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Planning in the Face of Uncertainty
I think I met Jana Matthews about ten years ago when she invited me to speak on a panel about entrepreneurship. Not only did she become a great friend, but because of that day, I met another great friend. I can count on one hand the number of days where I met two life-long friends in one day, and I'm very grateful for it.
Jana consults with CEOs and management teams on how to grow their companies. Actually I think that the companies are often already growing, but they are either out of control or not a nice place to work. Jana knows how to combine good business management with culture and values, and I know many entrepreneurs and their employees have benefited from Jana and her team's good work.
I subscribe to an email newsletter that Jana sends out occasionally, and I also get to watch her webcasts sometimes. You can sign up too right here, and you can see a nice library of ideas and support for entrepreneurs at her websiteby clicking on the Library tab.
Here's a sample from the latest JanaMail – it's a good reminder of what we need to be doing as entrepreneurs and leaders:
As we continue to fight through challenging times, I'm sharing some of my ideas for succeeding in the current economic environment. One of the best ways to stay strong is by making your strategic plan flexible and responsive to changing market conditions.
Planning is essential in any situation for a growing company, but it's especially true during these times of uncertainty. When the future is hard to forecast, you should continue to set growth-minded long-term goals and strategies, but you should develop your detailed, tactical plans to support those goals two quarters at a time.
Focus Hard On Today, and Stay Flexible For Tomorrow
For example, if you were starting today, think through where you'd like to be at the end of the next 12 months, then plan Q3 2009 in great detail and Q4 with somewhat less detail. The important thing is to commit to a ongoing monitoring, tracking, and adjusting of the plan. This commitment is true even in good times, but it helps you stay responsive in bad times.A Plan… and a Process
You aren't simply creating a plan, you are building a planning process. Conduct weekly tactical meetings to monitor results and identify exceptions early. Hold monthly strategy sessions to ensure your goals are on track with the marketplace. And once a quarter, insist on a rigorous progress review on the current plan. At this meeting, you would also adjust and firm up the Q4 plan – and begin planning Q1 2010.Communicate and Motivate
Remember, as a leader, one of your greatest charges is to communicate with your employees – and the plan is a big part of your message. Employees will stay motivated when they hear that "This week we closed the highest number of leads in the history of the company," but they will also respond and rally when you say "We are falling short of our target for the quarter, but if everyone can bring in two more leads per week, we'll get back on track."As Dick Schultz, founder of Best Buy once told me, "The big difference between the pros and the amateurs is that the pros keep score."
Check out Jana's website here.
Kindle in the cockpit
I mentioned in my post about "The New, New Kindle" that I had seen a photograph of the Kindle displaying an approach plate, but that it had disappeared. Russ Still commented on the post to say that Airbrief.com is doing an open beta, providing pilots with the approach plates for the Kindle. Below is a photo from Airbrief showing how the plates look on the Kindle. If you are a pilot or just interested in aviation, also check out GoldSealFlight.Com and if you use Airbrief.com, I'd be interested in hearing about it too. It's been a long time since I sat in the front seat of an airplane, but I like keeping up with it and thinking about the day when I'll do it again.
Update #1: Russ just emailed me to let me know you can get a free copy of the 2009 FAR for the Kindle right here, and it works on the DX as well as the Kindle 2. For the Kindle DX, they have the Airplane Flying Handbook and Instrument Flying Handbook as well. The Kindle just became a "Must Have" for pilots I think.
Jim Collins and Steve Martin arrive today
What an interesting day! The new book from Jim Collins arrived today and in the same box was Steve Martin's new Banjo CD. I got in a chapter or two at lunch and I expect I'll finish it tonight. "How the Mighty Fall and Why Some Companies Never Give In" is available now and looks really interesting. It seems to be trying to answer the question, "What happened to the companies mentioned in Built to Last and Good to Great that have fallen from greatness? Where did they go wrong, and what lessons might we learn from them?"
I think I might cut out the quote from the back cover and stick it on my wall.
"Whether you prevail or fail, endure or die, depends more on what you do to yourself than on what the world does to you." — Jim Collins
And what about the Steve Martin reference? Everyone knows that Steve Martin is a funny guy, and some people know that he plays banjo, but not many people know that he's a REALLY GOOD banjo player. He's also a friend and student of Boulder's own Dr. Banjo aka Pete Wernick, and he's just released his first serious music CD. Pete played on some of the cuts as did Dolly Parton, Vince Gill, Earl Scruggs, Bela Fleck, Tim O'Brien and Mary Black. You might remember that Pete is the Banjo Player for Hot Rize and Tim O'Brien is the mandolin player, so there are a couple of Boulder connections.
