Tuesday, February 28, 2006

How to Prevent a Bozo Explosion - Guy Kawasaki

Guy Kawasaki usually has some good stuff on his blog, but this particular post got me laughing quite a lot :)

Read the article on his blog here. Even the comments by various people are quite funny :)


It's depressing to watch a mean, lean, fighting machine of a company deteriorate into mediocracy. In Silicon Valley we call this process the “bozo explosion.” This downward slide seems inevitable after a company achieves success--often during the years immediately following an IPO. The purpose of this article is to prevent, or at least postpone, this process in your company.

The first step is to determine whether a bozo explosion is happening. Here are the top ten signs of bozosity to help you decide.

1. The two most popular words in your company are “partner” and “strategic.” In addition, “partner” has become a verb, and “strategic” is used to describe decisions and activities that don't make sense.

2. Management has two-day offsites at places like the Ritz Carlton to foster communication and to craft a company mission statement.

3. The aforementioned company mission statement contains more than twenty words--two of which are “partner” and “strategic.”

4. Your CEO's admin has an admin.

5. Your parking lot's “biorhythm” looks like this:

8:00 am - 10:00 am--Japanese cars exceed German cars
10:00 am - 5:00 pm--German cars exceed Japanese cars
5:00 pm - 10:00 pm--Japanese cars exceed German cars

6. Your HR department requires an MBA degree for any position; it also requires five to ten years work experience in an industry that is only four years old.

7. Time is now considered more important than money so you have a company cafeteria, health club, and pet grooming service. Moreover, the first thing that employees show visitors is the company cafeteria, health club, and pet grooming service.

8. Someone whose music sells in the iTunes music store performs at the company Christmas party.

9. An employee is paid to do nothing but write a blog.

10. The success of a competitor upsets you more than the loss of a customer.

Addendumbs (sic) to the list from readers:

11. You have a layer of middle management who worked at big-name companies (usually consumer goods) who like to call meetings and designate “project leads.” (I experienced this first hand.) Zoli Erdo

12. Your hire a big name consulting firm who brings in MBAs with one year of experience to re-think your corporate strategies.

13. The front-desk staff gets better looking and less competent. Jeff Barson

14. Your CEO or CFO spends more time on CNBC than in the office. Laurie Sefton

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Did you gulp? Don't sweat it: you're not alone. In fact, you'd be alone if you weren't going through the slide. Here's what you can do about the situation:

Insist that managers hire better than themselves. For example, an engineering manager should hire a programmer who is a better programmer than she is, not worse. By the way, this principle starts at the level of the board of directors when hiring the CEO.

Eradicate arrogance. Arrogance manifests itself in two principal areas: first, when your employees describe the competition using terms like “clueless,” “bozo” (ironically), or just plain “stupid.” Second, when your employees start believing in “manifest destiny”--that is, that your company deserves, and will achieve, total market domination. Your competition probably isn't stupid, and trees don't grow to the sky.

Understaff. Hire fewer people than you're “sure” you need to accommodate that hockey-stick growth you're “sure” you're going to achieve. When you're in a rush to fill openings to respond to growth, you make mistakes. Unfortunately, many companies adopt the attitude of “Hire any intelligent body, or we'll lose business--we'll sort everything out later.”

Undergrow. This is the flip side of under-staffing. I am suggesting intentionally forgoing sales. Staying small and fine is a perfectly acceptable management policy. At the very least, calculate the entire impact on head count of getting that additional sale, new line of business, or acquisition.

Look beyond the resume. The goal of hiring is building a team of great employees. One proxy for a great employee is a relevant educational or work background. However, the perceived “right” educational background and work experience are not sufficient conditions for excellence. Hiring a bozo with the “right” resume can drag down other employees and increase the probability of hiring more bozos. Not hiring a great person because she lacks the “right” resume is not as harmful but is a mistake too.

