Who is Farhan Lalji?

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.

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.

During my last job, at a design agency in London, we had a pool table. At 530 everyday, almost like clockwork, 2-4 of us would go and shoot some stick. It was a great semi release, we would end up talking about projects or developments in the world of technology more often then not. When we moved offices and ditched the pool table a large part of me felt that was a mistake, but I couldn’t articulate why.

At Yahoo! we have pool, foosball and ping pong tables and though I rarely get the chance to play these days it’s good to know they’re there. I’ve had some good conversations about life, work, philosophy and politics around these tables. One of the best times I’ve had at Yahoo! has been when we went out to play golf in the middle of Soho, not only was the golf fun but in winning the closest to the pin competition I’ve been inspired to play more golf. There was also some great work-related conversation that evening in a relaxed non-traditional environment.

And then I read about the Google Games (hat tip: Brad Feld) where students from MIT and Harvard came in and played various physical, mental and just plain fun games. Great recruitment technique if you ask me.

Last week I came across an article in the London Business School Business Strategy Review regarding the role of play at work. It’s weird but I’ve always felt that having a playful outlet was important to being able to work effectively. And this article makes that case.

If/When I start my own company I think play will play an important part in recruitment, engagement and strategy. If for no other reason then the fact that its fun and we spend way too much time at work not to have fun there.

Acquisitions and strategy

Web acquisitions are not strategy. Acquisitions are usually financial gymnastics showing value. Personally, I think when a big company buys a smaller innovative company there’s a good chance that innovation in the acquired company dies. Google was guilty of this with its acquisitions of Blogger (nothing new there, Wordpress, six apart innovative), Yahoo’s been guilty as well. And AOL, AOL is probably the guiltiest of the lot.

When I read that AOL had bought Bebo my immediate thought was, well they’ve just handed the social networking industry to Facebook. Facebook’s kept its independence and as a result has been cutting edge. Bebo was showing some fight, but my guess is that this purchase is going to kill any incentive Bebo has to fight and innovate.

Strategy is seeing where there are gaps, filling those gaps with a superior product or service. Strategy means seeing where you can add value and create value and then executing like crazy, it’s not acquiring a company that does a decent job filling it with cash and then watching as its motivation to innovate disappears.

Henry Blodget and Kara Swisher have two great videos on Yahoo!’s Tech Ticker.

On the first they’re discussing the mentality of Google’s founders in comparison to other founders. Their DNA and how they’ve moulded the company in their own image. Basically, how they’ve kept it authentic.

My take, well duh, authenticity and value people, authenticity and value!

Second one is looking at how a lack of innovation has ended up biting Dell in the behind. You have to invest in research and think long and convince the market to understand the value of research. HP, Apple and Google do this well, the list of companies who don’t is too long.

Enjoy the videos embedded below.

So Google’s the biggest brand in the UK as well as the world (pdf 800+ kb). To me this signals a huge shift in advertising.

I think Umair nailed it when he wrote about interaction being so cheap that building a brand through traditional advertising is no longer necessary.

For new technology products interaction is dirt cheap, even free, for traditional products access to these products is cheaper but information about the product is so accessible that if you have a crap product people will not only know they’ll tell other people.

We – technologists, marketers etc – need to focus more on creating phenomenal experiences and less on advertising perceived benefits through ads. If you focus on building great experiences the brand and the market come cheap, just ask GOOG.

Some University professor down in Brighton wants to ban using search engines and Wikipedia from her corner of Academia. Personally, I think it’s a rotten idea. In this age of information overload you need to be able to cut through and get a good understanding of an issue, event or person as easily as possible. Not to mention I have no idea how you enforce such a ban. After doing some searching I found out that the University professor is peddling a book called, get this “the University of Google”– surprise, surprise, this whole things smells of propaganda to me.

Personally I think access to information by searching and using tools like Wikipedia has revolutionized the way we gather information. Very quickly we can find out basic levels of information on a wider variety of topics.

Use Wikipedia a lot? Do this test, type in en on your browser, click the down arrow and check out the things you’ve looked up recently. My list includes Tao, Albert Einstein, Pete Newell, Petra and Ubuntu, that’s a eastern philosophy, and African philosophy, a genius in physics and a genius in basketball and a location I visited on holiday recently.

The web, and in particular helped me get a basic understanding of these diverse subjects and that’s not a bad thing.  Had I been doing an academic paper on Taoism, or the theory of relativity or whatever else, Wikipedia and search engines would be a starting point not a reference at the end.  After a superficial understanding I can ask the right questions and dig deeper into a subject - that’s what I believe any sensible student of the world would do.

Society and information in society have changed as a result of the internet, as a result of having so much information at our fingertips. What students really need is more courses on how to differentiate the signal from the noise and where to go to get deeper understandings of the subjects they are researching.

Three things I’m thinking about today:

1. It’s kind of crazy that if you build an exceptional brand that gets engrained into people, it’s hard for a competitor to overtake you, no matter how much better the experience is.
Inspiration: the fact that Mapquest still dominates the US mapping market

2. Investment into public transport is only half the battle against climate change and carbon emissions, people need to stop seeing cars as status symbols and more as big polluters.
Inspiration: the new Tata nano and the fact that so many Indians are going to enter as car owners.

3. Standard of living doesn’t equal quality of life, it seems like the more we have the less time we have to enjoy it.
Inspiration (joint):
a) this story I heard about a fisherman who meets a capitalist, and the capitalist says “Why you should sell your fish”
and the fisherman says “Why?”
Capitalist says “Because then you’ll have lots of money and you can build a company selling fish.”
Fisherman says “But why would I want that?”
Capitalist says “Because you can make lots of money.”
Fisherman says “But why would I want that?”
Capitalist says “So then you can retire.”
Fisherman says “But what would I do then?”
Capitalist says “I don’t know… fish?”
b)The story of stuff, it’s a bit long - 20 mins plus a bit of loading time - but definitely worth watching.

I raised an eyebrow yesterday when I saw that Google had acquired Zenter and was going to add presentations to its online docs and spreadsheets suite.

I’ve used G docs (but not G spreadsheets) and found it “okay”. I’m fairly certain G spreadsheets is the same, decent for collaboration and okay for the basics, but you wouldn’t create too extensive a document or model using the tools.

I’m not sure how good Zenter’s stuff is - has anyone use it? What I’m really hoping for is that this gives Google a bit of the office applications marketshare so we can see a bit of innovation around the Microsoft Office suite. Personally, I think Microsoft can do a lot more with Office online. Will this be the poke that the giant of Redmond needs to get it done?

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen competition being the spark that lights innovation. Apple and Microsoft keep enhancing their OS offerings because of their competition. If Moz hadn’t developed Firefox would we see tabbed browsing in IE? Probably not. In a competitive market no one’s able to rest on their laurels. Competition sparks innovation and innovation is great for users so in the end we all win.