Michael Lewis article on The End of Wall Street

A friend sent me an article by Liar's Poker author Michael Lewis about The End of Wall Street .

In the article he expertly weaves in anecdotes about subprime mortgages, CDOs, rating agencies and his old boss, John Gutfreund, former CEO of Salomon.

I heard Gutfreund speak at the 2002 Columbia Business School panel that that Lewis referenced in this article. Oddly enough, the panel was held on the eve of the first year corporate finance final and so it was sparsely attended. It was a surreal event -- Gutfreund didn't weep, but he almost broke down when he recounted how proud he was of his son's decision to become a teacher. Having read Liar’s Poker years before, I sat there, puzzled that many of my investment bank bound classmates who had the most to gain from hearing Gutfreund and the other speakers were still studying for the corporate finance final, unlike myself.

Will your data be your destiny?

It is not enough to work to protect your own data these days. You must also think about how the myriad organizations you deal with protect your data, whether or not you have a choice in the matter. Let’s look at a few examples and consider their implications.

Web browsing habits from the home, which may bring out the lowest common denominator in many people, though mostly innocuous, were initially ordered to be revealed by user name in the Viacom v. YouTube case before bulk views was agreed upon.

Many people have grown accustomed to using publicly available online resources where the implicit way these same resources are managed changes over time. Over the years we’ve seen companies that provide free email turn specific messages over to authorities, such as when Yahoo provided a journalist’s email to his government which then imprisoned him for divulging state secrets.

An employee of PA Consulting Group lost a memory stick with unencrypted data on tens of thousands of prisoners in the UK. The worst here is that the loss itself does not represent the real incompetence. I’m sure people will continue to lose things well into the future. But my guess is that the data were unencrypted and on a memory stick simply for the convenience of working with them in that format. It was probably PA Consulting Group policy not to work that way, but with a tight deadline, less safe timesaving methods were used.

There are further examples of how corporations do not protect personal information simply because they do not deem it worthwhile. For example, ConEd online account information (address, phone number, email) is available simply by inputting an account number. No password is required.

The Princeton Review published personal information and test scores for tens of thousands of students on its website.

There is also the possibility of data theft after information is turned over (we see enough examples of thieves stealing or companies losing credit card, social security and other personal data).

Protecting personal information is not solely in the domain of the individual. Companies that have access to personal data will continue to lose this data in the future. We just have to ask that they do a better job of protecting this data to begin with and give individuals a clear and easy to use option of keeping their data private.

Seriousness to the individual of the following:
Viacom v. YouTube: low to medium, depending on ability to identify individuals from the data.
Yahoo email share: high, since this resulted in a prison term for the journalist.
PA Consulting Group memory stick loss: potentially high.
ConEd: medium. Mostly a risk of identity theft or unintended pranks such as changing address or payment schedules.
Princeton Review posts student data: low to medium. More of an ability to snoop on data that will eventually be revealed to schools to which the students apply.
Credit card or Social Security data theft: medium to high. Opportunity for identity theft and fraud.

Sunday, August 18, 1805

I recently read the Journals of Lewis and Clark, a nearly day-by-day account of the expedition sent by Thomas Jefferson to survey the Louisiana Purchase. Here is one journal entry from Meriwether Lewis on his birthday, while passing through what became the state of Montana.

Sunday, August 18, 1805

“This day I completed my thirty-first year and conceived that I had, in all human probability, now existed about half the period which I am to remain in this sublunary world. I reflected that I had as yet done very little, very little, indeed, to further the happiness of the human race or to advance the information of the succeeding generation… [I] endeavor to promote those two primary objects of human experience, by giving them the aid of that portion of talents which nature and fortune have bestowed on me, or in [the] future to live for mankind as I have heretofore lived for myself.”

With improved health and longer lifespans today, maybe people can get away with having this thought at age 39, instead of 31 (though Lewis only lived another four years). But still, for someone who had achieved much at a young age, what a journal entry.

A riveting definition of impact

An online search of some business and innovation keywords led me to the following sentence used by a well-known organization to describe itself:
“Make a difference. Make History. Our products have captured the attention, imagination and loyalty of generations of diverse individuals since our founding over 150 years ago.”

Any organization that can claim to have such a rich cultural impact over a century and a half while also appealing to individuals to join and “make a difference” and “make history” must be quite impressive. I tried to guess what organization it was. I was way off. The above sentences came from a Levi-Strauss ad.

No disrespect to Levis or to the fashion industry but jeans were not the first thing I thought of when the search engine presented me with that sentence.

But then again, as the world has moved from local, customized artisanal production to mass production handled by global entities, the sheer size of these organizations does allow them to claim wide impact on the way people live. At large scale, whether clothing, food production, communications, transportation, retailing, or entertainment, a more efficient process or innovation in design can truly have an impact on millions of people.

The Levis ad later states that it had an impact on “activewear for women in the early 20th century” (could it have helped the passage of the 19th Amendment?) and led the “casual businesswear revolution of the 1990s” (would dotcom employees have worn suits instead?). If Levis thinks of itself in these terms, then why don’t more organizations appeal to individuals similarly?

The pastry that changed my life and a new stage for business

I recently sampled a kouign aman made by my friend Romina, who is a pastry chef superstar and an amazing person. Her kouign aman immediately became my favorite pastry. Too bad she lives two thousand miles away.