Diversify. Some companies look like the corporate version of the Stepford Wives: people are too similar. For example, everyone has a PhD. Everyone grew up in a white, upper-middleclass family. Everyone went to an Ivy League school. It's a bunch of Me and Mini-Mes. When this happens, it means that form is overruling function, and the way people succeed is by representing the right form, not excelling at the right function. That's back asswards.

Merge and purge. You owe it to your employees to take corrective action, and, if necessary, terminate people as soon as issues come to light. You may be thinking, “Let's wait and see; maybe he'll improve; our numbers are still great, etc.,” but this is unfair to everyone involved. If there's a problem, fix it. If you can't fix it, then make it an “exployee”--thereby, establishing performance excellence as a corporate standard.


I highly recommned subscribing to Guy's RSS feed here. While a lot of his posts are rehashed and updated from his books, he usually has very interesting things to say.

Monday, February 27, 2006

Boing Boing's Guide To Defeating Censorware

Boing Boing is taking a brave stand, but unfortunately they've put the instructions of how to access their site from behind a filtering service such as Secure Computing's SmartFilter on their site :) I'm just replicating them here, So people on the net can find the suggestions on a possibly non-blocked domain.


(For more information, see story here or the article here )
"The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." -- John Gilmore

If your employer or corrupt, undemocratic, dictator-based government uses a filtering service such as Secure Computing's SmartFilter to block access to BoingBoing.net, you can try the following workarounds:


  • Use the TOR network. The more people who run Tor servers, the faster and more anonymous the network becomes.

  • Using an SSH tunnel, VPN, or anonymous overlay to an unfiltered network is widely considered to be the best way to protect yourself while accessing "prohibited" content. (Thanks, chris)
  • Use Google as a proxy to access forbidden sites. Link

  • A group called Peacefire created proxy software called Circumventor to bypass censorware. Install this software on your home computer and allow others to use your proxy to access the web, or use your proxy from work or school to access any web site. (Thanks, Sean!)
  • Breaking out of a Proxy Jail. Link (Thanks, Mutz!)
  • Try Daveproxy, and other services listed on the proxy list at samair.ru/proxy together with AntiFirewall (a small app that tests proxies). (Thanks, Joao Barata!)
  • Try Java Anonymous Proxy. JAP uses the TOR network, and installation is pretty easy for non-nerds. (Thanks, Jonas)
  • The Bitty browser, while not initially designed as an anonymizing tool, has helped some of our readers work around corporate internet filters. (Thanks, Scott Matthews!)
  • Some of our readers have found the Coral Content Distribution Network (CCDN) helpful for evading internet blocks.
    Just add ".nyud.net:8080" at the end of boingboing.net -- for example, instead of typing
    http://www.boingboing.net to your browser's address line, instead type http://www.boingboing.net.nyud.net:8080. (Thanks, Tian!)
  • Check out the regularly updated list of public proxy servers
    at publicproxyservers.com.
  • For BoingBoing readers in the UAE or Qatar, or other countries where BoingBoing is blocked, one anonymous reader tells us: "There is an internet via satellite called OPENSKY sold through www.broadsat.com which goes around these problems. Using VPN with normal dialup, the signal gets sent back from Europe, so, uncensored. Works really well and is cheap!"
  • Andy Armstrong says, "I've also set up a proxy for boingboing at boingboing.hexten.net."
  • Abdul Aziz
    says, "It's a pain to know that countries and companies alike are blocking and censoring sites like Boing Boing. I face this at my office everyday. I've mentioned two ways on my site by which you can bypass these proxies and filters safely and securely without breaking any rules or arousing the network admin's suspicions." Link

Or...


  • If possible, ask your system administrator to whitelist BoingBoing.net. Sometimes network admins leave all the defaults on when they install enterprise filtering software. If they're using SmartFilter, for example, the admin can selectively allow the BoingBoing.net domain, while keeping the rest of the entries for the "blocked" category in which BoingBoing is listed. Bribing your sysadmin with cartons of Skittles and Red Bull may expedite this option. (Thanks, mcsey!)

