Archive for December, 2008
Control of attention is the ultimate individual power. People who can do that are not prisoners of the stimuli around them.
Malcom Gladwell
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Since March I was using a free theme from Design Disease called Dilectio and blogging at BeMango. Things were going well till I got an urge last week to shake things up and create something. So I spent a few days sketching, working in Photoshop, and cranking away at WordPress and am proud to have ended up with this design.
You will see that there is a lot of emphasis on the title. I liked that because it makes each post “pop” and feel more magazine like. I also created a post style that would let me showcase quotes. I’m so glad Georgia is a web font.
I still have a good amount of work to do. I need to fix some CSS tweaks as well as create a template for “pages” and create sections for “About Me”, “My Travel”, and “My Photos”. Enjoy the new domain, design, and please leave me your feedback.
They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
Andy Warhol
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On the Blogosphere there is some chatter going back and forth between how hard folks in Silicon Valley work compared with their counterparts in Europe. The contention is that engineers in California work hard and stay late while those in France are too relaxed and do not work at the pace of business.
While Westernized socities battle out who works the hardest, there is one workforce across the Pacific that has been displaying discipline and a heavy-focus on work. Here is an excerpt from Silicon Valley works hard? Try Japan… by Sridhar Vembu, the CEO of Zoho, that describes a typical day for his Japanese colleagues:
Here is the schedule of my colleagues in Japan, and this is entirely typical in Japan: come in to work at 9 AM, on the dot, after a standing-room-only commute on a very crowded train lasting an hour or more, often changing 2-3 trains along the way. Lunch around 12:30 to 1 – usually a quick affair, often at their desk, so it is not even much of a break. Work till at 8 to 9 PM, with many folks staying in the office as late as mid-night, catching the last train, another hour spent commuting (trains are crowded even at 11 pm on week days!). If it is an important customer, you go out to dinner with them (add 3 hours!), and that means last-train-if-you-are-lucky and the last train is usually even more crowded. Yet, they are back at 9 AM next morning, impeccably dressed.
After reading Outlier by Malcom Gladwel, it makes you extra aware of different cultures and their varying work ethics. As I find more examples, I’ll post them. And Vembu is right when he says the Japanese are impecabbly dressed. The photo above I took of a person waiting for the train back after work. It was 10pm.
First competent mover advantage is real. The first person with a great product or story that matches the market establishes the narrative, sets the bar and forces followers to conform to her specs. If you’ve got the good stuff, going first means you’ve set a standard… the consumer now has to abandon you to choose someone else, which means pain and admitting an error. People hate to do that. (Evidence: Pownce).
Seth Godin, Set the agenda by showing up first
In the past year I have turned my attention to many inputs on what is happening in the world today: blogs, television, newspapers, magazines, and podcasts. How can you blame me? There was a gripping election, an economic crisis, innovation in technology, and a lot of guilty pleasures reading celebrity gossip. This has taken a lot of my time and as a result I am consuming more content than ever. This is great, but where did all my creation go? Where did all of your creation go?
When I say creation, I mean content creation. These are the light-weight Twitter updates to mini-documentaries uploaded to YouTube. These are photos uploaded to Flickr to songs written and shared on MySpace. Some activities are easy, and can be done in two minutes. Others will take a day to a couple of days. And if you are extremely inspired you can spend weeks to months creating something.
I think it is important to have a healthy mix of consumption and creation. Consumption makes you more aware of your surroundings and helps you see the world from a different perspective. Creation enables you to define your surroundings and share your interpretation of the world through your own lens.
In the next two to three months I am going to adjust the amount of things I consume. Filter out the inputs that have become noise, and focus on the ones that I value. I am going to increase my creation to consumption ratio each week. Look out for photos I have taken, small articles, and if I am ambitious a video coming soon.
Zeynep Ton from HBS on Supply Chain Layoffs. Her articles touches on why having the right product in the right place at the right time means everything to customers. Her contention is that more labor can equal an increase in profit margin.
“My research reveals that what happens in the last 10 yards of retail supply chains is really important. Customers often experience stockouts not because the supply-chain plans are poor, as we often assume, but because they are not executed well at the stores.” Boots on the ground matter a lot. “When there aren’t enough workers on the selling floor, it’s those ‘boring supply-chain activities’ that are affected first,” Ton observes. “If employees are spread too thin, they’re going to be rushed. Then they either make mistakes or take shortcuts to get their work done.”
On why she studies supply chain, her answer makes me fall in love with my IEOR classes once again:
“Someone asked me why I’m interested in labor in the supply chain. The answer from my head is that we have evidence of how important people are to the total equation. So my future research will definitely focus on identifying better process designs and labor management practices at stores and distribution centers with the goal of improving operational performance and ultimately increasing profits and wages and offering a better work environment. The answer from my heart is that I would like to help improve the working conditions of so many hardworking, hard-pressed people.”
Outlier is a depressingly-intriguing deconstruction of the formula for success. Read this book to understand why the amazing people of our time relied on social constructs, luck, opportunity, and working their butts off for 10,000 hours.