The Blog of Burgher Jon

I had a thought as I was reading a book about the evolution of Facebook.  Privacy Sucks.  That was the thought.  We live in a world that has its values are shaped by publicists, movies and secrecy.  Publicists because we only see the parts of the famous that they want us to (for the most part).  Movies because in the entire 2 hour life of our heroes they never screw up.  Secrecy because we don’t know most people’s mistakes and they don’t know ours.  These factors lead to a morality where our ideal boyfriends don’t ever checkout the ass of another girl.  Our ideal fitness experts don’t ever piece of birthday cake.  Hell, even our ideal interview candidates have never had one too many at a party.

Last year, Ryder Media published a survey that stated that 45% of employers use social media profiles to screen candidates; 35% have rejected a candidate because of something they found there.  I’m of the opinion that 90% of America has done something that, if posted on the web, would lead to us not being able to get a job.  Penalizing the people who have allowed whatever they did to be posted to the internet is ridiculous.  Would you rather have someone who sweeps their mistakes under the rug or someone who owns up to them?

Fortunately the rug is getting smaller and smaller.  Pretty soon, there won’t be enough room for your mistakes under there, you’ll have to put them out in public.  I for one am looking forward to that day.  The day where openness and honesty and being able to justify your actions are more important you’re your ability to avoid cameras.

My theoretical response to this question comes in two parts, first you need to look at the way people are using the internet and identify some of the obvious next steps.  Looking back to 2003, I would say there were at least two of these obvious next steps.  First, people would begin using the internet for personal email more (most people only had their school or work account).  Second, people would all have their own website.  I think these were pretty widely understood truths and, smelling potential profits, companies hurled themselves at them.   The first problem got solutions from Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and ISPs.  The second problem got solutions from Macromedia and Microsoft (Front Page).

The first problem got solved quickly, soon Hotmail and Gmail had exploded.  AOL opened up everyone’s old email addresses (I actually still have access to my Jonyisgood@AOL.com email, not that I ever check it) and everyone who wanted personal email had it.  The second problem, faced much stiffer odds.  I remember that in my college, they tried to teach everyone how to use Dreamweaver to create their own webpage.  The results were disastrous.  I’m pretty crappy at design and I can tell you that mine personally, was never going to be my face for the web.  It wasn’t the worst one though, and it was distanced from the worst ones by a long shot.  One thing was clear, too small a part of the world at the time had the knowledge and skill to create attractive websites.  Another problem facing this concept of the individual website was how to let others know that it existed and tell them when it was updated.  Most of these websites at my school got created for class and never touched again (not by the author or visitors).   There was no central catalog of all my friends’ websites and no standard way to read them quickly.

These difficulties made this second problem one with the potential to spawn a billion dollar company or two.  Why?  There was an obvious, logical truth about where the Internet needed to go and it was suffering from serious road blocks.  The rapid incremental innovations that were being applied to DreamWeaver and FrontPage were not enough to help/motivate people to go build their new sites (they only partly solved the need to know HTML and they didn’t solve the linking/updating/directory problem at all).  What the world needed was a disruptive innovation that solved the problems and made the obvious truth of personal websites a reality.

Friendster then MySpace then Facebook solved these problems with the disruptive innovation of a single website that allowed everyone to build their own page and neatly keep track of their friends.  While they (especially Facebook) have done much more since, the reason they grew in to giants was this concept.  My theory is that this shouldn’t have been surprising since there was a logical truth to what was coming next and they provided a solution.

One other thing that I think is critical to note in this space is that identifying billion dollar companies requires first looking at the truth you think will drive disruptive innovation then looking at EVERY new company through that lens.  If you were an investor who had identified personal webpages as one of those truths, you might have been rummaging through “web design tools” and not taken notice of this new University-Based service for keeping track of friends.  However, if you had taken the time to look closely you would have seen exactly the innovation you were looking for.

So that leads to the next logical question, what are the obvious, logical truths that are suffering from major road blocks?  I’m going to come back to this topic, but I’d love to see some thoughts in the comments.

Twitter announced today that they will be monetizing in another new way.  They have started the @earlybird account.  This account, will (for a small price) tweet about the time bound deals your company is offering.  The concept is pretty creative and should result in some serious revenue for Twitter, especially if they can get influential people to follow @earlybird and retweet the message to their followers.

