I have written several posts this year on the topic of selling and the future of salespeople. A good many of the articles involve Google because I think one of the central themes in Google's business is to eliminate the inefficiency of the sales process in general and salespeople in particular.
Clearly the sales process and salespeople are vulnerable. Salespeople strike out much more often than they make contact -- so much so that a part of sales training is to help salespeople handle the rejection. If a salesperson only closes one out of ten deals -- the salesperson is not producing value ninety percent of time! That is a pretty fat target.
On the other hand, if salespeople could close 100% of deals, they would be considered "order takers" and replaced by automation.
Salespeople are purveyors of information. They help people with problems find the solutions. Hey, that is the business Google is in - helping people find information. Could it be that if Google did its job better, anyone looking to buy anything could find that thing without the aid of a salesperson? For more on this see my post earlier in the year about the Changing Role of the Salesperson.
Enter the paid trusted advisor. Some will say this is that consultative selling stuff all over again, and maybe so, but either way salespeople as we knew them are on their way out. They will be replaced by consultants that get paid to advise. Instead of thinking of this as consultative selling, I prefer to think of it as Doctors of Selling. The salespeople that survive will be specialists -- just like doctors. They will be paid for all of their time, and they will differentiate through reputation and brand association.
Every other newspaper story in 2010 seems to include a reference to how this next generation of Americans will have it worse than their parents for the first time in well, ever. I have been there among the alarmists trying to get people to worry more about the balance of trade, the state of our educational system, corruption in Washington, and others issues. Change does not come easily to humans and we all know that the bigger the problem, the more likely we are to change our behavior. This creates bad news inflation to inspire change. We hear it all day every day from just about every interest group.
I have to wonder: Does it work? Do people really change their behavior from fear of bad things happening? There is some evidence that people do. There are many waterways in the US that have recovered from terrible pollution, we all recycle, and after suffering heart attacks - eating and exercise habits change. It could be said credibly then, that people's behaviors can evolve.
Alternatively, people often do new things. Electricity, railroads, the Panama canal, the car, the plane, the space race, the computer, the Internet, and the cellular phone came to us as new things. New things that humans adopted vigorously. These were revolutionary new things.
When talking with founders of start up companies or the people that finance them, the common belief is that new things get adopted if they are ten times better or ten times cheaper than the thing being displaced. The new thing gets adopted, the old thing dies, Schumpeter is proven right, and change happens. Revolution brings about much more change than evolution.
Could 2011 be the year where some of this revolution happens and we regain the hope that our kids will be better off than we are? Here are a few areas to watch:
- Innovation Engine: Innovation happens because the innovators have confidence that they will preserve the value of what they create. Many companies are built round the patent and copyright systems, but many more have captured the value of their innovation without those constructs. Neither Google or Facebook are protected by patents or copyrights. This structural IP protection scheme will fuel an explosion of innovation -- limited only by the ability of people to think freely.
- Leap Frog: The idea that an emerging nation can leap frog the developed nations by rapid deployment of new technologies is a myth. A village with no telephone landlines and just cell phones has acquired communications capabilities much faster than anyone had dreamed, but can anyone really argue that they have leap frogged over and ahead of a town that has had landlines for 100 years and has cell phones too? This phenomenon will create markets for products from the developed nations. The first will be healthcare, the second will be education, and right after that -- anything that conveys status.
- Work Redefined: Soon we will be re-allocating all of the time we used to spend as computer operators to other productive activities. This could represent a dramatic change in productivity. Here is a post on the subject from November 30.
I hope that 2011 is the year that the revolution takes hold. I hold out less hope for the evolution part. Either way it will be quite interesting to watch these things play out.
Yesterday I wrote about how much respect I had for Keith Richards regard for his heroes -- particularly once most of his contemporaries were worshiping themselves. On the theme of heroes, and not on my being Keith Richards but rather following his example, here are two of mine:
Dave Winer: A cantankerous techie who has returned to New York for yet another chapter of his career. If you are not already a follower, there is a pretty good page about him on Wikipedia here. His blog Scripting, and his podcast Rebooting the News with Jay Rosen are two that I follow, but he has done/is doing so much (see the links on his Scripting blog). I have never met him, but would thoroughly enjoy a beer and a lively discussion about tech -- particularly on his self removal from the middle of the circle in Silicon Valley to foster the growth of a new circle in NYC.
