The Blog of Burgher Jon

I was watching the movie Robin Hood last night and thinking about the difference between great men in the middle ages and great men today.  A great man in the middle ages routinely risked life and limb to pursue greatness (whether that greatness be in business, thought, science or politics).  The best of the best in each of these disciplines regularly died for their possessions, philosophies or discoveries.  The great people of today, rarely are this brave.  They do not command the respect that a great man of the 13^th or 14^th century would have.

This deficiency in the greatness of the greatest is more than made up for by the enormous increase in the greatness of the median.  The median person in the middle ages was a surf on a leased plot of land.  He gave a bit of his harvest to the landlord, a bit to the king and used most of it to feed himself.  The median man today on the other hand, likely works in a factory or services position; a position where he supplies the labor that runs the world.  Perhaps he builds cars for Ford, something that would have been considered a very rare skilled position in the middle ages.

The question this logically leads to is, why?  I think the largest reason is the wider distribution of technology and the advancement of freedom.  The technology justification is easy to see.  Automation of simpler tasks means that hundreds of acres of land can be effectively harvested by a handful of men.  Freedom allows men of all stature to create ideas, earn money and contribute scientific advancements without the risk of facing persecution or jealous violence.

The great man is challenged by such technologies and freedoms though.  The automation of more and more complicated tasks (take computer driven computation for example) makes it more and more difficult to distinguish one’s self.  Great men of these days not only need to have original thoughts, but be able to leverage the new technologies and available information.

Now that I’ve bored you with the difference between the middle ages and today, it’s time to bring it back around to the blog.  I believe you want to make your company more like today than the middle ages.  This may seem obvious, but it can be threatening to great men (which your company will need).  In order to encourage these men, you will need to identify them, train them in how to use the technologies and information available to them, and encourage them to achieve what they can achieve.  By doing this while promoting an atmosphere full of technology and freedom you will enable both great men AND make the median men in your organization stronger.

As I sat down to figure out what aspects of our favorite little German delicacy we could explore with today’s issue of Sunday Sauerkraut, a question hit me.  Why do they call sauerkraut, sauerkraut?  I mean what does the word actually mean?  A little googling later, I have the answer and a great tidbit to share with you this Sunday.  Turns out, it’s as simple as you might expect.  In German, “sauer” means “sour” and “kraut” means “cabbage”.  So we’re quite literally dealing with Sour Cabbage.

There you have it ladies and gentlemen, now on to the purpose of Sauerkraut Sundays… As I go through the week, I use Twitter to send out little updates and links.  I realize that I do this quite a bit and that not all of you use Twitter, so with that in mind I’d like to take Sunday to do sort of a week in review.  I’ve selected the most useful of my tweets from the last week and placed them in to the categories that I use in this blog.

Me

• I’m a Burgher livin in CLT atm RT @kristin_vstpgh: 10 years ago today I moved back home from Charlotte. Best decision I’ve made.

Personal Technology

• So this is the last day of Lost, that’s 2 minutes of reading stupid Tweets that I get back every week from here on out!

Pittsburgh

• HUGE News! #Pens and #Caps to play a game at Heinz Field on NYD!!! http://bit.ly/cfHL2c
• Mike Madison: “The Igloo should go. It is not the Pantheon; it is not Penn Station.” Couldn’t agree more.
• In March, Pittsbugh had more job growth then any other US City.http://bit.ly/95146E

Sports

• Ugh, he’s right but still…. so painful right now. RT @BucsDugout: Huntington: Brad Lincoln Not Quite Readyhttp://sbnation.com/e/1258005

Technology News

• Unless Albornoz is a pop culture reference I don’t get, there are 4 trending topics right now with nothing to do with the USA.
• Today @cdixon blogs about Amazon beating up Google in a core area. I’ve speculated that his company is the bigger threat.

Unsolicited Advice

• Solid Idea: A magazine delivered on iPad for iPad users. High income, homogeneous base.

Other (Mostly Humorous Comments from the Week)

• So my Task Manager is Frozen, how do you kill that exactly?http://yfrog.com/bfllxp
• The theme of this year’s memorial day weekend: Remember when memorial day meant I didn’t have to work?
• I hope that in heaven Gary Coleman finds the peace that eluded him on Earth, and finally discovers what Willis was talking about.
• Interviewer: What are 3 of your weaknesses? R: I don’t mean to brag, but I only have 2. Hookers and Blow.
• If I see bud light and wheat make out in the elevator one more time I won’t be able to try it without feeling dirty.

