Book Review: The Frugal Superpower by Michael Mandelbaum

We have spent all of our money and no longer have the ability to project power to all four corners of the globe.  We probably knew this was coming because it has happened to every world dominating superpower to date.  We inherited the role as the protector of the free world when the sun set on the British empire.  For a time we shared the responsibility with the USSR, the protector of the not free world, but on November 9, 1989 the job became all ours.

As Lord Acton pointed out in 1870, the Pope is not immune from fallibility.  If the Pope is not, we are probably not either.  Lord Acton is the guy that first said:  "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."  

Michael Mandelbaum does a very good job of surveying our current situation and placing it in the context of recent history.  His authority on the subject comes through in the writing as well as in his BIO (Yale, Cambridge, Harvard, professor at Johns Hopkins, 10 books...), he keeps to the point, and offers one simple solution:  Increase the tax on gas in the US.

Imagine that, we have a very complex problem that threatens our role on the world stage, and probably our quality of life, and it very well could be fixed with one easy to implement policy.  

Huh.

Here are some other reviews:

The Washington Times

The Guardian

Finding the Time

Since starting this blog I have stopped using time constraints as an excuse.  Reinforcing the fact that I have control over my time is one of the benefits of writing regularly for fun.  Clearly this activity is not essential -- so if I have time to write on my blog every day, I must have time for a lot of other things.

This weekend I started reading Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus.  Right in the beginning he sets up a very interesting contrast:  Volunteers editing Wikipedia vs watching TV.  Shirky estimates that the cumulative time spent on Wikipedia writing/editing is something like 100 million hours of human effort.  Say what you will about Wikipedia, but I find it quite useful.  I would trade 100 million hours of everyone's TV watching time to get a Wikipedia.  

It turns out that Americans watch about 100 million hours of TV commercials -- every weekend.  Can you believe that?  We could create something as valuable as Wikipedia -- every weekend -- just by not watching the commercials on TV!

Growing or Shrinking

I think it is a miracle that our economy grows at all.  I can't say that I have an intricate understanding of the way we calculate GDP or inflation.  But here are the things from my life that are pulling the deflationary lever: 

Computers:  In 1988 I bought at 286 machine for $5,000 -- now I buy computers for less than $1,000.

Cell Phones:  In 1990 my cell phone bill was $600 per month.  It is still $600 per month but I have 11 phones and a handful of data devices on it.

Housing:  I do pay more for housing because my family is bigger and we have upgraded our house.  But I don't see any reason to expand any further and at 30 years old, my house is a long way from wearing out.  On a larger scale, we have about 15% vacancy in housing units (empty houses, rental units, and other unoccupied inventory) I would say it will be a while before we need more housing as a nation.

Cars:  We just bought a car for about the same price as the last new car I bought in 2002.  And this one is nicer.

Media:  I pay less for my phone, internet, cable TV, music, and movies than in the recent past.

Travel:  We seem to get great deals on airfare and hotels whenever we decide to travel.  We may be traveling more that we used too -- so this could be a net increase.

Healthcare:  Our family spending on healthcare -- even with insurance -- goes up significantly every year.

Education:  My kids are now in private school because I could not risk a public education.  Up a bunch here too.

In the end, more items are going down or staying flat than items going up.  The ones going up, healthcare and education, are going up a lot.  So my personal net GDP change is up.  This "growth" is pretty much a demographic thing -- my kids are growing up and requiring more medical attention and more education spending.  Without those two things, my individual GDP change would be down.

Our Standard of Living

We put a good deal of weight behind averages.  Whether it is GDP, GDP per capita, inflation rate, cost of living, or even the cost of gas -- these numbers are national averages that only tell part of the story.  There was a good opinion piece in the NY Times (from Reuters Breakingviews) yesterday about how Americans have gotten used to continual increases in living standards and how the wind has now turned against that trend.

