I’ve been working out of the Yahoo! offices for a couple of days a week and then out of the London Business School Library and most recently I was granted access to Camden Unlimited’s Collective project this is great as it allows early stage entrepreneurs some office space for a short period of time. I’m really hoping I can help shape the space and make it a really good environment.

Then, the Bee and I were having a conversation that turned into an idea for a work space that could encompass childcare and working space, and then someone tweeted about Third Door which is trying to do something just like that. I think this is a great idea and I really hope they’re able to get it off the ground and expand it into different areas.

And finally, today I came across this great blog post from Seth Godin, goodbye to the office, it’s great post discussing why do we need an office and how technology and our society has progressed beyond the need for a traditional office. I think Seth’s right, but I do think there’s something to be said for social interaction with individuals, they just don’t necessarily have to be in the same company.

Imagine if there was a group of hubs in different areas of cities where local residents could go with childcare and an office set up. Where people were working but not everyone worked for the same company. Where you could socially interact, where you could hold meetings, where video conferencing capabilities were available, but it was walking distance from your home and everyone had access to one of these work hubs. Companies pay a lot for overhead, where they have to pay for cleaning, supplying basic stuff like utilities, water, coffee etc. Imagine if they gave employees a work space allowance that allowed individuals to subscribe to a office away from home but close enough that you could roll out of bed and be at work. People may say that working in the same place helps as your team helps productivity but having worked in traditional offices for the most of my career and having worked away from my teams for the last couple of months I don’t buy that.

I’m a big fan of Scott Adams, the creator of dilbert, and I love the fact that he has an office across the street from his house, or something like that. Why can’t everyone have an office across the street. Think of the environmental impact (transport emissions saved), the societal impact (less time commuting means more time with the family) or the productivity impact. I think that’s the future of the office.

Here’s the thing, it’s nothing new! Sony Ericsson had a video calling phone more than a few years ago. A colleague at Yahoo! reminded everyone about this with his tweet and link to some Germans on YouTube making avideo call using the Sony Ericsson k-800.

The difference is that the experience is way better now than it was then. The resolution, the camera’s and wifi mean that you’re not dependent on network access and it can be a pretty good experience. That’s all pretty big. Overall the technology is ready for mainstreaming, and Apple is great at releasing a technology when it’s ready for mainstreaming.

Launch a service too early and it’s restricted to the UberGeeks’s of the world. I have friends who had Sony Ericsson phones with video calling capability, problem was as most of us weren’t ready for the calling capability these friends spent most of their time using the phone and texting rather than video calling. It’s like people using email in 1991, facebook in 2001, twitter in 2008 etc. If the network isn’t ready for the technology it’s not going to really get adopted. I call this my technology mainstreaming theory and I’ve drawn up a little visual explaining the principle and how this might apply to video calls. Apple is potentially right on the money, launching right when the technology is ready for mainstream, I expect Android to follow suit quickly, and the fine folks at RIM, Windows to lag a bit – don’t even get me started as to when Nokia and Samsung will catch on.

(Note – if you have trouble seeing this, click on it for notes on the flickr page)

This seems to be a general trait with Sony Ericsson, they seem to be great at creating things when the technology is there, rather than when the technology has matured to a point where it becomes a really good experience. Which is what Apple’s doing here and done since their foray into smart phones.

As well, by launching Facetime as an open standard Apple’s hoping other phone manufacturers will build on it, but I’m sure they’re banking on most people wanting to buy and use the video calling capabilities on the iPhone 4. Not a bad bet by Apple.

Personally, I think the idea of eating your own dog food is bull. If you’re a dog maybe this works but if you’re a human being with some idea for taste, quality, performance and functionality dog food is just that, food for dogs. How do you get better than the competition if you don’t know just how good the competition is? How do you succeed if you’re not familiar with what works in the market?

My belief is that employees should be charged with making products they want to use, and that the aim of the corporation to be to build products so much better than the competition that people inside the company don’t want to use other products, but rather become evangelists for your products to their friends and contacts outside of the company.

If you work in a company where people within the company are using your competitions products or services, don’t out law it, charge them with the idea to build products better than the ones their using now. Get people to build something, use it for two weeks and then see if they switch, if not, why not? Can you fix it, can you make it better, do it, switch again, and now? Repeat often until your employees switch to your own product by choice. I call this the “stop eating dog food and start making caviar” or “caviar” approach to product selection and development in an organisation, i wonder if it will stick.

