Who is Farhan Lalji?

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.

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.

I was amused to see the article “EU to scrutinise Microsoft’s promise to open up Office” on my feed reader today. Not because I wasn’t expecting it - heck, I was wondering what the heck took the EC so long - but because Microsoft was actually trying to do something good, at least in principle, and was getting nailed for it. The trouble is Microsoft has a history of being bad, being anticompetitive and being closed. So people suspect that when they are trying to be nice that it’s just a front or a ploy or a dishonest attempt to get away with something.

I’m not saying that Microsoft is genuinely trying to open up. Personally, I suspect it is a front or a ploy or a dishonest attempt to get away with something myself. But I think it’s interesting that not many would give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt.

This was the trouble I had with game theory or taking things down to one off games. It’s never a one off or even a zero-sum game. There are never only two players. By being bad and screwing someone or some company or some institution over you’re opening the door to bad karma and some other entity will get even on behalf of the universe.

By being bad you piss off the universe. By being good you open yourself up to good things. I think the harder part is trying to be good when you’ve got a history of being bad. Good luck Microsoft, I truly believe Ray Ozzie wants to be open and good. Whether the whole company wants this and whether the universe believes it and allows it will be an interesting next chapter.

Umair’s been spending quite a bit of time talking about good and evil, open and closed, Microsoft and Yahoo, and Facebook and Google. A very basic synopsis would be that open is good, Microsoft, and increasingly Facebook, have bad DNA and this will prevent them from sustaining success in the long run. Whereas Google has being good in it’s DNA and this will enable them to succeed in the long run. It’s a pretty smart analysis and I think its pretty spot on.

However, one company that has kept its doors closed and managed to succeed is Apple. iTunes has to be the most closed bit of software I know. And DRM is just plain evil, very evil. But yet Apple kills in this market and is showing no signs of letting up.

So my theory is that design can trump good and evil in the short term. If you ensure that users have a great experience, and that it’s simple, efficient and effective users and the community in general will overlook the fact that it’s closed, proprietary and evil - how else would you explain DRM? The iPhone is another example of closed and well designed but yet super successful. The fact that Apple was bricking unlocked phones is another great example of evil but well designed.

Is this sustainable? I don’t believe so. I believe if someone comes up with a really useful, easy, super smooth system that has a wide variety of content and is good, open, basically DRM free, then iTunes could go down. And if someone (RIM/Nokia I’m looking at you) comes up with a phone that meets the standards Apple has set for usability for browsing and interacting online on your handheld device and is open as well, well then Apple could go down there too. It’s not easy, because Apple’s set the design bar so high, but it’s not impossible.

I just finished reading Seth Godin’s the Dip. It was a quick, enjoyable read that’s helped me focus a bit.

The book talks about how anything worth having needs dedication and is usually pretty hard and how quitting a dead end masquerading as an opportunity (or as Seth calls them a “Cul-de-Sac”) is a good thing.

It’s hardly rocket science, I know. In fact the Missus told me “That seems pretty obvious” when I brought it up with her last night. But it’s funny how you can invest a lot of your time and effort into something that offers very little value and not think that you should drop it and focus on something really valuable – sunk costs apply to everything in my opinion. Or on the other hand how you can think something is too hard and forget why you’ve started down the path in the first place. Sometimes you need a kick up the backside to remind you that this is a dip and you need to power through it.

So thanks Seth, it was a good and short read and just what I needed this week.

One of the reasons I love twitter and SMS messaging is that you have a limit to the number of characters you have to get your message across. So you’re constantly thinking about the most effective way to use the limit to get your message across.

Communication formats without limits makes it more difficult to communicate effectively and efficiently. So I’ve started putting limits on other forms of communication.

Cathy brought the 5 sentence rule to my attention a couple of weeks ago, and I have to admit that it’s changed the way I write emails. I have five sentences in my head the whole time I’m writing so I make sure I don’t go on and on which I’ve been known to do as well.

I’m thinking about what would be the optimum framework for blog posts. I hate posts that could probably be cut in a third and would end up being clearer for it. So I’m trying to stick to 3-4 paragraphs and see if my posts are clearer because of it. We’ll see.