Of course the article is citing the average living standard.  With the polarization of incomes becoming ever more dramatic, the average living standard does not tell the whole story.  Some people are doing better, the wealthiest 10 percent of households got 35% of income in 1980 and got 48% in 2008.  And the other end of the spectrum are the unemployed, now numbering 20 million.  Here is a good article on this subject in Businessweek if you want to read more.

The rising tide is not raising all of the ships.  Those in the knowledge economy that can compete on the world market will do well.  Anyone that wants to earn 10 times what someone offshore earns -- had better figure out how to contribute 10 times as much.

The Dinosaurs Have No Money

One of the best ways to move a large marketing organization from unmeasured marketing to measured marketing is to test everything and kill the things that cannot prove their value -- then move that budget to things that can prove their value.

This is not new, every sizable marketing organization has been doing this for at least a decade.  This reality translates to a great deal of disruption -- even if the overall budget is only changing slightly.  

The same thing is happening in the labor market.  Our unemployment rate is stuck at 10%, but 3.2 million new jobs were created in August.  This number cannot be evaluated without also looking at the job separations -- also 3.2 million.  So no net new jobs -- no change in unemployment rate.

Some would say that nothing is happening in either marketing or employment.  I say that a great deal is happening.  For every dinosaur company that is letting people go, there is a rising company hiring.  For every dog of a marketing idea getting killed, there is a new one starting up.

The next time you hear "we have no budget for that" remember that somewhere else someone is saying "let's do it!".

LATER:  Jobs numbers just out:  95,000 net jobs lost in September.

The Media Spotlight Eludes the Enterprise

Even people immersed in enterprise computing would rather follow the latest product announcement by Apple or Facebook than the latest news about Network Attached Storage, or Business Intelligence Software.

You might be thinking that those business IT people probably have their own media outlets to follow and we just don't see them.  After all, we don't see news about the sewage treatment industry either but we know it is there.

I would think CIO magazine would be the place that the enterprise types hang out.  Top story today?  Windows Phone 7 and Verizon gets the iPhone.

According to Gartner the 2010 worldwide IT spending by the Enterprise will be $2.4 trillion of an overall market of $3.4 trillion.   Those of you doing the math know this makes the enterprise 72% of all IT spending.  Add into this the fact that many of the consumer tech companies like Google and Facebook are really paid in advertising dollars -- and we can't help but conclude that the technology industry is clearly dominated by the budgets of businesses.

So why no coverage?

According to Wikipiedia, Business Intelligence is computer based techniques used in spotting, digging out, and analyzing business data....often aimed to support better business decision making.  According to Gartner, the German firm SAP is the leader in the Business Intelligence market with 22.4 percent share.

This stuff is just not interesting.  No wonder we all just want to talk about the movie about Zuckerberg.

We have to figure out how to make enterprise computing interesting.

Facebook is the Paris Hilton of Tech

Smart phones, tablets, TVs, app stores, Twitter, and Facebook (and the movie) sure seem to get the bulk of media attention.  HP now has over $114 billion in revenues, the largest part generated selling to the enterprise, but their consumer products get all of the coverage.  IBM has 400,000 employees and also generates nearly $100 billion in revenues – rarely ever mentioned – because it is focused on the enterprise.  Microsoft, well Microsoft just never gets mentioned.  See my post the other day on the Pew Study.  If Larry Ellison wasn’t pulling stunts with the Americas Cup or Mark Hurd, no one would ever cover Oracle in the media.

Real work is being done hardening networks against cyber terrorism, lowering total cost of computing, developing and enforcing enterprise standards, safeguarding large amounts of sensitive data, and developing industry specific solutions.  This work is done with rarely a mention in the press.  My explanation:  enterprise computing is complicated, hard to understand or explain, and most of all it is boring.  To Journalists, Facebook is Paris Hilton.  Write about either of them and your web site gets hits.  Write about lowering energy consumption in data centers and you might as well be covering anything having to do with sub Saharan Africa’s problems.

We really have not had big coverage of business tech issues since Y2K – over a decade ago.  Could it be that we are due for a surge in enterprise coverage?  It may make sense to think for a minute about events that could cause this to happen and how it might impact the technology industry.

