Blogmatic

The September issue of the Open Source Business Resource (OSBR) is now available at http://www.osbr.ca.

The September issue includes articles on the open source definition, proposed approach to define open source assets, open source hardware, open educational resources, and open source communities. It also includes answers to questions received and information on recent reports, newsbytes, and upcoming events,

Let Dru Lavigne, the editor of the OSBR, know if you’re interested in submitting an article for a future edition or know anyone else who may be interested in doing so.  Her email address is Dru@osbr.ca

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I was admiring a banner at Jeff Eisen home the other day, but for the life of me I can not remember the words. We spent a fair bit of time talking about it though and I do remember the sentiment. The saying went something like this:

The past is history, the future is a mystery and the present is a gift to be savoured.

This is very much along the lines of life is a journey. I used to think that those who lived for the moment needed to be more goal oriented. I now think that those that are able to enjoy each moment will get the most out of life.

Cheers and have a great weekend,
Ian Graham
 

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I once had a boss who said that your strengths are your weaknesses. This is a statement that for me rings very true. Your strengths are your weaknesses apply in spades to the entrepreneurial characteristic of passion.

While passion is the glue for the vision and the driving force behind the dream it can also be the poison in the kool aid or the seed of irrational exuberance. Passion needs to be tempered with reason and objectivity. The entrepreneur and dreamer needs to be able to pull themselves out of the weeds to objectively evaluate their situation.

There is a great Stephen Covey story from “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” of the habit “sharpen the saw” that helps to illustrate this point. The story comes form the managerial level of his four levelled organizational model. The key factor at the managerial level (supervising people) is empowerment. The managerial level is essentially driven by founding teams vision and the empowerment is the leaders ability to inspire the team.

Our scene starts with a dedicated team working very hard to clear a path in the forest. There is a dead line to meet and the team is working extra hard to get the job done. The leaders have instilled a sense of urgency in the team and everyone is fully committed to clearing the path. Everyone has their head down and is working extra hard. There is much chopping and hewing of wood. The forest is very dense and it is difficult to get a sense of direction. The team leader hires a consultant to climb a tree and get a view from above the forest, then report back to the leader.

The consultant yells down from the top of the tree to the leader “we are in the wrong forest!”.

The leader yells back up “shut up we are making progress.”

Being passionate about your dream or idea is great and probably the most essential characteristic you can have to succeed. However, do not let your passion blind you to outside advice. Temper your passion with an open mind and objectivity.

Cheers,
Ian Graham

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I have chatted with many people about this over the past year or two and done considerable reading and educatumicat’n myself on this topic.
What are the three key characteristics of an entrepreneur?

According to Napoleon Hill who did a study of highly successful Entrepreneurs in the early 20th century the first two factors he lists in his book “Think and Grow Rich” are Desire and Faith. Most of the reading that I have done (and talks with people around town) are that persistence is the number one factor in being a successful entrepreneur. I have had time to ruminate on the various inputs and come up with the Blogmatic top 3 characteristics of the successful entrepreneur.

Here it is:
- Passion
- Persistence
- Actually the jury is still out on number 3, looking for ideas.

Passion in my opinion is the most important characteristic that an entrepreneur must have. This encompasses the faith and desire that Napoleon Hill was talking about. Zig Ziglar had said that the first person you must sell on a product or service is yourself. Passion is the contagious enthusiasm that helps the entrepreneur sell their idea. Passion is also the glue for the vision that the entrepreneur sells. Without passion you have a hollow idea.

Persistence is the characteristic that I have heard most often from people as the most important factor. Persistence is what keeps the entrepreneur plugging away even when times get tough. Persistence is that dogged determination that keeps the entrepreneur going. Perhaps this should be number one.

The jury is still out on number 3. I had thought that perhaps it was determination, but someone said isn’t that very similar to persistence. Yes and no. Another thought is that perhaps that a killer instinct or business savyness is essential for success. I am sure there are others.
Back to Napoleon Hill who listed 13 factors as key to successful entrepreneurs. Why have I listed only 3? Because I can remember 3. I believe that the 80/20 rule applies to these characteristics as well. The top 3 factors probably account for 80% of the success.

Cheers,
Ian Graham

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I have previously written a couple of posts regarding my experiences with Vista and you may have notice the progression from hey that was pretty easy, to man this is getting annoying to outright hostility. My experience with Vista actually started very well (Mac and PC Guy). I was able to get all of my files converted and transferred from old machine to new with relative ease (Microsoft Kick starting the product lifecycle). As I started to use Vista I encountered these little annoying things that were well … annoying (Locked in the car). I have used Vista and Office 2007 for several months now the number of annoying incidents has increased in frequency and degree of annoyance.

