Digital Business

If you like change, then it is as good a time to be alive now as it has been for a long time.

For instance, in politics this time last year we had a Labour Party government. This year, the British electorate decided that it wanted a coalition government to run the country which is the first time in generations that this has occurred.

In sport, the most highly played football players in the world have been humbled by their less famous and worse off competitors.

In business, with the recession hitting hard, people questioned why bankers were getting paid so much money when their risky investments created so little value.

In the media, the BBC is going to be more open about the pay of the top earners in the organisation.

Now, with government data being made publicly available (search for ‘Spotlight on Spend‘ on the web to see what I mean), we should soon be able question how our money is being spent by our local governments.

There really has been a change in the way that we think about people, practices, institutions and values over the last two years compared to the previous twenty years. We are not only becoming much better at questioning what we took for granted before, but at actually being able to understand more about the reasons for the previous practices or policies by having better information.

However, some things have not changed. Traffic jams and poor train services are just two that are still terrible. But, I have a solution to those hassles. I have a Honda Silver Wing and, unlike Red Bull, it does give me wings.

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WiFi at home and at work is a great innovation which helps to make sure that whenever we are in our home or office, we are always connected to ‘the network’. Wifi has also been a great benefit for companies who struggle to provide enough meeting rooms for their employees (especially when they spend more time meeting than doing) by enabling them to meet anywhere in their offices and still be connected to the web.

If your job relies on access to the network and the internet, then you have probably fallen into the way of thinking that being unconnected feels odd. You have got used to being able to look up directions on Google Maps on your smart-phone to the meeting in town. You have probably got used to working from home and accessing your documents and intranet pages at the same speed as when you are in the office. You have become used to checking emails anywhere.

But, there was a gap in being connected to the internet when you stepped out of your home, office or the coffee shop. If you were at the train station, at a conference or at the airport, getting internet access for your laptop was a challenge. 3G phones came along and you could get high speed access through that but getting access through your laptop was not that easy.

Soon, 3G data cards came along which you slotted into your laptop, yet another dongle or device to plug in. Recently, however, 3G access has become a lot more flexible when 3 Mobile introduced their Huawei E5830 3G Wifi hub. It’s a device which you can carry around in your pocket and connect most devices which have WiFi capabilities.

I pay £11 per month for this device for 1GB of download capacity. It’s really useful when you are out and about. Some people use them in conjunction with their iPod Touch. I imagine it will useful for anyone who has an iPad but does not want to buy a 3G version of it. More often, however, I use it at home when my BT Broadband becomes slow when everyone in town is online.

Another great thing about this device is the ‘off’ button. Just like my Blackberry and mobile phone, you can switch it off! I don’t miss the internet that much.

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Image by Casey Serin via Flickr

Previous generations thought that moving jobs was a sign that someone could not stick at a job which made them less employable. How different it is now when people move jobs regularly and it is thought of as being normal.

The two jobs where I have spent the longest in my career were the British Army (5 years) and with Microsoft (5 years). The rest of my career has been spent with a number of companies in a number of roles and running my own ventures. By moving roles numerous times and starting my own businesses, I have learned a number of skills including sales, marketing, vendor management, product management, finance and operations.

Many of the lessons have been very valuable. Some of them have been costly. A few lessons have been painful. The big lesson I wished I had learned far earlier in my career was about money. My parents certainly didn’t teach me about money. School had no lessons about money. Business, yes, but, money, no.

Today, I listened again to ann audiobook, ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad‘ by Robert Kiyosaki. It’s a good, down to earth tome questioning how we are brought up, in the majority, to think about money and pointing out the difference between how a rich person to someone in the middle class or who is poor. It teaches these simple lessons.

And the lessons they needed to teach at school or at home yet didn’t are simple, which is why they probably did not deem them necessary. The first lesson was this: Assets. Assets put money in your pocket. The second lesson is this: Liabilities. Liabilities take money out of your pocket.