Here are three things that could bring enterprise computing closer to the center of technology media coverage:

1. A Big Security Event:  Let’s hope it never happens, but if a big section of the power grid goes down, or all of the credit cards become inoperable, or a cyber attack crashes the stock market, the media will start to pay attention.
2. Follow the Jobs:  If big tech starts hiring again and makes a dent in the unemployment rate it will be a big story.  Unfortunately, this probably is a result of the changes we would like to see instead of the cause. 
3. Someone Connects the Dots: Google and Facebook are largely considered consumer businesses.  They are however, big enterprise operations in their own right however.  The media could latch onto the fact that Google’s network of data centers, gigantic databases, and all of the infrastructure required to run its business is cool and worth paying attention to.

What would change and why should we care?

1. The Money Follows the Media:  A lot has been written lately about how the VC business is changing.  The story is that the investment exits are not there and new tech start ups don’t need as much money to start.  It is true that someone building for the Apple App store does not need to raise much if any venture capital, and may never go public.  Venture capital is needed just as much now as ever before.  The VCs do seem to follow the media, so if the media goes enterprise, maybe the VCs will too.  Thomas Friedman would sure be happy if we started funding green tech instead of another Twitter clone.
2. Exports Up:  Technology innovation is something we can do well and we can export.  Enterprise computing is harder to knock off than a movie or an iPhone. If we build more capacity in our big business computing services – we could export it.  Companies like IBM, HP, Microsoft, Oracle, and others are already doing this in a big way – so we know how to do it.  And the balance of trade needs attention.
3. Do Our Part:  If this were to happen, all of us could be proud of our contribution to the worldwide economic recovery.  Instead of presenting a military face to the world, or fancy financial engineering – which deploys just as much of a scorched earth approach as the military, we could be helping companies and governments around the world increase their productivity.  And they would pay us for it!  Good for us and for them. 

I hope someone figures out how to make enterprise computing interesting enough to get some media attention.  Could do us all some good.

Packing Brains instead of UHauls

Anyone who has tried to hire a software engineer lately will tell you that the unemployment rate in that part of our economy is just as low as it always was.  It would fit my experience to say that the unemployment rate in the tech industry is around 5% - which is half the national average of 10% and a third of the often cited number of over 15% which counts the people who are underemployed or who have quit looking for work.

So people with the right skills do not have any problem finding a job right now.  And since averages are pretty straightforward, we know that for everyone who is experiencing 5% unemployment, there must be another person experiencing 25% unemployment, to make the average 15%.

When comparing the US to the Euro-zone, economists often cite worker mobility as the reason the US consistently outperforms.  The mobility the economists are talking about here is physical.  An American will move from Detroit to Dallas for a job before a European will move from Greece to Germany.  In China people are moving to the cities before they even have jobs - but that is another story. 

In a knowledge economy, the willingness or ability to relocate does not solve the problem.  Our workers need to repack their brains instead of UHauls in order to move from the 25% group to the 5% group.  In fact, the way the work follows the smart people around now, there is no need for the UHaul at all.  Just pack your brain with the right knowledge and the work will come to you.

We saw "Waiting For Superman" last night.  I will write more about that later.  The movie paints a big target on the teachers unions -- a fight I am very interested in following.  The teachers unions, and all of our unions, are in a perfect position to play a critical role in the packing of American brains to compete on a world stage.  In the area of education, the teachers unions have two layers because they have to decide if they want the teachers to get smarter, so the teachers can make all of the students smarter.  This is unbelievable leverage and one of the reasons so many people in the technology industry (from Bill Gates to George Lucas) are trying to figure out how to fix our education system.

If you are thinking about seeing the movie -- do.  My only complaint is that it is about half an hour too long.  If you want to think more about this subject, check out my review of Work Hard, Be Nice.

