Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

I have a new job! I’m now a Product Manager at Google, working on Search out of the Kirkland office. It was a really tough decision to leave Microsoft after nearly 5 years. I especially loved the past 3 years working on (and writing about) WinFS. Though, once WinFS was cancelled, I needed to look around and figure out what I wanted to work on next.

There were a few interesting projects around Microsoft; and Search and Ads interested me the most. I had some opportunities to work as a Technical Program Manager in those areas with MSN, but I knew that eventually I wanted a broader role. I wanted a job that would be a balance between core technical and business development. This would hopefully give me the insight to see if I really like business and product definition work and would want to do it exclusively.

So, during the last few months, in addition to reading tons of relevant books, I did a quiet, but thorough, job search internal to Microsoft and a very select set of external companies. Ultimately, I took the position with Google giving me a broader role and the opportunity to work on Search and Ads. (Of course, during this time I also got married. A new job AND a wife!)

The office I’m working out of is just a mile or so down the road from my apartment. Turns out, it’s a lot easier to change jobs if you the only change in your personal life is that you just drive a slightly different direction to work. Even my gym membership stays the same. :-)

The Five Temptations of a CEO is another of Patrick Lencioni’s fable-style business leadership books. This fable was about a troubled CEO who has a dream where mysterious figures (including a janitor) teach him how to be a better leader. Needless to say the fable portion of the book is mostly useless, and the lessons to be learned are just variations of those in his other books.

Here are the five temptations:

1. Protecting your career status. If your career is more important to you than the success of your company, your motivation is in the wrong place.
2. Wanting to be popular. This prevents the leader from giving honest and direct feedback to his team. As a result, no one is held accountable.
3. Unwilling to make decisions. If you’re very concerned about your reputation, you’ll avoid making decisions until you have the full information (which is never). No decision is a decision; it’s just always a bad one. Without a decision there is nothing to hold people accountable against.
4. Desire for harmony. You need productive conflict and opposing ideas. Otherwise you lose credibility as you surround yourself with yes-men.
5. Afraid to trust others. To get others to trust you, you have to trust them, and this means having some professional vulnerability.

This book is very short and has tons of extra whitespace, so it reads in about 15 minutes. Despite this, I found reading this to be a waste of time, since it’s the same material as all of Lencioni’s other books (though I think this one came first).

The main thing I learned that if you want to write business books, you don’t need new ideas, you can just repackage the same message several times. However, I’m not sure that’s what the author wanted me to learn. :-)

I recently finished reading Keith Ferrazzi’s book, Never Eat Alone. I first learned about Ferrazzi about two years ago when Forbes ran an article about him. He’s a “master networker”, and maintains contact with thousands of people.

When Ferrazzi’s book came out last year, I read through an abstract and placed it on my “To Read” list. Finally, I read it and found it pretty interesting. Some of tips and ideas he writes about are things that I could probably never do, but I realized I was already doing some of them.

The book has much more in depth than the title implies. Obviously, it’s important to socialize and network; you should leave your desk for an hour a day and eat with someone from work. But, the main thing he emphasizes over and over again is that you don’t network for volume, but for quality. He says a good contact is one that will take your calls. I personally would go a step further, a good contact is someone I could call at anytime and ask a favor.

At conferences, Ferrazzi says many people will just hand out their business cards to everyone in a room, but that’s a waste. If you can’t match a face to contact info, you likely didn’t make any personal connection and the relationship is pretty much worthless. Instead he listed a number of strategies; I really liked two of these. The first is to host your own smaller private gathering during a conference. The second is to help organize the event. This gives you some insider info and will likely get you into the VIPs gatherings.

Ferrazzi says he profiles people he wants to meet, learning as much about them. He even goes so far as to have his staff create abstracts on people that include as much personal information as possible. At first I thought this was a little stalker-ish, but I changed my mind. When I conduct interviews or am interviewed, I google the other party to learn as much as possible. I consider this to be standard practice now, and I’m surprised when others don’t so the same.

He also talks about the Johari Window and how it’s important to communicate to others in their own communication style. I read something similar a while back, but I didn’t know about the specifics of the Johari Window exercise until I looked them up.