Schools are geared for supplying employees and not entrepreneurs. They teach you to have an employee mentality which includes thinking that your house is an asset. But a house is a liability. It takes money out of your pocket through interest charges, maintenance and taxes.

Unfortunately, I am still in the ‘middle class’ with more liabilities than assets. I am in the process of reducing my liabilities as quickly as I can so I can begin to buy assets, which is the only way you can become rich. I have downsized my house, I am not planning to waste money on new cars and I am planning to do more of the things which give me freedom.

Time has been wasted by me. Thinking differently about money should be something we all know about.

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I can quite see why Apple has sold over a million of them since March.

By chance, yesterday I had the chance to play with an Apple iPad. A colleague from the USA had bought one for himself and had it with him when he had flown over for an important meeting in London. Funnily enough, he said “I have good reason for justifying why I spent over $700 on the iPad, but I’m glad I did”. His version was the 32GB version with Wi-Fi and 3G.

My first impression of the iPad was the size. It was slightly smaller than I had expected. It’s more compact than a netbook and it is larger than a Sony Reader. The next thing I noticed that it has looks of simple elegance. The screen is clear and sharp.

When I handled the iPad it was heavier than expected but that was reassuring in so much as that it is well made and it would appear to have some ‘good kit’ inside the casing. Not being an iPhone owner (yet) I was not used to the ease at which you can navigate around it through the apps and in the apps.

The on-screen keyboard was a lot bigger than I had expected too. It is certainly usable. The only challenge is the angle at which you type compared to seeing what you are typing. Because it is flat, you will either need the purpose-made case to enable you to put it at an angle so you can see what you are typing, or you will need to lean the iPad up against a book!

The applications I was very interested to see were the book apps. The iBook app is slick, easy to navigate and a clear reading experience. The Kindle app was as easy to read and use but you can’t have two pages open side by side like a paper book. A small concession. However, the Kindle syncs between the Kindle app on your iPhone and your iPad so it knows where you were last time you were reading between the devices. Clever.

The next impressive application is the built-in calendar. It synchronises with your work calendar or your Google calendar and it is beautifully laid out so you can see your schedule in detail and in general on the same page. You can also synchronise your work email (and personal email) through Microsoft Exchange too.

Overall, I was impressed with the iPad. It is pricey but I know it would be incredibly useful. It’s not something on which you would do a lot of hard-core office work on, but it is something I can quite see that I would have with me for much of the day, whether for reading books, watching films, listening to music or catching up on my emails and schedule.

I can quite see why Apple has sold over a million of them since March.

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Cutting training costs is an old cliche

In tough times, the cliche is that the first things to be axed in a business are the marketing and training. They are easy prey to any CEO or finance director to provide immediate impact on lowering costs within a business when the going gets tough.

But a research article dropped into my inbox this morning which highlighted an affect the recession is having on how businesses, particularly in the news industry, are having to take a different approach to this way of thinking. It’s likely that if you ran a newspaper for any length of time up to two or three years ago, you have lost your job because you did not have the right skills to adapt to the new digital world we are in.

The research article highlighted articles where the new chiefs in newspapers have come from different backgrounds from their predecessors. Here are some of the articles it used:

Papers’ new publisher, CEO to push digital content

Freedom Communications’ chairman sees opportunity

Journal Register Company Names Veteran Media Executive John Paton as Chief Executive Officer

So, it seems that people at the top really do value the right skills in their businesses, and particualry their own skills. If they don’t, they’ll soon be walking themselves out of the door with a P45.

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When should you be honest?

Looking up virtues on Wikipedia gives you an impression of just how many virtues there are. Honesty is a virtue.  Honesty is slap-bang in the middle of the table, below helpfulness and above honour. To the left of it is consideration. To the right is patience.

And yet, as virtuous as it is, honesty is something which is tricky. Being honest can make you friends and lose you friends equally quickly. Here’s a story about honesty which I hope will show, at least, when not to be honest.

