Yes, hello, everything!

Best of both worlds

 

 

I finally got to reading The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. If you are planning any kind of growth business in uncertain conditions, right now it seems to be the book to read.

Although I sometimes wonder how well these new start-up theories apply in businesses that are outside the US and not web-based, I found the book interesting and mind-opening. I truly share the notion that a lot of time is wasted in the world by not doing the right things, doing the wrong things right and getting things exactly wrong.

A topic I find especially captivating is how the principles of the lean startup model could be applied in internal venturing projects in large organizations. The book itself doesn’t go very deep into the problematics of this startup type, but having worked with new business development in big companies I remember how challenging it can be. It is one of the most intriguing business puzzles I know.

The mother organization often wants the best of both worlds: higher returns with the low risk of the core business, innovation that is based on existing technologies, flexibility that follows the company processes, and explosive growth that would not bother the main business lines.

The venture teams on their side would like to keep their monthly salaries, but be rewarded like independent start-ups if their projects succeed.

Furthermore, if the new projects really grow, the teams often fall in love with them and tend to stick with the project longer than they should. It is very rare that the same team is the right team all the way from an idea to an established new business. Creating a balanced innovation portfolio and moving the people around according to project maturity is a key part of the challenge.

And all the time, the core business side tries to slow the venture projects down, because they are a risk to the old business and typically cause confusion in the organization. Nobody likes those who don’t play by the book.

No wonder most internal venturing projects fail.

I liked the idea in the book that it is critical for internal startups to protect the parent organization from the disruptive work (and not vice-versa). Getting the rules established and the limits of authority laid right from the start is a fundamental prerequisite for innovating freely.

Getting the best out of internal venturing is a paradox all right. I hope I get to try it again one day.

External Concentration Problem Syndrome

 

A few weeks ago I wrote about today’s ADHD society and how it sometimes feels as if short-term thinking and a scattered way of working have become the standard.

After talking with a couple of busy people lately, I realised that the situation is worse than that. It is not just that erratic work patterns are trying to take over, they have a clever viral way of doing that. There are still people left out there who can concentrate, but they are constantly disturbed by those already infected, until nobody can focus anymore. It is like outsourced ADHD.

I see symptoms everywhere. 

People book working time in their calendars to block distraction. 

People take days off to accomplish things.

People work during holidays because they then have time to think.

That is just crazy. When did the workplace become the place we don't go to when we want to work?

I am not saying that everybody has to stop to think (like I said before, I embrace the variety), but I wouldn’t want anybody to be forced to stop thinking, either.

I will try to get back to this issue with solutions – after the summer holidays, maybe.

 

I have seen the future

 

I have seen the future of design. And the nice part of it all was that I didn’t have to abuse a crystal ball or any other substance to see it. All it took was a couple of days at Umeå Institute of Design, in their yearly UID design talks and degree exhibition event.

There is something amazing about seeing the graduating students give five-minute talks about their degree projects; the enthusiasm, the spirit, their beliefs. What I found even more interesting, though, was seeing the choices of the graduating designers, what the young believe is important, and the trends that emerge when you see tens of degree presentations in a row.

This generation worries about the environment, wants to help other humans and prefers businesses that make the world a better place. To the extent, actually, that a cynical old business man like me would like to ask them a couple questions about the viability of the ideas. But that is how it is supposed to be. We’ll save the nasty questions about business realities for later. I am sure we’ll find the balance.

The event also provides a great meeting venue for people from all sides of the industry. The great thing about Umeå is that there isn’t much else to do, so those who travel to UID stick around for the two days. The discussions during the breaks and evening activities are a big part of the charm.

And as if that wasn’t enough, the list of keynote speakers is pretty impressive too: During the past couple of years Chris Bangle and Richard Seymour have been there to give thought-provoking presentations. This year’s entertaining keynote by Simon Waterfall you can still see here.

This week’s design award goes to UID for organizing all this. The future of design is in good hands.

 

Creative breaks

 

It has been a quiet couple of weeks here at Yes, hello, everything! The paradox is that they have been busy weeks and there would have been plenty of things to write about. I just haven't been able to sit down and publish.

To me, this proves a point: if you want a person to do any kind of creative work, give the person a break.

Now, I don’t want to over-emphasize the value of these blog entries as major pieces of art – it only takes minutes to actually write one –, but the process of getting an idea to write about, figuring out what the point would be, and letting the right sentences come to you can’t be forced in a pre-booked fifteen-minute slot. At least for me it can’t.

I am big fan of irregular working hours. It makes me happy to see that there has been more and more discussion lately about the traditional 9-to-5 office routine not being the most productive way of working.

There will always be busy weeks and days with scheduled meetings in a row, but I hope with time more people will be allowed a new way of working that combines hard work with creative breaks and social office cooperation with remote thinking. More would get done.

That’s it for now. I think I need a break.

 

Long-term plans to watch

 

While more and more start-up coaches are promoting lean business validation, customer development through fast iterations, and making your mistakes quickly, it seems that there are still venture capitalists out there who want companies to do long-term business plans.

