Commercials in commercials: two points of view
I always liked the little "
Intel Inside" commercials embedded in computer commercials. But
my wife has another perspective: she says it's like a virus embedded in a
spam. :-) :-) :-)
Labels: consulting
Dr. Ron back to NASA again?
My old NASA office-mate wrote me this week, lamenting the loss of talent in his discipline area:
Lots of controls [work] coming along and not enough
competent folks to do it. [...] we are really down to just [two guys]. Makes me appear to others to be more valuable, but in reality I am less valuable as I am a follower, not a leader. Darn. I was always spread out too thin and never got to learn enough of the hands-on stuff. Need the experts [...] to figure everything out and the grunt like me to run the code and do all the paperwork and reporting of results and anomalies.
The guy is FAR from a "grunt." But you see what he means: as the workload shifts, people move to other areas, other companies. We find that the people sometimes have flowed away. This is a BIG problem for small organizations and companies, and though
NASA is quite large,
his group is just a group. He sees the same thing that entrepreneurs see.
So I said I'd be glad to come out for a month this summer and try to bear some of the burden, and to train him (and hopefully others) as well. I can't offer more than that because I don't wanna jeopardize things with
my present (generous) employer. But I think what's more likely to happen is that he'll be directed to contract out the work, and he'll have the (comparatively boring) responsibility of
monitoring the contracts. And more talent slowly seeps away. I really don't have anything against NASA for operating that way: the contractor system was designed to compensate for changing demands on government engineers. The system works. But it's not designed to minimize regrets.
If the opportunity were there, it would be good to see the NASA meatball (above) again.
Read here for more than you ever wanted to know about that. :-)
Four arguments in a business plan
Lunsford and Ruskiewicz, in
Everything's an Argument, list four major types of argument we run into every day:
- Of Fact: what happened?
- Of Definition: what does it mean?
- Of Evaluation: to what extent does it effect us?
- For Proposals: what must we then do?
Normally, writers treat each of these types of arguments separately. In writing
business plans, we can't. All four appear:
- Of Fact: I have a business idea.
- Of Definition: I have a market niche for my business.
- Of Evaluation: I have the team in place to make my business profitable.
- For Proposal: You should consider investing in my business.
They're all in there. You can argue that the proposal argument is central to the business plan, but you can't ignore the other types.
Labels: rhetoric
Bartering Networks, part one
There are such things as "
barter networks." Sometimes, these networks are organized, but most of the time (for your purposes), it's little more than small businesses trading space inside their facilities to advertise one another.
BUT... bartering networks may do more – MUCH more – than trading advertisements. They may also trade professional services, and even share access to such delicacies as health benefits, giving small companies the potential power to take care of employees and customers that large companies have. (For such privileges, you are likely to pay for membership.)
There are also large businesses that allow smaller businesses to set up
small spaces (or, kiosks) inside their buildings, e.g. the
Bucks County
Coffee inside the
Pennington Market or the
US Post Office inside the
Robbins Pharmacy or the
Zen Zone inside the Beverly Hills Hair Studio. I am guessing that this expression of reciprocal agreement, while not the most common, is much more common than a bartering network. Most small businesses (and large ones) can put one of these together pretty quickly, forming a symbiotic relationship not totally unlike
the one the crocodile has with the crocodile bird.
Forgive me if this is just a bit "stream of consciousness." I am just learning about bartering as a business option. I plan to explore this a LOT more.
Labels: rhetoric
We've all got our dirty little secrets...
The All-American Rejects might have been just another band, reaching out to our teens and pre-teens. They might have been, but they created a song with a video that's unusually deep -- maybe too deep for their audience. (Of course, in person they're a bit too crude for their audience anyway, but that's another story.) Throughout
the video for "Dirty Little Secrets," teens and others hold up not cards bearing their own secrets. How much do these sound like our own?
- I know it stinks, but i really like the smell of my own poop.
- I only love two of my three children.
- I fake empathy to get people to like me.
- I'm not sure my fiance is THE ONE.
- I only date her to get at her sister.
- I'm not close enough to God.
- I think I'm ugly because I'm half-black, half-white.
- I wish I was blind so I didn't have to see them together.
- I'm a virgin.
- Three years ago I tried to kill myself. I'm 18 and now people say I'm happy, but I still want to die.
- I fear I have an undiagnosed mental illness.
- I wish I was the other twin.