As anyone who reads this blog regularly knows, one of the concepts that most intrigues me about the new world of social media is the idea of socially driven decision support.  I’ve covered the topic in at least one, two, three posts.  To this point though, I’ve mostly covered the future of socially driven decision support.  I’ve talked about the day when socially driven decision support will be right so often that we’ll begin to trust it.  The day when Amazon knows what kind of suit I want because of the suits my colleagues, my friends and myself have purchased or “liked” in the past.  What I haven’t spent much time on is current methods of socially driven decision support; today, that means the leaderboard.

It’s a primitive, but surprisingly effective form of decision support.  Think of the number of places that you have seen the “most downloaded apps of the day/week/month”, “most watched videos of the day/week/month”, “most popular dresses of the season”, “The trending topics are”, etc… the thing that needs to be grappled with is how you attack this particular phenomenon as a a marketer.  I think it is a simple (though not particularly easy) process.  First, you must identify the leaderboard you want to top.  Then you must figure out the way to the top.

One of the few case studies I’m aware of is Twitter.  About a week ago Fred Wilson suggested on his blog that one of the reasons Twitter has attempted to consolidate the number of clients in the world is so that it can ascend the “Top Downloads” list on iPhone.  This is a strategy that makes sense.  I recently pointed out on the blog that while 87% of the nation is aware of Twitter, only 7% are using it.  In that post, one of the reasons I speculated this was true was because of confusion around what client to load.  Twitter has solved that, by purchasing Tweetie.  The result is the number one spot on Apple’s “Popular iPhone Downloads” list.  This will doubtlessly result in more then a few people saying, “oh look, it’s that Twitter thing, I guess I’ll give it a try.”

While not everyone can pull off a move like Twitter’s to try to top such a critical leaderboard, it’s an important technique for many of the big boys to at least consider.  It’s also something worth considering when you look at the value of a tech startup.  What leaderboards is it on?  How could it help a suitor get an enviable position?

I’m a huge proponent of the saying, “If You Can’t Win, Don’t Play” and I found myself defending it again the other day.  Specifically, I got criticized because I came in 3201st in my recent marathon and if that’s the best I could do, then why did I bother to run it? This misses the point.  Before you can live by the “If you can’t win, don’t play” motto you have to get really good at selecting your games.

The game I was playing with the marathon was that I wanted to get in to good shape.  I wanted to set up a meaningful hurdle that I could cross, that would show I had gotten there.  The marathon wasn’t the game then, getting in shape was and I won at that.  I’m not going to be the CEO at my current company, I don’t want to be and I shouldn’t.  For more on setting up your games, take a look at my New Year’s Resolutions post.  My philosophy for coming up with New Year’s resolutions is similar to that of picking games you can win.  The only exception is that I think New Year’s resolutions should require daily attention and the games you enter don’t have to.

There is one giant cautionary tale here.  Do NOT pick games that you WILL win, pick games that you CAN win.  This function of picking games you can win is not an excuse to call yourself a winner for doing nothing.  For example, graduating with my MBA is not one of my goals for the year.  I will graduate with my MBA, I have committed to the program and I will.  If I wanted  to pick something MBA related I could pick, get a 4.0 or network with my fellow graduates.  Things that I could easily not do, if I didn’t make them priorities.

It’s a useful tip for goal setting, always know what games your in and what your strategy is to win each.

I just finished Michael Lewis’ new book, the Big Short.  It follows three groups of investors as they forsaw and then attempted to bet on the biggest financial calamity since the great depression.  As is typical with Lewis’ books (including “The Blind Side” which was recently made in to a movie), he took a larger social issue and found a key character or two that he could use to illustrate the point.  He did so masterfully by following Michael Barry, Steve Eisman and several others bet a couple million against the US SubPrime business and made hundreds of millions.  Throughout most of the telling the protagonists are desperately trying to figure out why they are the only ones that see this coming.  It’s an interesting question.

The book does a better then average job of describing the financial instruments (CDOs, Synthetic Bonds, CDSs, etc…) in layman’s terms; although with Lewis’ slight political twist.  This information alone though is worth the $11 at Amazon.  Throw in the breezy pace and great story telling of one of this generation’s best authors and you’re in for well more then your money’s worth.