Steve Jobs: I am hardly the first guy to say that Steve Jobs is a hero. His work over the past 14 years at Apple says alot of it. Not that market cap is a true indicator of value, but here is a chart of the stock VS the NASDAQ since his return in 1997.
I imagine a moment when Steve is looking at prototypes of the iPod Touch, to this day I think it is the most amazing of his amazing machines, sometime in 2006 deciding on the size, what to have in or out, the fine points of the form factor... Mine lasted for three years, the third of which I was often heard marveling about how I used it every day and the magic was still there. The guy has a passion for what he does. Unbelievable.
Upon meeting him I would ask: have you ever hung out with Keith Richards?
Later: Links added and if you want to hear one of the best podcasts ever, listen to yesterday's Rebooting the news with Dave Winer, Jay Rosen, and Doc Searls (guest). There are some podcasts that I skim through at 2X, this one I am going to listen to twice.
I am sitting here in the Delta Lounge at Narita waiting to board my plane for home. Hardened travel veterans all around me. Who else would be here on Christmas week? In rolls an AirFrance Airbus 380. I knew they were making them, but I had lost track of whether they had been put in service.
The thing pulls up right in front of me between two 747s and everyone reaches for their cameras. If you have not spent much time flying in Asia, the 747 still rules here. Even if it was introduced in 1969. From my seat I can see 12 planes. All of them are widebodies, 6 are 747s, a DC10, two A340s, 3 777s, and the A380.
Ever since I few on a 707 to Manila in 1970 I have been a student following the planes. I don't know if anyone else was into
knowing the difference between the planes: they were pretty much all Boeing planes back then; probably didn't even get me 7 year old street cred, but I was into it anyway.
It is cool to see others marvel at this flying beast. It just pulled up right in front of my window.
I just finished reading Life by Keith Richards. Actually, I had Johnny Depp read it to me via Audible. An truly enjoyable experience even if it was hard to figure out why the voices were changing. Who knows, Depp may have been doing a little method acting and using while reading.
I am not a giant Rolling Stones guy, in fact the only CD I own is 40 Licks. But I am close to going out and buying the whole archive after experiencing Keith Richards through this book. I have a list of real reviews below. Here are my main take aways from this experience:
- Heroes: Keith Richards has heroes, and lots of them. He maintained his respect for venerable blues players like Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, and John Lee Hooker even after he eclipsed their accomplishments or discovered they were not all that he thought they would be. Most any guy who had done what he has would eventually expect the tables to turn, just like another well known guy in the band, and start thinking he was the hero. Not Keith Richards, at least not by my reading of Life
- Music: Keith Richards loves music. No way to avoid it in the book. He cannot live without creating music. What a passion. Anyone who is wondering if they should follow their passion (instead of being practical) should read this book and just do what cannot be avoided. He got to the point were he recreated the guitar as a 5 string instrument. I am not deep into music, but to me that sounds like unrestrained thinking.
- Changing the World: The Rolling Stones took black music, made in America, and played it back to Americans. These guys did as much for our civil rights movement as anyone. Anyone. Just crazy how they were colorblind. Even more than that, they were sought out the black side of town.
Have a great time with this one.
In recent posts here and here I have proposed that Facebook, Google, and Groupon are advertising companies because their clients pay them for advertising. I argued that they use the Internet and technology to do what they do, but that calling a company an Internet company is soon to seem very old fashioned. Would you call General Electric an electricity company? Would you call the New York Times a printing press company or an Internet company, or a news company? (I think news because they still do have subscribers that buy the paper, but advertising is right in there too.)
Where does Twitter fit in? Right now they don't seem to be getting paid for anything. It is likely that their monetization scheme will be advertising. Whatever they pick, I am sticking with my assertion that companies serve the people that pay them. Before long Twitter will be an advertising company too.
Here is a post from some time about about Third Party Payers. True, there are many industries with third party payment systems and most of them are broken. Companies would be smart to recognize that they serve their true masters -- those that pay the bills.