To demonstrate the difficulties of predicting consumer behavior, here is the story of my plans for TV watching at home during the past three years:

We have moved several times and renovated quite a bit lately. This has allowed me to redo the media facilities at home according to what I thought my family would need.

Three years ago, we were living in an apartment with a baby. The falling asleep by the TV then took place in the bedroom, where we had our only TV set. When we moved a little bit later, I logically thought that the bedroom is where we watch TV and decided to make place for a larger connected TV there.

When the renovation was ready, however, it turned out the only person watching live broadcast TV was my son, who wanted to watch the morning show for children. The ideal place for the new TV was as far from the bedroom as possible. Which was fine as we in the new house had an extra room for it. The carefully crafted sockets for the TV antenna and the Internet connection on the wall of the bedroom were never used.

Now, we have moved again and based on my previous learnings, I rewrote the media consumption plan. The TV for my son is now in the corner of the living room, and I have a Playstation connected to a projector in the guest room that allows watching TV shows and films from the Internet. Quite nice a setup actually, with cables hidden in the walls and all.

Too bad nobody’s using them. My son now refuses to watch the TV morning show and wants to watch his favorite series on an iPad instead. My wife and I still have very little time for media entertainment, but we sometimes watch downloaded TV shows – when the pad is free late in the evening. This takes place in the bedroom, where we have no TV. 

No wonder the TV manufacturers are struggling. If I can’t even predict my own media behavior in a year’s time, I imagine it is tough to create an Excel sheet that tells the exact truth about what potential TV customers think in 2015.

So my vote goes to agile learning and rewriting of plans.

To add a short epilogue: I just got a letter from the local health authorities who want to store my reckless behavior in their statistics. There were many funny questions, the relevance of which was at times difficult for me to grasp, but among other things they wanted to know how much TV I am watching.

It would be statistically correct for me to write down 0 hours and 0 minutes, but is it the relevant fact?

 

Who cares about apps?

Nokia is not doing very well right now. The future success and profits depend on the high-end phone sales, which is why the new Lumia Windows Phone range has been analyzed a lot.

I haven’t tested one, so this post won’t be for or against Nokia or Microsoft. It is about the strange application focus that many on the smartphone market seem to have.

Almost all Lumia reviews I have read list as a major fault that there are “only” 70 000 or so applications available for the Windows Phone platform, when iPhone and Android users could choose from about half a million.

Does it really matter? 

Firstly, most people don’t care much about apps.

I have been working with mobile phone technology for a long time and have used tens of smartphones, so I believe I know something about phones. Yet, I am not interested in the size of the app stores.

I only want a few things to work on my phones: uncomplicated access to all my email accounts, a good web browser, smooth Facebook and Twitter clients, an easy way to upload photos, something for short meeting notes and occasional video viewing, a little navigation, a music controller, and IP calls maybe. Ability to view work files would be nice, but I can do without editing on the go.

That’s it. I don’t need real-time pictures of public traffic in cities I'll never visit and I don’t want to know how many calories I drank last Friday. I don’t have any interest in fine-tuning the phone’s battery life with widgets, nor in bonding with the local McDonald’s. I don’t play games on my phones. I don’t even know what Instagram actually does.

For what I have seen and experienced, most smartphone apps are poorly written uninteresting crap (crapps?). A billion unnecessary low-quality apps in a store only makes it more difficult to find the few interesting ones that really add value to everyday life.

Secondly, a lot of people don’t care about apps at all. 

If the phone companies want to keep on selling smartphones at current pace, sooner or later they will have to sell one to my mother. I can tell you right now that she will never go to an app store. If the sales guys at the local phone joint will use the amount of compatible apps somewhere in the web as a sales argument, they have totally missed the point.

My father-in-law is a happy iPad user. He never goes to the App Store. The few apps he has on his device (a newspaper, a TV recording service and Skype for talking to grandkids) have been installed by the IT department. If he ever needs something more, he will probably ask me again, but I doubt he ever will. A web access device with a good screen is enough.

Thirdly, apps are a complex system for accessing simple web content.

Creating, testing and distributing several apps for various platforms is a pain and causes a lot of unnecessary work for developers. As a result of the divided efforts, most apps aren’t well-designed or optimized. Often, the user experience can’t compete with a good mobile web site. For example, Facebook’s mobile pages still beat many Facebook apps in speed, functionality and ease of use. 

Sure, there are some great applications that make life easier, but finding, downloading and installing the right apps requires time, interest and capabilities most users don’t have. I sincerely hope that the development of web standards will get us past this stage. Some new HTML5 implementations I have seen look promising.

What I would like to hear in a Lumia review is how quickly you can switch windows in the web browser, how easy it is to view photos, videos and comments in Facebook, or how well data connections and roaming can be controlled. I really don’t care about the apps.

Am I alone in thinking that most nerds who write reviews about smartphones have lost touch with the reality of the normal user and criticize phones for things only very few users would really be bothered about?

An appliance? Sounds good!

 

I have a wireless multi-room sound system at home. It is several years old now and it is still great.