Now this is Jim Joyce, an umpire who made a mistake on a baseball play that costed Armando Galarraga a perfect game, he’s contrite, he says things like “I missed it… I kicked the sh*t out of it, nobody feels worse than I do, I took a perfect game away from this kid”…:

When you mess up, take responsibility and apologise. Be honest and upfront and say you’re sorry. Joyce did this, he found Galarraga and apologized after wards and everybody was big and understanding.

Zuckerberg and Facebook continually do things with privacy and instead of being honest and quick with an apology they act defensive and put the blame on users rather than accepting the issues on their site. This is one of the reasons why my pictures will be on flickr, my blog posts will be here and not on Facebook and my status messages will be on twitter and linkedin as well as facebook. I’m not naïve, I’m not going to quit Facebook, it’s too big a part of my communication with people, but it won’t be the only place I store information and a lot of this decision has to do with the way the company handles themselves and their apologies.

“1. the marginal cost of a newspaper is zero. 2. there is perfect competition. conclusion? zero industry profit, paywalls or not.”

I’m sure I’ve written about the eventual doom in the newspaper industry as well but no one ever talks about how they could make it work and what would need to be done. Don’t get this twisted, I don’t think pay walls are a good idea, but I do think they could, repeat COULD, work if done right.

So here are my thoughts, I believe there are three principles to make payment for news content work:

1 – offer superb editorial/analysis/content that is unavailable elsewhere
2 – keep it cheap and painless to pay
3 – Consistency across competitors

First, pay walls work when you have superb analysis or original great content like the WSJ or the FT. Where people aren’t paying for the “news” they’re paying to read commentary and gain insights. It works for people like the economist and monocle for content creators with a large, affluent readership. If you don’t have content that is killer odds are you’ll put up a pay wall and users will go elsewhere.

The other element that could help a pay wall succeed is making it dirt easy to purchase. Think of iTunes, how easy is it to buy music on iTunes? How easy is it to do a purchase on Amazon. One click and you can purchase. For a pay wall to succeed you’ll need to make it super easy to for users to pay. Make it even a little complicated and the users are off. iTunes might be more expensive than some other 3rd party websites, but the fact that you can make the purchase easily means I save time from interactive with the complex shopping basket functionality that you see on other sites.

Lastly, if you don’t have specialist content you better make sure that your competitors are not close enough to you in terms of content and aren’t giving the content away for free. In the UK the BBC is likely to always give content away as long as that’s the case it will be difficult for anyone to really put up a viable pay wall. To really make it work you need consistent pricing policies but most people would call this collusion. So if you’re a news media company don’t bank on this third principle.

The Irish News really failed across the board, they didn’t provide great analysis and content that was original, they didn’t make it easy to subscribe and their price point was all over the place. So to make it succeed, focus on creating great content, providing analysis and features that people value and making it dead simple to purchase and don’t price it at a point where it becomes a competitive disadvantage and pay walls might, I repeat MIGHT, have a shot.

Don’t get it twisted, I really like Google and respect the Android OS, I love Apple and love working on a Mac and am itching to come up with a reason to get an iPad. But I’m pretty stuck on the blackberry.

Why? Simple. Blackberry does one thing really really well. The Blackberry messenger (BBM) feature is whole heap of awesomeness. A lot of my friends are on crackberries and the fact that we can message internationally in groups for free wherever we are has a whole lot of other people hooked. Not to mention university students who love to use the BBM with their friends and family across the world.

Sure Blackberry does a whole lot of other stuff well, emailing with a proper physical keyboard is nice, and for business email management it’s a great service. But for me it’s BBM that keeps me as well as a lot of other people hooked. So much so that the Blackberry still outsells the iPhone and Android handsets in most markets – in the US last quarter, iPhones had 21%, Androids 28% and RIM 36% of all smart phone sales.

The lesson here is to do one thing really really well. Most companies that are really successful do one thing absolutely, phenomenally well. Google does search really really well, this gives them license to develop and build other great things like maps and mail. Facebook makes it simple to share stuff really well, it’s not the best picture sharing sight, it’s not the best for updates or events, but because it does sharing this content really well it enables them to do events and photos etc and get traction in these other areas.

So when starting something, make sure you have one feature that’s absolutely fabulous that makes it difficult to compete with and this will help grow and maintain your market share.

Small interactions can mean a significant amount to people. I’ve connected with a couple of people recently who made a little time for me and it meant a lot. I’m not sure if these people will remember me in the next couple of weeks but I sure as hell hope so. At first I was a bit taken back when I received Linkedin invites from a couple of people who’ve accomplished a lot but then I realized that this should work both ways. If there’s anyone I made time for who wants to stay in touch I should be open to them.