Ferrazzi mentions the importance of follow-up. If you don’t follow-up (or at least ping) frequently, you can lose contacts. Also, it’s important to be interesting. When you meet someone new, they are likely thinking something along the lines of, “Do I want to have lunch with this person?” Boring and annoying people don’t usually make the cut.

Another interesting thing he said is to never be a generalist in your career, rather at every stage of your career you need something to differentiate you from others. This is part of your personal brand and you need to pay attention to it.
Ferrazzi mentioned that most of business isn’t reinventing the wheel, rather it’s attaching the same wheel to a new wagon. In this way, the content creator (i.e. idea person) is inherently valuable for their ability to bring value out of almost anything.

It’s also important to be mentor to many people and have many mentees. All of my valuable mentor/mentee relationships have been terrific mutually beneficial learning experiences.

And, of course, play golf. Tons of business happens on the courses and if it’s important to you to be part of that, you need to be there.

Earlier I was talking about what makes a good friendship. Ferrazzi has another description which I like more: you know you’re friends with someone if you can walk into their house and rummage through the refrigerator without asking. :-)

The most important thing that Ferrazzi says is that you should not hesitate to spend your “personal capital” on others. Lots of people think that if they ask someone to help out someone else, they have exhausted their capital with that person. Actually (and I’ve noticed this to), personal capital is very renewable. If you connect two people, both of them will likely be happy for your help (unless you are spamming them). In my short career, I’ve referred my mentors, mentees, and friends to others with great results, including lots of people finding new jobs.

There are a lot of things that I felt were a bit overboard, like only having one non-social meal a week or spending every free minute on a cell phone, but those are mostly lifestyle differences.

Overall, I enjoyed this book. I’m glad I read it, though, since I took lots of notes and there are a lot of related articles online, I don’t think I’ll need to read it again.

The other day I was talking to a friend that said that he doesn’t read fiction, because there’s so much history to learn so he’d rather stick with what’s more important. I’ve been rolling this around in my head and have been trying to figure out if history is more inherently valuable than fiction?

Of course, there’s the old adage, “history is written by the victors. Lots of important things end up getting deemphasized as a result. The Bataan Death March and Firebombing of Dresden were both horrible atrocities, but the former is much more well known than the latter. This, despite the fact that Dresden was arguably much worse than Bataan.

There is also the problem with just the scale of the history. My middle school history teacher, Mr. Luther, had been teaching for over 40 years when I had the privilege to be his student. One day he remarked to me that when he started he didn’t have time to teach his students everything they needed to know, and now 40 more years of history were added to his burden.

The problem that results is that history is simplified to make it more efficient to learn. For example, every American student will say that the American Civil War was fought over slavery. But this is really a gross over-simplification: at issue were different viewpoints of federalism, economics, modernization, and separatism. All these were brought to a boiling point when the issue of slavery was considered. Many facts are overlooked; like the fact that the Emancipation Proclamation came a full year after the Civil War started.

And, of course, the relevant Simpsons reference. Apu is trying to get his US citizenship and the following occurs during his verbal exam:
Proctor: All right, here’s your last question. What was the cause of the Civil War?
Apu: Actually, there were numerous causes. Aside from the obvious schism between the abolitionists and the anti-abolitionists, there were economic factors, both domestic and inter–
Proctor: Wait, wait… just say slavery.
Apu: Slavery it is, sir.

Lots of people say that it’s important to learn history so that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past. But even people who study history but think they can do it right themselves. After all, we all now know to “never get involved in a land war in Asia“, but that really hasn’t stopped anyone lately.

Anyway, if we can learn from the mistakes in history, why can’t we learn the mistakes of others in fictional works and try not to repeat them. I can think of a bunch of fictional works that have amazing relevance, whether its Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Quartet, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, or even Battlestar Galactica.

I suppose the main distinction is that the lessons from fiction can be dismissed by saying, “that would never happen.” Of course, that defense can also be applied to history with some modifications. People will often say, “Well, now we know better.” or “Those people were just crazy.”

Still history, or even fiction disguised as history, tends to be more relevant, because people like us made those decisions and had to deal with the consequences of their actions. And sometimes we’re still dealing with the consequences.

So does history have more intrinsic value than fiction? I’d have to say no. The main differentiation is how we choose to interpret and value it.