Romina was in NYC recently and worked as a stagaire at a couple of restaurants here. The concept behind the stage is that a chef will work in another’s kitchen for a day or so in order to get exposure to other techniques or cuisines. Restaurants are certainly businesses and I began to imagine whether non-food business managers could offer the same courtesy to colleagues from other organizations.

What would work the same:
- The stagaire agrees to respect specific innovations of the organization itself
- The stagaire actively contributes to the new organization
- The stagaire quickly learns and appreciates what could apply to his/her own business back home

What would work differently:
- The timeframe would need to be longer. A one-day stage in an office probably wouldn’t suffice, whereas a one-day stage in a restaurant would
- While anyone in an organization as a stagaire would be trusted by the owner/manager, their presence may be viewed differently by compliance organizations and other employees. Security issues would need to be addressed
- In non-food businesses, the stagaire may be better off observing, sitting in on meetings and discussing with the manager at day’s end

In a sense, the traditional management consultant is something of a reverse stagaire, going into a new organization for a time to bring in ideas and processes from outside and not necessarily having the relevance to apply what he/she sees on the client side to the consultancy. Other than consultants, typical business stage-like exchanges include the formal (case studies, articles, best practices) and the informal (talking business outside of work). It’s important to do this, no matter what business you’re in.

Photo fakes, data loss and co-evolution

Over the last year there have been some high-profile photographs that initially caught the world’s attention and were then revealed to be fakes.

Picking some that I followed in the news we have the recent famous photo fakes from China (which for some reason are all animal-based) and include the wild tiger, photo contest pigeon shot, and antelopes by the new train to Tibet.

Now we also have augmented photos from the recent Iranian missile launch.

Sure, photographs have been altered since there has been photography and some fakes have lasted more than 100 years before being found out (such as one from the US Civil War). Intentionally doctored photographs were more difficult to make but certainly were made in the past.

One thing that all of the above examples have in common is that the doctored photos improve upon the composition of the original. The other thing they have in common is that they lessen the belief that we have in the photographic image, especially those from official sources. Further, the notoriety of these fakes will not dissuade people from creating more fakes; rather, more care will be taken and future fakes will be harder to spot until fake-spotting techniques also advance, resulting in better faking techniques, ad nauseum.

The issue is one of co-evolution. That is, once there is a way of protecting something valuable – a lock and key, for example – eventually someone will develop a way to pick the lock. We see this in areas as varied as encryption technology, the recent man-in-the-middle attack that freed the hostages in Colombia, elongated trumpet-vine flowers matched with elongated hummingbird beaks, and so on.

This continuous development of ways to break through security requires that corporations continually step-up controls on sensitive data. It is also why we can always expect to hear about examples of unintentional data loss in items as varied as social security numbers, pension data and credit card numbers. Mistakes also happen (a laptop with sensitive data is left on a bus) and databases are hacked. Since we have to share some degree of personal data in order to easily maneuver our way through this world, we need to prepare for eventual possible data loss. Therefore, corporate (or personal) data security is not only a question of what you do to prevent data loss, it is about what you do after it occurs.

Burmese days

Over the years, working in Asia/Pacific I was fortunate to visit Burma (Myanmar) a couple of times. Apart from being an absolutely beautiful country, my experiences were often with people so friendly that they went out of their way to help travelers such as myself.

Some things in Burma are unnecessarily unusual. Take the currency, the kyat. When I first went there, the denominations still included 45 and 90 kyat bills. Those denominations were introduced by Ne Win, who believed that he would live to the age of 90 if the country had currency in multiples of nine. It worked.

So in other words, for the sake of one person, the entire country had to sacrifice simple efficiency in daily commerce.

Now we have a situation where the recent cyclone has killed tens of thousands of people and the Burmese junta prevented or limited foreign aid from entering the country, ostensibly because of a fear of looking weak or of losing power. Add to that the lack of investment in Burmese infrastructure, education and a slow openness to communication from outside (you need a permit to have a fax machine and the Internet was only selectively legalized in 2003).

So perhaps given their past experience and current realities it should not be surprising that the military junta decides to retreat and fortify its position in the new capital of Naypyidaw. There is just no benefit for the junta to try to improve the situation in the country if there is no possible way for them to remain in power afterwards. It therefore has to pull back and fortify itself in the new capital and try to postpone the inevitable.

If both think it’s the other one’s fault, neither one fixes it

I worked with a new telecommunications service provider that had started to send large volumes of voice traffic to China. As part of their buildup, they installed additional equipment and software from a third-party vendor. Initial computer-automated tests showed good call quality to selected cities and so they initiated the switchover early. The launch was a total flop.

The telecommunications service provider received many complaints about calls that did not connect and they had to replace the new service with a more expensive alternative. Accusations flew. The service provider said it was the fault of the equipment and software vendor. The equipment and software vendor said it was the fault of the service provider or even their customers who were dialing incorrect phone numbers. Both pointed to the initial successful tests as a reason for why it was the fault of the other. Nothing happened.

I didn't know who was at fault. I simply made 100 phone calls using the problematic telecom system. I made several calls to every province in the country over a couple of days.

About 1/2 of the calls failed. I knew that something was wrong so I looked at the location of the calls that failed; they were all in the same set of provinces. The successful calls were in the remaining provinces. Could it be as simple as that?

I talked to both the service provider and equipment/software vendor. We eventually discovered a slight difference in the way equipment across Chinese provinces handled the calls that led to the high failure rate. A slight tweak and call completion rate almost doubled.

Problems sometimes have simple solutions; taking an open approach without assigning blame can help us solve them.

