Category: Resources

Dick Costolo blogging on technology ventures

Dick Costolo, CEO of FeedBurner, has started blogging again at Ask The Wizard. Better yet, he is blogging about his insights and experience as a serial entrepreneur (in Chicago of all places, which is not noted for its friendliness toward technology startups). Here’s a bit of a teaser from one of his recent posts on the nature of strategic advantage:

Strategic Advantage, Part II

…

Hidden barriers to entry are particularly helpful to your company because potential competitors will severely underestimate the level of investment and resource commitment required to compete with you. I cannot tell you how many times since we first launched FeedBurner I have heard the following comments from senior executives at large companies, industry pundits, hobbyists, and my five year old son: “We could build FeedBurner in [a weekend, three months with three people, whenever we wanted]”. When you have hidden barriers to entry, you don’t get too worked up about these kinds of comments because you know there are lots of pitfalls and issues and challenges that you don’t understand fully until you are far enough along in development that you stumble into them and think “oh wow, now what do we do”.

But there are even better hidden barriers to entry in some businesses. I’ll call them Quantum Hidden Barriers to Entry. Quantum Hidden Barriers to Entry happen when you keep encountering new and unforeseen cliffs you have to scale as you move through different stages of market penetration. While hidden barriers to entry make it harder for potential competitors to enter the market, quantum hidden barriers to entry keep popping up as you move through stages of market penetration. When you are thinking about companies and markets, it’s fun to think about the kinds of businesses where there might be quantum hidden barriers to entry. I think you can anticipate these when you see markets that are characterized by: spiraling complexity, market reactions to the first mover (gaming behaviors, 3rd party ecosystems, etc.), and centralized platforms

…

Definitely someone you should be paying attention to if you’re interested in the venture world.

Research on business collaboration from IBM

James Robertson pointed to this last month. It is one of several excellent articles in an issue of the IBM Systems Journal on the topic of business collaboration. While the writing is a tad dry, the thinking and the research is nicely grounded in some real data for a change.

Beyond predictable workflows: enhancing productivity in artful business processes

C. Hill, R. Yates, C. Jones, and S. L. Kogan have written a journal article on managing ‘artful’ processes. To quote:

Aside from the issues of scale, lock-in, and dependency, certain types of work simply cannot be formalized well enough to safely entrust to an enterprise application. The goals and methods of some processes change too quickly over time; for example, the process of designing high-technology products. In some processes, it is primarily the content in each process instance — rather than the process itself — that determines the outcome; for example, a request for proposal (RFP) process. Most important, many highly specialized processes are developed or refined locally at the individual or small-team level such that the process cannot easily be separated from the specific people who perform it; for example, managing client relationships in professional services firms. While the framing process may be stable at an abstract level, the key details are not. They depend on the skills, experience, and judgment of the primary actors. We denote these kinds of processes artful in the sense that there is an art to their execution that would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to codify in an enterprise application.

[Thanks to Martin White.]

Flight tracking with Flightstats

I neglected to mention this when Buzz first pointed to it, although I did start using it. I’ve tried many of the flight tracking sites and Flightstats does appear to be more useful. Check it out. And thank you to both Buzz and Scoble.

Flight tracking

We’re about to hop on yet another plane, this time from Seattle to San Jose. One problem is that the flight trackers that Google points to generally suck. Buzz was raving about a new flight tracker he found, Flightstats, which is much better. Our plane is running late, which is why I wanted to track the flight.

Learning how to make wikis work effectively

Atlassian has indeed put together a very useful resource with their Wikipatterns site. The social patterns that contribute to successfully wikis are by no means self-evident. This provides some really useful tools and ideas to help someone who grasps the technology make headway on the necessary changes in work practice.

Making the Wiki Work

“If you build it, they will come.” We’ve all heard those words way too many times, and yet I’ll bet if you look around at your online haunts you can find more than a few ghost towns: places that some web worker built where nobody bothered to come. Part of the problem is that we tend to be the virtual vanguard: we assume that everyone else on the team will “get” the latest bit of social software as fast as we do, and jump wholeheartedly on board.

