The Corner Office

When I was a fulltime executive, I never would have found time for social media and all the communications gadgets everyone’s eyes, ears, and thumbs seem to be glued to these days. I used to work like 50-60 hour weeks, not to mention all the travel. The rare times I was home and not working or sleeping, I had things to do, fun to have, and relationships to maintain … like my marriage.

Now I work a lot less but my time is still somehow consumed - with what, I don’t know - and the lure of social media and communications gadgets loom like an ever-growing mountain of unmet expectations. So I wonder: how the heck does anyone have time for all this stuff and is your business life “more” or “less” fulfilling and productive now than it was pre-social media?

For me, the answers are “I don’t” and “less” and “less.” Bigtime. (more…)

Updated 1:15pm PST: Just heard that the Northwest Airlines pilots who overshot the runway in Minneapolis last week were reportedly on their laptops and failed to notice all the control tower and control panel alarms and messages. I rest my case.

Last week, university researchers announced the results of a study on awareness: Just 8 percent of pedestrians talking on cellphones noticed a clown on a unicycle pedaling across a campus square, versus 60 percent of pedestrians talking with a friend.

The results are fascinating, but I think gadget and media-bombardment presents cognitive issues that go well beyond “distraction.”

A recent Stanford research study suggests that media multitasking or “high-tech juggling” between web browsing, emailing, and texting, for example, impairs cognitive control and is counterproductive. (more…)

Once again, Apple blew away analyst forecasts with a record quarter on record Mac and iPhone sales and profits. Firing on all cylinders doesn’t begin to describe what this company is doing to the competition.
Apple is now the fifth biggest U.S. company by market cap behind Exxon Mobil, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, and JP Morgan Chase. Hard to believe.

But how does the Cupertino company do it? How does it turn out one breakthrough product after another that redefines every market it enters? Is it all about Steve Jobs? Insanely great marketing? Innovative product design? The user experience? Sure, it’s all of that. But there’s one more thing that makes it all work. It isn’t obvious and it isn’t easy. 

Even BNET’s feature The Science Behind Apple’s Magic - which did a great job of capturing many aspects of Apple’s success - missed this one. Why? Because, if it was obvious, everyone would be doing it. This aspect of Apple’s methodology is a bit complex, but I think I can break it down for you. Here we go:   (more…)

Open Source or proprietary, ad-hoc or planned by a standards committee, it doesn’t much matter; platforms have enormous leverage. In a world of virtually infinite choices where no two products are the same, companies and entrepreneurs can develop, manufacture, and market products for a fraction of the cost by leveraging successful, existing platforms.

How do platforms start? Simple market dynamics. When a device - like a PC or an iPhone - becomes popular (presumably for good reason), then it makes sense to develop applications on and for that device. Once that happens, it also makes sense for next generation devices to maintain backward compatibility, making it easy for customers to upgrade. In time, you have a platform. And the more devices sold and applications developed, the more leverage power the platform has.

The most powerful platforms on the planet are the Internet (IP and HTML) and the personal computer, although the Wintel PC is really made up of two platforms: Microsoft Windows (software) and Intel’s x86 processor architecture (hardware). (more…)

Venture funding is tighter than ever, business loans are virtually nonexistent, nobody’s spending, and morale is down in the dumps. So why is this a great market for entrepreneurs? No, I’m not on drugs … except for Claritin. I’ve actually got a logical argument here.

10 Reasons Why This is a Great Market for Entrepreneurs

1. First, I’m a big believer in contrarian logic when it comes to markets, a sort of “fools rush in” mentality. When the masses are running for the hills, check out what they left behind.
2. In this market as in any market, if you have a great concept, after you’re through listening to dozens of investors tell you you’re crazy and it’ll never work, you’ll find one or two believers who will back you. Google had Andy Bechtolsheim. You’ll find yours. (more…)

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The other day I accidentally got into some poison oak. When it comes to poison oak there are only two types of people - those who are allergic and those who will be allergic. Turns out that some 15 percent of the population begin life immune to its effects but repeated exposure fixes that. Contrary to what you might think, you actually become more, not less sensitive to poison oak (or ivy) over time and exposure.