Pew Says Tech is less than 2% of Media Coverage

If you are interested in technology media coverage or new media, you should take half an hour and study the report just out from the Pew Research Center.  Here are the main points I took from reading it:

Echo-chamber: Technology coverage in mainstream media is less than 2% of the total.  This just shows how those of us in the industry spend all of our time talking at each other!  Twitter is more reflective of the tech biz with 51% about technology.  So anyone getting their news from Twitter is going to have the bias of a technology insider.  

Microsoft is in the back of the media bus:  Of companies featured in the media it was 15% to Apple, 11% to Google, and Microsoft comes in at 3%.  Jay Rosen and Dave Winer had an interesting take on it on Rebooting the News this week.  They proposed that Google and Apple are fighting on purpose just to suck all of the oxygen away from Microsoft and everyone else.  Whatever the reason, it is apparent to people on the inside and the real world that Microsoft is not making the news these days.

Keep it Simple:  If you want to get into the main stream media, keep your story simple.  The study has a stark example comparing policy coverage on texting while driving to policy coverage on net neutrality.  Texting got 12% and net neutrality got 2%.  If those of us in the industry cannot form a clear description of what net neutrality is:  how is anyone in the real world going to become interested?

No matter your take on the results, we are lucky to have a quality organization like Pew to do a study like this.

10 Reasons to Listen to This American Life 9/10/2010

Sorry to be tardy to the party, but I just today listened to the 9/10/2010 episode of This American Life, titled Right to Remain Silent.  Here are 10 reasons you should listen too.

1. If you have ever had a bad customer experience at an Apple store.
2. If you are looking for real life examples of the impact of the Patriot Act on average Americans.
3. If you are wondering if you can be arrested for posting a joke on Facebook (that you thought was private).
4. If you want to know if you should fear the police.
5. If you need some good examples on how performance measures induce the wrong behavior.
6. If you are wondering if there is anyone left that is trying to do the right thing.
7. If you think crime is really going up in NYC -- despite the "statistics".
8. If you think the decline in investigative reporting is important.
9. If you want to restore your faith in America (because WBEZ and Ira Glass were able to produce this show without fear of going to jail).
10. If you are looking for a reason to support public radio.

I could go on and on, just listen to it and let me know what you think.

One Button

I bought a new microwave over the summer and so far I have only used one of the buttons on the thing:  the Start button.  The software on this $120 machine is impressive.  I never read the manual, watched a tutorial, or anything.  If you push the Start button it sets the timer at 30 seconds and starts.  If you hold down the Start button it scrolls up in 30 second increments and starts after you release the button.  The thing has all kinds of other fancy functionality but I doubt I will ever use it.  An impressive design feat by GE, the maker of this particular machine.

I remember getting our first microwave oven in 1978.  At the time it was probably the only computer in our house.  It may in fact have been made by GE as well.  It was a bit complicated to run in that you had to enter the power setting with a particular sequence of keystrokes, and then enter the time setting with another specific sequence, and then push start.  It may have been possible without reading the manual, but read the manual we did.

The power setting, time setting, model was pretty consistent in all of the microwaves I owned for maybe 20 years.  Then the power part seemed to fade away, and then quick minute idea came on the scene sometime over the past 10 years. 

I bring this up because it is interesting that innovation in the microwave user interface sure seemed stalled for 20 years and then all of the sudden one big breakthrough.  I suppose part of the equation is the training of microwave users that happened along the way, but I bet the biggest part of the slowness in change was due to the focus of the engineers.  The turntable, lowering manufacturing cost, and other initiatives probably took priority.  With a little effort, the quick minute button could have been added in 1980.

The one button on my iPad also does a different thing in different contexts.  If the device is asleep, it turns it on.  If an application is open it closes it… quite elegant.  There is a big opportunity to invent technology that just works because someone spent the time to really think about how to make the one button work well.  Now if someone could only do that with my TV remote. 

My Track

I have been a boater for a long time.  Ever since the advent of navigation software in the early 90s I have been accumulating tracks.  Those dotted lines that follow my boat across the electronic chart.  I am closing in on twenty years of tracks and going back and looking at them would be fun.  I have upgraded and changed platforms to the extent that going back and mining those tracks is probably more work than I will ever do.  Maybe some long dark winter.