I am sure the good folks at Twitter have done their research, but it does leave me a bit concerned.  The problem, as I see it, is that Twitter is monetizing on top of their platform rather then monetizing the platform itself.  If you’re monetizing on top of the platform you don’t really have a competitive advantage, unless you disallow competition (which they have).  Disallowing competition though, means that the platform won’t benefit from competition amongst ad providers, which in and of itself hurts the platform.  How much do you think Alexander Graham Bell made off the telephone?

So do I have an alternative?  I’m glad you asked.  What if they required all companies that serve commercials to use a particular hash tag or URL shortener.  Then you tax those per display.  In this manner you’re monetizing the platform itself rather than trying to monetize on top of it (and either losing competitive advantage or stifling the kind of competition that would be good for your platform).

Some companies have become famous for innovating (think 3M), while others derive their reputation from operational efficiency (think Honda).  I’ve long been a proponent of innovation.  In a paper for my MBA program I was asked to defend this decision and setup a structure with in a fictitious organization that would convert the culture from operationally focused to innovation focused.  The question made me think for a little while, but I ended up posing the following solution (excerpts and paraphrasing are written as a memo to my boss explaining my next steps):

In order to establish an innovative culture within my new division, I will be following two critical steps.  I will first determine the most critical areas of innovation that are required; establishing these critical areas as the goals for innovation within the division.  Then, I will identify organizational constructs, processes and controls that will allow us to achieve these goals.

…

We need to establish an innovative culture that revolves around three primary goals:

1. Locating and pursuing the appropriate markets for our new product.
2. Identifying threats and opportunities brought on by disruptive innovations in our industry.
3. Ensuring that our division leverages and contributes to communities of innovation in our industry and our supply chain.
4. Maintaining a commitment to carrying innovative products.  << I didn’t focus on this one, because a solid R&D process was already in place at the company >>

…

The first three of these items will be implemented by setting up a series of innovation focused virtual teams.  These virtual teams will be composed of executives, managers and line workers from many existing teams as well as dedicated business analysts.  Their job will be to review the fruits of our new innovation suggestion process (a web submission process designed to transform water cooler complaints in to helpful innovations).  They will analyze the feasibility and priority of each of these suggestions.  Membership on these teams will rotate so that all employees gain exposure to the innovation process and gain an active role in selecting and refining innovations.  Additionally, employees will be measured moving forward, in-part, based on their innovative recommendations.

This is a rather harsh chopping of a 6 page paper that went in to the theory behind each of these points.  I’ll get a chance to get a grade on the theory from my professor; I placed these words on this blog because I’d like to hear your thoughts.  My guess, based on the people who read the blog that I’ve interacted with, is that one or two of you have actually faced this challenge in the real world and I’d be interested to know how you tackled such a problem.  Also if you agree with my four general areas of corporate innovation.

Image from Wikipedia

I think you can tell a lot about a person by their response to the question, “can you be in at 6:00 tomorrow?”  I don’t think the right answer is, “YES” or “NO”.  I think there’s a thought process that responsible, hard-working people take to the process.  I think that process goes like this:

1. Why?  There are good reasons to be in the office at 6:00 and there are bad ones.  If there truly is a time sensitive issue that needs to be addressed before business, then fine.  If its something I can do tonight before I go home, you owe me that option.  Furthermore, if its not really necessary for me to be there, don’t ask me to be.  I’ll resent you thoroughly for it.  If you’re the kind of manager who measures my contribution by the time on the clock when I’m coming and going, we won’t be working together long.
2. Assuming all those questions are answered to my satisfaction, the answer is YES.  If you can’t handle days that require you to be in the office at 6:00, then don’t work for a startup.  When you’re working for a company of a couple dozen, any one person dropping the ball can be heard around the office.  These pressure moments when you see everyone coming together to get a product out the door should be the ones that you’re excited about, not the ones that you dread.  I’m here in the office at 6:00 this morning waiting for a build of our product from the developers that I can test before showing it to some clients at 9:00 and I’m excited.  The team made some amazing progress on it overnight and I’m excited to share that with my clients at 9:00.

What gets you excited enough to get out of bed at 6:00?