thingamy

Solutions creates problems

Thingamy's first business task is to create problems. 

Worse, Thingamy's business is to create problems for the daily work of most people! 

Sounds like a rather bad business purpose or what? 

Not so, it's more to it:

Solving problems is the foremost driver of new products, services and economic growth. That we're taught.

What nobody teaches you is that you need a solution before a state becomes a problem.

Do you wake up every day thinking "ouch, ouch, I'm going to die one day, must fix that problem!"?

You don't. That you eventually will die from old age has no solution hence is not a problem, just the inevitable fate of being human so enjoy it while it lasts.

Now, straight from the spiritual to the mundane - daily work:

Meetings, phone calls, budget processes, paper shuffling, firing up multiple applications, enter figures, travel - in short all that will bog down you and Dilbert every day. Is this a problem? Not really, just the inevitable nuisance of working in an organisation knowing that the only alternative is to go Bedouin and leave the cubicle farm.

Now add politics to meetings, wrong people at the wrong time on the line, lost papers, bugs to applications and cancelled flights - now we see problems! And of course such problems have solutions; focus on agenda, install CRM, KMS, support desks and conduct online meetings fixes problems.

But the meetings, phone calls etc. are still there taking up most of our days minimising our creative and work output while leaving a somewhat bitter aftertaste of much time lost. But that's as inevitable as death at a ripe old age leaving us to went the frustrations on Twitter and at the water cooler instead.

Enter Thingamy, it offers a real alternative by making much of those time-wasting issues moot.

There's the dilemma - this hugely counterproductive state is not seen as a problem so we have a solution to fate and not a problem!

Luckily there's a way out: Show the solution and the state of things becomes a highly visible problem!

So there we go building business flows disregarding how things are done today, show how it works as a natural flow without much use of meetings, phone calls, lost documents and other issues. Suddenly the inevitable becomes a visible problem that can be solved, not quite on par with an offer of eternal life but still extremely helpful to all.

Hence our initial business is to create problems.

http://30megs.com/

Stop managing

If you like the occasional blinding flash of the obvious there's a book out - Management rewired: Why feedback doesn't work and other surprising lessons from the latest brain science by Charles S. Jacobs. Basically takeaway is that the annual performance review is for the birds, and boss pressure is of dubious value. When I was involved in running companies I always found employees telling about their latest work successes and solutions like new algorithms or graphical UIs at lunch. Not bragging to a boss but discussing and getting much ahhs and ooohs from their peers. Peer strokes and peer pressure is good. Simple as that, it's pretty obvious and we know it. But alas most management experts don't for whatever reasons. Another issue is motivation. How come the military see their crew risk life and work long and hard hours? How come small startups have employees working nights and days without complaining? They have simple and clear goals, goals that are easy to understand and for some to get aligned with - purpose and belonging that at the end will entice us to give our utmost. What would be a common denominator for these obvious facts? Transparency. Let your peers see what you do and allow you to see what and why all is happening. Simple, obvious and presumably easy to implement even in a cubicle farm. Except of course, that current enterprise systems and even E 2.0 stuff are designed as tools for specific organisational and process silos. And as we all know, sitting inside a silo hampers transparency big time. So, silos away and let the sun shine on the workers again.

Go to market by Extreme Business Planning

Don't know if this is an effort to make own behaviour plausible, but so what...

When entering a market the GAMP (Generally Accepted Marketing Practices) has to be right, as in getting certain stuff right:

• Target market
• Price
• Packaging
• Channel
• Story
• And the rest of it

But one forgets, there are two ways to enter a market:

A. By GAMP

1. Spend days and weeks in the boardroom trying to outguess your potential customers as to who, how, what and when they will use your product.
2. Set the choices in stone, get the channel onboard, set the message and story, price it and colour your product.
3. Go.

Result? Binary. Uncontrolled and rigid outcome. But fast. Success or crash and burn in the fast lane.

B. By EBP (Extreme Business Planning)

1. Keep everything open with two exceptions; build your product so it can be changed and tweaked easily, ditto for your organisation and cash burn.
2. Go.
3. Let the potential customers decide who, how, what and when. Adjust accordingly.

Result? Analogue. Controlled and continuous movement. But slower. Slow and deliberate right hand lane driving.

Think I like B. better. Doable? But of course as long as you question the assumptions you do not know you're making.

Bonus question: Which method would the time-constrained VC board members push for?

The conceptual failure of business software and why nobody bothers

If you're in business you'll soon find the need for some business software...

When you forget to follow up potential clients that's when you find a need to "manage" your leads and call the CRM vendor.

When you need to know when and by whom to fill up your warehouse with bits, parts or whatever you invest in SCM and SRM. And so forth ad infinitum.

Now, imagine you're running a shipping company; your purpose is to deliver goods from Europe to the US, the economy is in shambles and you need to get better and earn more money.

There are two things you can do:

1. Make your ships faster and more economical, and/or
2. revisit your purpose, the core value delivered, and explore airfreight, logistics and more.

Now draw a parallel to your need for business software:

1. Analyse the specific needs of existing processes and tasks and invest to make those faster and more economical, or
2. revisit your purpose and explore different processes and tasks.

That would be theoretical. Airplane and truck makers exist so the shipper have the freedom to do what he wants, but the business software buyer will only be offered tools to make specific and existing processes more efficient. Not much software to enable easy change to his business are on offer. (Need proof? Read out loud the full names of CRM, SCM, HCM etc.. See? All process specific.)

This is when business get stuck and where software developers fail miserably.

Maybe the blame should be with the oft repeated advise to entrepreneurs to "find a need and offer a solution"? Do not offer him an alternative (an easy way to explore alternative processes) so he'll be stuck with simple needs to increase efficiency instead. And simple needs are easier to fix and to sell into. Bad laziness. Self fulfilling prophecy. 

The vendor wins short term and the buyer loses long term.