It does not support photo sharing, you can’t view videos with it. It doesn’t have an alarm clock or a Facebook widget. It just plays music.

The basic UI looks like this:

To rock the house, you can use a PC or a smartphone. You select the room where you want to listen to music, pick the music (from a hard drive, Internet radio station or Spotify) and click play. Works like a dream.

And when I move, I just grab my boxes, plug them in and play again. The ones I have can be moved around as I please, and to add a room, all I need is a new box. The only issues I have had over the years are minor interference incidents when too many wireless devices try to use the same frequency range, and one over-protective PC firewall that wouldn’t allow a connection to the sound system. 

In a world where technology is getting more and more complicated, and user interfaces more and more cluttered, one feels happy with simple experiences like this. The design award of the week goes to Sonos and everybody else who have faith in focused appliances.

 

Crossing cultures

 

I am back in Sweden after a few weeks in France and I have a minor cultural shock. The weather was colder, but that is not what provoked the shock. It wasn’t the short lunch breaks either.

While we were gone, there was major water damage in the kindergarten. They had to evacuate the building and assemble a temporary one on the parking lot. The construction was delayed by a couple of weeks because they also had to build access for the disabled (of which there aren’t any) and a separate room for changing diapers, which can’t be maneuvered in the toilet for hygiene reasons.

Thinking about the electricity installations in the escalier of our building in France (the picture above), I felt that this might have been a time where nordic authorities could have loosened up a bit. But around here there aren’t any exceptions for temporary buildings, regardless of the urgency.

I had similar culture assimilation issues a couple of years ago, when I was working in the French sales office of a Finnish company. I remember us counting then that there were about two hours a day when the French actually were working at the same time with the headquarters in Finland.

When we came to the office after the rush hour in France, it was 11 o’clock in Finland, which is lunch time. The first joint working hour started when the Finns came back from lunch at 11.15. Then the French took lunch, and returned two hours later to the other joint hour, before the Finns stopped answering the phone at 15.30 local time. The French day was then really just starting.

That is what one hour of time difference and a spoonful of culture traditions mean in practice. Add bigger distances, stronger cultural asymmetry and a couple of time zones, and it makes one wonder it ever can be possible to build a smoothly functioning global organization. The cross-cultural challenge is to turn all this into an asset. 

Doesn’t that make the world a great place to probe?

Happy Easter to everybody! (In case that is something you tend to celebrate.)

You can't sell innovation

 

Innovation is these days often presented as a solution to the growth problems of western economies. I have been following a couple of small university start-ups lately and I have an impression it is not innovation we are missing. 

Is the technology they have innovative? Yes, indeed. Is it of high quality and internationally competitive? Yes, that too. Are they ready to sell and grow, employ and pay taxes? Well, not exactly.

After a short review of their technology I only had one major question: What are you selling?

The answers were long and multifaceted: We have a potential customer in China who is interested in our algorithms, and there is a very interesting demo about integrating the technology into a larger system, and we have venture capitalist contacts that are interested in buying the company, and we have a great SDK that other companies can use, and we could make our own mobile products, and... 

Ok, that looks promising. Which alternative will you concentrate your efforts on?

It seems to be a tough question to answer. This is a typical teething issue in a small university start-up. They often have a great piece of innovation that could be applied in many ways, but very limited resources for turning it into a business. The challenge is made worse by the fact that very few venture funds invest in companies at the earliest stage of growth.

If the early work is not focused, there is a risk that the company ends up selling a little bit of whatever anybody is interested in. The limited resources are scattered on vague projects embryos that have little chance of succeeding. This is where help would be needed.

I strongly believe that many more new successful companies would emerge if public support was directed more to assisting start-ups in finding their business case when they still are true start-ups.

Often it is not even money these companies need for turning innovation into something sellable. A pair of fresh eyes and a helping hand from somebody who has been there before would do.

This is more a networking challenge than a funding problem. I call for more support systems that can link start-up companies with outside help when a little push to the right direction is needed.

We would also need more people with business development experience to be available when that push is needed. Based on my experience it can be educating and fun.

Would that be too much to ask for saving a couple of national economies? Anyone?

 

Drugs on the corner

 

 

 

In our series of peculiar characteristic of France: pharmacies.

Or more accurately, the amount of pharmacies. They are everywhere.

This is due to a generous social security system that reimburses almost all medication you think you need. Not having to pay much for drugs, the local people quite easily end up taking some, even in cases where most people in other countries would just go to bed and rest a little.

As a result, the public drug expenditure per capita in France is the highest of all OECD countries. Which is why there is a pharmacy in every corner.

Really, every corner.

This has generated an interesting side business of pharmacy crosses. If you run a pharmacy, it seems you have no other choice but to hang one blinking above your door.

And not just any kind of cross either. Some years back, it was enough to have an illuminated green cross. Not anymore. The emergence of the LED has completely changed the pharmacy cross trade. Now the cross has to dazzle, flash and sparkle. Like this:

   

 

This week’s design award goes to the profession of pharmacy cross animators. Not because their work is particularly great design, but for reminding us that there are potential niche business areas waiting around every corner.