Greek Complexity

How to Communicate Start-up Traction to Investors

http://www.quora.com/Brendan-Baker/Posts/Startups-How-to-Communicate-Traction-to-Investors

Great advice for every VC-backed start-up.

Why incompetents think they're awesome

http://pocket.co/soLsT

This made me introspect about my own beliefs about myself. How competent am I at various things and, further, how competent am I at evaluating my own competence?

How to Get a Pay Raise (If You're a CEO)

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-04-26/how-to-get-a-pay-raise-if-youre-a-ceo

Sounds familiar? Oh, yeah.

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!