But last year I didn’t know that. And having been “immune” my entire life, I thought nothing of working all weekend in a giant patch of the stuff until most of my body suddenly decided to react to it. It was so bad I call that time the “lost week” of 2008.

Anyway, faced with the grim prospect of another lost week, I did some Google searching yesterday and found that if you run hot water - as hot as you can stand - over the affected areas for a few minutes, your cells release their stored-up histamines, providing 6 to 8 hours of complete relief. It’s miraculous! I’m sitting here right now without an itch … and no drugs.

That’s just one example, but I can rattle off a long list of circumstances - related primarily to the medical, legal, and construction professions, among others - where the extreme wealth of information we call the Internet has changed my families lives and, in one case, just about saved one. (more…)

No, The Corner Office hasn’t gone mental. But I’m fascinated by an entrepreneur that came up with a unique business plan that targets 57 million Americans – one in four adults – that have a diagnosed mental illness, not to mention the countless millions that suffer from non-diagnosed disorders related to stress and anxiety.

And this is further evidence of our ever-expanding appetite for “quick fixes” - take a pill, go on a diet, buy a self-help book, join a health club, get an MBA - that sort of thing.

TechCrunch50 is a Bay Area conference where 50 early stage companies get to pitch their “concept” to panels of VCs, entrepreneurs, media mavens, and corporate execs that last year included the likes of Mark Andreessen, Mark Cuban, Henry Blodget, and executives from Facebook, Google, MySpace, salesforce.com, and Yahoo.

In only its second year, the conference has achieved some credibility. Intuit acquired Mint - a startup that launched at last year’s conference - for $170 million last week. (more…)

In yesterday’s post, Tradeoffs Make or Break Careers and Companies, we discussed the role of tradeoffs in major decisions affecting careers and businesses big and small.  The post referenced four examples to highlight the point:

• Whether to stay in a safe job that pays well or take a big risk on a startup or by becoming an entrepreneur
• How Twitter can monetize its business without destroying the viral attraction and simplicity of its microblogging site
• Whether Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile’s parent company) should risk a failed merger by acquiring Sprint Nextel to grow its U.S. wireless business
• Whether a dentist should move to a more favorable location to gain access to new clients at the risk of alienating existing clients

While these are four distinct situations, there is indeed a common process I use for analyzing these and other complex tradeoffs and making the right business decisions. In every case, the process - which closely resembles a strategic planning process - comes down to three steps: (more…)

Like most children, I visited my dad at work a few times. He worked at the general post office in Manhattan. You know, zip code 10001. There were no computers, no monitors, no fax machines, no printers. Just typewriters, adding machines, and rotary telephones. My dad wore a pocket protector filled with pens and pencils. There were no bright colors; everything was drab … except for the white shirts.   

Management was conducted by discipline, by attendance, by various output metrics, and of course, by walking around.  

Who, at that time, could have envisioned the business environment of the modern world? And what gives me the crystal ball to do the same thing now and predict the business world of the future? A career in high-tech, plus I’m a Silicon Valley management consultant-type who likes to think about this stuff and occasionally gets a look at what’s coming. 

But you wouldn’t believe what business will be like in the future. It’s really, really weird stuff. Check it out: (more…)

It’s nearly Labor Day, the kids are back in school, summer vacations are memories, and Silicon Valley is on the move. There’s hiring going on, a classic Carol Bartz internal Yahoo memo, and other interesting, if not amusing, news from the land of tech (where I happen to live and occasionally work):

There Are Jobs in The Valley!

Venture-funded technology firms are hiring, according to Business Week. Not only that, but most senior executives polled by audit firm KPMG are expecting a full industry recovery in 2010, ahead of the rest of the U.S. economy:

Amid the worst recession for tech jobs since the dot-com bubble burst, companies are eagerly adding workers in such fields as cloud computing, computer security, business analytics, and IT services for government and health-care providers. Even some companies hit hard by recession are slowly reopening their doors to new employees amid signs that the tech sector may rebound before other areas of the economy. (more…)

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