'Lax or Lion?

Needed to make some changes in both the organisation and make-up of an operation in Europe. In the doing so, an obvious contrast between one set of cultural - and hence business - norms and another was once again thrown into sharp relief.

There are countries where it's accepted that the needs of the business are uppermost when it comes to assessing the suitability of any particular employee to best fill a given position. However, there are also those places where the opposite holds true, and the expectation is that the welfare of the team or the group should prevail, even it it means carrying weak performers.

Perhaps this is stating the obvious but the Silicon Valley start-up ethos is most certainly the former, not the latter, and that's the way it needs to be if the fledgling business is to thrive and grow. I got called "unsentimental" this week in dealing with just such a situation and I suppose, given this cultural divide, that this was an understandable opinion. So be it. The idea of wasting another 6 months while the local manager tries to "coach" this employee to success is just ridiculous, especially when he himself admitted that this wasn't going to produce a different outcome.

Silicon Valley may indeed be a jungle, but at least you know how the laws of nature work and why they work the way they do.

Back in the USA this week and it feels, at least out West, that Spring has arrived. Got home to find it was 78 degrees with wall-to-wall sunshine on offer for the rest of the week.

Meanwhile, back at the farm, the Q-end is approaching ever closer and we've got a ton to get done between now and then. The treadmill never slows, but it does seem to gain a few points on the "incline" scale each month....

Ford's Disease: Octophenia

I still think that Quadrophenia was one of the Who's best works, and indeed one of the greatest rock albums of all times. It has a coherency and level of energy not seen in any of their other concept works,and marked a pivotal point in the band's career. It also marked a key time in the development of post-war Britain, mods and rockers battled it out on the seafronts of England's south and east coasts marking the struggle between the old-guard still looking backwards to WWII and the younger generation desparate for change, and for a future.

It tells the story of Jimmy, a youg 60s mod who is so internally conflicted that he doesn't just have schizophrenia, he has quadrophenia.

Imagine then the state of Ford as they too try and deal with the multiple personalites - read "badges" - that inhabit Dearborn these days. Here's my summary of their current state-of-affairs:


Ford: bog-standard badging, mass market boxes, and cars that are about as far from aspirational as you can get. Mustang was a nice try but honestly, a live axle in the 21st century? And never, ever, let Marketing tack on a plastic spoiler at the back, OK?

Lincoln: appealing only to a core demographic so old that oxygen cylinders and colostomy-bag holders are on the options list.

Mercury: a complete joke. Pick any standard Ford model, throw on it a different grill, a bit more chrome and add $4,000 to the price. Crass commercialism meets brain-dead buyer.

Mazda: the good news is that they only own a bit of it. The bad news is that they own any of it at all. Marketing department staffed by infantiles who live in a city tower-block somewhere and ride bicycles.

Volvo: an entire line-up targeted at the affluent-end of the surburban soccer-mon brigade. Fine, but hardly a viable long-term business. Some day real soon Ford will stick their own deeply-suspect styling cues into the mix, cut costs and quality and you can wave Volvo good bye, if you haven't already done so.

Land Rover: a money pit that drank cash to get it up to even a basic level of reliability, and a brand that Ford still doesn't know how to sell properly, despite the vehicles finally starting to, well, start for one thing. The quality is now there, but the marketing and sales is MIA.

Jaguar: a case study in how to devalue a brand that you bought to add class to the company line-up, but then allow managers in Europe to sign-off lineups including hideously underpowered estate cars and low-end vehicles a plenty. Go figure.

Aston Martin: finally, something Ford did right. Preserve and enhace the marque; use it as the flagship engineering brand, showcasing what Ford can do when it's allowed to; re-build all the sex/power/majesty of the earlier cars and, finally, turn a profit, something unheard of in the entire history of the company. Nice one.

So then, you might ask, as Ford tries to stop the headlong slide over the cliff into bankruptcy, what's their first step on the road to a cure? They sell Aston Martin of course, the only thing they have of value, for less than a billion bucks and smiling all the while. Well that should keep the lights on at Mercury for another couple of months so all right with the world then.

