Greek Complexity

Links of the day - Feb 9, 2012

Triple the fun today:

The Zuckerberg Tax -- a US tax lawyer's suggestions for increasing taxes on the mega-rich. Do tax lawyers get paid on a commission basis?

Turin's Enduring Importance -- a quick history of Alan Turing's seminal contributions to modern computing

You Are Solving The Wrong Problem -- I didn't understand how the title was relevant to the problem he outlines at the start of the post until the end of the post when I had my "A-ha!" moment. Very nice. Clearly showed me how I, like everyone else, really was looking at the wrong problem!

 

You probably already know this but for the dodos out there (not you, of course, dear reader) I'm just being cheeky with the tax lawyer commission jibe above.

Dilbert wisdom

On CEO stock options:

And in real life? After having run the company to the ground, the CEO walked out the door and left the clean-up job to whoever stayed behind.

Olympus provides fodder for schadenfreude (and my Dummies book)

Yet another little anecdote to include in my forthcoming The Dummies Guide to Completely Effing Things Up. After news broke that Olympus had fired its recently appointed CEO, its shares have reportedly dropped about 40% since Friday. That's about a few billion dollars.

An Olympus spokesman on Saturday responded, "The reason for [the board's decision] is the major differences in management style and direction."

via Olympus Conflict Spills Out (WSJ)

I wonder how "major" these differences could be given that Woodford has been with the group since... wait for it... 1981. Surely he knew something of the company's management style. Surely the company knew something of his management style. I seem to recall the WSJ also had a mention, since removed from their website, of Woodford being regarded as new blood. Gah. In fact:

In its official explanation for the firing, Kikukawa said Woodford, who is from the UK, ultimately could not understand Japanese management style or culture -- though that was also one of the reasons the company had promoted him in the first place, hoping he would make decisions and develop strategies that would be difficult for a Japanese executive to accomplish. Olympus had previously lavisted praise on Woodford for his turnaround of the company's European branch.

Another quote from the FT:

Mr Woodford has stressed that he has seen no evidence that Olympus executives benefited personally from the acquisitions, claiming instead “a catalogue of calamitous errors and exceptionally poor judgement” that resulted in inflated pay-outs to others and a sizeable loss of shareholder value.

What, is that all?

Also see this and this, both from the WSJ.

Why am I writing about this? Only because the incompetence, misguided secretiveness, self-serving behaviour and thumbing of noses at fiduciary duties remind me of a couple of other companies I know. Neither Japanese, since you ask.

Why I will never buy an Apple product

I used an Apple Macintosh as a teen and liked it very much so let it not be said that I speak with zero prior knowledge. In more recent years, I have stayed away from Apple products partly because they started out being too-cool-for-you and are now everyone-has-one, and partly because of the closed walled garden ecosystem that they put in place and vigorously enforced. [Update: And they're expensive!] Now we have this more complete description of Apple's (and Steve Jobs's) failings:

In the days after Steve Jobs' death, friends and colleagues have, in customary fashion, been sharing their fondest memories of the Apple co-founder. He's been hailed as "a genius" and "the greatest CEO of his generation" by pundits and tech journalists. But a great man's reputation can withstand a full accounting. And, truth be told, Jobs could be terrible to people, and his impact on the world was not uniformly positive.

via What Everyone Is Too Polite to Say About Steve Jobs

Stuff like this has got to affect the prospects of the company itself at some point, because surely consumers, the media, government, Apple's suppliers and maybe even Wall Street (!) don't only care about the pretty gadgets the company churns out.

The different faces of innovation

Nice piece on innovation by Malcolm Gladwell in his usual breezy, readable style. This bit in particular resonated with me:

“You can be one of the most successful makers of enterprise technology products the world has ever known, but that doesn’t mean your instincts will carry over to the consumer market,” the tech writer Harry McCracken recently wrote. “They’re really different, and few companies have ever been successful in both.”

from Creation Myth: Xerox PARC, Apple, and the truth about innovation

Nice little ending too. Read all the way through without skipping. Cheating won't be as fun!

This was published a few months ago. Not directly related to Steve Jobs's demise.

Making the best of a bad situation -- without resorting to spin

Received an email a couple of days ago that I thought was very quote-worthy. This is from an online service called Boomerang that went down briefly after a major disruption to Amazon's cloud-computing platform (which this service uses). Here's what the letter reads:

Notice of Boomerang Service Disruption (Apr 22) and our apologies

As some of you noticed, Boomerang service was unavailable this morning. We were impacted by a widespread outage of our hosting provider, Amazon Web Services (AWS). To minimize the disruption, we have been able to mostly restore the service from our backup.

While the service was down, we weren't able to deliver the messages you scheduled to go out during that time period. If you have messages scheduled to go out today (in particular this morning), please check in the Boomerang-Outbox in Gmail and send them manually.

We were also unable to get to the messages that were scheduled within the last 9 days since AWS has not recovered so far. When Amazon AWS services resume normally, we hope to be able to recover the missing messages and deliver them as you scheduled. We apologize for the problems and inconveniences and we hope to be able to resume delivering all scheduled messages soon.

How to make sure all your messages are sent as scheduled
Please click on Boomerang-Outbox label in Gmail and check to see if there any messages that needed to go out. You will need to send them manually (compose a new message, copy-and-paste the content from the message you scheduled, and send it through Gmail) if you don't see them under Messages to Send Later section of Manage Boomerang page at [URL] .

How to make sure all your messages are returned
Please click on Boomerang label in Gmail and check to see if there any messages that should be back in your inbox.

