deal architect

The audience is heavenly - the traveling is hell

So I was asked yesterday in Vancouver how the book experience has been and I invoked Dan Fogelberg.

I should not have - that beautiful song always leaves me depressed. In contrast, the book experience has been hugely invigorating as I get to make new friends around the world.

It's time to thank facilitators of this week's book related events/columns

• Reg Nordman for bringing together some of Vancouver's best tech thinkers to an event yesterday
• Fred Studer for bringing many of Microsoft's smartest at an event at his corner of its sprawling campus
• Om Malik for my guest column urging Silicon Valley to move beyond its current focus on "light" innovation
• Mark DeSantis, himself a Polymath as a tech entrepreneur, educator and talk show host for inviting me to a very enjoyable session at WMNY 1360 AM in Pittsburgh
• Joe Garde for inviting me to his IrishDebate show thinking about next-gen Ireland in a changing wold
• Dennis Howlett for inviting me to his show on how the book's themes could allow accounting and other professional services firms to innovate themselves

Big Tech is Broken - badly

Someone at a large outsourcer shares with me an email he sent to his CEO lamenting the while the annual report repeatedly talks about innovation, there is no budget in R&D/innovation at the firm - and he has been there over a decade.

A friend at a large software firm complains his firm did not get much ink in my book, then proceeds to justify the lack of ink by explaining how poorly their product innovation cycle works

An executive at a large telco listens to my "tough love" about how telcos have abdicated innovation to Apple, Google, Cisco and others. No protest - he just laments how his hardworking group's internal innovations don't have much of impact on his firm's external reputation.

Each one of them works for a multi-billion technology company. Each one of them is way past sensing something is broken - they are internally yelling for things to change.

In all my time (and partly because my book tour is letting me interact in person and over the web with a wider set of people) in the technology industry I never seen this much acknowledgement that our big technology companies are inefficient organisms - much goes in, little comes out in innovation.

In the meantime, those 3 firms collectively spend over $ 10 billion a year in marketing how good they are (and many times more in selling costs). Print, web, TV - they drone on.  These 3 are not overly acquisitive. In other big tech, their acquisition groups continue to spend billions seeking the magic outside their walls.

And you wonder when their executives will wake up and stop that self-delusional spend and use that money to fix things internally. And you wonder when their customers will send them the message that they are badly broken - rather than keep sending them faithful checks.

More New Renaissance

from the innovation blog

Fuzzing – next-gen software testing

Hillsborough County Tax Collector – a Malcolm Balridge candidate

A car for the blind

The Science of Phiten

More New Florence

Back after a short break, this periodic summary of posts from the innovation blog

Hurricane Drones

Delta tickets on Facebook

The Go Go in-flight wi-fi

The Android 4G HTC EVO

"Living in the present"

Not all food in Paris is memorable. As my wife and I sat in a forgettable bistro on a Friday evening she could see my fatigue from book events in 4 countries that week and lack of interest in the meal and said “Don’t know how you do it all the time. Insufficient sleep, strange hotels, unpredictable meals”

“But you know you better keep doing it. Your book is barely out”

We are both well traveled - between us we have been to 60 countries  - but it was my wife's friendly way of reminding me me how big and wide the world really is.

More proof comes in a tweet from Martin Gillet saying he is disappointed I did not do a book stop in Brussels. I get home and Marnie Landon has all kinds of ideas for book events should I visit Toronto. Ditto with Sherry Lowry about Austin. Others talk about a visit to India.

But then comes a friendly zinger from Curt Monash "How can you keep plugging your book? Where do you find the stamina?"

It then hit me I need to apologize to folks like Curt. Between Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, amazon, my blogs folks like him in the social world have seen way too many mentions of the book. On the other hand 98% of the world has never even heard of it.

I am not that unusual. amazon recently announced its ebook sales exceeded paper sales. Yet, ebook sales make up only 4-5% of worldwide book sales. Or Skype in its IPO filing announced that 7% of its users contribute bulk of its revenues. Even with its large non-paying customer base, less than 1% of the world's population has likely ever used Skype.

Us in social (and broadly the digital) world sit on the left edge of the bell curve and constantly look further to the left. Most of the world is to the right of us. As  Merv Adrian eloquently reminds us the right side is "living in the present". 

If someone can figure  out how amazon or Skype or I can efficiently reach the majority to the right of us, without continuing to bombard the ones to the left, we would be eternally grateful. We sure could use a knife to spread the peanut butter evenly across a not-so-flat - and a very wide - world.

The Future of Clouds

Phil Wainewright, Dennis Howlett, Narinder Singh and I will fling barbs and worse during the appirio sponsored Summer Slam on Thursday, August 19.

Given the "no rules, just right" spirit, I am throwing out the first punch by using a slide I presented at the EuroCloud event in London couple of weeks ago.

