deal architect

The New Milan

This weekend I saw the CNN profile of Yves Behar, whose firm Fuseproject has helped design various Jawbone products, the One Laptop Per Child computer and countless other products. In my upcoming book I have sections on Jonathan Ive, Apple’s master of industrial design and Robert Brunne,r who has worked on the Kindle, Nook and several other innovations. I also included how Lexmark designed the vertical, piano black look of its Genesis. In my last book, I profiled Darrin Caddes, lead designer at Plantronics. On the New Florence blog I have profiled designers like Mauro Porcini

The common thread in these designers is how effortlessly they can move from one product to the next. In Caddes’ case he used to design cars and motorcycles and after an accident turned to designing gorgeous headsets. Porcini is responsible for style at 3M, which has over 60,000  products.

We are living in product design heaven. You can see it is a glass half-empty or half-full. There are better days ahead for UX in Enterprise Software. Or, time to yell again - why the heck is taking it so darn long after so much investment?

Resolutions – still doing good

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to post an average of 1.25 innovation posts a day on the New Florence blog. Year to date I have 102 posts, so 1.7 a day! It truly feels like living with Da Vinci and Michelangelo during the Renaissance – so much innovation all around us.

Especially nice are the assists from guest posts by Brian Sommer from his recent European trip, Michael Krigman about FujiFilm and Pilar Carnicero Marquez about iPad in her classroom in Spain.

More Innovation

On the New Florence blog

“Third major prosecution wave” on Wall Street

Edible Innovations

Freestyle Fountain tour

Turning a plastic bottle into a bulb

“Drafting” in technology

As I watched bits of the Daytona 500 it hit me how adept the drivers are at taking advantage of the aerodynamics of the car ahead of them, while balancing the overheating from breathing the fumes of the car ahead. It’s called “drafting” and drives home the adage “You don’t need to be the lead dog all the time”. And it hit me, how in technology we could use the principle in some ways.

Workday has been adept at organizing analyst meetings around other vendors’ conferences. I was part of an Appirio event – morning at Google HQ, afternoon at a conference room in Giants stadium, evening at a suite at the Giants game. I have met with Rimini execs several times - in a hotel near somebody else’s event. Think how much more could be organized around “magnet” events – CES, Gartner IT Symposium, Google IO, Oracle Open World, Dreamforce etc.

Even more opportunity lies around what I call public calendars. Every year, for New Florence I have about 50 posts around dates like St. Patrick’s Day and Cinco de Mayo and innovative technology around them. This weekend I had posts around the Oscars, Daytona 500 and the NBA All Stars. While many of those dates require expensive event sponsorship rights, many of them do not.

Readers can you share some creative “drafting” you have taken advantage of?

Role models for the new IT

Michael Arrington and Dennis Howlett are both entertaining and influential (and ok to some, annoying) bloggers. They come at the world from very different POV – Michael sees it from a startup/VC view, Dennis from a enterprise software view. I respect them  both for their pedigree. Michael cut his teeth at Wilson Sonsini, a firm we used in our startup and was impressed with for the ease in which they handled funding and other startup legal scenarios. Dennis brings the rigor of a professional accountant and a trade journalist. Last week I had a chance to interact with both. I commented on Michael’s blog that the world is more than startups and VCs. I spoke to Dennis last week about the world being more than software executives and developers.

We are at the cusp of a revolution in IT – see the final chapter of my book that I have excerpted in its entirety here.

The role models for the new IT to me are “grown-up start ups” like Apple and Google and Facebook and eBay and Amazon and HP which are showing amazing operational excellence in their supply chains and data centers. Other role models are not software vendors like SAP, but customers (yes, customers not partners) of SAP which are embedding technology in their automobile, banking, and other products and services.

Membership in the new technology elite will not come from just being conversant in HTML5, SQL Injection, or cloud architectures. It is about:

• Product design elegance.
• Physical presence in strategic retail locations.
• Ecosystems of developers and thriving App Stores.
• Social savvy.
• Paranoia in the world of hacker groups such as LulzSec and Anonymous.
• Pragmatism in a world where attorneys are even more influential than engineers.
• Being able to fly to Xiamen or Xanadu at a moment's notice.

As I say in my book

We live in exciting times. To some degree the current landscape is the throwback to the 1960s and 1970s, when we dreamed of competitive advantage through technology. Sabre, the American reservation system, and American Hospital Supply were spoken of fondly for changing their industries.We have a similar opportunity now, but in most organizations the IT group is much more focused on the back office, not on product or revenue or growth.

There are plenty of role models for the new IT. We do have to start by looking beyond our startup fascination and the product pipeline of our established vendors. 

More New Renaissance

On the innovation blog

Fujitsu’s 2 inch mobile printer

The Watershed green home

Remember Atari?

J.C. Penney’s Business Model Innovation

Of Ecosystems and Handcars

Maybe because of my books the last few years, but I have become much more aware of a large community of developers, musicians, authors, SAP Mentors, Oracle Aces. They share a common trait – they are not entrepreneurs or employees in a traditional sense, but are the key components of ecosystems around big brands like Apple, Google, publishers, music and film studios. They are somewhat invisible in the media – think of how many stories have been written about Apple’s China labor issues versus those on the App Store community which has delivered over 600,000 apps in a few short years.