Bear Stearns and the Tour de France

There is another case of email messages being used to identify possible wrongdoers in the financial services industry (see “Prosecutors in Bear Case Zero In On Email”, Wall Street Journal).

Anyone in the US financial services industry should be well aware that regulatory compliance requires that employee email, IMs and file uploads are tracked and cached. Over the last decade when prominent cases emerged where old emails were used as evidence I thought that this common knowledge would not so much improve ethical standards as push unethical behavior to other forums, such as the phone, face-to-face meetings and the use of allusions.

So it is surprising to see people make the same mistake as recently as mid-2007, as the Bear Stearns employees’ old emails may show that they acted contrary to their clients’ interest. My take is that as long as enough money was being made, sketchy actions that improved performance did not attract notice, but once the market tanked, it became a matter of assigning responsibility. Electronic messaging supervision (the active monitoring and spot-checking of emails by compliance personnel) helps catch problematic behavior, but not even the best system can catch every ethical lapse as it occurs.

Breaking the rules in sports is similar. In ultra-competitive contests such as the Tour de France, cyclists have used doping in order to qualify and perform above their natural peak. Again, this strategy calls for breaking the rules to improve performance. Doping is not used by all competitors, but one must assume that all competitors have the ability to use it. Prize money is high. Some are caught and some not. And in the Tour de France, this has been going on for the last century.

Hence the paradox: there are industries and contests so competitive that it can be necessary to break the rules in order to compete. Governance bodies then often eventually identify and ban these same rule-breakers, but only after they have done the damage. A behavior may be prohibited (insider trading, options backdating, doping) but the means to catch the behavior often lags behind the means to evade detection.

Perhaps the only means to reduce these types of unethical behavior is to reduce the dramatic temptation that huge compensation gives to the competitors, whether in the form of a massive annual bonus or prize money and future sponsorship contracts.

Cost/Benefit analysis and the Bryant Park chairs

There are several thousand folding chairs at Bryant Park and by the front of the New York Public Library. None of the chairs are collected or locked up at night: they stay out all the time, a fact that sometimes surprises people. Does it make sense for it to be otherwise? Back of the envelope calculations follow.

Assets
Number of chairs estimate: 3,000
List price $149 per set of two; estimated volume discounted price of $50 each
Total estimated chair asset cost: $150,000

Setup time calculation
Number of chairs that can be set up / collected per person per hour: 600
Number of people setting up / collecting chairs: 5
Time to set up / collect chairs: 1 hour each

Chair setup and collection costs
People involved: 5
Hours involved: 2 per day
Wage per hour estimate: $8
Assume chairs are set up daily: 365 days per year
Total cost of chair setup and collection: $29,200 per year

Chairs replaced per year
Wear and tear: 400 chairs x $50
Total: $20,000

Chairs lost to theft: 5 – 6 per year:
Total cost: $250 - $300

You might quibble with some of the numbers, but the direction is on target. This means that for Bryant Park, there is no economic reason to have people set up and collect the chairs every day. Chairs lost to theft do not even cost 1% of the overall labor, to say nothing of lost use of the chairs at night and I’d even argue, a loss of goodwill. For businesses, trust can be a good value.

The above is representative of some of the work Inticiti does.

On the chair I sat in today, the following plaque:
“Look at all the people”
For 10 years he helped make Bryant Park great.
Mel Kopelman 1926 – 2003.

Thanks, Mel.

Keyboards, convention, efficiency and luck

When Christopher Sholes designed the QWERTY keyboard layout for early typewriters, it was partially to separate the keys of letters commonly used together and thus prevent key jams, which had a secondary effect of slowing down typists once key jams were no longer a problem.

But still, the QWERTY standard is seen on almost all English language keyboards even though it is not the optimal placement of keys. Rather than learn a new arrangement, like the Dvorak keyboard, most people prefer to stick with what they know. (The world’s record for fastest English language typing is held by Barbara Blackburn, using the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard. She had a peak speed of 212 wpm.)

So while most of the English language world uses a substandard keyboard layout what impact does this have on typists of other languages? Is it possible that some languages, purely by luck of letter frequency, use the QWERTY keyboard more efficiently than English language typists?

I looked at the languages for which I had data: English, French, German, Spanish, Esperanto (why not), Italian, Turkish and Swedish and mapped letter frequency to the QWERTY keyboard. A screen shot is below.

Doing a true comparison of keyboard efficiency in different languages calls for typing speed tests (of letter, not word speed), but lacking these data I made some assumptions. To compare the effect on different languages, I assumed that the Dvorak model was ideal and measured the degree to which the foreign languages followed that model of putting high frequency letters in the middle row and weighted to the right hand.

And the winner is… Esperanto. Yes, by chance, this artificial language should have a faster typing speed than the others. Losers in the speed contest are German and French, both of which have their highest frequency letters in the top row and to the left. That’s the power of convention and luck on efficiency, whether on keyboards or in business.

Then again, maybe we shouldn’t focus on typing fast but rather on writing thoughtfully and well…

Fool’s return?

Beatrice Otto’s book “Fools Are Everywhere” reintroduces the role of the Fool (or Jester) in history around the world. In many past royal and religious courts, Fools acted as a type of advisor to the leadership, having close access to the leadership and the context in which to say anything. Only the Fool could speak so directly, simply and humorously to the leadership and by doing so change accepted thinking and get results.

