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.

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 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.

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.

Great post from the boys over at SvN about planning. They’re talking mostly about software, but I think it totally applies to business as well.

Why do we spend so much time planning? Does preparation really help anything? Business plans, marketing plans, blah blah blah. Thing with plans is no matter how much you plan you don’t know what you don’t know. This is especially true when it comes to all things online.

According to RWW 5 years ago Ad Sense wasn’t around, web 2.0 hadn’t been invented, the top blog was Slashdot. By my recollection, 5 years ago Flickr was independent, big web companies were IPO-ing, and not having a mobile phone wasn’t unheard of. That’s all changed. So what about all those business plans that weren’t written 5 years ago?

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think planning is all bad, I think you need to set some milestones and a general direction. But planning every detail so you don’t change or allow for flexibility as times change is just silly. When the world is changing at the rate it’s changing at you need to be able to change with it.

A plan might look great today, but tomorrow something might change the circumstances around the plan and it will look like crap. People need to plan less and do more.

Some colleagues of mine went/came to Switzerland last week. They stayed mostly in Lausanne and spent a couple of hours in Geneva. They had terrible weather and in short they hated it. I had been hearing for a few days about how few people would be on the streets, how little there seemed to be to do, all in all how unliveable it was.

My experience has been totally different. I had pleasant weather on my first day (pictures will be uploaded to Flickr when I get back). Loved the scenery, saw some great restaurants and have enjoyed practicing my French, even if it’s just a listening and understanding exercise for now. We’ve seen some really nice villages around Lausanne, there’s a nice little buzz in the area. And I can totally see myself here, at least for a little while.

I think this is largely due to priming effects. The fact that my expectations were set so low, that I was told how unpleasant it was and how few people there would be, has meant that Lausanne has been able to exceed my expectations. Phew.

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.

I was flipping channels while on the bike this morning and caught a bit of GMTV’s interview with Madonna. They discussed her collaboration with Justin Timberlake – really digging that song by the way – and her career and other stuff. Just after the interview they mentioned that GMTV had the UK exclusive of the new video and would be playing it in its entirety on Monday. The interview’s on the GMTV site, but since you can’t embed it here’s the link.

Later this morning I’m checking through my feeds and Jason C has a post with the video embedded. This post has the video too after the cut.

What the hell is the point of having a “regional exclusive”? Some people still don’t get the fact that the web is international and that releasing something in one market and then waiting months if not years to release the product in another market is pointless.

Companies need to get better at global releases. Customers are already consuming internationally organisations need to catch up.

Anyway, it’s still a cool song and video, can’t believe Madonna’s nearly 50?!

Jason Fried over at SVN pointed an article on why the internet won’t be nirvana by Cliff Stoll from 1995. In it Stoll makes the point,

“Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople”.

That really got me thinking about salespeople. Could there be a more unauthentic role in capitalism then that of the traditional salesperson? I get shivers just when I hear the word.

But the internet is changing the sales perspective. No longer is it a person who goes around knocking on doors or cold-calling people. Everyone is becoming a salesperson.

I think in part it goes back to Umair’s point about interaction; everyone can interact with a product at a minimal cost. And then if you add the fact that sharing information has become super cheap and easy too, well then everyone becomes a potential salesperson.

By talking about NCAA basketball on my status on Facebook, by adding a bookshelf widget, by writing about 37signals on my blog, by adding feedback on a book on Amazon, by… you get the point. I’m a salesperson and so too is everyone else on the web. So if everyone is a salesperson 2.0 then no one needs to be a traditional salesperson and a salesperson is no longer needed. Finally, no more shivers.