Now with GPS in my cars and phone, creating my personal track could be pretty fun.  When i think of the ultimate personal new years day review of the prior year, it would be cool to replay my track for the year on a globe.  I suspect it will be a few years until it is easy enough to do this.  For starters, right now I have no idea how to get my gps data out of my car.

If pressed to guess who will figure this out, I would say it will be Google.  Mash together an android phone and maps and presto.  Zoom right into street view and it would be just like reliving any part of my past.  Cool....  Yikes!  Some of this information could be sensitive.  Do I want to see my personal track badly enough to give that data to Google?

This brings up the best tweet I saw this week:  If you are notpaying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold” I think this is attributed to @lawrencebrown.  It is more accurate to say that your data is being sold. 

As we rush into using these cool new gizmos we are going to have to think more about this stuff.

American Jobs

Robert Scoble has a good post this week about keeping jobs in America.  He is absolutely right.  

Every single person in our country should be thinking about the balance of trade.  Each month we send away 40 billion dollars of our money.  This means we buy $40B more in goods from other countries than they buy from us.  This is not sustainable, and we all need to be thinking about it.

The trick of course is to create products in our country that can compete while paying a wage that can support the lifestyle to which we have become accustomed.

Thomas Friedman has a good piece on China vs the US in Jobs associated with climate change.  Here is a good quote:

So while America’s Republicans turned “climate change” into a four-letter word — J-O-K-E — China’s Communists also turned it into a four-letter word — J-O-B-S.

One of these days our elected leaders should probably stop crabbing at each other and get down to work.

Cool Car, Cool Idea

The new Tesla all electric sedan is not going to be out for over a year but that has not slowed down the Tesla PR machine.  Yesterday they did a joint announcement with Autodesk, the maker of Autocad computer aided design software about the new Model S going on display at Autodesk in San Francisco.  

This is a great example of using partnerships, in this case a vendor, to promote products.  Both Tesla Motors and Autodesk win and there is very little cost for either company.  Cool.

Follow the Money (budget) to the Money (revenue)

An interesting pattern is emerging in Tech Marketing.  The gap between the haves and the have nots is growing.  I don't mean the rich and poor citizens of our country, even though that gap is growing too, but the gap between the marketing ideas that get budget and the marketing ideas that do not.

The industry has been quantifying results for long enough now that senior decision makers are gaining confidence and cutting the budgets of marketing activities that cannot prove their value.  At the same time, new revenue is scarce and getting more valuable by the day, so those same budget cutters are increasing their spending on activities that work.

The days of doing the same thing as last year -- just because it was done last year (and the year before) -- are coming to a close.  The rotation is happening inside many large companies where one area is being starved of budget while another area is getting expanded resources.  I am sure there are examples of companies that are starving their entire marketing budget -- clearly not a strategy for survival.

All of this is about marketing ROI.  I don't mind bragging that my getting to the fourth paragraph of this post without actually invoking ROI, the most overused business term in the universe, is quite an achievement.  Want an eye roll in your meeting today -- start in about marketing ROI!  Anyone interested in restoring ROI to a position of usefulness in business dialog needs to campaign to tie ROI to the desired end result.  Discussion of ROI to intermediate results is a waste.  The desired result in marketing should be revenue, not impressions, page views, inquiries, leads, downloads or anything else that currently gets measured (because it is easier to measure).

If your idea can prove ROI to Revenue -- you will be in the big budget bucket.  ROI to intermediate metrics or no ROI at all -- the shrinking bucket. 

More Fuel for the Cloud

In the last 24 hours I have come across three stories in the media that give the cloud movement even more reason to be gaining momentum.  If you are following the cloud acceptance / cloud vs desktop story, you may want to check them out.

