deal architect

"Men Not Working, and Not Wanting Just Any Job"

"Millions of men like Mr. Beggerow — men in the prime of their lives, between 30 and 55 — have dropped out of regular work. They are turning down jobs they think beneath them or are unable to find work for which they are qualified, even as an expanding economy offers opportunities to work."

I was disturbed to read this NY Times story about millions of men who choose not to work. Depressing they cannot start small businesses, do charitable work, or even blog.   Almost like they are the ""homeless who stay at home".

Ruined my day.

Readers - please send me some cheerful news  - particularly jokes.

Link Love - in MSM!

Holy mother of God! Newspapers plan to link to competing papers.

What next? Forrester pointing to Gartner Magic Quadrants?

I bet you that will happen before egos let them link to blogs- probability of 0.8....

Options Backdating and the Little Guy

Number of tech companies are being scrutinized around back dating of options, with fresh fuel each week. HP acquiring Mercury last week raised it. Apple. Brocade.

It is a complex area, but the consensus view appears to be "There is no law against backdating. However, it needs to be adequately disclosed, properly treated for tax purposes (employee comp among other things) and properly accounted for." Complex enough that Larry Sonsini of Wilson Sonsini, widely respected in the Valley is also caught up in  it, according to the NY Times.

I am sure it will be a three ring circus. But as the SEC examines options pricing and dating,  let me throw in a plea for the little guy - the small employee in these companies and other tech firms. It should also consider relaxing quiet period restrictions on non-executive employees. The issue at hand was meant to reward them in the first place. Options were a decent portion of their comp and they had little control over its pricing.

In the late 90s, I received options at Gartner. But as an employee you are subject to "quiet periods" where you cannot trade stock, even though most employees have little to zero knowledge of their company's financial details.  Several quarters in a row I noticed the stock price would dip as soon as the quiet period ended.  As soon as the period started again the price would go up. I think most employees lost between 10 to 15% of value because they could not trade at the higher prices. Now you may say that's just demand and supply. During the quiet period, the employee sell orders dropped off. But compared to institutional investors these transactions were small. I thought about going to the SEC to investigate if someone was taking advantage of the quiet period timing. I should have because I suspect it was happening around stock of number of other companies with employee options.

Whether it was demand-supply or someone mucking around, losing 10 to 15% of your options value is not fair to the little guys. You are bound by the quiet period even if you work in Timbuktu, far far from corporate. Likely the only insider information you have is the CEO's 4 digit internal phone extension. I bet you any backdating advantage does not come close to compensating them for any quiet period dip.

As the SEC goes after the executives, it is important it also thinks of the little guys it is supposed to protect. The non-executive employees who get options have little control over pricing - at grant or at exercise (other than their contributions to making the company successful). I would relax the quiet period restrictions on such employees.

We demand equal time!!

Jim Holincheck of Gartner, Charlene Li of Forrester and Jason Corsello of Yankee Group all have their own blogs. Jason has even joined the Irregulars. Each of them is very good - and each has a great personal brand (BTW - I worked with Jim for a couple of years).

I think us bloggers should get reciprocity on their analyst firm channels -)

You do have to wonder about the analyst business model, though. Both Gartner and Forrester spent almost 45% of their revenues on SG&A last year (I suspect Yankee has similar metrics).  Yet their readership channel is not growing at even a fraction of that of Google's or Technorati's.

By my estimate, each of these analysts probably makes 5 to 15% of what they bring their firms in subscription and consulting revenues. At some point, these smart folks and others are going to ask how much the firm brand and channel really adds to their own personal brand and rapidly growing blogging channels. Analyst firms are going to have to take a hard look at their channel costs and effectiveness, and shift some of savings to lower pricing and some to these stars.

Reengineering the Software Sales Process

A client told me a few months about what they had observed about their software sales rep. Nice person, responsive, but was involved in every single meeting over the course of the sales process. The client's comment: I am sure we "paid" lots for the rep's time  and travel expenses- wish it could have been broken out and we could have had a choice of when we needed the rep involved.

Another told me wryly- here is a vendor trying to sell us sales force automation, and their own sales process is so people intense and hardly automated.

Software vendors complain about the software procurement process - the detailed RFPs, the sales cycle time, number of demos etc. Buyers on the other think it is the sales person who stone walls, tries to corrupt the process. Clearly, the software sales process could use reengineering. In particular, the product discovery process could be considerably more automated.

I would break the product discovery process into 3 steps each with varying levels of customer self-service and vendor sales involvement:

a) From the thousands of RFPs vendors have already responded to, they should have an A,B,C analysis of most requested/somewhat requested etc. features. Expose that on-line to users (in a password protected area to keep from prying competitor eyes) using a requirements traceability tool. Let prospects navigate and fill their own feature/function checklists, if need be. Then it would be ok for vendors to refuse to fill out requests for 400 page feature lists in RFPs – encourage users to do so on a self-serve basis. And I mean refuse. JetBlue decided it was only going to have instant ticketing business model - no reservations on hold for 24-48 hours. I am sure they lost a few customers but they stuck to the model and it is becoming industry standard.

b) For horizontal functionality – common across verticals, geographies - expose major process flows in on-line demos, architecture in well structured documentation etc. so customers can self-navigate through the look and feel, flow  etc. Make reps available by on-line chat, telephone – remotely - to answer questions. Organize product marketing collateral on those lines.  This functionality should not usually require demos at the client site. 

c) For more unique vertical or client specific functionality, invest in on-premise, scenario based demos. Vendors should encourage buyers to define likely real-life business scenarios and then diligently walk them through how their solution delivers it. And tell the truth – what is available as a standard feature, what comes from partner functionality, work arounds etc. Too many vendors fight scripted scenarios. Or they will only do them grudgingly if a competitor is likely to invest in them. This is where the sales person should be focused, because this is likely where the differentiation will be most acute.