Years ago, a friend was going out with someone who worked in a well known advertising agency. She was in charge of their account with an equally recognisable international brewery. They were launching a new beer which was a bit different in that it was supposed to appeal to different types of male beer drinkers. In fact, the beer was trying to attract people who wanted a good pint of bitter in the winter, which was also appealing to lager drinkers, and those who wanted something to drink with food. Ridiculous, right? It sounded like a Swiss Army knife in what it was trying to achieve. A beer just cannot do that.

The advertisement was on TV and showed a man moving through three different rooms each of which met the atmosphere to match when they were likely to drink the beer. It was a nice advertisement and must have taken hours to pull together.

The advertising executive asked me what I thought of her advertisement. I was honest. I didn’t like it because the beer did not appeal to me. I am not really a lager drinker and I don’t often drink beer with food. Her face dropped.

In retrospect, I should have said it was great because it did not really matter what I thought of the beer. She was going out with my pal (and eventually they married) and it was more important to be friends with them than what I thought about her advertisement. I should have lied.

Another time, I was running my own online delicatessen and selling hampers. They were good hampers and not the standard stuff that is turned out in volume by the big companies. A customer found my site and rang me up to say he loved what he saw on my site and I could I do him sixty hampers. I was honest. I did not have enough stock to be able to fulfill the order at the time. I should have lied. I should have said ‘yes’ and worked out how the hell I was going to get the stock in and out on time.

On other occasions, particularly in business, I have found that being honest saves a huge amount of time and builds relationships that are strong and beneficial. Too often I have been in meetings when I was honest with a client about whether we could help them or not only to be rebuked by a colleague afterwards. Or I was honest about the reality and that we were unlikely to deliver on time because I knew the dire situation with our resources to be able to help them.

In my experience, clients like to know where they stand because people don’t like surprises. People like to know so they can plan for the change in expectations. People respect honesty. But being honest can lose you opportunities too. You just have to use your judgement  whether you need to be honest or charming. You need to consider whether you are honest and pass by some luck or whether you take a risk and grab an opportunity by less than frank.

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If you want to do some serious research, don't just rely on search

In the same way that when people vacuum-clean their houses they say they are ‘hoovering’ it, people nowadays say they are ‘googling’ it when they are searching for information on the internet. By far and away the most popular search engine is, of course, Google. Until very recently, my perception was that all human knowledge (well, a fairly large proportion of it) was available to find on Google’s search engine. Therefore, if you want to do some research into, say, patents on a product your business is looking to develop, then you start and finish with Google.

Far more than just searching for information on websites around the world through Google, the search giant is now scanning books so that you can search across thousands of out of  copyright titles for the information you are looking for. This action in itself has created a large and heated debate in the publishing world as publishers and authors worry about their intellectual property and whether this is being abused. But that’s another discussion.

So, one might assume that carrying out market research, say, in the 21st century that you can rely on search engines to find what you need. You make the assumption that everything you are looking for is properly indexed and categorised. One might also assume that because what you searched for in Google appears at the top of the search results that that result is the most authoritative and well respected piece of information on the subject.

The reality is that serious researchers don’t rely on Google or other search engines to do their research. Much of the information is not indexed, categorised and reviewed by peers in enough detail for researchers to rely upon it to make decisions about whether to invest millions of pounds or dollars into a new product development.

Academic and corporate researchers use academic and corporate research libraries which, in turn, invest many thousands of pounds in information which is aggregated, indexed, categorised and tagged by hand and in detail, so that researchers can rely on the information to make the right decisions.

So, there is a big difference between search and research and people expect to have the same simple interface to find the information they need. It’s just that you need to trust the quality of the information you find which is not always the case when much of the results at the top of research results might well be there because someone has spent a huge amount of time optimising the content to be at the top. It might not be the best content, however.

So, if you want to do some serious research, don’t just rely on search.