With the commonplace seriousness of many business organizations, this can a difficult role to reintroduce, though some organizations have attempted just that. A notable example was the Corporate Jester position that Paul Birch held at British Airways (until he was… dismissed). Smaller, more entrepreneurial organizations may take more kindly to the role, but then again, by being less hierarchical in the first place, they may not need it as much. David Firth, author of "The Corporate Fool" offers instruction on the roles that a Corporate Jester should take to make a positive organizational difference. These roles are: alienator, confidant, contrarian, midwife (creative thinking), jester, mapper (knowing who knows), mediator, satirist, truthseeker.

These are basically the types of behavior we would expect to be found informally throughout a healthy organization.

Would Fools have made a difference to the behavior of businesspeople engaged in dubious behavior, such as stock option backdating, sub-prime mortgage issuance, or accounting scandals? This is a tough question but I believe that the difference is that Fools in the past could absorb enough of an understanding of the issues to comment with clarity, direction and wit. Today’s business problems may be more complex (as in the financial scandals) and impenetrable (requiring technical knowledge).

Therefore, if the role of the Fool has a future in modern organizations, it must be spread out among the many, not concentrated in one person. I believe that some creative organizations have accomplished just that through selective hiring and an open culture. We’ll see where it goes.

Speed to marketer

When I first incorporated Inticiti, I was astounded at the speed with which direct marketers contacted me. I incorporated on a Thursday. The following Tuesday I received my first piece of junk mail addressed to the business.

Certainly the process for sending that piece of junk mail was automated and not specific to me. And I did what most people would do – into the recycling bin it went.

The marketers send so much mail because they believe based on their research that each letter they send is worth more in future revenue than the cost of its printing and mailing. What happens if we become a customer of one of those companies and need to call their help desk? General customer experience notes that wait times are excessive (or “feel” excessive) and staff are often not as helpful as we would like (or we “feel” that to be the case). It sometimes seems as if companies believe that each customer served is worth less in future revenue than the cost incurred to serve them.

The second complaint (helpfulness) is more difficult to improve since it requires not only good automated menus and scripts for call center agents but also a degree of familiarity and longevity at the call center, where employee turnover can be 100% per year. The first complaint (wait time) could be easily addressed: simply add more agents. Using knowledge of call busy hours and queuing theory we know that adding a handful of agents to a large call center can dramatically reduce customer wait time. And agents in general are pretty cheap.

So why do we ever need to wait on the phone for the help desk? I think it is mostly a matter of context. Companies traditionally viewed their facility and support staff as costs rather than as potential sources of revenue. Only recently are companies thinking about call centers not as reactive cost centers, but as proactive sources of additional revenue.

Like call centers, direct marketers do not consider costs that exist outside of their business model. The most important one of those externalities to me is the time that I have to take each day identifying and discarding junk mail. Further, there is the municipal cost of disposing discarded mail. And do I throw it away or recycle it? Further to that is a possible increased exposure to identity theft made possible by each additional letter with my name and address on it. Taking all of this into account, perhaps the social costs of junk mail (or call wait time) are greater than the economic benefits that accrue to the marketing organizations and their corporate clients.

Taylorism or Tailorism?

It’s been almost a century since the publication of The Principles of Scientific Management. Is there a new Frederick Winslow Taylor, a student of knowledge worker scientific management?

There are a number of drivers in knowledge work and a number of reasons why Taylor’s approach does not work well in this area. For example, there are cost savings arguments to standardization in more complex organizations. Contributing to this is lower employee tenure. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, average employee tenure fell since 1996 (from the BLS study “Median years of tenure with current employer for employed wage and salary workers by age and sex, selected years, 1996-2006”). Tenures decreased the most for employee ages 35-44 (a drop of 7.5% to 4.9 years), ages 45-54 (a drop of 12% to 7.3 years), and ages 55-64 (a drop of 8.8% to 9.3 years). When employees change employers more frequently, they must spend more time ramping up in order to add value in their new organization. It would seem that lower tenures add to the benefits of process standardization for knowledge workers.

But there is a limit to how deeply an organization of knowledge workers will want to standardize processes. The problem is that knowledge work tends to be less easily compartmentalized and that knowledge workers, like the manual workers of Taylor’s factories, often resent being told how to do their jobs, especially as it may make them feel like cogs.

What do the stakeholders -- the organization, the employees, the customers – gain and lose from a process-heavy approach? To the organization: possible gains in productivity but less flexibility to act on creative ideas that produce future productivity gains. To the employees: possible improvements in efficiency in some tasks but lower job satisfaction, depending on disposition. To the customers: perhaps lower prices, but possibly less customized service.

Then I thought of my old tailor from when I was based in Hong Kong. His business was incredibly customer-centric. I would stop by his shop, have a cup of tea, talk about work, look at some fabric, talk about suit styles, talk about the family and then make a purchase decision. A very long, inconsistent and inefficient process. Behind the scenes, cutting cloth and sewing, he may have been efficient, but to the customer he gave a personal and, well, tailored series of interactions. I’d say that to some degree the knowledge worker is a customer of his/her employer.

Maybe not all of what passes as inefficiency is true loss.

Business aesthetics

Aesthetics are growing in importance, or perhaps rather, the loss of aesthetic appreciation is waning. Even aesthetics of products that are mostly visual and not very functional, such as Philippe Starck's "Juicy Salif" lemon squeezer, shows that aesthetics themselves can sometimes be the point. The lemon squeezer is apparently poor at squeezing lemons and is primarily to be appreciated as a way to "start conversations". It sold well and lived up to its description.