My daughter turned 13 last week and wants a Facebook page. So we were talking about it and had a very interesting conversation. In the end I agreed that she could have a Facebook page as long as she remembered this:
- Facebook makes money by selling your information to others
- People will form impressions of you by the way you present yourself on Facebook
- Once your information is on Facebook you can never take it back
It was an interesting conversation and as with many interesting conversations I came away with some realizations including the fact that a young person probably cannot opt out of Facebook. By the time she gets to college, the admissions people will be looking at all applicants in the context of their Facebook presence. Without one an applicant could be at a disadvantage.
So my final wrap up was the idea that Facebook is an advertisement to the world of you. Use it to your advantage.
While you are thinking about Facebook. You might want to check out the 60 minutes piece from last week. You may want to pick a different segment on the CBS site -- but after looking at a few of them, it is hard to find one that shows the whole Zuckerberg segment.
I have said the Google and Facebook are advertising companies. So is Groupon. Sure they have smart engineers and they build internet enabled tools, but they get paid by their clients for delivering advertising that works. They are advertising companies. These companies are not internet companies any more than General Electric is an electricity company.
Whether or not you think Andrew Mason was crazy for turning down six billion dollars (like I do) you have to respect the guy for building a business that is adding 3 million subscribers a week.
Here is a great video of his interview last week with Charlie Rose. Clearly a smart guy. And also very funny. Check it out here.
What do you get when you combine governments that oppress their citizens, the unrepressable nature of free speech, the Nobel Peace Prize, and citizens that are committed to freedom? A very interesting week in the news.
Manning, Assange, and Xaiobo are probably safer in jail than they would be if released. Accidents happen frequently and these three courageous men would be in danger of falling prey to an accident if not under the protection of their captors. Their captors are obligated to keep them alive by the bright light we are all shining on these events. I shudder to think of what would happen if that light went out.
Our mistrust of government, the foundation of our constitution, is what makes our country resistant to the corrupting influence of power. If we are going to prevail as a nation it will be because we support people who are willing to put themselves in harms way to end a war or end a governments oppression of their own citizens.
The war in Afghanistan is now the longest war we have ever fought.
If you are interested in this subject, here are a few links you may want to follow:
Bradley Manning Wikipedia Page
Daniel Ellsberg Wikipedia Page
Daniel Ellsberg Speaking in Bradley Manning's Defense
Wikipedia Page on Article Three of the Constitution
Huffingtong Post on Liu Xaiobo
New York Times on the Nobel Prize
New York Times on Keeping Secrets Wikisafe
As you know I did not go to Paris. I was here in Seattle with my team working to learn as much as we could about observing awesome events like LeWeb over the internet. And learn we did.
We have now watched the live stream or the video for 45 sessions, and we still have 16 to go. We have provided notes on these sessions, links to the videos, and links to as many other blog posts as we could find.
We are very interested to know if you think we are in fact making it easier to follow events on the web. Please take a minute to check out our new web site and give us your feedback.
The Site: www.shownotes.co
Twitter Feed: @show_notes
Today we are launching our new web site to help technology people follow events from a distance. Check it out at www.shownotes.co.
There is so much content flowing out of leading technology events that following over the web has gone from impossible: before the tools were there; to possible: as live blogging, live streaming, and Twitter gained momentum; and back to impossible again: because the volume of content is overwhelming.
Shownotes.co is our attempt to answer this challenge. We are going to do our best to help people watch LeWeb in Paris -- starting tomorrow. The organizers have live video streams of both stages, and there are dozens of people blogging and writing about the event as it happens.
Check it out and let me know what you think.
The mainstream media, lead by the venerable brand of the New York Times, and new media are all abuzz about a bad person on the Internet. There have always been bad people on the Internet, and Borker is hardly the worst. There are bad people in the offline world too. This is not news.
The most disappointing thing in all of this is that the editor at the NY Times did not do what an editor should have done and said:
If you only have one person to site, it is not fair to draw the generalization that Google's search results can be gamed by bad people inflaming customers with their bad behavior.
OR
You cannot do a story about Google if you do not have a response from Google. The whole article is about Google.
I hope the next time the New York Times gets a story like this the editor stops it and tells the reporter to go get a job in the tabloids.
I have not put links in this story on purpose. If you have somehow missed this whole episode, consider yourself lucky.