- When I eat I feel like a failure.
- I had gay sex at church camp -- three times.
- She cheated.
- I make fun of fat people, but my mom's huge.
- I hate people who remind me of myself.
- I cheated on my SAT and got a scholarship.
- I take more than the suggested dose.
- People think I've stopped lying, but I've just gotten better at it.
- I have more body hair than any woman should.
We have stuff like this hidden inside, and it eats away at us. Who can we trust enough to tell? And will the effects prevent us from moving forward? I can tell you that entrepreneurs have failed because of their inability to either live with or unload their own secrets. So what will we do?
Update: Liz was absolutely right in her comment:
it's all here.
Labels: diversions
How you get the itch
A student of mine bought a box of donuts and brought them to an exam, selling them to his classmates at $1 each. He made a profit of a buck or two, plus a couple donuts. Then he said he wanted to expand. :-) :-) :-)
Labels: consulting
Don't let conflicts stew
I've tried to collect a summary of good information about
conflict resolution as part of the
Rhetoric for Engineers e-book. When I look at conflict resolution, however, it's not with the point of view of an expert, oh no. And it's not with the detachment of a scholar, either. I'm a conflict survivor.
Once, at
NASA, I got into an argument with an office-mate. He was dissatisfied with the work he was doing. I tried to counsel patience. He said that the work we were doing was simplistic, compared to what could be done in our discipline. (Only what was said was a bit more crude. Do I have to describe it in more detail?) I took the remark personally. So I escalated the argument, finally saying he never did anything around there anyway.
Well, he winged his coffee mug at me. He broke a picture of my wife and me that was on my desk. (I was lucky he didn't hit me.) I marched past him, down the hall to the management office, and demanded that my boss be dragged out of a meeting to resolve this, with the co-worker close behind wanting the same thing. The boss says "what the hell is going on here?"
OK, the co-worker was suspended from work for a couple of days and made to take an
anger management course. I was made to take a conflict management course. You might say I was slapped on the wrist; you might say I didn't deserve any punishment at all. But for me the bottom line was what I learned: the
self-esteem of the people you work with isn't some kind of immeasurable soft quantity that you can ignore if you want to succeed as a team. People have feelings, whether we think there is room for that in the workplace or not. Big companies can afford on-site shrinks and other programs to help take care of our sensitivities; entrepreneurs can't. We have to heal the hurts ourselves.
Better not to give those hurts in the first place.
- Don't let conflicts stew inside of you, giving them a chance to grow and take shape.
- Don't assume anything done to hurt you was intentional.
- Do try to talk things out privately with those who offend you.
- Go to the boss if a private talk gets nowhere. Bosses can be experienced arbitrators.
- Remember that your co-workers were people before they were your co-workers. They may have outside factors influencing inside behavior.
- Do what Solomon says: with all your getting, get understanding. :-)
Labels: character
Media effectiveness rankings per Entrepreneur
This plot was shown as a table of numbers in the February issue of
Entrepreneur magazine. To me it's easier to interpret as a bar graph, despite the large number of bars. The interpretation is obvious -- and I think it's the one
Entrepreneur would like you to have -- their readers overwhelmingly prefer
word-of-mouth marketing to the much, much more expensive strategies of radio/TV and the
Yellow Pages.
I would like to believe in the effectiveness of word-of-mouth marketing myself. But I happen to know that not all entrepreneurs read
Entrepreneur, so the survey, taken by
Affinity Internet, is flawed. The survey was taken by an Internet service provider, which means
answers to the basic question are built in.
Bottom line: don't make major business decisions on the basis of the magazine's data table. (And don't make those decisions on the basis of a blog posting either. LOL)
Update:
Two-thirds of all economic activity in the US is influenced by shared opinions about a product, brand or service. But word of mouth as a marketing discipline is only just coming into its own, and the data indicate its best years are yet to come.
...per the
Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association.
Labels: consulting
On time estimates
The good people at
Reynolds Kitchens give us this tip on saving time in the kitchen:
To speed up food prep, chop, shred or grate similar ingredients for recipes at the same time. Wrap with foil and refrigerate. Foil keeps food odors from transferring to other foods.
Strictly speaking, this isn't going to save time at all. It's just going to rearrange time. You still have to chop, shred, or grate. Their argument is really that you don't want to be bothered with the duties of a sous chef when you are busy being a regular chef.