Similarly, a business may have aesthetic appeal that is broader than the design or use of its products and relates to a larger impact it has on the world.

But there has to be strength of both artistry and finance. Dotcoms for example, did not have an enduring aesthetic. Their value came mostly from potential financial upside and much secondarily from their output. Once the upside disappeared much of the excitement disappeared with it. Older, stodgier, more established companies that worked on similar issues did not reap the temporary benefits of the dotcoms.

Industries that meld aesthetic appeal with financial upside include environmentally friendly technology (health, social and climate benefits / upside tied to high oil prices), pharmaceuticals (health and lifespan benefits / upside tied to waning regulatory regimes that protect drug patents), architecture and urban development (comfort of the local population / upside tied to real estate market). If the importance of the financial upside gets too extreme and is lost, these industries may also lose some of their aesthetic impact.

The classical music cost disease

A paper from William Baumol and William Bowen “On the performing arts: the anatomy of their economic problems” (1965) showed that while productivity improvements have been made in many other fields there cannot be productivity advances in the performing arts (a string quartet still requires the same number of performers today as it did centuries ago). Baumol and Bowen show that since the performing arts could not realize greater efficiencies, their cost rose over the centuries in comparison to other things.

But today the paper seems to be incomplete in that Baumol and Bowen did not expect performing arts output gains outside of live music. Today it is no longer only the process (playing the music live) that the audience pays for. Productivity has come from other developments such as the sale of recorded performances, performing for larger paying audiences and even quality improvements in instrument components. Additionally it may take musicians less time to learn new music by using technology including computerized note recognition and the ability to hear different recorded versions of a piece at a whim. There may be even more room to improve the learning process.

That being said, classical music today is a money-losing endeavor reliant upon donors and sponsors in addition to ticket sales. What had been the popular music of a century or more ago was the favorite musical type of only 30% of the American public back when Lincoln Center was built in the 1960s and the current favorite music of only 3% of the public today. I believe that some of this problem is related to the fact that classical performers today have found limited success in creating new powerful works and in evolving the performance experience itself. Some steps in that direction have been taken by performances such as those put on by Sympho.

Otherwise, the music exists as if in a museum but with pieces that are preserved not necessarily being the best ones available and the method of their current display influenced by the practicalities of the past.

This is one example of the type of problem we work on at Inticiti.

The risk of measuring business success against false peers

Sometimes companies fall into the trap (or are pushed in by market analysts) of measuring themselves against false peers. A false peer is an entity that is not comparable (for a variety of reasons) and to which comparison may even lead to poor business decisions.

Here’s an example (guess which company). Company X was measured against a set of companies, some of which showed their innovation, skill at execution and cultural maneuverability through a series of acquisitions, new service launches and soaring stock prices. Company X was not seen as being as innovative nor did its stock jump as high, but soon it became involved in a senseless joint venture, money-losing acquisitions and service offerings. A few years later, Company X’s competitors were shown to be frauds in accounting scandals. Did their fabricated success lead Company X to engage in business behavior that it might not have otherwise?

Company X was AT&T in the late 1990s – early 2000s. Other companies it was measured against included WorldCom, Qwest, Tyco, Enron, etc.

Was former AT&T CEO Armstrong pressured into a bold (but reckless and unprofitable) cable play? By spending $100B+ to acquire cable networks and improve the upstream signal quality from the home to cable headends (something that was never intended in a cable TV model), AT&T tried to defend its place competing against false peers. It seems that it destroyed value by doing so.

Round the island

I recently walked around the perimeter of Manhattan – 32 miles – and that walk became a metaphor for me.

I’ve lived in NYC for six years and most of that walk covered places I had never been. During the walk I met people I never would have met otherwise, saw things I wouldn’t have otherwise, including driftwood sculptures, an enormous abandoned trellis, the big Columbia “C” visible from the Harlem River, a fisherman who caught a 2 foot fish.

No matter where you live or where you work, how often do you “walk around your island”?

Mechanical conscience

I’ve been thinking about how businesses react to ethical transgressions. Some types of transgressions, such as those recorded by electronic messaging (email, file uploads, IMs etc), contributed to a number of large corporate court cases in the US since 2000 and came to influence the way companies store and monitor data.

Messaging supervision is a series of processes and tools put in place by organizations to monitor employee electronic communications with the goal of catching problematic communications either in real time or soon afterwards. Businesses (often those in financial services) implementing messaging supervision are often required, or influenced by regulations including NASD Rule 3010 and SEC Rule 17a-4 when they put such systems in place. Businesses also implement these systems in order to protect intellectual property and catch undesirable employee behavior, hopefully before it gets out of hand. Transgressions are caught by the system’s mechanical conscience.

But really, businesses just want to automate compliance and adhere to regulations efficiently. While no regulatory body requires a software-based system to check for possible transgressions, the sheer volume of email is too large for anything but spot checks from compliance staff. Nor should an organization want to actively review all communications traffic. Instead, the bulk of email communication, website visits, IMs and file downloads are scanned by rule-based software platforms. That means that if compliance staff look at a fixed number of tracked communications daily, use of these systems should increase their probability of finding something problematic without adding extra content volume to view.