The Crow: New Songs for the 5-String Banjo is available at DrBanjo.com and other fine music retailers. It comes with a nice set of liner notes (is that what they are called now?) and I'm looking forward to getting home and listening to it while reading Steve's comments about how he wrote the tunes and who was playing on each one.
Here's a Youtube video of the title cut.
The new, new Kindle
I won't be buying the new Kindle DX, because I like that my Kindle 2 is small enough to fit into my backpack for traveling, but it does look interesting. If you haven't heard, Amazon surprised people this week with another new Kindle that has a screen that is "two and a half" times bigger than the Kindle 2. It also auto-rotates when you turn it on it's side, can handle PDFs and it holds up to 3,500 books. Some people are saying this device will save the newspaper industry, but I'm not believing that as long as they still think of themselves as the newsPAPER industry. Amazon announced new deals with the New York Times and the Washington post and also partnerships with several universities and textbook publishers so that students can get their textbooks on the Kindle DX.
Yesterday I sat outside at lunch and read. The sun was so bright that I was practicly blinded, but my kindle was perfectly readable. When a new email arrived on my phone, I pulled it out to check it and was struck by how un-readable my phone display was in the sunlight compared to the Kindle. In the photo below, the phone display is on, but impossible to read in the direct Colorado sunlight.
(Click the photo for a closer look)
I was also going to link to a photo I saw yesterday of the new Kindle DX that showed an instrument approach plate on it. Pilots carry big books of loose-leaf paper around with them with diagrams of how they are expected to fly instrument approaches. Every month they get updates that they are then expected to file (quickly and correctly) into their spiral bound notebooks. Occasionally they put one in the wrong place and then "discover" a new antenna or other structure has appeared near the airport. The picture seems to have disappeared – maybe the idea of depending on technology in the cockpit scared to many people. That's a joke – unless you fly a Piper Cub, you probably are already depending on a whole lot of technology in the cockpit.
Windows 7 RC first thoughts . . .
I've got Windows 7 RC (Release candidate 1) running on my production laptop at work now. No guts, no glory. Actually it was an easy decision to do the upgrade as soon as RC was available because my experience with the beta version of Windows 7 has been so good. I'm running Windows 7 on all but on of my computers now, and that includes the FJ Car Computer, and yes it runs Office Communicator just fine. I've even done a video conference from the FJ. (Safely parked, I promise! And I don't have RC on the FJ yet.)
Here's what I especially like in Windows 7
- It's fast. It boots very quickly and resumes from suspend within two or three seconds. Lately I've noticed a lot of laptop users that always shutdown their machines completely. I had problems in XP, and some in Vista with putting machines to sleep, but I haven't had that problem once with Windows 7.
- I like the new look. It isn't radically different, though the RC candidate release has a nice new login screen.
- I LOVE the fact that when I open my laptop at home, it realizes I'm on a new network and gives me a new default printer which is actually at home. With XP and Vista I was always trying to send things to the wrong printer. Setup is as easy as telling it a default printer for each different network you really care about.
- I LOVE being able to "peek" at running apps on the task bar. Internet Explorer makes the best use of it, but other apps will pick up the ability in time. Now when I have five windows or tabs (doesn't matter) open in IE, I can very quickly jump to the one I care about without cycling through all the others. Outlook uses it effectively too. You have to see it and play with it a bit to get it, but once you do you will curse Vista and XP for not having it. This alone will drive me to upgrade my last Vista machine. Here's a video showing Aero Peek, Aero Shake and Aero Snap – turn your speakers down if you are at work or the kids are asleep.
- I've always customized my task bar and start menu with the apps I use the most. Every version of windows makes this easier, but now it is dead simple and everyone will be pinning apps they really care about to the start menu and task bar.
- In Vista the cool little app that became a part of my everyday work flow was the snipping tool.
With Windows 7, it might be the magnifier tool.
- This may have happened in Vista, but the calculator now can server as a programmer's calculator. I didn't care before, but now I do and I have no idea where my TI is anymore, though I'm sure I still have it.