If you know of any good ways to defeat censorware, please send us your suggestion.

Friday, February 24, 2006

Web Analytics & more Web 2.0 logos

Did you think that WebTrends and HBX didn't really have any competition because of their domination of web analytics services over the years? I did.

Until, because of a new found interest in web analytics, I did a little reading up and was amazed at the sheer number of choices available out there right now.

ConversionRater's guide makes good reading on the subject, but unfortunately is a little too brief for my liking. But take a look at the article anyway, it'll give you an overview of what's available out there.

One analytics solution that completely fascinated me was the one from VisitorVille. I mean really, its a visual treat to watch your site traffic in 3D, with little buses and people traveling to various sections on your site.

Take a look at some of the screenshots here:


Amazing, isn't it? A tad useless, maybe, but quite the thing to show off to your manager while trying to convince him/her to purchase their services. :)

There's a wealth of information on the new guys on the block, and while they all have their own quirks and issues, its good to see the competition hotting up with Google in the fray as well. I've signed up for Google Analytics, but they don't seem to regard puny blogs as worthy for the beta program :-P

While there are a lot of cool free analytics tools out there, a note of caution: Most web analytics tools give you the statistics you'd usually want to see, but only highly customized (and costly) analytics tools will give you detailed stats, IP address-to-company matching and a whole lot of statistic views created specifically for your organization. Also, if you have a really popular website, then going for a log-file based solution takes some serious computing power - someone in the business recently told me that WebTrends can take upto 8 hours to spew out results of a single query on a large database!

Another interesting read I came across recently is this one, by John Marshall. Titled "Seven Deadly Web Analytics Sins", he points out the most common mistakes people and some analytics engines make while looking at statistics. A must read for your clients in you're in the analytics business :)

Lastly, here are a few more Web 2.0 company logos:
(No, I haven't made this, someone else did)




In case you've gone to some of these sites and said "Hey this is cool, but I'm probably never going to come back here again", I completely agree with you. Here's hoping these companies have rational business plans this time around :)

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Design Patterns and Web 2.0

The new age of the Internet is dawning, after the colossal waste of money seen 5 years ago when it crashed all around us. Not only do we have a whole bunch of new companies trying to do some intersting stuff on the web, we also have the old regime of junk - dot com companies with meaningless names and funky logos, doing very niche and quite often useless things with cool interfaces.

For instance, take a look at these:

web2.0_company_logos

It quite amazing how all these companies have succeeded in resurrecting the "Internet economy" of the past, but with a lot more caution and this time around, solid business plans for revenue generation :)

Some of these logos most of us will be familiar with, as for the rest, lets just hope their angel investors cash out soon before the next bubble burts. With that logo list growing bigger and bigger every month, I won't be surprised to see a few Indian companies getting into the game as well. In fact, thanks to Neeta, I just read an article thats talks about how overseas investors are looking at some Indian companies, and that the race to buy or invest in a few indian companies is hotting up.

So what's the big deal, you ask? Well, quite a lot actually.

For one, web designers are moving to cleaner, more usable and much better looking designs. Most the the new sites out there seem to despise clutter, think CSS is the coolest invention since the wheel and treat typography as an art, and not just "Lest use Arial man, its the best!". This is the best overview of this design evolution I've come across so far, please go read it, it's good stuff.

The hiring game has gotten quite heated - all the big boys are offering quite a few perks to bring in and keep the best talent available.
Here's hoping they start a perk race amongst HR departments:)

Not only has usability become very important, people are sharing their insights and *gasp!* sometimes even their code to ensure these good practices live on. The big boys are also playing nice, as one can make out from Yahoo's example.

Personally, I'm happy to see all this. There's a nagging feeling at the back of my head that says very few of these new Web 2.0/AJAX spewing/funkiness enhanced applications will actually live for more than 2 years. But hey, if they're going to be helping make the Internet a better place, then I'm all for it.