I noticed this when I was getting ready to make a batch of pancakes for the kids. The
Bisquick box says that the prep time for pancakes is three minutes, and it takes three minutes to cook up a batch. That prep time makes some pretty generous assumptions:
- that I know where the pans, measuring cups, and mixing bowls are (they get moved around sometimes)
- that the last couple eggs in the carton are still unbroken (my son broke a couple recently)
- that the milk hasn't gone off
- that the kids get their own orange juice and silverware
...and so on. If you ever do any cooking, you can see that in order for the Bisquick time estimates to be valid, either they assume everything's perfectly in place before they start their timers, or they violate
Murphy's inviolable law.
At
NASA we used to handle time estimates in this tongue-in-cheek manner: whenever someone tells you how long a job will take, you multiply by two, add one, and raise to the next higher unit. So when the Bisquick people tell you prep time is three minutes, you should allot seven hours.
There was a news Web site in Australia that published a mathematical formula for predicting the effects of Murphy's law. The page has expired, but others have salvaged the following:
...a panel of experts has provided the statistical rule for predicting the law of "anything that can go wrong, will go wrong" - or ((U C I) x (10 - S))/20 x A x 1/(1 - sin (F/10)). [...] In the calculation, five factors have to be assessed: urgency (U), complexity (C), importance (I), skill (S) and frequency (F), and each given a score between one and nine. A sixth, aggravation (A), was set at 0.7 by the experts after their poll.
There are two problems with the formula: first, it says nothing about predicting what will go wrong; second, it gives us false hope that we can avoid having anything go wrong. It's better to ignore the predicted prep time and set aside the seven hours. :-)
One more note about pancakes:
Hellboy loves them. The day
Hellboy (pictured) discovered his love for pancakes was truly Hell's darkest hour. Never mind the prep time. :-)
Update:
Guy Kawasaki writes the following about the time estimates of entrepreneurs:
Generally, an entrepreneur has no idea what sales will be, so she guesses: "Too little will make my deal uninteresting; too big, and I'll look hallucinogenic." The result is that everyone's projections are $50 million in year four. As a rule of thumb, when I see a projection, I add one year to delivery time and multiply by 0.1.
If people are going to do this to our estimates anyway, why is it necessary for us to make them? :-)
Labels: consulting
The Death of Nexus Trade
Nexus Trade has been dissolved. Its founder is going to study abroad, and one of the group's associates has moved the group's for-sale items to
uBazaar. To me, this is somewhat of a step down. uBazaar purports to be like
eBay, but it's not, really. Between the loss of look and feel, and the fact that I am not totally trusting of the group's remaining management, I am not planning to get behind it -- which I was willing to do with both my time and my money at one point.
This is something that happens to entrepreneurial ventures, though: so often their very lives depend on the continued enthusiasm, and even the availability of their original founders.
Labels: young entrepreneurs
Ben Casnocha weighs in
On the subject of starting an "entrepreneurship club" on the high school level, something in which I have an interest
with my new employer,
Ben Casnocha had this to say:
Yes, there do seem to be student clubs on nearly every topic imaginable. Though it may pay to be in a niche, it'd be great to see you start an entrepreneurship club that embraces the wide definition of life entrepreneurship. We need to get more students to reject the cog-driven please-the-superior-and-follow-all-the-rules bullshit that most schools reward. So perhaps your club can look at great people in world history who went against the beaten path and made the world a better place because of it. Of course, brainstorming business ideas is always fun (start by making a list of all the problems that bug high school kids, then figure out solutions) but I'd start by developing a framework of thinking different, and discuss how such a framework can be applied to ANYONE.
With respect to Ben, whose blog is one of my favorites, he didn't suggest anything I wasn't already doing with my classes at TCNJ.
I was reminded, however, of the fact that I'd participated in
Junior Achievement in high school myself. At the time, JA was about students forming their own small companies for a brief time, and learning the stages. This is not unlike what I had in mind myself. So would I reinvent the wheel? It's hard to tell: JA today seems to be more about business in the general sense than about entrepreneurship in particular. I'm not interested in helping kids in my spare time to learn how to be employees. Teachers do that on the job enough already.
Labels: education
SOMEBODY has to think of these things...