Bottom line – It looks like Windows 7 is going to be a great upgrade. I'll probably upgrade my last Vista machine soon, and then I'll buy my next new machine when I can get Windows 7 from the factory. I realize this post is mostly about changes to the UI and apps, but I believe the real change is under the skins. Windows 7 feels more stable and much faster.
Here's what I don't like, and all of these gripes have been around since even before XP.
- Why is it that I can be working in a window, say typing happily along in a document, and then some other application can pop a window up and take the focus and thus my keystrokes until I notice that my window has been hijacked?? It always happens at the worst time too, like just as I'm about to type "yes, that would be a good idea" in an email, another application pops up and asks if I really want to cancel the download that has been chugging along for 20 minutes. I hate it when that happens. Many years ago I turned in a bug report as a beta tester of either Windows for Workgroups or Chicago about this behavior, but apparently I'm the only one who thinks this is a bug. Do Apples do this too??
- Have you ever noticed that when an error message does pop up, that you often can't copy and paste the error message into a document or email? Why should I have to copy a message one character at a time into an email. I often use the snipping tool to capture the error, but I can't always get to it.
By the way, I caused the error with the code I wrote, so I'm not complaining about the error, just that I didn't have an easy way to save the message.
- Finally, why can't I sync notes back to Exchange Server just like I do email, calendar, contacts and tasks? OK, that's not even a Windows problem but it still bugs me.
Saturday is the last day for TechStars applications
Now is a great time to start a company. One source for some funding and a lot of great connections and mentoring is TechStars, and Saturday is the last day to get your application in for this year. You still have time! If you do start a business, you'll get much less realistic time frames from customers and partners, so as Jim used to say in a slightly different context, "Get used to it."
You can find everything you need at Techstars.org. And don't forget, they've expanded to Boston too so if you can't stand the idea of spending part of your summer here in Boulder, Colorado then I'm sure the Boston entrepreneur community will welcome you too. If you do apply and get accepted, give me a call when you get to town.
Virtual Clouds
Virtualization and cloud computing are two areas that I think are coming together in a way that will have a huge impact on how we work with computers. In this post I'm going to talk about virtualization. I've been playing with Virtual PC 2007, a free download from Microsoft. I'm running it underWindows 7.
Virtualization is the idea of having one computer run in software a emulation of another computer. This isn't new – there have been emulators around since I was a young programmer, but I think we are starting to see an explosion in the use of virtualization, and average people will start benefiting from virtualization. Already in my company we've virtualized many servers, so instead of having lots of little servers that aren't doing much more than wasting power most of the time, we run them as software simulations on bigger, but fewer servers.
The benefits of virtual machines are many. Besides using less power and generating less greenhouse gases, they actually can be easier to use. To get a development machine ready to use, someone has to purchase and configure the hardware, load the operating system, get the machine on the network, patch it, load all the applications, create user accounts and then maybe it is ready to use. A physical machine is fragile. As soon as you login you start changing the configuration. You run your applications, they drop temporary files and change system configurations. It doesn't take long before the machine is in a funky state. With a physical machine, you format the disk, and start loading CDs hoping you don't miss a step until you get it back to a clean state.
With a virtual machine, you just restart the virtual machine from the snapshot you saved when you had the machine in just the right configuration. You can also run multiple copies of the virtual machine, so if you need four servers to play with, you create four virtual servers. Need an old Windows 98 machine? No problem, create a virtual machine, load a Windows 98 image and off you go. How about running Linux under windows? No problem. Below is a screen shot I just made of my Windows 7 machine running Virtual PC 2007 and it is running virtual machines running Vista, DSL Linux and then just for good fun, I'm running an emulator of UNIVAC 1, the first commercial computer ever. Next up is a Macintosh emulator and that Atari 800 I always wanted.
In my next post, I'll talk a little about cloud computing and how it will combine with virtualization.
Mind Control
If you listen to the network news (I don’t recommend it) you will hear that the economy has ground to a halt. You will also hear about how all of the auto makers have seen their sales cut in half. But did you hear about the automaker that saw sales increase 14% in January over the same period a year ago?
While the auto market had their worst January since 1963, Hyundai actually increased sales. I heard the CEO of Hyundai on the radio a few weeks ago and mentioned it to TC North. TC’s written about “taking the fear out of buying” in his Weekly Encouragement email.