This does lead into another interesting discussion: when does fiction become fact and, of course, it’s related cousin, can anything be fact? But this is now getting too metaphysical, so we’ll have to talk about this some other time. :-)

With most of my work experience in an R&D (research and development) environment, I noticed that we’re always told that our number one priority is to build a great product with the best features and high quality. After a while, it’s easy to feel that this goal is the number one priority for not just our job function, but for the entire company. However that’s not the case.

The company is around to make money for its owners (i.e. shareholders); obviously building a great product is an important part of it, but it is just a part. I’ve talked to many engineers that started their own business and failed. A common thread is that they were able to build a really cool product, but couldn’t make money on it. That is, they could not find revenue (i.e. customers).

It seems obvious, but in this context someone has to sell the cool technology, otherwise it’s mostly useless. I have a friend that creates really cool software and tools, but does very little in the way of marketing or selling and, in my opinion, sees a tiny fraction of the money he could be making.

Now, the trend I see is more and more technology start-ups created with the goal of not making money, but with the goal of being acquired by a company like Microsoft or Google. They figure, let someone else figure out how to monetize this. This way they play to their own core competency of product development.

All this really means is that marketing and sales are really important to business. I know that every engineer hates to hear this, but really they are just as important as us engineers (if not more). A technology company just won’t survive without all of these functions.

I had been thinking through this idea for a bit, and some recent reading and work helped me crystallize it a bit more.

I’ve been lucky to be doing some focused product strategy work recently. While I can’t talk about the specifics, I was happy to do some more business analysis and learned a lot in the process. I found that it would be possible for the company to target a certain market segment and with relatively small investment in marketing and have amazing market share gain a quick time period. How’s that for a blatantly generic and optimistic prediction? :-)

It seems straight-forward from there, but I had to look at the overall opportunity cost. The resources (time, money, and people) needed to achieve the short term goals are, of course, non-zero, but the ROI (return on investment) seemed to justify going ahead.

But that level of analysis was still limited in scope. When you look at other products in the company, would the same resources on another project result in higher ROI? In this case, due to economies of scale and some barriers to entry, it turned out that putting those resources on another project would be more profitable for the company.

Turns out that this really is no different than the work I would do in the scope of a single product. You look at possible individual features and enhancements and rank them by the calculated worth (ROI, etc.) and execute on the top ones.

This recent strategy work made me realize that I was doing the same thing but instead of working with individual features as my variables, I abstracted it up to the product level and then even higher to the business function level.

Now, if we look at this practically, I can now explain a lot of decisions that technology companies have made historically that made all the R&D staff and technical analysts confused. It seems pretty obvious, but keep in mind that some of these people are the ones that always say, “If it’s cool, we should just build it.”

If a company has a product that is hands-down the industry leader and clearly differentiated and you wanted to grow market share, what would you do? Of course it varies by the situation, but given resource constraints a very valid solution would be to cut R&D in favor of sales/marketing. It sounds really weird (especially coming from an engineer), but think of it as a queen sacrifice. :-)

I’m getting really tired of all the political campaigning and I can’t wait till the election season is over. I’m so glad that my Media Center lets me fast forward commercials, because I really, really hate the TV ads: ‘Vote for me, here’s a picture of me with a veteran. Here’s another of me and a kid. Here’s a black and white picture of my opponent with some red words. I added ominous music in case you were still thinking of voting for him.’

It seems the politicians are counting on the apathy and ignorance of the populace to help them win. By apathetic, I don’t necessarily mean that people don’t care, rather, they don’t care enough to listen and fully understand issues before deciding. Instead, people generally reflexively vote for party or even choose the candidate that they would rather have a beer with.

Incumbents for the most part run on the same platform they ran on last election. I think this means they didn’t accomplish what they said they would while they were in office. So if they were ineffective, kick ‘em out! But all the challengers promise is ‘to do things different’ and move us in a ‘new direction’, and have no clear end-to-end plans. Also, they apparently don’t know that “different” and “new” are not necessarily better.

I really wish that we had an option on the ballot that said, ‘None of the above. Find some more candidates.’ It would be really helpful in some of these local races.

Or just make it possible for both candidates to lose. What if the system said that you couldn’t win an election unless you got a majority of all eligible voters (instead of just those that voted)? How interesting would that be? :-)