NPR On the Media - Laptop Searches at the Border:  The segment is towards the end, but the rest of the show is also worth listening to.  The story highlights the work of the ACLU in pursuit of the US Government for overly aggressive search and seizure of laptops at the borer.  This is a very good reason to use cloud services and not keep any data on your laptop.  I suspect the government is tracking activities on the cloud as well, so if you are up to no good -- you are probably no better off there.  But if you are a law abiding citizen worried about getting caught in the government's web -- the cloud is probably safer.

NY Times:  Microsoft + Russian Government against activists:  Unfortunately for Microsoft there is a very disturbing story on the front page of the NY Times today about how the Russian government is using Microsoft piracy claims to seize computers of people they don't like.  I suspect that if the Russian government wants to take your computer -- they are going to take your computer.  So again, the cloud would be a good place to put your data.  And for Microsoft -- any type of collaboration with the Russian government is likely to end badly (ouch!).

Dell Gets Blasted by the Haggler:  Again in today's NY Times the typical tale of woe.  Hard drive fails, sent back to Dell, lost again, lost again, in a Sisyphean tragedy we all know too well.  Same remedy, keep your data in the cloud and access it with multiple machines or devices or even someone else's machine.  Then you can still get your work done even while *insert vendor name here* is doing whatever they can to make your life miserable.

Maybe there is something to this cloud computing thing.

What I am Remembering About 9/11

Sometime in the 90s an unhappy rich guy in Saudi Arabia assembled his followers and said something like this:

We have few men and little money.

But we are smart and resourceful.

With careful planning and committment to our plan -- we will change the world.

And so he did.

He flew airplanes into the World Trade Center.

We responded just as he predicted.  We attacked Afghanistan and Iraq causing loss of life on a significant scale.  We spent enough of our credibility and money to seriously diminish our ability to influence the world for a long time to come.  

Meanwhile, we now realize that we are the pawn in the war Osama bin Laden was really fighting -- between moderate and extreme factions of Islam.  Say what you will about Osama bin Laden but it does appear that he is a smart guy who is committed his cause.  A formidable opponent even thought we spend more on defense than all of the other nations combined.

We should never forget 9/11.  For the innocent people we lost there.  And for the way were drawn in to a fight we did not understand, and had no hope of ever winning.  Time Magazine has a good piece on this today.  I hope we can follow through and withdraw.

Selling to the Enterprise is Hard Work

Selling is getting harder and this is causing a vicious cycle.  The harder it gets the more desperate salespeople get.  Desperate salespeople do unseemly things (lying to my gatekeeper is a minor offense compared to full on deception through the sales process).  Bad behavior by salespeople brings down any prospect's willingness to engage in any sales process -- making selling even harder.  And so on...  The deflationary trend in the economy only amplifies these problems.

Some companies get around this by eliminating salespeople all together.  Amazon and Google really don't have salespeople.  They have developed self service sales processes and have lowered their prices to a point where customers sell themselves.  I have a few posts on the topic of selling, here is a list.

Companies that sell complex products or services to big business clients (aka the enterprise), do not have the luxury automating and lowering the cost until the thing sells itself.  The most dramatic proof of this can be found in the sales and marketing budget of Salesforce.com.  I have a few posts about that as well, here is another list.  

What then do we do in an age where white papers and webinars and spam are well, just spam, and salespeople don't add value because any person with both the technical capability customers value and the social skills to be a salesperson increasingly chooses a technical career?   Here are two trends I have observed in the marketplace that may be the manifestation of this new reality:

Consolidation

Companies that know how to sell have a big advantage. Oracle is a company that knows how to sell.  Their sales practices are both legendary and ruthlessly efficient.  Sales and marketing at 20% of revenue may seem high, but only a fraction when compared to Salesforce.com's 50%+.  Think of it this way, when Salesforce.com spends a dollar on sales and marketing -- it gets $2 back.  When Oracle spends a dollar it gets $5 back.  Big difference.