TC (aka Dr. North) has a long bio, including sports psychology research and consulting with Olympic and professional sports teams. Somewhere a long the line, he realized that CEOs and sales people are like athletes in that a big part of the game is mental.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the years talking with TC about entrepreneurship. When Jim and I started Gold Systems, I was completely unprepared for how the business would affect my attitude, and how my attitude would affect the business. Thankfully, Jim and I were rarely in-phase – when he was down, I was often up, and when I was down, he would pull me up.
Over the years I’ve learned how to control my attitude most of the time and now I’m more of an optimist than ever. One thing TC taught me was to catch any negative thoughts quickly and to replace them with positive thoughts. I know, it sounds like pop psychology gobbledygook, but it works most of the time. Here’s how it works:
My brain catches sight of a TV news program announcing how bad the economy sucks. I’m hardly conscious of it, but almost instantly a part of my brain plays the tape of “Look, there’s proof that bad things are happening! All is lost!” The conscious part of my brain, which is now on the lookout for this sort of negative thought, grabs control and says, “Not so fast, we’ve seen bad things before and survived just fine. Things are not as bad as the talking heads on TV want to make them sound. They are just trying to sell advertisements and suck us into watching more. Be thankful for all that is going well, and show more compassion to the people who really do have it bad and stop worrying about your own problems. Oh, and one more thing – good job at catching that negative thought and throwing it out so quickly!”
Now tie this back to the athlete. When a pro basketball player misses a shot, do you think they run down the court saying to themselves, “I’m a terrible basketball player, and I’m probably going to miss the next shot too and look like an idiot on national TV, and then I’m going to lose my contract and my big fancy house and extravagant lifestyle.” I don’t know any professional basketball players myself, but I’m guessing that’s not the tape they play. The good ones shake it off and start telling themselves how they are going to hit the next shot and they keep their mind in the game.
I don’t believe that a good attitude is all that is needed to be a successful entrepreneur or a professional athlete. Hard work, ability and luck are necessary ingredients. But to quote TC again, you only have control over two things in life, your actions and your thoughts. If you don’t get control over your thoughts, everything else is a lot harder.
Here’s a link to TC’s archive of Weekly Encouragement.
Have a great weekend!
Kindle 2 arrives
Amazon.com beat expectations again, as they often do, and delivered my Kindle 2 a day early. I love my original Kindle, but my first impression is that the Kindle 2 is a big improvement. It is true that I can share content between the two devices, so everything I bought before can be moved to the new Kindle 2. I don't know yet if I can have a book on both devices at the same time, but I think I can.
I had breakfast this morning with a friend who used to work in the publishing business, and we both are scratching our heads about why people get hung up on physical books. For me, it's about reading, not the actual physical books. I'll aways own certain books – my grandfather's and my father's books, or books that have really meant a lot to me will stay on my shelf, but soon I'm going to start getting rid of the books that I've already read (or never will read) using bookcrossing.com. Let me know if you find one of my books in the wild. And you can be sure that the book below will remain on my shelf.
Everything’s amazing, nobody’s happy
My good friend Marty sent me a link to a video clip of comedian Louis C.K. doing a bit on Conan O’Brian where he talks about how amazing things are now. I sometimes have to keep my optimism in check a bit, because I know people are hurting and worried about the economy, but this is good for a laugh, and it’s a reminder of how much things have improved in just the last 50 or 100 years. As a phone geek, I got a laugh out of the reminder of how phones worked not that long ago.
I would imbed the video, but the comments are interesting, to a point, where it just turns into a flame-fest. I will say this though – the more I learn to appreciate what I’ve already got, the happier I become and the less stress I feel about the things that aren’t going the way I want them to go. I still want still want a new guitar and the next cool gadget, but I now know that happiness is NOT defined by or provided by – stuff. It’s often a choice and it’s about actions and relationships. Seriously.
Have a happy weekend!
Ask the VC live in Boulder
Jason Mendelson, Managing Director for the Foundry Group, will be speaking at a public event in Boulder, Colorado on February 24th. This is a great chance to hear about how VC funding works from somebody who's investing in new companies and who is very open and honest about how it really works. If you have any interest in raising money for your startup, you should also be reading Jason and Brad Feld's blog, Ask the VC. Here's a link to the event.