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It feels as though our government is spending now so that we can pay later

By chance, I met a candidate for the position of Mayor of Newark, New Jersey, this week while travelling on business with a colleague in the USA. We were on our way back to the railway station, being given a lift by the car rental company who were also giving Mirna White a lift.

Mirna introduced herself to us when she heard what we were doing in the USA and mentioned that she was running for mayor with the election on 11th May. We duly asked about her campaign theme which centred on the issues of crime and unemployment in Newark. she recounted some of the facts about the city including their unemployment rate had risen from 8.3% in 2005 to 14.8% today. They have a steady murder rate of about 80 a year. A million people come to the city every day to work but their official population is only 280,000. in 2005, they had 1,250 robberies and 1,387 in 2008.

Newark is a stark contrast from its next door neighbour, New York. Newark is only a 15 minute train ride from central Manhattan and the journey takes you over the marshy ground between the two cities and through some of the industrial heartlands of America, which are not pretty. There are acres of containers and warehouses and a noticeable amount of derelict buildings.

Speaking with some of the people with whom we were doing business, they told us of house building companies selling houses for $1.99 as long as a highly discounted price for the house and a cheap mortgage were taken up so they could sell huge inventories of houses which had been vacated by customers who could not afford the payments. Some of our colleagues from Michigan told us about the large drop in the value of houses because large numbers of the local workers had been laid off by the failing motor industry.

All in all, it felt like there was a whole lot of pain out in America which we, in the UK, can only really guess at compared to what we have been experiencing as a result of the credit crunch.

However, in contrast, when we went back into New York, although things have slowed down compared to before the credit crisis, you would not know there was a recession happening if judged by the number of people eating in the restaurants we visited at lunchtime and in the evenings. Some of them were packed. The hotels seemed to be busy too. But I expect that is more to do with the fact that New York is bound to be recovering faster than the parts of New Jersey we visited because of the nature of the city and its strength in financial services and other leading industries.

This picture of different stages of a recession is bound to reflected in our own economy. But I can’t help thinking that the UK population has been shielded from the darkest realities of the credit crunch by our governments’ willingness to subsidise our economy. So, in effect, it feels like the government is spending now so that we can pay later.

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Being honest with yourself not always easy

One of the great things about starting a new job is that you get to start it, more of ten than not, without any preconceived ideas about what the business is really like. When you went through the interview process for the job you now have , it’s a tricky activity which needs to be handled very carefully.

The employers are trying to find out what you are like. You are doing the same. They are trying to make sure they pick the right person. You are trying to get the job and can be tempted to paint a ‘rosy’ picture about yourself. Conversely, so can the employers. They might be trying to fill a position which is difficult to retain new employees in and could be painting an equally tinted portrait of the position they are desperately trying to fill.

Fortunately, my new role, in a company which helps serious researchers with serious research materials, was nothing like what I have described above. The more experienced I have become in interviews gained through having worked for a number of companies, the better I have become at knowing whether I am right for a role or not. It does always work, but I am pretty good at assessing how comfortable I feel that I am the right person for them and they are the right company for me.

The toughest thing to overcome when interviewing for a position in a company is being honest with yourself. You have to be brutal about your suitability for that position. It is not often that easy to tell yourself that you are a square peg in a round hole. You might need the job because you need the income and will take the job no matter how good or bad it is. That leads to pain and pressure for both parties.

And yet, for my new position, I had a pretty good feeling for the role, the company and my fit within it. I got on well with my new employers very well from the start. I am now going through a month or so of being inducted into the company. The company wants me to succeed and they are showing it by being clear about what they expect of me right from the start. I may seem odd to say, but that is refreshing. There appear to be no big egos in the people I have met so far. Just a group of people in a successful company that wants me to succeed.

I have a busy week ahead meeting more people and clients, followed by flying to the USA for five days next weekend where we are meeting clients in Philadelphia, New Jersey and New York. I will keep a log of my impressions and experiences over the coming days.

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