They say the devil is in the detail and after using Vista and Office 2007 for several months I have found many of the annoying details with both these products. In my opinion both of the product and feature decisions with Vista and Office 2007 have been poorly done. When you are migrating users there is a certain amount of change management involved and users do not like change. That being said no matter what the product managers at Microsoft do not everyone will be happy. Therefore you can take the slower more gentle change route, or a faster more radical change to move existing customers to new products. The analogy used for this type of change management is reforming an ice cube. You can take the brute force approach and smash the ice cube into powder with a mallet and then pound it into the new shape, or you can gently transform the ice cube by melting it slowly, then pouring it into the new mould and refreezing it into the new shape. Both methods have their merit.

Microsoft seems to have mallet in hand and have done a great job at smashing the Windows ice cube to transform it into Vista.  The problem with this is that the usability and existing user friendliness of Vista and Office 2007 have taken a huge hit. Vista is fairly radically changed from Windows lots of GUI stuff instead of pull down menus; right click functionality and all sorts of other stuff. For those familiar with Windows, Vista is something like culture shock. By trying to make Vista better than Windows Microsoft have actually made it worse. Much of the intuitive stuff and conditioning Microsoft had set with Windows has been radically altered in Vista resulting in user frustration.

This isn’t rocket science but my Blogmatic prediction is that Microsoft will lose share to Apple. The annoyances and reputation of Vista are enough to overcome the user switching cost of learning how to use a MAC. I understand that computer store are actually charging a premium to install Windows XP on new computers instead of Vista and I know why. Vista’s sometimes challenging user experience will drive people to check out the new iMAC which is a very sexy machine.

Cheers,
Ian Graham

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The goal of innovation and commercialization should be to create wealth and prosperity. Now you might ask yourself which type of strategy is better suited to furthering that aim. To a certain extent both business and exit strategy create wealth and prosperity. The key difference in my opinion is the longevity of that wealth and prosperity. 

Exit strategies create short term prosperity. When I look at the Ottawa based exits in Technology and particularly in life sciences what tends to happen is that along with the exit is a transition of intellectual property from seller to buyer. The Seller is the company being acquired and the buyer is the company acquiring the intellectual property. That means that ownership of the sustainable value (Intellectual property) has left the local area. There is an immediate short term injection of cash into the local economy, however, this is transient. The longer term intellectual property and sustainable value is transfered. Wealth is still created in terms of salaries and taxes paid to local governments so long as the acquiring company maintains a presence.

Business Strategies create wealth, long term value and the intellectual capital and all its spin off benefits continue to reside locally. The decision making authority for that intellectual property is also resident locally and that is a huge intangible value for the local economy.

Business strategies create sustainable long term economic value. Exit strategies create short term capital gain at the expense of giving up long term sustainable value.

Cheers,
Ian Graham

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One of my all time favourite books is Winning Friends and Influencing People by Dale Carnegie. This book was written in the first half of the 20th century; however, the concepts and principles are timeless. I had a busy day yesterday travelling to the BrookStreet Hotel, Centrepoint and the Clocktower in the evening for a Digital Ottawa meeting which was quite fun. The inspiration for this post comes from a couple of the conversations that I had regarding Winning friends and influencing people.

It is really tough to pick a favourite story from the book because there are so many excellent stories. However, one of my favourites has to be the story of the spirit of friendly competition.

The story starts with the manager of a steel production facility standing outside the entrance of the building with Andrew Carnegie and several others of the plants senior managers. They are discussing the poor performance of the plant which is the lowest producer in the country. The plant manager is explaining to Andrew Carnegie that he has tried everything to improve production.  He has used incentives, increased production quotas, and all kinds of stuff. Nothing has worked.

As they are standing there workers start to leave the facility because it is the end of their shift. Andrew Carnegie says to one of the workers “how many units did you produce today?”

The worker answers “Five”

Andrew Carnegie takes a piece of chalk and writes a huge 5 on the ground that all the workers will walk over when they leave the building.  As the next shift is entering the building to replace the other shift they say to the workers standing there “What is the 5 for?”
The worker that is leaving says “the big boss was here today and when we were leaving he asked us how many units we produced? We told him 5 and he wrote the number down there.”

As the new shift was leaving they erased the 5 and put a 6 because they had produced 6 units. This continued for several days until 12 were on the ground at the entrance and the plant was one of the top producing in the country.
This is an incredibly powerful lesson, at least for me. The spirit of friendly competition is a powerful force. If you can harness that energy great things can happen.

The second and possibly less obvious lesson is that little things can make a huge difference. I am going to call this the deflection theory. I believe that I have just invented the term “deflection theory”. Deflection theory is where a seemingly small thing like writing a number on the ground can change the production of an entire plant. An example from science might be Rutherford experiment of sending a beam through gold foil. The deflections occurred when the beam struck the nucleus of the atom. It is also similar in many respects to Malcolm Gladwell’s the tipping point. I will give some more thought to deflection theory and have another post on it soon.