What the mechanical conscience cannot do is account for context, intent, or employees who write for the censor’s eye. Also, these supervision systems are used at a corporate level primarily in the US. Interestingly Americans, who are normally considered to be privacy conscious, accept the right of their employers to look at their email. In France, for example, employees are allowed to set up private email folders which cannot legally be read by corporate compliance supervisors, should there be any. Further, employee knowledge of messaging supervision also pushes potential transgressors to other means of unmonitored communication: the cell phone conversation or meeting for a drink, which an industry worker once told me is just what the presence of the system is supposed to do.

Does regulatory compliance lead to a different approach to ethics in organizations?

As customer friendly as an orthopedist's office?

I recently visited an orthopedist's office (I was not the patient).

As I sat in the waiting room I kept noticing that many people, especially older patients, were unable to open the pneumatic office door. Since my seat was near the door I ended up helping several of the people who had trouble. The door was not only very stiff but it also had a handle that was hard to turn. Remember, we are sitting in an orthopedist's office -- the place you go when you have bone injuries. I might be able to accept a door that didn't work in an Eye, Ear, Nose & Throat doctor's office, but in an office where most of the people who come in have a problem with movement?

Things like that are clues about the people who work there. Do they notice? Do they care? Do they know how to solve the problem if they do notice and care? Don't take this posting as a complaint. Instead, take it as a way of evaluating organizations that you may work with.

I told the receptionist about the door. If it's not fixed the next time I visit I might just go get a screwdriver and loosen the pneumatic hinge myself.

Olympic protests

Back in 1995 I was for a while with an NGO that worked to encourage diplomatic recognition between the US and Vietnam. When diplomatic recognition came that summer, there were a few protests in Washington by American Veterans and Vietnamese former refugees. One of the group leaders I was with debated whether to shield the Vietnamese government officials from seeing such protests. He soon relented, believing that there was value for them to see the differences of opinion; that is, on the US side the country had moved to support reestablishment of diplomatic relations but some dissenting voices remained – voices that at times even came into the conference room to demand answers from the officials. As we know, it all turned out fine and those protests are a footnote in the history of the last century.

Countries in the international spotlight must become accustomed to receiving criticism and having questions asked from all sides. The critics may be no better than the criticized, but that does not matter. To a certain degree, hearing criticism and answering questions are healthy exercises that inform of possibilities for improvement and allow people to learn more; but criticism and questions may also be a hallmark of special interests. Whether justified or not, this is a part of life in the spotlight. However, the pro-China Olympic protesters seem to be more concerned with forbidding the right to criticize or ask questions. The pro-China protesters’ focus seems to be one of legitimacy, noting the shortcomings of the pro-Tibet protesters and foreign countries where the torch relay was disrupted.

I look forward to moving past this part of the 2008 Olympics but wonder how long both sides will dwell on their emotional reactions to the other. Moreover, there is a competition over which side can produce the most supporters and the best slogans. These protests are certainly more than a footnote now. They may inform the way Chinese businesses and businesses from the rest of the world think about each other for some time.

Entrepreneurship

I heard Howard Milstein speak recently at Cornell University’s Entrepreneurship@Cornell annual awards event.

Here are a few take-aways from his talk.

Economics:
In one example, Milstein realized that the main hotels in NYC were always full during the work week – there was a shortage of rooms for businesspeople. He then started to raise room prices from $36 at the top end (this was the late 1970s) until top room rates were $125 a night. This price jump occurred within one year. And the other major hotels in NYC increased their prices along with his. Result: hotel still full.

Timing:
In another example, Milstein was able to get commercial airtime for his Milford Plaza Hotel during the Super Bowl by both being well connected to the TV execs looking to sell 30-second advertising slots and able to make a spot decision on whether or not to buy the airtime when they called. Milstein held out for what turned out to be a 90% discount on airtime (he paid $33K for a standard priced $350K / 30 second slot).

DIY:
When Milstein wanted to install cable TV at the Milford Plaza, Time Warner quoted him a price of $10/day/room. Time Warner refused to negotiate and as a result, Milstein started Liberty Cable to provide service to his hotels and later sold service to other buildings in NYC.

Overall a great speech exhibiting the entrepreneurial mindset.

New attraction to the humanities

I have enjoyed reading the recent defense of the study of philosophy and the humanities. In a New Generation of College Students, Many Opt for the Life Examined Stanley Fish’s blog from earlier this year has a different take.

It is heartening to me that these days more students are choosing majors in the humanities. One discipline of the humanities -- history -- has fascinated me since I majored in the subject at Cornell. Over the years I’ve found that you can have nice conversations about many things with people when you travel but if you discuss history, it is easy to get into an argument. Each country puts its own slant on the history taught in elementary and secondary school, stressing, ignoring, changing and reinterpreting events along with the times. And not everyone studies history at university, where there is more likelihood to be exposed to alternative viewpoints.

Many people have asked me how I made a transition from history to technology and business but for me this was never an issue. Many of the big problems in the world today are at some point a disagreement about the interpretation of a common history. Taken with that view, technical questions seem smaller.

In a time when we see worried articles stating that for example, US universities have too few engineering students and that many engineering graduates from emerging nations are not adequately equipped to work upon graduating it is intriguing to see articles like those cited above.

Bear Stearns rescinds MBA job offers

Yes, this is tough news. I remember what it was to be an MBA student looking for a job. While I never had an offer rescinded, I have to say that as tough as it is for the students (as well as the many others involved), Bear Stearns and JPMChase are showing some class here. For example, first year MBAs who would have interned at Bear will receive their standard 10 weeks salary if they go to work for a non-profit this summer. Graduating students now out of a job will keep their signing bonuses.