So, more automation to handle basic feature demos, FAQs etc. More people involvement in more unique areas. Good, solid A-B-C application.

Finally, I would also recommend smaller, more intense sales teams. As I wrote here the industry has a mind-boggling set of roles in sales, marketing and business development.  Try billing your customers for their time and expense. You will get a clear answer about what customers think of their value add...

Coulda. Woulda. Shoulda.

I must be aging. In the last couple of weeks I have said "Wish I could have stayed here longer" and "Wish I could have been there". So different than the "been there, done that, let's get home" attitude I have picked up with all the travel I do.

Two weeks ago I wish I could have stayed longer in the UK/Europe - Farnborough Air Show, British Open at St. Andrews, Tour de France, Military Tattoo in Edinburgh. I have been to each in the past but for a change would have enjoyed any or all again (I know you are saying how do you "go" to the Tour de France - I was in Paris on the weekend the Tour kicked off a few years ago)

This week I wish I could have been in the Bay Area for AlwaysOn and BlogHer.

Client commitments prevented me from doing so in both cases. (At least that's my excuse and I am sticking to that)

The good news is most of us around the world have way more entertainment/education/etc. choices than we know what to do with.  Around the world there are so many local events, often low cost /free and with the magic of television and the web exponentially more choice.

Hate to bring the Middle East again, but what is that makes some of us just ignore the bounty around us and be obsessed instead with mayhem and meanness?

Passionate Blogging

Think tech blogs are opinionated and passionate?

Try French blogs

And some of the participants at BlogHer

My father-in-law used to say - only cowards need guns (and as a farmer he had a couple). Nothing you cannot resolve by just duking it out. With bare hands.

Can we update that to: Nothing you cannot resolve by blogging it out. With Naked Conversations.

The Men get Sneaky

The continuing battle of wits and dollars with the Men of Telecom

I am diligent about going to the Verizon store to pay my bill (since they will not take my credit card on-line, I will stop by the store next to a Starbucks and pay my bill there). So, I notice  a $ 5 late fee recently and decide to watch what happens this month.

My bill was generated on the 19th. I go in to the store on 24th and pay my bill. I get a paper copy of the bill a few days later and it is for $ 4.02 more than what the lady told me was due. I go into store again. Apparently there is a several day lag between the central billing and the data the store has access to. How convenient - so I pay what I am told by the store and central billing can still nail me for the $ 5 late fee?

I notice on latest bill a charge for a one minute call to Australia - $ 4.10. My wife calling her cousin. We have moved to a calling card from Tel3 which gives us great international rates - 3 to 5 c a minute most everywhere. Margaret must have had a slip and forgot to use it for this call. Usually they can talk for hours - thank god she did not this time. $ 4.10 a minute! What are the guys at Verizon smoking?

But guess what Verizon?. On my 2 lines, DSL, long distance my average spend with you for last 5 months has been $ 149. In 5 previous months it averaged $ 286. Thanks to Skype, Tel 3, feature rationalization I have cut your bill in half.

Keep up the sneaky charges and that average will keep dropping....may be even down to zero.

The Best Run Companies Run...

More on SG&A in software companies. This time a glimpse in to the A part at SAP and Oracle. (Note to my marketing friends in both organizations - this has nothing to do with your generosity.)

So I get my expense check from Sapphire from SAP. Took 6 pages of vendor set up forms, 65 days of processing,  2 reminders. They tried an electronic remittance - did not work so sent me a check.

Last year, Oracle took 70 days for a similar expense reimbursement. Fewer forms but an internal admin did the heavy lifting getting AP to cut the check.

Both wanted original, paper receipts. Scanned ones not acceptable.

Each payment was for less than $ 1,000.

In the mean time, my clients one using SAP, another Oracle and another Microsoft AP software cut me checks like clockwork with average pay cycle of 30 days with few reminders needed - and they are for much larger amounts. And they all take scanned receipts.

Ok, so my sample size is real small, and hopefully their revenue, payroll and other admin is more efficient.  But these vendors are in the business of selling administrative efficiency. Is it unreasonable to expect them to be better and more electronic than their customers?

Update: A consultant who works with SAP on a regular basis confirms the initial vendor set up process is very manual and extensive. But on an on-going basis he says their payment process is fairly streamlined. When I did expert witness work for PeopleSoft, their payment process was pretty efficient. Not sure how Oracle has adapted that.

A 30 year retrospective

"The low regard in which business is held by the American public is the most serious problem confronting the free enterprise system today..."

Sound familiar? It is from a speech David Packard, then Chairman of HP made in 1976. Ravi Ramakrishnan (who works for HP) shared with me a copy of HP's Measure magazine from that year.

Check out the story on "Slaying the Paper D ragon"

I guess some things never change....thanks for sharing.

Two things I am glad of - HP's history of ethics. And that somebody still keeps paper copies of old stuff and makes them now available in PDF format.

Download hp_measure_july1976.pdf