Have a Great Weekend,
Ian Graham

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I have read a number of great posts on how to be a more effective blogger and strategies on improving your readership. This post comes from a slightly different yet similar perspective. The perspective is, “How do I become a more effective blog writer.” The best suggestion that I have for would be bloggers is “be true to yourself”. Write about things that you like and enjoy. I have noticed a direct correlation between how much I have enjoyed writing the post and the number of RSS subscriptions and views that the post receives. Writing has a tone and your readers will pick up on it. If blogging becomes a chore why do it, or put another way enjoy your blogging experience.

This is more of a logistical thing but I have found it very helpful. Have a blogging sandbox. A blogging sandbox is a folder where I keep written and partially written blog posts that have not been posted yet. The sandbox is for unposted, partially written and work in progress posts. 

Why the sandbox?

Basically some days you feel like writing more than others. While I can generally write everyday and that is what I still do as time permits, there are days when it is more challenging to write then others or you have other commitments that take time away from blogging. Some days you are in the writing grove and the sandbox provides a way to capitalize on that. For a long time I had written one post per day for that day. The sandbox actually alleviates the time pressure of writing everyday which allows you to write more and better posts. In summary the blogging sandbox is a repository for posts that lets you harness your creative energies.

Cheers,
Ian Graham

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I enjoy reading Denzile Doyles column “Loud and Clear” in National Capital Scan. Mr. Doyle often provides something that is extremely rare and refreshing, that being the voice of common sense. Yesterdays “Loud and Clear” Column echoed the sentiments that I have been writing about for some time now. That sentiment is that the supply side of Canadian Commercialization is working quite well thank you.
Mr. Doyle’s opinion differs somewhat from my own opinion on the root cause of the problem. The point that I took away from his article was that in his opinion financing was the root cause of the challenges faced by Canadian knowledge based companies. This is an interesting thought on a number of levels. First of all financing touches both the supply and demand side of commercialization.  Second is that financing can come from private industry in the form of cash or public institutions in the form of incentives. In my opinion the financing of the supply side of commercialization is working well and not so well. Well in the sense that there are incentives available from the government. Not so well in the sense that the private money funding supply side commercialization and public incentives are breeding branch plants om Canada. The premier’s cancellation of LSIF (Labour Sponsored Investment Funds) did a huge disservice to early stage businesses in Ontario. Couple the cancellation of one of the few early stage financing vehicles with the tendency of local VC’s to fund follow-on rounds and what you have is a real challenge.   So in a sense I agree with Mr. Doyle that funding is an issue.

On the demand side Financing is a total disaster because there isn’t any form of government support. The only program that I am aware that supports demand side commercialization is in co-operation with IRAP and the CMC. This is a program called the Management Assistance Program and allows knowledge based businesses to hire a certified management consultant to help them with the demand side of their business for minimal cost. Most of the cost is picked up by IRAP.  Other than that there is limited financing support for demand side commercialization.

The greater issue in my opinion and the one requiring major surgery is a Canadian Commercialization paradigm that is supply side centric. The cultural shit from a supply side paradigm to a balanced paradigm will be a real cultural challenge for many Canadian minds. This is the topic for many, many blog posts. Actually I have written an article for this month OSBR on this very topic.

Financing can be fixed with money, changing a paradigm requires a willing mind, time and persistence.

Cheers,
Ian Graham

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I tend to like the early stage businesses best, however, at the same time I can respect and admire some of the larger companies and one smaller as well. I have thought about it and here is the Blogmatic MY5.

Google
Microsoft
Rogers
Bridgehead
Appl

What I like about Google is their culture, or at least the culture that I perceive them to have. I also admire their success, vision and ability to acquire solid young companies. In my books Google is the GE of the Internet. I mean that in a very positive way

I like Microsoft too, in spite of their Vista disaster. I wonder if they call it Vista because that is what you see when you are at the top of the mountain getting ready to go down. That being said I still like them as a company. Microsoft has consistently performed for decades. There is a certain appeal to PC guy if they can get their act together. Microsoft is going through a tough time with Vista which is a PR and technical disaster. I believe they will learn from the experience and be a better company for it. Microsoft has the depth, breadth and talent to persevere and I like them as a company.

I needed to have at least one Canadian company in here and Rogers narrowly edged out Westjet my other large enterprise Canadian hero. Rogers is a marketing machine and their customer service is light years ahead of the competition.  I believe their dominance of the youth market will continue and only get stronger. This bodes well for them longer term. Rogers is MY5 Canadian large enterprise  pick.

Bridgehead is a Canadian fair trade coffee shop. Since they are both Canadian and coffee related they are a natural Blogmatic pick. I like their product, attitude, vision and ethics. A great company and one to watch in the future.

Apple is an exciting company that I would like to rate higher, but just couldn’t. I think what I like best about Apple is Steve Jobs ability to re-invent the company. Apple has had many challenges; however, they are remembered more for their successes than those products that didn’t quite make it. Apple is at a crucial time. Their iPod was a huge success, but the iPhone a disappointment and the iMAC is just being released. In spite of the  iPhone setback I like their image and innovative style. Certainly a company worthy of a MY5 rating.

Who are YOUR5?

Cheers,
Ian Graham

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