In real life, things are different, as anyone who has ever tried to set up a corporate wiki has probably discovered. Faced with the possibility of building up a vibrant company-wide user-edited online resource, most people end up scratching their heads and retreating back to more familiar modes of communication. Now Atlassian (makers of commercial wiki software Confluence) have done something about this particular problem with their new site Wikipatterns. [Web Worker Daily]

A nice substitute for plant tours

One of the enduring benefits of being a consultant over the years has been the opportunity to go on more than my fair share of plant tours. I love the chance to learn about all the ingenuity and creativity that goes into making stuff. If you can’t get to the actual plant tours, here’s one good alternative. Thanks to lifehack for the pointer.

How do they do that?

The National Association of Manufacturing has been posting a weekly video for over two years that shows how things are made. This is a great way to learn new information while being entertained. Some of their past topics are linked below:

The series has been going on for over two years which means there are well over 100 videos available.

How things are made – [Shop Floor]

Indexed – a daily regimen to prevent dumbth

Comparing the average management self-help book to Nigerian spam may be a bit harsh. On the other hand, I’m also finding indexed to be a welcome daily provocation. Makes a point and makes you think. I think of it as a daily dose of insight to help avoid succumbing to what the late Steve Allen described as “dumbth.”

Modern snake oil

card614-1.JPGThis delightful sketch comes from indexed, a blog which is worth a daily feed. Having spent a lot of time in airports recently the sheer number of shelves devoted to simple guru based recipes is scary. Everything is made simple, reduced to simple steps, off the shelf recipes and impossible problems. Snake-oil salespeople have been around for a long time and they persist. Nigerian spam is just a difference of degree from the average self help book.

Tony Buzan’s advice on how to create mindmaps

This video clip of Tony Buzan on mindmapping is making the rounds. Jack Vinson and Chuck Frey also pointed it out. According to Buzan there’s a right way and, by implication, a wrong way to draw mindmaps. I suspect Buzan would give me low marks on how I make use of his technique. What good is a tool, if you can’t twist it to your own purposes? In particular, I ignore the “one word per branch” guideline in favor of one chunk per branch. Regardless, I am still a proponent of the technique, both manually and with whatever software tools best suit your style. And Buzan’s Mind Map Book remains your best starting point.

Excellent mindmapping video (and a couple of links)

Really great YouTube clip of Tony Buzan holding forth on the features and benefits of mindmapping. Fascinating stuff from the master himself….

Relatedly, for utter information overload, check out this list of mindmapping tools. Or, check out this relatively recent list of narrowed down options. That second list turned me onto Gliffy, which is best described as free Visio in a browser–very excellent tool for diagramming, but I don’t think it’d port well to mindmapping.

Slacker links: Management Craft
Lisa’s blog is full of good advice.

The Procrastinator’s Clock – User-centered design at its best

Now this is the kind of tool that demonstrates a deep understanding of its target users. Probably wouldn’t help me, as being late to scheduled events isn’t my particular procrastination issue, but I appreciate the design insight.

The Procrastinator’s Clock

clock.gif

If you’re a procrastinator, you don’t need a mathematical formula, you know who you are. Worse, the people who work with you know, too. I’ve tried the “set the clock ahead 10 minutes” trick, but it never works because I know that I really have that extra 10 minutes. If you’re nodding, then perhaps you need David Seah’s Procrastinator’s Clock.

It’s guaranteed to be up to 15 minutes fast. However, it also speeds up and slows down in an unpredictable manner so you can’t be sure how fast it really is. Furthermore, the clock is guaranteed not be slow, assuming your computer clock is sync’d with NTP; many computers running Windows and Mac OS X with persistent Internet connections already are.

Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

Very nice collection of visualization methods, nicely visualized. Another nice find from Boing Boing.

Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

David Pescovitz: Periodictable Visual-Literacy.org is an online introductory tutorial about how data, abstract thoughts, and concepts can be graphically represented more easily hold complexity in your mind and navigate through it to gain useful insights. One of their examples of knowledge maps is this excellent Periodic Table of Visualization Methods. Rolling your mouse over each form of visualization brings up an example of the technique. It looks like it would very useful if you think a visualization is in order but you’re not sure which specific kind to try.
Link to Periodic Table, Link to PDF paper “Towards a Periodic Table of Visualization Methods for Management” (Thanks, Mike Love!)[Boing Boing]