Those impacted may think that this is far from fair. After all, they competed for, won and were hired for a particular position – a position that is now no longer needed. But in an “employment at will” culture, making these small concessions is not bad.

For the students who are now stuck applying to jobs all over again: don’t worry, you’ll find something. I only recommend that you be more creative in your search and look beyond standard MBA jobs. And maybe when you look back at this years later, you’ll be glad at what you’ve achieved. I wish you the best of luck.

Importance of a story

Part of consulting work is the analysis of data. But typically, the analysis itself is not what is most difficult. The more difficult parts tend to be gaining access to good data and knowing how to interpret the data. From that point, patterns, cause-effect relationships and forecasts are possible. That is also where there is value to the client. So in effect, the value comes from knowing what story the data tell you.

This is very different from starting out with a story or from making up a story.

I was thinking about what is analogous to this in the non-consulting world and I remembered my own experience learning about modern art. Much of the value of a piece of art comes from the depth of the story behind the piece. Let me explain.

One gallery I frequent is Murray Guy in New York. The first time I went to the gallery in 2003 one piece of artwork was almost invisible to me – the piece was a pile of crates. My eyes literally skipped over them and looked elsewhere. But after talking to the gallery owners I learned that those crates were made by Dave Muller, an artist who appreciated the work of Andre Cadere, who in turn was an artist who made painted wooden poles (Barres de Bois) and left them in galleries as a disturbance. Muller, unable to afford to buy one of Cadere’s wooden poles instead made crates that matched them in size, like carrying cases.

Getting access to the data (seeing the crates) and knowing what to do with the data (uncovering the history) led to getting the value (understanding the story).

Artwork, like business data, may be high or low in value to the consumer or client in relation to the story told.

Choices, choices

A number of years ago in Madrid I had a conversation with a man who compared the lack of choices on European restaurant menus to a form of mind control. In the US, he suggested, where restaurant menus are more expansive, minds expand accordingly and people question other things.

It’s an interesting idea, though perhaps chicken and egg. But apart from mind control or mind expansion as a byproduct of menu size, do people actually make better ordering decisions when they have larger menus?

Research shows that on day-to-day issues an abundance of choices leads to lower purchase levels and even to less satisfaction with the selections made. So does that mean that “mind expanding” choices result in less buyer value? What about when buyers take the time to consider and weigh all of the options? Does more information lead to better decisions?

I often deal with large-scale corporate decision-making by advising clients on investment decisions: for example, where to build a new facility or what vendors to select.

One issue with projects of this sort is that large decisions are often generational events in which the client invests perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars in the outcome. Because these events are relatively rare, it is impossible to take a portfolio view by making many comparable smaller decisions and studying which worked well in what situation.

Instead, when there is a single large decision to be made, it often becomes a question of understanding the drivers of value to the organization, conducting due diligence on each option and considering the qualitative issues involved in each choice. Where final options were similarly good, I have seen decisions swayed by anything from the driving distance of management to the proposed new facility location to whatever option was more similar to stories currently in the news. At that point, a good consultant’s talent is to accommodate the whole organization’s needs while also giving some allowance for those that will have to live with the decision.

Cultural insight

I met Cathy Bao Bean recently at a Claremont Graduate University alumni event (I’m not an alumnus, but was there as a member of the Peter Drucker Society). Cathy is the author of a great book called “The Chopsticks-Fork Principle: A Memoir and Manual” as well as being a really enthusiastic and interesting conversationalist.

I read her book the day after I met her. Many of her cross-cultural stories reminded me of what I experienced while working in China over five years. Much of the business I did then (and even now) involved understanding the meaning behind peoples’ words (or lack of words) and cultural differences. I wish the book had been available before I went to China in the mid-90s, since it would have helped me understand some things more easily.

What small business teams can learn from jazz

- The better you listen, the better you play and the better the group sounds
- Everybody has a role
- Low hierarchy can work well
- Even solos take place within the context of the group
- By following a few simple rules, you can make great things happen

Toys of the times

I was amazed when I heard about this toy. Rather than using a toy metal detector to search for buried treasure, it's a way to educate kids about airport security. Now we just need knowledge worker toys for kids. There could be a toy kit for being a management consultant, investment banker, marketer... maybe not.

From their website: "This unique toy/teaching aid provides ample amounts of healthy fun along with education and awareness of the security measures that people face in real life."

http://lifesinventions.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=product.display&Product_ID=2385&CFID=17420493&CFTOKEN=53095688

On training impact

I often see clients with corporate training plans that seemed based on the premise that employees have a right to training, just not the right to use what they learn. Most training courses follow a one-time course model that has no follow-up. In a typical training course that might last a couple of days, employees can be exposed to new ideas and methods, but hardly have the opportunity to practice what they have learned. Under these conditions, how much new knowledge do they retain?

Even more problematic are training courses delivered right in the employee’s office via distance learning. While many companies prefer these courses because they are less expensive, their design means that employees are more easily distracted and tempted and expected to check in on their regular work that they are missing.

One company that seems to have got training – at least company-wide training – right is GE. For example, GE’s Six Sigma program has employees attend four weeks of training in statistics, processes and quality control and then requires employees to use what they have learned while working on or leading Six Sigma projects. Top management, many of themselves former Six Sigma “Black Belts”, supports the training.

I’m not making a case for implementing Six Sigma, but the integrated approach that GE takes seems to lead to more learning and higher payoff.

