. Be an opposite, as Seth touched on yesterday. Polarize your market. Excite some people, upset some people. Avoid mediocrity. As my (soon to be ex) boss told me in my performance review, Change the Game.

The Google Blog has broken the news today that the Google Crew will be launching a web presentation application to do what Powerpoint does. I can’t help but picture someone in a big meeting, walking an executive team through a strategy presentation. The presentation starts with the presenter looking for a network point and battling to get internet connectivity. Once he sorts that out he gets his presentation going and pulls up slide number one. It has big fonts, with an intro saying “Executive Summary of xyz strategy”. down the right hand side of the slide there is a skyscraper of adword ads and the top three say “Buy new and used xyz strategy on eBay”. Terrific

From the google blog post:

First of all, we want to welcome the team from Tonic Systems to Google. Tonic, which we’ve just acquired, is based in San Francisco and Melbourne, Australia. They have some great technology for presentation creation and document conversion, and it will be a great addition as we add presentation sharing and collaboration capabilities to Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

The whole point of presenting or pitching is the ability to be prepared. Being prepared means eliminating every possible risk of something going wrong. When I used to present as a consultant I used to have a backup of my powerpoint on my USB key. I would take printed copies with me. There is no way I would walk into a presentation and say “I need an internet connection before I can start, please”. It is for this reason, combined with Powerpoint’s core market (I know I’m making an assumption here) that I think the response from Microsoft as well as from business people would be something along the lines of “meh”. And this is why I think Read/WriteWeb are a little off the mark with their headline article captioned by a graphic saying “Microsoft vs Google”.

I’d be interested to see the demographics of who actually ends up using the Google product – using, not trialling – and to somehow determine who of those people actually owns a licensed copy of powerpoint personally or through work. The bit that interests me much more than the “meh” is the collaboration and sharing thing. that’s largely overlooked and understated in the posts I’ve seen, and I’d see that as an on-the-back-foot move responding to whats in Office 2007 – Groove. Groove rocks. If you don’t know Groove check it out. That’s a tough act to follow.

Ok, so it happens that you wake up one proverbial morning, walk out the proverbial front door, and find yourself confronted with a sack of proverbial horse shit. You stop. You think. You’ve read Victor Frankl’s book Man’s Search For Meaning and you know all about Choice Theory (Thanks Peter ). So you realise for once in your life that in between encountering the situation and reacting to it you are king.

You get to decide what you will perceive it as, and what you will allow it to become. The realist says "It’s a bag of crap". The pessimist says more or less the same thing. The cynic says "Yeah, that’s about right for a Monday morning". The optimist says "maybe it’s here for a good reason". The visionary, however, says "Ah. fertilizer for my roses".

Too often people cloak their real motives (or lack thereof) in alleged optimism, and they call "Maybe someone else is going to sort that out" optimism.  That’s not optimism, that’s laziness or, more dangerous, apathy.  Whatever you call it, I don’t have time for it.  The people I find myself respecting more and more are the visionaries.  I am learning more and more about people, and about myself now.  I am discovering that I have less and less time for passengers and more and more for pilots. 

No matter how you try and regard a sack of animal excrement, no matter what attitude you adopt, it is and will remain a sack of excrement.  Until someone makes it change.  The person who steps out and says "I am not scared or lazy or frightened of failing" might be at the bottom of a corporate ladder, might be the quiet guy who works hard and battles with English.  But he or she is a pilot.  The guy who sits by and watches, he’s the passenger.

Pilots are visionaries.  They can assess where they find themselves and can formulate a plan to get to where they want to get.  They put themselves out there to see what will happen.  And they will see you through to arrival.  Pilots can understand a vision from their Squadron Leader and can understand their part of that vision.  Passengers, no matter how skilled or smart or amiable, are passengers.  They are here for the ride.

And as an afterthought, in a futile effort to tie my shocking analogies together,  the smell of manure after it’s been worked into the ground is usually the smell of imminent success.

I sat down and thought about what I’d done with my team over the last year, and it really did stack up.

Some of the key things we did were: 

• Established a more scalable architecture
• Introduced more effective use of css and table-less layouts 
• Introduced nUnit 
• Threw out SourceSafe and moved everything over to Subversion, eliminating checkouts blocking work and allowing a more structured branching release process. 
• Introduced some key Agile development ideas like continuous integration, user stories, code reviews and more 
• Moved towards Scrum as a management technique 
• Eliminated the old 1.0 and 1.1 framework bits and pieces and rolled out our first asp.net 2.0 systems. 
• Eliminated Crystal Reports (hurray!) 
• Brought in the use of more .net goodies like caching, master pages, section handlers and more 
• Introduced and rolled out the concepts of syndication and extensibility 
• Extended the dev team with some really good new people and grew with some really good old people  
• Shifted our culture towards being more inquisitive, more technically aware, and learning more of how to be creative (my personal favourites are no 9 and 29) 
• Extended the concept of offline processing for asynchronous tasks based on a simplification of a design I’ll admit to having pilfered from Seth

We didn’t acheive all that I would liked to have acheived, but all in all I would say that the team is operating a league above where we started out this time last year and I would call our efforts very successful.  And worth it