Who is Farhan Lalji?

There’s an interesting article from the Economist this week on Bill Gates and the future for Microsoft. I was skimming through it when one particular point caught my eye,

Microsoft will launch a $300m rebranding campaign later this year. To make Microsoft hip again, the firm has hired one of America’s coolest advertising agencies, Crispin Porter+Boguski.

I don’t think dumping money into branding will help MSFT become hip again. At the end of the day consumers can see through false messages.

Unless Microsoft backs up the branding dollars with openness, supporting the tech community, and innovating in a way that users really find engaging and attractive all the dollars they spend on branding might have been better spent as a grant to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.

The bee (new name for the wife) and I were walking around Hampstead yesterday. We walked into the Body Shop – her choice obviously - and I said “has the body shop changed at all in the last couple of years?” it was obvious that it hadn’t. I started to wonder what if the Body Shop hadn’t been acquired by L’Oreal, would I be saying the same thing? Sure there have been other factors which slowed down innovation, like the death of Anita Roddick, but surely being part of the giant L’Oreal machine has slowed down growth.

This kind of thing is common in the internet industry; every cool company that I’ve liked hasn’t done anything really innovative since being acquired. But I was surprised to see that the same applied to retail.

A lot of entrepreneurs like the idea of pumping and dumping, build something cool, make it valuable, get someone big to pay a pretty penny, sit around while shares vest, and then head off to the next big thing. It’s not just small or medium sized start ups where this happens, a friend who’s in the venture business with whom I was discussing recent events at Y! made the statement

“pretty much all M&A is value destructive for the acquirer. But its great for the target”

I disagree… well sort of. While it’s great financially for the target, I think all M&A sucks for both parties, it handcuffs people, makes it difficult to do anything new and while the companies are busy ironing out the mess left after the transaction the competition pounces. Sad thing is while the entrepreneurs, founders, shareholders and other investors’ pockets get fatter the users/customers/employees suffer.

I hope at some point I’ll dip my toe in the entrepreneurial waters, and if you had asked me a year or so ago how would you feel about the company you built being acquired; I would probably have had a very different answer to today. Then it would have been “show me the money”. Today, it’s more likely to be “show me the plan and how value won’t be destroyed”. Interesting how your perspectives change in a short amount of time.

Let’s recap here, fuel prices are going up and up and up. People want to have a work-life balance. The internet has revolutionised the way people communicate. So why do we need to be in the same place to work together? We don’t.

Sure being in the same room as people you work with adds value, it means you’re able to socialise, you’re able to learn more about people and trust people. But how many people do you actually work that closely with? Is it enough to justify large rents in metropolitan locations? Not to mention a lot of times meeting with people or conversations get in the way of productivity.

I’ve worked virtually with lots of folks in past jobs and in my present job. I find getting together once a week with some, once a month with others, and once a quarter with others is enough to build rapport and through the telephone, instant messaging, email, desktop conferencing, video conferencing and other tools we don’t need to be in the same office as each other to work together effectively. I like working from home. I probably should do it more; I bet I’d be more effective.

So my prediction for the near future is that we’ll see a lot more virtual working, a lot more working from home and lot more smaller offices. This will potentially mean fewer meetings, less distractions and a drop in our collective foot prints. Not to mention a healthier bottom line as you don’t have to pay for large offices.

I’ve been reading Jeffery Sach’s book Common wealth and I’ve learnt the following; smart people are more likely then dumb people to contribute to society and Information leads to intelligence. So I believe that the internet is a source of information and so the internet should be available to anyone.

One of my favourite stories from my university days is how me and my buddy split cable internet over our apartments – him on the 12th floor me on the 11th and us being one apartment over from each other it was no small feet. That was how badly we wanted high speed internet access. It made us more connected, made us more knowledgeable and the fact that we’re both in the technology industry today probably has a lot to do with throwing the cable over the balconies in our apartment building about ten years ago. Okay, he was studying math and had courses in computer science so not a huge leap for him, but I was studying health sciences for pete’s sake!

The government funds libraries, it subsidizes higher education – in some countries footing the whole bill for it, and it funds a lot of stuff to ensure that its population are able to contribute to society so why not funding free wifi access for all taxpayers? It’s been trialled in a couple of councils here in the UK, as well as in Philadelphia and other cities. Sure the providers have an issue as their making lots of money on it. But screw ‘em, they’re complaining about data charges pipes and infrastructure so governments should squeeze them out of them out.

Personally, I think this could have huge impact in the developing world. Imagine if every villager had the ability to access the internet, perhaps through a project like the one laptop per child to ensure that every village had an access point, I truly think people could be better informed, make better decisions and thus contribute to society more.