I also came across this piece on Mashable about Linkedin, a lot of it is pretty basic, but the one thing that stuck out to me was:

There are some on LinkedIn who believe you should only connect with a small percentage of professionals you know and trust. Others say (including myself) you should connect with everyone, even if you vaguely know them.

When looking for a job, you never know who will be able to recommend you, or who is looking for someone to fill a position where you would be a perfect fit.

That really hit a cord with me. Who knows who might be able to help me find a job or find the right person to fit a role in the coming months/years so I should be open to them I guess.

The one thing I won’t change is my stance on recommendations and introductions. I only recommend people that I truly would want to work with again. My connections are precious so introducing someone when I’m not totally sure about their value won’t really happen. So am I way off on my Linkedin philosophy?

Let me explain, a product is something that stands on it’s own two feet. Something that can grow, innovate and develop in to a really successful, scalable big business.

A feature is something that is nice but is really part of a suite in another product. So for example a lot of companies building twitter clients are feature builders and when twitter buys a service and integrates it into it’s suite or when twitter creates their own client the service suffers.

Sure there are nice ones like Tweetdeck and others which are extending themselves and building out browsing across platforms to try and establish themselves as products but a lot of these companies are just building features.

When I hear that Facebook is launching locations or Yelp is launching check ins, I wonder if LBS companies really launching a new product or are they basically doing R&D for larger companies?

If the goal of the company is to flip, i.e. to be bought by a big brand in a short amount of time, then companies need to make sure they’re building the best service around so that the big brand doesn’t acquire a competitor. If the goal is to be huge and to change the world maybe some of these companies need to re-examine their business models.

Two bloggers/business folks I trust, were on either side of this issue last week
First, I came across a tweet by Umair Haque last week which said:

“every great company reaches a transition point: founders must cede to professional ceo’s. that’s facebook’s real problem. google did it.”

I don’t agree. We had a bit of friendly back and forth on twitter which ended with a great analogy of comparing Zuckerberg to Jobs as being like comparing NWA to T-Pain.

Another blogger/entrepreneur/investor writing about a similar problem was Ben Horowitz (of Andreesen Horowitz) who wrote a blog post about how worrying that whether an executive’s ability to scale is can be corruptive.

Let’s look at this specifically (in the case of facebook and Zuckerberg) and philosophically.
In the case of Facebook – Zuckerberg might not be Steve Jobs and he might not be Gates or any other founder-turned-exec who managed a company that he founded and turned it into a multi billion-dollar company. Doesn’t matter, what matter’s is that he has a solid advisory group around him as he learns. Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook COO) is pretty frakin smart, as is Marc Andreesen, Peter Thiel and the folks at Accel and Greylock who are either investors or advisors in the company. Not to mention the numerous managers and leaders that Facebook has brought on board from Google and other large well established players.

To say that Zuckerberg is running the ship on his own is like saying that Jobs didn’t get any assists from the likes of Jonathan Ive or the other designers/engineers/leaders within Apple, not true.

Philosophically speaking, people learn throughout their whole life, as young people we learn with mentors and structures to help us learn the lessons others have learnt before us. Or we learn through experience. The first time entrepreneur or the executive learning to lead. And we continue learning throughout our lives, whether as a pensioner learning how to put videos on YouTube, or a grandparent figuring out Skype.

It’s not always easy or intuitive but that doesn’t mean that skills can’t be learnt. What people need are people to mentor them and the structure to learn effectively.

According to multiple free online dictionaries equanimous means:
“Calm and composed; of stable disposition” or “having or showing equanimity; even-temperedness”

The reason why I’m writing about being equanimous is two fold, firstly the celebrations/riots in Montreal after the Canadiens won a playoff round (that’s right, a playoff round, not the Stanley Cup, not even the conference championship, the second round). As well our stroller was stolen (we think, it may have been taken in mistake) from outside our flat. Two pretty big things, one very positive and one very negative but in both instances being equanimous is very important.

Things can go very well, and things can go very badly. But as long as you’re equanimous you can move on and move up. For Montreal, there are still two rounds of potential playoffs to win before they can declare themselves champions. For us, we still have our default stroller, and we’re okay, our daughter is very happy and we’re still blessed overall.

This is a lesson in business as well. I’m reading Blue Ocean Strategy right now and the interesting thing is that the authors research has shown that no company remains successful forever. Companies that do remain successful for extended periods reinvent themselves repeatedly.

I believe being equanimous in life and in business is one of the keys to happiness and every day I struggle and fight to remain equanimous. I’m glad Tasleem introduced me to the philosophy.