And the companies at the center of these ecosystems themselves treat them with ambivalence. My new book describes the stunning turnaround at Apple:

Dan Wood is founder of Karelia Software. His company logo shows two men pumping a handcar—the kind used to maintain rail tracks and resolve other right-of-way issues. The story behind the logo goes back to 2002.According to Mac Observer, “You could see people mouthing the word Watson when Sherlock 3 was demonstrated at MACWORLD
New York on July 17. Watson, an Internet services application, was originally released by Karelia Software back in November of 2001 as a complement to Apple’s Sherlock search software.” Wood had been called in to Apple prior to MACWORLD and shown Sherlock 3. On his blog he describes his reaction: “I drove home, gradually realizing what I had just witnessed, and sent off an e-mail to my contact at Apple Developer Relations expressing my unhappy sentiments.” An hour later, Steve Jobs called me. “Here’s how I see it,” Jobs said—I’m loosely paraphrasing. “You know those handcars, the little machines that people stand on and pump to move along on the train tracks? That’s Karelia. Apple is the steam train that owns the tracks.” So basically the message was: Get out of the way, kid; this is our market.

Fast-forward to 2011.Answering a question at the company’s shareholder meeting, Apple’s leader of iOS development, Scott Forstall, pointed out that Apple has, in the iOS App Store, “created the best economy in software in the history of the planet.”

But for every Apple which has gone one way, I see so many others piss away this huge asset that is their ecosystem. I hear about musicians and filmmakers auditing, even suing studios for accounting disagreements. I hear SAP mentors complain about legal issues getting licenses and other access to new technology. It’s easy to dismiss Joe Konrath’s litany of complaints against book publishers as one from an unhappy author, but the 230+ comments it has drawn shows a deeper angst about how poorly publishers are managing their author ecosystems.

Ecosystems, communities – call them what you want. They are a vibrant organism which deserve far more ink from all of us. And they need professional managers at the companies at the middle who nourish them and not just treat them as railcars to be hustled away whenever inconvenient.

Update: Dion Hinchcliffe provides a nice digital versus analog view of ecosystems

A Historic Day

This is one in a series of periodic posts to recognize articles, blogs, books, videos interviews I think are worthy of sharing. The category A Rare Medium Well Done says it nicely

This time it is Sam Fuld of the Tampa Bay Rays describing the wild night of last year’s baseball regular season. Two things that stand out – an athlete who is so articulate, and a first-hand account of someone who was part of one of the historic games and one who watched the other in the clubhouse with his just-as-exuberant team mates.

My memories of that evening: I was on a Southwest flight coming back from the West Coast cursing that the flight did not have wi-fi and cursing even more at the pilot I had asked to provide periodic scores – he had to weave around weather most of the way so could not. The whole plane erupted in joy and disbelief as soon as all of us turned on our phones upon landing.

Credit for bringing story to my attention – Jarret Pazahanick

How can you not promote your own book?

Read this post by Joe Konrath, and you will think that relations between book authors and publishers make those between spouses and mother-in-laws look cordial:) 

I have had a less tempestuous relationship with my publisher for two reasons:

a) As a blogger, I realize I am used to a pace and editing independence that a traditional publisher like John Wiley actually tempers

b) When I do rant about delays or quality problems at the publisher, I have a saint of an editor, John Deremigis, who knows how to calm me down.

As the  The New Technology Elite gets ready to be printed., though, I have had a more interesting conversation with John:

“If a $ 2 billion publishing company with a 85% share in a book's revenues is not willing to invest in a promotional budget, what message is it sending to a small business author with only a 15% stake in the book?”

John's response is "but every author does his/her own promotion".  I certainly did that with our last book together. If you see the website for The New Polymath, you will see the countless press/blog interviews, podcasts, presentations and social media investments I made. I forwarded Wiley many orders for bulk orders – several thousand copies from case studies, events etc. Wiley’s cost of sales was close to zero.

And I have done similar with the new book before it is released – excerpting on the New Florence blog, doing press interviews (see here, here, here), paying for a book web site being developed.  But I will be much more selective going forward unless Wiley frees up some promotional dollars. 

Honestly, my own economic interests are also not well aligned with the publisher’s. So, the book badge I had on this blog is gone – to make space for a sponsor. I also make much more from consulting on innovation, and speaking on themes from the book, than from the book.

To which John asks me, aren’t you proud of your book? I definitely am – in fact, early reviewers have told me it is even more inspiring in its innovation tales than Polymath was. It has twice as many case studies, countless interviews and guest columns from some of the most innovative technology executives in the world. And it is even more gratifying I wrote it while I was not 100% last year.

I encourage readers to pre-order a copy from Amazon or Barnes & Noble or your local bookseller. If you want bulk copies (25+) I have arranged a nice discount with an independent distributor. I will still be presenting on the book’s themes at several locations.  Please contact me directly for bulk orders or speaking/consulting.

So, I will still promote the book albeit in a reduced fashion. And I hope Wiley steps up their promotion. With almost 6X the author’s share, it is definitely THEIR book more than the author’s.

Our misaligned economics, though, is one item I would add to Joe’s list of items that publishers and authors need to both work on.

Introducing a New Sponsor: LumenData

I am excited to welcome LumenData to the past and present gallery of innovators and disruptors who sponsor this and the New Florence. New Renaissance blog.

LumenData is a Product Development and Services firm, focused on Enterprise Information Management. They focus on Master Data Management which is about establishing common semantics and governance of reference and shared data across a corporation (and beyond). 

LumenData partners in particular with Oracle, building and selling products together.  LumenData also offers services in data management, data quality and governance.  As businesses start to leverage “Big Data”, the demand for semantic harmonization and data governance is rapidly increasing which, in turn, is fueling LumenData’s growth.

LumenData has over 50 customers including Credit Suisse, Prudential, US Food Service, Weight Watchers, PC Connection, Bausch + Lomb and others.

Disclosure: Blog sponsor policy is outlined here