While it may not be practical to do the same with shorter, more specific courses that only apply to a small number of employees, companies can do a few simple things to increase their return on training investment.

- enforce a minimum amount of training per employee annually (dollar amount, credit amount, or time amount)
- encourage employees to take training outside of the office
- After an employee receives training, require them to deliver an internal training session to others. The purposes of these sessions should be to both transmit knowledge elsewhere in the organization and to make sure that the new training sinks in over time

Permanent space vs. hoteling

Some businesses have done away with permanent office space or cubicles. Instead, when an employee is in the office he or she registers for a place to sit and depending on availability gets a spot. Work or personal items that would have been kept in a permanent desk drawer may now be kept in a locker and moved to the temporary space each day. Colleagues who wish to find others may look them up on a website directory which lists the identification number of the cubicle or office which they are using that day.

The entire argument for hoteling, as this is known, is financial. Reduce your office real estate and save on the bottom line. However, what is lost from the top line in this structure? What is lost in terms of worker productivity and morale?

Rules of lunch, or Why to take a break

A few years ago I had a client who was a senior member of a large real estate development firm. During one lunchtime conversation he looked back over a career that spanned 40 years and talked about a few of the things he had accomplished of which he was proud. One of them, curiously, was his “lunch policy”. He has lunch almost every day in the office with colleagues of all levels. At lunch he has two rules. First, if you are busy with something or have other plans you take care of lunch yourself and don’t disrupt the lunch of others. Second, at the lunch table no discussion of work is allowed.

In the past, when I worked at a traditional management consulting firm I found that to many colleagues, lunch was just a time of day when you happened to eat while working. The idea of leaving the office to eat somewhere else while not working was foreign and the perception of having done so was to be avoided. I could never understand why people could think that being seen working through lunch would make them more effective or raise their perceived value to the firm. Eventually I came to eat lunch with the colleagues who felt the same way I did or with clients who never even heard of the issue.

I never could figure out what kept the others so busy. In fact, I came to believe that they were always working because they were less efficient due to the fact that they were, you guessed it, always working.

My recommendation is to take a break, go out, walk around, refresh your mind and be more productive.

Does social networking keep people from changing and developing?

When I grew up I didn’t know anyone who used email, cell phones were rare, and social networking websites were non-existent. As a result I had no simple way to stay in touch with most people I grew up with, especially when people moved. In the past I also knew a great number of people whose phone number or address I never learned, but whom I would see regularly. Staying in touch didn’t seem to be a problem.

Contrast that with a younger generation that will probably maintain some contact with most of their friends from high school throughout their college and working years. Even if the contact is passive via a social networking site, one potentially may maintain that network forever rather than losing it with physical distance.

On the rare occasions when I meet up with friends from more than a decade ago, the retelling of stories of the past and common memories means that we often temporarily settle back into the personas and styles of those earlier years. However, these situations are the exception for me since I only occasionally see my friends from youth as is probably typical of most people my age who have moved around.

Would one be less able to change if that cohort of friends followed one through life via today’s social networking tools? If so, will the generation that grew up with Friendster, Myspace and Facebook change less over time from its youth? Will the unbreakable threads of history keep this generation from evolving?

Memory as art

I saw something recently that reminded me of an earlier post (Your Brain Is Not a Closet). A month or so ago I attended a gallery opening at BUIA Gallery in Chelsea of Eve Tremblay’s “Becoming Fahrenheit 451”. Ms. Tremblay actually recited Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 from memory (ok, with some starts and stops, but still, what an amazing accomplishment). Like the characters in the novel who memorize books, Ms. Tremblay reminded us of how powerful memory is if we develop it.

Measured by tickets closed, not problems solved

What are we measuring? Misguidance on what to measure can result in poor customer service, albeit service that may satisfy agreed customer service requirements.

I recently called a software manufacturer because I had trouble activating one of their products, which I had bought. Here’s a synopsis of what happened.

- First call to customer service. Rep asks me for name and phone number. Decides my case needs to be handled by another group which specializes in product activation. Routes me to another rep.
- Second rep calls me by a different name and has the wrong information about my case. Starts to walk me through activation process. Can’t handle a question about a different version that I have preinstalled on my machine. I mention that the rep must get this question all the time. Am asked to call another specialist (cannot transfer me).
- Third rep has to ask all over again what the case is. I explain again and ask the version question no one can handle directly and am told to call a fourth person. Am given 10-digit case code.
- I call fourth rep, who automatically knows my name from the phone number the system recognizes but needs the case code anyway. I end up explaining to him how I think I can solve the problem. He agrees and asks if he can close the problem ticket. I decline since I don’t know if the problem will really be solved since it will take 20 minutes to uninstall and reinstall the software.
- Receive two different long emails from customer reps asking if the ticket can be closed. Includes details on how to respond to message, such as different email address and ID number.
- Receive additional email (addressing me by a new wrong name) which states that the ticket is closed since I have not responded.
- Ticket closed, problem solved.

All too common topic of conversation

It seems that an all too common topic of conversation is about the use and questions about the use of gadgets.

I do not imagine that previous generations spent the time we do – conversation time – sitting around discussing their difficulties using the rotary dial telephone or the post office. Or rather, while I do imagine people in the past discussing how the phone works or just how mail gets delivered, I imagine that these discussion would have been about the systems themselves and how they change the way we communicate. I do not imagine that the conversations were about how much time they wasted trying to figure out how to dial or how to address an envelope.