My voiceover for this slide said

"IBM and Oracle are no longer the benchmark. Now cloud vendors are the benchmark for each other - each striving for best practices and efficiencies of the others. Imagine a cloud "polymath" who can do all these things well."

That to me is one of the exciting things to look for in the future of clouds.

See you on Thursday!

“If it ain’t broke, improve it”

Doug Belden invited me for a visit after he read my recent blog about innovation at the Hillsborough County Tax Collector’s office he has presided over since 1998. It is a candidate this year for the prestigious Malcolm Balridge award. 

He started off sharing his recent presentation to a Charter Review Board the country convenes every five years. And you can see (his section starts at page 58) he has brought fresh thinking to government with statements like

“We may be a government agency with no obvious competitors, but the attitude we convey to our customers is if you could choose, would you choose us?”

But what was fascinating was when he moved past his immediate focus. He is incredibly connected in the community with a wide web of interests – in 15 minutes the conversation went from Electronic Medical Records to biofuels to a trip to Ireland. And in each case it was not just an academic knowledge – he was citing people he is helping or products he has evaluated to improve the community.

I brought him a copy of my book – but leaving his office I could not but think about Anshu’s post – the man may well be both a Linchpin and a Polymath.

The ethics around the HP matter

Over the last few days, as the news around HP has unraveled I have asked myself a few times : if the incident had happened in March, would I have included it as a scenario in Chapter 20 of my book? That chapter is titled Ethics: In an Age of Cyberwar and Cloning.

The angles in the HP matter are many:

• Is the HP governance broken with 3 forced executive changes in 5 years?
• Why did the HP board take 5 weeks to make the decision to push Mark Hurd out?
• Was Hurd treated too harshly given the relative immateriality of the expenses misstatement (supposedly $ 20,000) compared to all the shareholder value he has delivered?
• Should it have given Hurd such a hefty severance?
• Was the sexual harassment charge merely a red herring?
• Should Larry Ellison of Oracle have jumped into the fray and publicly criticized the HP board? 
• Given Ellison’s own colorful past  what would his board have done in a similar situation?

Chapter 20 in the book has 8 perspectives from academics, attorneys, industry watchers on new ethical issues technology is spawning. I also laid out 8 scenarios where I ask readers to grab a colleague or a friend and go debate/argue the issues in each scenario:

• Florida: Biofuels and impact on food prices and chemical pollution
• GPS and Routing Traffic through Family Neighborhoods
• Regulation of Tech industries: Do we need more like Neelie Kroes, Former EU Commissioner for Competition?
• Do we hold Google to a higher standard? (includes discussion of the recent issues with China)
• Environmental Trade-offs: Sustainability of Rare Earths needed for many cleantech versus Sustainability of carbon fuels
• Should we be applying Isaac Asimov’s Rules to modern day robots, UAVs etc?
• Increased availability of personal genetic marker information and resultant increase in prophylactic treatments
• Should we walk away from our “Patently Absurd” patent system?

As you can see some the scenarios cover very thorny issues across a wide range of infotech, cleantech, healthtech and other tech.

The more I thought about it, the HP/Hurd matter while juicy and gossipy did not really tread NEW ethical ground. While I may have mentioned it in other chapters where HP and Oracle are cited, I would not have dropped any of the 8 scenarios above and found a place for HP/Hurd in the chapter on ethics.

Readers: Agree? Disagree?

BTW – if you want to read the 8 scenarios in detail, send me an email and I will send you the extract from the book.

Book event – Cognizant Toronto

Cognizant’s Insurance group in Toronto is hosting an event around The New Polymath on September 2. If you are in insurance, or broadly in financial services come meet and greet and also get to see their state of the art location which opened last December and learn about their offerings for those verticals .

Please send me an email and I will get you an invite.

A cynical end to a cynical Hurd era

The largest technology vendor, HP gets less than 4 pages in my 400 page book on technology innovations. And almost 3 of those pages are about Cartridge World and Cisco and Oracle which are challenging HP’s bread and butter printer and data center markets.

Yes, history will record that HP shares rose 136% under Mark Hurd’s watch. It will also record that HP released little in the way of breakthrough innovation and ended up with beaten up assets in EDS, Mercury and several of its acquisitions. It will also note this blog repeatedly asked why so called data center consolidation efficiencies HP internally claimed never made it to more than a few showcased clients and why ounce for ounce,  printer ink is way more pricey than the swankiest perfume or champagne.

So, the Hurd era rightfully ends with the board taking 5 weeks to decide how to spin the departure news, and the press release announcing the departure spending as much space assuring the world the company is financially healthy as discussing the cloudy circumstances of his exit.

Healthy? The board really, really needs to take a good hard look at the company’s labs, the customer satisfaction metrics  and competitive landscape. For too long it has accepted shareholder value as a proxy for too many innovation and customer value metrics.