I’ve been interested in the concept of business ethics for a long time. The idea that business can operate in a “good” way versus operating in an “evil” way has been revolving in my head for sometime. With Google’s “Don’t be evil” internal motto, MSFT’s reputation as the “evil empire” and a bunch of the work by Umair, Fred, and other bloggers fuelling my thoughts, I’ve reached the conclusion that “good and evil” isn’t necessarily the right way to frame the question – at the end of the day all businesses are run by people and people don’t just fall into good and evil camps. I think it’s more about operating with the best interests of the customer versus the best interests of the bottom line.

I’m convinced that long term sustainable success is driven by being totally focused on what’s good for the customer, staff and the community, whereas short term unsustainable success is driven by making an extra dollar / pound / euro / franc / dirham / rupee etc.

The problem, I’ve found, is in large publicly traded companies there’s a responsibility to shareholders and showing that the business is operating with the best intentions for profitability but there’s no impetus to show that the business is delivering to the needs of all their other stakeholders – i.e. customers, staff, the community.

When I was in business school I wrote my dissertation on valuing the social and ethical return of business. Personally, I believe that businesses should be valued on a triple bottom line, how profitable they are, how sustainable/ethical they run their business, and the utility they provide customers. Only then do you get a true value of the company and its ability to be successful over the long term. Unfortunately there is no standard for such a valuation right now – there are way too many ideas for me to list on this blog post. There are so many different thoughts on how to value social returns that no one does it and so we all suffer.

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is kicking off in a couple of minutes. I don’t own a Macbook or an iPhone (yet) but I’m pretty excited. As I mentioned earlier I’m a guy who waits for a couple of product iterations and when the price comes down a bit before I dive in. In addition my phone contract is up later this year and I’ll be relocating in the next couple of months which will mean it’s time for some new toys – hello Apple… or blackberry, it depends on what’s announced later today.

It’s incredible how much excitement is generated from the WWDC, with speculation running rampant from tech blogs to the BBC. Flickr has over 11,000 pictures tagged with the term wwdc. My favourite is this picture that has the covered banner from inside the conference space.

What Apple does really well is create products and get people excited about them. People are so excited that when they release a newer cheaper version a few months’ later people aren’t ticked that they bought the more expensive version, instead their lining up to buy another phone.

It all comes down to innovation, design and execution. Apple does this well, they build innovative products, they ensure the design has a “wow” factor and they execute early, often and iterate like crazy. That’s a great model for tech businesses if you ask me.

I deal with a lot of data. I sometimes find it difficult to present data in a way that allows people to really make decisions or draw insights easily. That’s why I was thrilled to come across a great graphic/flash tool from the New York Times that shows how the different demographics voted in Democratic primaries (hat tip to the boys at 37 Signals).

Pretty easy to draw some conclusions from this app. While Blacks hugely supported Obama, Whites support of Hilary was luke warm at best. And it was kind of cool to see as the segment gets younger and more educated the support for Obama grows. The educated future of America chose Obama, which makes me think even if he doesn’t win in the next election; the future looks pretty good for the country.

The simple visualisation from the NYT is a great example of providing data graphically in a way that enables people to make insights easily. Very cool.

Launching quickly in a market you know or eventually in all markets, that is the question? Starbucks is launching free wifi in US branches, partnering with AT&T. No news on when this will happen in other markets yet.

I’m of two minds on this. Part of me is pi**ed off that big US companies almost always seem to launch cool new initiatives or products in the US and then eventually in other markets. Another part of me understands that it’s better to get it out there in a market you know and then establish the presence in other markets.

I just hate significant lags between a US launch and an international launch. Companies that have lags are basically allowing local competitors time to make an imprint on the market with copy cat services until the big US company comes into the market.

In the end no one wins. Not the local market – because they have a poor copy cat, or the big US company, because you end up competing with a local competitor that might not have been there had you launched globally. Guess it depends on how strong a product or service it is your offering. Take the iPhone for example, there was a delay in launching in Canada versus the US, but – as I saw on my trip there last week – a lot of people waited and are now happy costumers. But not every product or service is as kick a** as the iPhone.

Coming back from vacation and reading about how to taking time off from work on the Harvard’s Discussion Leaders site was a pretty interesting coincidence. I don’t take enough holidays and when I do I end up occasionally checking email and reading blogs and what not.

Working too hard can be counter productive. If you’re exhausted it’s hard to be really effective. You don’t add any perspective or allow for any creative down time. Two examples in the post from HBSP hit this on the head. The first was Bear Sterns and how the CEO was working for 72 hours straight during some moments, that’s just setting yourself up for combustion. And having read that Clinton worked mother’s day and hasn’t taken any time off from the campaign trail didn’t make me admire her, it made me pity her.

Life is too short to work too hard. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t work smart or that you don’t out-perform the competition. It just means that you enjoy your down time so that you can make the most of your time at work. Not sure if I was able to do that last week, but I plan on doing more of that in the future.