How are we going to make Boomerang more reliable?
Like many startups, we entrusted AWS with virtually our entire infrastructure, including both our production servers and most of our backup systems. We hoped that their systems were independent enough to see us through if something went wrong with one piece of the service, but today's problems reminded us that data centers at that scale are very hard to make independent.
We should have had a better plan in place, and we'll be making one. We'll be working very hard to improve our redundancy in the upcoming few weeks, both because we want you to be able to rely on us to get your messages to the right place when they need to get there, and because mornings like this are making me bald and giving me wrinkles.

Again, we are very sorry for this disruption in our service.

Sincerely,
Alex Moore
CEO

Very, very nice. Why do I like this letter so much?

• Clearly communicates the problem
• Takes ownership, no excuses and provides an apology. This letter is the written equivalent of looking someone in the eye.
• Offers an immediate solution
• Tells you what they plan to do on a longer-term basis to prevent problems
• Responsibility at the highest level with the CEO, not a head of PR or, worse, a PR agency signing off

---

Yes, I have to finish that travelogue series I began a couple of weeks ago but life keeps interrupting!

SaaS is not Pure Profit, says Yongfook.

Correct. What people who say this actually mean is that each new customer is pure *gross* profit. Which is not at all the same.

This is one of those times one feels like accountants actually contribute something to the world!

Pleasantly surprising customer service

It may surprise readers of this blog to know that I'm not just a nit-picking armchair-theorising pain-in-the-unmentionables. Occasionally, I even Give Credit. Incredible but true.

There are two examples that I'd like to highlight today as examples of a superb attitude to customers:

Singapore's Land Transport Authority (LTA)

No matter what one says about bureaucracy and a rule-book mentality in Singapore's government, one also frequently experiences pleasantly surprising efficiency, customer orientation and even flexibility.

As a road cyclist, bumps on the road are something I'm always aware of. When riding in a group at speed a few inches behind someone else, one person swerving or braking to avoid an unexpected hole is enough for disaster to occur behind them. So when I do see a pothole in the road, I generally note down the number on the nearest lamppost and report it to the LTA.

Now, if one weren't familiar with the LTA, one might expect that the problem would be fixed "in due course". One pothole doesn't mean a road is falling apart and might be treated with relative nonchalance.

Not in Singapore.

Not only does the LTA alert their road contractor immediately, they even call back within 24 hours to confirm that the job is being processed or has been completed, and, get this, thank the person who reported the problem. On the occasions I haven't been able to take the call, they've tried a few more times to call back, simply to thank me for the report. I've reported potholes and other road hazards several times and am always tickled to see that they expect to thank me rather than my thanking them for doing a prompt job. I do thank them in any case, of course.

Why do they do this? Who are they accountable to? I don't know. But I'm not complaining!

The Economist

So I'm a subscriber to various free newsletters sent out by The Economist. I'm not, however, a paying subscriber to the website or the print issue.

One of the newsletters comes with the subject line, "From the desk of John Micklethwait, Editor". I've always thought that a pretty useless subject line. The From field of the email tells me already that the email is from The Economist so do I really need a reminder in the subject line too?

So I shot off an email to them. It came across as quite snarky in hindsight even though I didn't mean it that way. Witness:

Hello,

I have been an Economist reader for years now and read the paper version, the website and your email newsletters. However, I signed up for the email newsletter that comes "from the editor's desk", so to speak, only relatively recently.

Can I ask you: how useful do you think it is to send out a newsletter with the subject line, "From the desk of John Micklethwait". Why should any reader care whose desk a newsletter comes from? Wouldn't it be more useful to insert one or two major headlines in the subject line instead?

As masters of clear communication and to-the-point-ness, I'm sure you appreciate the point I'm making.

Murli Ravi

Really snarky, huh?

But guess what -- they responded within hours. Not the 48 hours they promised but just 4 hours later. And I know that the email wasn't written by a robot because, although its contents were pretty generic, it was addressed to me by name, even though I hadn't provided my name in a machine-readable format.

How many hundreds or thousands of emails they must receive every day! And I'm not even a subscriber. Wow.

Getting your start-up through tough times

Mohanjit Jolly of DFJ India writes another insightful article. To quote just one hard-hitting statement out of many:

Don’t think that the investors can’t afford to shut the company down, or can’t afford not to fund the company. Usually, the entrepreneur loses that game. Instead, it’s best to tackle the tough situations through collaboration, to anticipate the tough times ahead and have a plan to get through it.

How true.

Speaking of SIA

They're losing the plot. Service-wise, I mean. Getting to one's destination on time? No problem. Ever.

But the fall in service standards is another story. The other day, I had a problem with my video screen. This is something that's not uncommon these days, depending on the route one is flying (read: the plane they allocate to that route). What's unusual though is the reaction of flight staff.

When I asked a crew member about the problem with the screen at my seat, he looked at it casually, shrugged, said "It's an old plane" and walked off.

When this happened on my previous flight, I wasn't even given that excuse. Or any excuse.

Interestingly, my statistically nonsensical gut feel is that the younger crew actually come across as more contrite than the older ones. And among the older crew, the women come across as more genuinely apologetic than the men.

My theory? From first-hand observation, it's pretty clear that the female crew do much more work on the plane than the men. Yet, I'm told, the men find it easier to get promoted than the women. That's because there are many more women than men working as flight crew. Also possibly because some women leave the crew when they get married, but that's just a guess. Could this result in a general sense of complacency among senior male flight crew?