The
Wondervase, a thermally-activated vase that you shape (and flatten) with warm water, and the
Wovel, a "snow shovel on a wheel," are two interesting inventions I encountered while shopping for Christmas gifts this past month. They're two more of those things you look at and say "I thought of this years ago!" And yeah, I do the same thing. So why didn't we patent these things when we thought of 'em? Why isn't it US making the money from TV sales? SOMEBODY has to think of these things, right? Might just as well be me...
Labels: rhetoric
Learning Lessons Learned
I always try to get to the subject of failures in my entrepreneurship classes, because even when we start businesses outside of the manufacturing sector, we can learn vital lessons of preparation and prevention by viewing the history of our most celebrated failures. Plus, any group of students can pick up those lessons easily, just by paying attention. And how can you not pay attention to the chronicle of people being killed, or millions of dollars lost, because of something that broke when it wasn't supposed to?
Here's what they learned from a brief discussion of the
THERAC-25 incident:
- The operator should have a view of the patient.
- Error messages (e.g. "malfunction 54") should be explained in advance or self-explanatory. The operator should be trained in the error messages.
- The full duty cycle must be completed before new commands can be entered.
- The X-ray should be inoperable without the tungsten shield in place.
- The manufacturer should have had a representative on-site to diagnose the problem right away.
- There should be a "panic button" available to the patient.
...and as regards the
Mars Climate Orbiter:
- Mission Control staff should be cross-trained so no discipline is ever un-staffed.
- Either run guidance, navigation, and control with new software that the current engineers know, or bring back the old guard as consultants to train the current engineers and possibly run Mission Control.
- Have multiple sets of eyes responsible for sanity checks.
- Have management switch from a timing-based system of judgment to a performance-based system, even if launch windows are jeopardized. It's more important to fly successfully than to fly on-time.
Really, it's amazing that young people are ready after the fact to see the secrets that seem to elude us grizzled veterans at the time that history happens.
Later on, one of these same students went to New Orleans to help his sister, a student at Xavier University there, whose apartment had been damaged by Hurricane Katrina. He created a nice -- well, maybe "nice" is the wrong word when pertaining to anything that touches Katrina --
animation describing the damage to his sister's apartment. There may be better, more professional pictures out there. But I think my student saw a chance to view first-hand what happens when things go wrong and we're not prepared. (OK, he really wanted to help his sister. So sue me.)
Labels: consulting
...and the rest is history!
The following statement appears in the
bio for Sir Richard Branson in
the Internet Movie Database:
Started Virgin Atlantic Airways after a flight he was scheduled for was cancelled. Upon hearing of the cancellation, he quickly had a charter jet liner secured, and invited the passengers of the cancelled flight to fly for free. He jokingly posted a hand-lettered sign above the entryway, reading, "Virgin Atlantic Airways - Flight 1." Several of the passengers of that flight became investors of the airline.
This isn't the first thing Branson did as an entrepreneur, but it's highly illustrative. It's all about seeing an opportunity in front of you, and taking it.
Labels: history
The ultimate in impulse buying!
On
Mr. Cranky's movie review Web site, we can see the increasingly-used automatic placement of mouseover ads based on keywords:
...so what if the keyword has nothing whatsoever to do with the context? Even in the grocery store checkout line, I at least
expect to see the
Weekly World News, but I certainly don't expect to see an ad for toilets where I'm reading about
Geena Davis's career going down one. :-) :-) :-)
Labels: diversions
Maybe I can't hear, but I can read!
A local outfit called Beltone Hearing Care Center, a purveyor of hearing aids (!), sent me a brochure labeled as follows:
...doesn't this just say it all? :-) :-) :-)
Labels: rhetoric
Tips for the driver
I've had to drive hundreds and hundreds of miles as part of the entrepreneur's life. (The details are best left for later.) Here are some tips to make your drive not only safer, but
possible:
- Always go to the bathroom when you have a chance.
- Always stretch when you have a chance.
- Bring along something to read, and something to write, for periods when you're off the road and have nothing to do, or for when someone else is driving. If you MUST travel alone, bring something to listen to as well.
- Don't leave unless you're sure you have everything.
- Don't drive if you're sleepy, hungry, stiff, or have to go to the bathroom.
- Make sure your cell phone is charged up.
- Have someone at either end to whom you can give a "safe call."
- Don't take chances with the cops, and don't assume other drivers would, could, or should do what you want them to.
- Make sure your car is in good repair.
- Make sure you have an emergency kit.
Labels: office space
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