mardi 6 juillet 2004

The reward of purposeful work In an article about Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski turning down the Lakers coaching vacancy, Tony Kornheiser provides a nice quote: Warren Buffett, one of the richest and most successful businessmen in America, once said when asked to describe happiness: "Happy is what I am. I get to do what I like to do every single day of the year. I get to do it with people I like and I don't have to associate with anybody who causes my stomach to churn. I tap dance to work, and when I get there I think I'm supposed to lie on my back and paint the ceiling. It's tremendous fun. . . . I know I wouldn't be doing anything else. I'd advise you . . . to work for an organization of people you admire, because it will turn you on." Some workplaces are just dull, where no great purpose exists. Some workplaces have hustle-and-bustle, and enthusiasm, but still don't inspire greatness. Employees work hard, get paid well, and plan their family vacations. And some workplaces have passion. Bright people united by a common, purposeful goal worth pursuing. In such workplaces, employees don't have to be monitored, as they know what to do and they actually want to do it. They feel included. Stuff feels important. Chris McDonough wrote a wonderful piece called Lifestyle, Inc. that ranks as one of my favorite weblog articles of all time. Compare the six (no, 7) bullets in Chris' article to the Warren Buffet quote. Seems Warren got pretty successful following similar principles. Is Chris McDonough the next Warren Buffet? 9:20:07 AM   comment []

Tim O'Reilly on Open Source Economics At last year's OSCOM 3 at Harvard, Dave Winer gave a keynote with a contrarian view about open source. If memory serves me correctly, he described open source as destroying the opportunity for small software companies. Although I disagreed, my conscience nagged, because I didn't feel my position was founded on strong arguments. Rather, a hunch, and obviously the stakes are too high for this to be a grand experiment. Enter Tim O'Reilly. His "The Open Source Paradigm Shift" is a long, well-argued, and well-cited treatise on the business dynamics in open source software. As if he is responding directly to my nagging concern, Tim says: Open source advocates like to say they're not destroying actual value, but rather squeezing inefficiencies out of the system. When competition drives down prices, efficiency and average wealth levels go up. Firms unable to adapt to the new price levels undergo what the economist E.F. Schumpeter called "creative destruction", but what was "lost" returns manyfold as higher productivity and new opportunities. Boy oh boy, if ever there was a commodity market for software, content management is it. Especially open source content management, which (IMO, suffers) from an overpopulation of choices. The lesson I take from this is that we in open source content management need to permanently rid ourselves of the allure of locked-up software. There's the feeling that half-open source is the balance that preserves those investor returns of yesteryear. But in a commodity market, you might not get to make those kinds of choices, because those choices were predicated on things like first mover, proprietary lock-in, high switching costs, etc. Instead, Tim discusses success under the regime of his asserted paradigm shift: Yet Amazon seems to enjoy an order-of-magnitude advantage over those other vendors. Why? Perhaps it is merely better execution, better pricing, better service, better branding. But one clear differentiator is the superior way that Amazon has leveraged its user community. In my interpretation of this, success goes to those that: Know their true competitive strength Leverage that strength to the hilt For many companies, this exercise is too painful. They want to answer the first question with the fantasy of how they'd like things to be, rather than how they actually are. While it is possible that such a strategy might succeed, usually the reality distortion is evident to the market and the company heads straight to the graveyard of vanillacide. At the launch of the Plone Foundation at CAWorld, I listened to CA talk about the research on the "open innovation model" from MIT Sloan. This model debunks the classic software business model of high R&D costs that internally produce breakthroughs. Instead, market success is awarded to those that rapidly adapt by synthesizing material in the world around them. Instead of thinking that the world revolves around them, they understand their part in the big drama, quickly leverage it to the hilt, and make customers happy. If you have 20 or 30 minutes to spare, read Tim's article. Particularly, if you are in the business of open source, read it through the lens of your current experience. How well does your strategy hold up? 8:40:20 AM   comment []