Who is Farhan Lalji?

I’ve been thinking a lot about corporation size lately. In part because of all the layoffs around a number of big companies right now. In the UK they use the word redundancy, I hate the word redundancy and I don’t understand how organisations can grow without real needs, so how does an organisation get itself to a position where you have redundant roles! It shouldn’t take a recession to force organisations to cut costs organisations should only grow where needed. What we’re seeing now, in so many organisations around the world, is the result of haphazard hiring and growth without clear strategy and not the impact of a downturn. I really believe that organisations are using the economic climate as an excuse for downsizing based on bad decisions.

But how did we get here? How did we move from efficiency to inefficiency of scale? By getting to big too fast in the wrong areas in the wrong way. Too many organisations took too much public money, earned buckets of cash, spent said cash like it was in a burning house, hired too many people, without thinking efficiency.

How do you prevent such a thing from happening? I don’t know, I haven’t created a multi billion dollar organisation (yet, you never know, give me a couple of years). But I do think is that Umair Haque has it right on the Harvard Business Blog when he compared Obama’s campaign to the edge economy and innovation. What I’ve taken out of his post and my reflection on the post is that having a big hairy audacious goal is good – like Obama’s “Yes we can” and “Change the world”, but at the same time you have to keep your execution light, fluid and responsive, something that becomes difficult in a bloated, overstaffed, organisation.

Don’t get me wrong, I feel terrible for people who are being laid off, I have some friends around the world who are scared of losing their jobs, heck I’m scared of losing my job. But more then feeling terrible I’m a bit pissed off at the organisations who grew without a plan, who tried to get bigger, without focusing on getting better. In my opinion, they’re the real culprit behind this not the credit crisis and economic downturn.

Google’s launched a new browser, Chrome, and it’s nice. Sleek, very very very very fast (the Usain Bolt of browsers), easy to use and download, and it’s running on web kit and its open source so it’s extensible.

But I won’t be switching from Firefox, my browser of choice, just yet. I’ve tried Chrome a lot over the last couple of days, and I like it. I’d probably put it on my mom’s computer. But for me it’s just not integrated enough. While I was using it I found myself opening up the same site I was browsing on Chrome on Firefox and adding sites and pages to my delicious account. I found myself using Firefox to update and read through my twitter pages. And then I found myself sticking around Firefox after doing these tasks.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Chrome’s got potential and I’ll keep using it off and on to see how it develops and if I’m on another computer that doesn’t have all my Firefox extensions but has Chrome, it would be a no-brainer, Chrome here I come. But 99.9% of the time Firefox is still going to be my browser of choice.

I can see Chrome taking market share from Internet Explorer (my prediction is IE get’s hit hardest), Firefox, Opera, Flock (yes people do use Opera and Flock). But this user is sticking with Firefox. For now.

I’m reading subject to change by the good folks at Adaptive Path right now. It’s an interesting book that discusses features and design and why people like using what they like using. It’s all round good stuff.

At the same time I’m reading a lot about the credit crunch and how people are no longer spending as much as they used to how people are looking for a bargain and how places like Asda and Aldi here in the UK are gaining market share as users try to save more on their expenditure. That makes sense for every day goods that people need like bread and milk and other daily necessities, but it doesn’t hold true for the success of the iPhone 3G - which even Swisscom has run out of. If people are tightening their belts why are they spending on an iPhone?

Here’s my hunch, design is a powerful tool against downturns in the economy. When you spend a lot of attention to detail on design and build something that users want – and sure marketing and inventory controls probably have something to do with it – you’re likely to see off the headwinds and do okay. Building more features which ratchet up the price of a good isn’t a good strategy. Design is about making things simple and elegant, and during a downturn less is definitely more.