Being Mark Cohen

I saw a tweet come through (the image in this post) a few minutes ago that alarmed me. Not because it was saying do or do not deal with someone, quite the contrary. It was the implications of the tweet that caught my attention. Mark Pesce speaks about this effect when he talks about twitter. This user has a relatively small reach. About a hundred followers. BUT…a lot of their followers are active in the same industry being referred to. A business deal seems to have not gone smoothly, and ended up requiring intervention to get payment. As someone who worked as a consultant previously, this would serve as a caution to me. More the person referred to than the poster (although it’s entirely possible that payment was withheld for a reason). Most consultants are more weary of clients who dispute and withhold payment than of anything else.

A post to the opposite effect – like “Just finished a project with XXX and we’ve already been paid – what a great client” would be worth more to a client than they realize. Couple this with Duncan Riley’s furious warnings earlier today to avoid an accounting firm he had bad experience with and there’s a playing out today of real trend. The power testimonials has gone exponential with the freeing of your customers’ voices. The unhappy ones will reach for that keyboard and cast your mistakes in stone. Look out for it and make them happy. Everyone makes mistakes – the point is you need to repair them before they get to this.

Blogged from my mobile

Imaging trying to work with this going on and on and on and on and on and on and on….

’nuff said.

That title would get attention It also happens to be the name of a set of tools by Security Compass. Security Compass Exploit-Me tools are (currently) free Firefox Add-ons that you can use to test your sites for XSS and SQL injection vulnerabilities, as well as unauthorized resource access testing. I’ve started running them on some of our major traffic pages and thankfully they haven’t come up with anything. Well worth a look though, if you’re involved in web development – especially the SQL injection one if you use SQL Server, as there’s some serious
SQL
Injection going around now.

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.

Going on a thought from Seth Yates, I found this nifty feature in GMail.  Basically if you use GMail you can add anything to your email address with a plus, and it will still come to your inbox.  So for example you can set up your.name+tax.invoices@gmail.com to be tagged with “tax-claim” or downloaded to a folder called called “tax invoices”.   You can use this in combination with a GMail filter to help manage emails that need to be actioned by creating an email filter that will add a tag to emails, so for example an email sent to your.name+bills@gmail.com would automatically be tagged as “unpaid”, and you’d clear the tag .  This could allow you to track where people are getting your email address from too.