There is an article in Fortune magazine this month about short seller James Chanos and his big bet against China. I have written a fair amount about China, one of my first posts is still my favorite: Do We Want China to Fail?
The competitor in all of us wants to win, and China failing would be one way to accomplish that. Despite this, I still think a failure in China would be bad for everyone. Certainly it would be bad for the Chinese, but here are a few reasons why it would be bad for those of us in the technology industry:
- IP Theft. The work that the Chinese government is just now starting to do on piracy and IP theft will be the first thing abandoned if things turn for the worst.
- Aggressive Cyber Behavior: The Chinese government is already allowing or maybe even sponsoring efforts to compromise computer networks in the US. A stable and prosperous China will give us the chance to address this diplomatically.
- Nationalization: Fear of a Chinese economic collapse could drive nationalist factions inside China to take control of foreign investments in China with government support.
- Loss of a Market: While there is sufficient evidence that China wants the domestic consumer market to be served mostly by domestic companies, there will always be opportunities for US companies to benefit from a rising China. A declining China would remove the opportunity for either domestic or foreign technology companies.
So we want China to continue to succeed in raising itself up in the world economy. We absolutely want to stay ahead by making ourselves more competitive. James Chanos has some good arguments about why China may be in trouble. Let's hope he is wrong this time.
I read a study once that said if you want to change the culture of a company it will take 7 years -- unless you replace 50% of the employees. Have you ever watched a company move its headquarters more than a few hundred miles and wondered -- why are they doing that? It must be an incredible distraction! And think of all the people that would quit..... Ahhhhh.... I get it.
A similar thing happens when a company decides to buy an enterprise level business application. The reasons are not always what they seem. Senior decision makers buy Salesforce.com because they want their salespeople to sell. Selling is hard work and many salespeople would rather stay in the office and work on reports than go out and do the heavy lifting. Standardized reports from Salesforce.com can fix that in a minute. When someone else is producing the reports -- salespeople have nothing else to do but sell. Salesforce.com does not even have to be good. It just has to take away all of the excuses for not selling.
The proliferation of cloud based business applications that just work, and enable knowledge workers to focus 100% of their effort on their actual jobs, will produce the next 10x jump in knowledge worker productivity. (see my post yesterday for more on this thought).
For the past 25 years every knowledge worker has needed a certain amount of technical skill in order to work. Knowledge of operating systems, general business applications, and job specific tools have been required in order for a knowledge worker to add value and justify getting paid. So work has been a combination of operating the computer and doing the actual work.
Initially, the increases in productivity were astounding. Moving from a hand written ledger to a spreadsheet application was at least a 10x increase in worker productivity. I am no productivity expert, but my own personal experience would lead me to conclude that over the past 10 years this trend has flattened. Once computers got sufficiently powerful to do the work normal knowledge workers needed done, the tool makers just added complexity -- which may have even reversed some of the productivity gains.
The last big improvement in knowledge worker productivity was probably the widespread adoption of email with attachments. this would have been in the mid to late 90's. Since then computers have gotten smaller, faster, and cheaper -- but they have not given us a 10x improvement in productivity. We can stay in touch with our friends using social media, and watch movies anywhere anytime, but these have not been leaps forward in worker productivity. We are overdue for the next big step forward.
I bet there was a time when drivers of automobiles could drive without having know anything mechanical. They just got in and turned the key. Soon the knowledge worker will not have to know anything about computers in order to add value and justify getting paid. Computers will just work and knowledge workers will be able to spend 100% of their energy on their jobs.
One could argue that the time spent now on keeping a laptop running is less than 10% of a knowledge worker's effort. So removing this would not produce a 10x productivity improvement. I propose that many workers confuse the time they spend serving as computer operators as a value added activity. Building spreadsheets is work -- right? Once a knowledge worker can dedicate all effort towards the actual job -- big gains in productivity will occur.
I can give my daughter an iPad and she just knows what to do. No time spent being a computer operator. Soon we will be able to do the same thing at work. A new person to the team could contribute value on day 1 -- 100% of the time.
It is a formula I am naturally drawn to. A young smart protagonist (or two) is up against the establishment with every reason to fail. Add in a rich historical context with a hit of actual facts and I am hooked. Ken Follett delivers a satisfying ride through the war to end all wars in the Fall of Giants. I will leave the literary criticism to the experts at the New York Times and the Washington Post who have done an able job summarizing the story and pointing out the shortfalls of the author.