It is this ability to sell to the enterprise that Oracle is counting on when it buys all of those companies.  Here is a blog post on SoftwareAdvice that has a great chart of the last 100 or so Oracle acquisitions.  There is no reason to think that Oracle is going to shy away from exploiting its unique ability to sell to the enterprise.  Gotta wonder of Oracle could fix Salesforce.com's cost of selling.  Hmmm.

More Dependence on Partners

Microsoft is a company that knows how to build partnerships.  In fact, running its channel partner program may be its core competency.  Microsoft partners know that Microsoft is committed to making them successful and both Microsoft and its partners invest side by side in the pursuit of new business.  Dell has recognized this and is working hard to build out a channel partner program as fast as possible.  If you sell to the enterprise, partners are critical.  

Consolidation + Partners = Opportunity

If companies that know how to sell to the enterprise acquire other companies, and companies that know how to sell to the enterprise rely heavily on channel partners, then the real work is going to happen when combining channel partner programs of merged or acquired companies.  We already see a great deal of this, and I suspect there will be more in the near future.  

The bottom line:  Highly valued high performance partners will benefit through this evolution.  Low performance partners will be redundant.  

The Changing Way I Use the Phone

I recently downgraded my cellular plan to less minutes per month.  This is the first time I have done this since I got my first mobile phone in 1989.  I suspect I am not alone.  After all why would Verizon be playing those silly "this message has not been heard; first unheard message..." games with voicemail -- just to boost minutes.  It is only a matter of time before we get the "Telephone is Dead" stories in the press.

Amazingly, I am spending more time on my office phone.  Not only that but the time I am spending on the office phone is of higher value than ever before.  Here is a list of the moving parts impacting all of this.

The Law:  Now that it is illegal to talk on the phone in the car without hands free -- and the quality of the hands free systems still do not make the grade -- I rarely talk on the phone in my car.  I don't have a Bentley and I have never found a hands free system that cancels out road noise.

Email:  Email is that other thing that the press likes to declare dead.  Email has been with us for long enough on smartphones -- that my team get's all of the short answers they need from me by email.  I don't email while driving, but in between meetings I check my email (never voicemail), so if something needs my attention it can usually find me within an hour or two.

Conference Calls:  Most of my phone time is spent on conference calls, and a good deal of those are augmented with shared desktops.  These calls are scheduled in advance by email, and prepared for.  They are much higher value than just plain phone calls.  Even before it was against the law, attending conference calls from the car was bad form.  The background noise, lost connections, and other distractions take away from the value everyone gets from the meeting.  Unless you are sitting in your hotel room with a great signal, attending conference calls on a mobile phone should not be done.  

Voicemail:  We have a new system that delivers my voicemails to my email inbox with a .wav file attached.  I get the caller ID info, so I can tell who called.  Most of the voicemails never get listened to.  The ones from people I know usually say:  "I will send you an email about this".  

The net for me:

• Mobile data up
• Mobile voice minutes down
• Office voice minutes up
• Voicemail minutes down

Never Lie to the Receptionist

I get about half a dozen telemarketing calls per day and I don't take any of them unless they slip by my amazing gatekeeper.  I suppose this is ironic because my firm is in the business of managing channel partner programs for technology companies -- work we do mostly over the phone!  Thousands of times per day our valiant front line team members depend on the kindness of the gatekeeper to patch them through to the decision maker.  Granted, most of the calls we make are to channel partners with established business partnerships with our clients, but ironic nonetheless.

The other day a slippery guy from New York got past Kim by saying I was expecting his call.  She checked with me first, and I did not recognize his name, but she and I agreed to let him through.  The first thing I asked him was how we met -- we hadn't.  I then asked how I could have been expecting his call -- there was no way I could have.  I then asked him if he had lied to Kim.  He said that he did in order to get past her.

Turns out he was an investment manager.  He wanted me to trust him with my investments.  I suspect he wanted me to do that shortly after I forgot that he lied to my gatekeeper.  As you can imagine, the call ended rather abruptly.

Never lie to the gatekeeper.  If you have something valuable to talk about sell it on its merits.  If not, don't call.