Here are a few notes on what I took away from the book:
- There were so many characters losing their virginity that I lost count. I suppose this could be a metaphor about the nobles losing their innocence -- but sacrificing virgins to the dragon is likely a better parallel. I don't remember there being so much sweaty smut in Pillars of the Earth or World Without End. It makes me wonder if the author is compensating for something.
- In Pillars of the Earth and World Without End, the guilds (labor unions) were standing in the way of progress, in this book the labor unions save the day. This is an interesting switch.
- The idea that big changes cook for a long time before they surprise their victims is quite applicable to our world today.
- There is an Ayn Randian thread that runs through these three books that I cannot quite put my finger on. Clearly Ayn Rand would not have been a fan of the labor unions, but Billy, Ethel, Merthin, Caris, Jack and Aliena all have the genes of Howard Roark.
In reviewing Ken Follett's Wikipedia page today I realize that he has written an entire shelf of books since Pillars that I have never heard of. I am going to have to check those out. Hopefully it will take him a year or two to write the next 1,000 pages of this trilogy.
One other thing. I listened to this book as an audiobook from Audible. The narration by John Lee was incredible.
This week the Economist Annual predictions issue hits the news stands and I am really looking forward to it. Here is a preview from the Editor, Daniel Franklin. The Economist podcast also had a terrific installment on 11/23 featuring Paul Saffo from Stanford, one of the people to be in the Annual this year as a futurologist.
I found his comments fascinating. Here are some paraphrased notes:
- When looking at change there are three types of things: constants, cycles, and novelties, and the novelties are a tiny minority. One novelty to watch going forward is the fact that more people live in urban environments than rural environments for the first time ever. A trend that has been underway for maybe 5,000 years.
- It takes 15 years to become an overnight success. If you are looking for something that is going to be big next year, look for the thing that has been failing for the last 15 years. Robotics fits the mold for next year.
- Pessimism is the new black.
- The nature of capitalism is changing. There could be three flavors going forward: Entrepreneurial in the US, Community in Asia, and Cultural in Europe.
He rounds it out with the prediction of a totally new religion. We have not had a new god in 2,000 years. Here is the print version of that part.
Product designers live in a cruel world. The distance between delightful and disaster is very small, but like an egg balanced on the peak of a roof, it only takes a fraction of an inch to be rolling the wrong way. I have had a Droid X for a few months now and there is no doubt it is a well engineered device and that Android is a viable operating system. Unfortunately for Google and Motorola, it is not a delight to use.
I don’t have an iPhone, but I do have an iPod Touch and it is a delight to use. I first got it in 2007 and it still just feels good when I pick it up. I rarely ever find myself staring at it without knowing how to do what I want to do. Even after three years I am still regularly amazed by the elegance of its design.
This is the mastery of Steve Jobs and he is so very far ahead of everyone else. If you want to be inspired, read this great blog post about Steve Jobs and Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid.
The idea is that great designs already exist in the universe and people like Steve Jobs and Edwin Land discover them.
Getting work done is an illusive thing. I get my real work done early in the morning -- everyone has their way of getting the uninterrupted time they need to do something useful.
Jason Fried from 37Signals has this great TEDx talk on the subject.
In the presentation he talks about the two Ms: Managers and Meetings, from which come all things that prevent getting real work done.
Here are some good quotes:
- Managers are people whos job it is to interrupt people.
- They don't really do the work so they have to make sure everyone else is doing the work -- and that is an interruption.
- The thing that is worse (than interruptions) is the thing that managers do most of all and that is call meetings.
- Meetings are just toxic, terrible, poisonous things during the day.
- Meetings procreate. One meeting leads to another meeting...
What to do?
He goes on to suggest three ways to make the office into a place where work gets done:
- No talk days -- so people can actually do some work
- Switch from active communication (meetings) to passive communications (email)
- Cancel the next meeting -- you will find that everything is just fine.
Jason Fried runs 37 Signals, a company that provides elegant web based tools for getting work done. They have a pretty good blog called Signal vs Noise that I recommend to anyone interested in this subject.