When quadrophenia finally got too much for Jimmy, and in a final moment of clarity and insight, he realised that he'd never be the best at anything. Mediocrity and a future that would lead him nowehere except into misery and pain, he rode his GS scooter off the cliffs above Brighton to his death. Finally, one thing he could do right and do it to completion. Now he'd be remembered, recognised even, and it was some kind of revenge on those who couldn't "see the real me".

To cure it's ills, it's octophenia if you will, Ford carves out the only one of it's personalities that is interesting, worthwhile or valuable. Welcome to heptophenia, Ford. All the same pain as before, but now without the passion, hope and desire. The cliff's that way ->

Don't Fancy Yours Much ...

.. but mine's a looker!

(Thanks to Greg for this shot.)

Far-Away Phone Call

In addition to all the usual criteria - room size, comfort, nice bathrooms, quietness, heating/cooling controls etc. - I've now started to judge hotels by the quality and availability of their broadband services. Working in the room is always a given and, thanks largely to the usurious rates hotels charge for their phone calls, Skype has also now become an essential tool, especially if calling from overseas. I mention all this because the hotel I use in Stockholm - Radisson SAS by the train station - recently went from wired to wireless, which is good, but in the process screwed up both access and reliability a treat, which is very bad. I keep getting a duplicate IP address warning; signal strength is very variable depending on where your room is; it times-out overnight meaning you don't wake up with a nice fresh stack of messages ready to go; and they outsource the whole shooting match so are less than helpful if you call down to complain.

Everything else about the place is great, but not enough. This one issue now dominates what I need from a hotel and so I'll have to look elsewhere if this doesn't improve.

Up or Down?

Travelling is basically a destabilising activity, especially when 9 time zones & two climates are involved. Odd bouts of gloominess, sudden feelings of being too hot or too cold, stomach aches etc. are all part-and-parcel of long-haul flying and business trips. And that's before the lack of sleep, change in diet, general stress and everything else that all conspires together to make you ask the same question, at least three times a day, namely, "why am I doing this again?"

Even now, I look at that picture and have to reconstruct where I was, when, in order to answer the question of whether I was going up the escalator or down it. And it was only yesterday.

The Naked Traveller

According to the New York Times, and as discussed by Slate magazine (http://www.slate.com/id/2160977/fr/flyout), this is the kind of view airport screening staff will be having of us all! (The lady in question was wearing a blazer and skirt at the time.) Well at least it might improve TSA recruitment at airports in the "fitter" parts of the country I suppose, but of course this being America it will only be a matter of time before someone gets hit with an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit, not to mention making us all very self-conscious when we pass through screening and the staff all start to giggle uncontrollably....

Will we be safer than now once these scanners are introduced? Perhaps, though I'm not sure this isn't the security equivalent of not only bolting and deadlocking the backdoor, but then welding it shut as well. Sure, it will be slightly harder for terrorists to smuggle stuff onto US domestic and international flights, but why would they bother? There are hundreds of much less secure airports around the world that also have the advantage of being close to their supposed training camps and supply depots. Planes travel; that's why they are valuable weapons for terrorists. It's far simpler to fly the thing somewhere noticeable and then do whatever it is that will comprise the next atrocity than it it to get control of an aircraft in the USA . Or, of course, and as we've seen in London, Milan & elsewhere, just move onto the next target: trains, subways, etc. Alas, that's the inevitable result. That door is largely closed, but many others beckon still.

Frankly, none of this makes me feel any safer than I do already - and yes, I do feel very safe flying, certainly more so than before when security here in the USA was a bit of a joke. (Pre-9/11, anyone could walk up to a gate, for example, without challenge, screening or ID checks, a situation that had been long gone in Europe for probably 10 years prior.)

SPend this money somewhere else on protecting other things. Cargo security is still largely missing-in-action. Make that more secure first before going to these extremes,

Commute #5: Evening light

OK, so I'm cheating on the last one. This was taken in Chicago from the John Hancock building just as the sun was setting on a cold winter's day. My blog, my rules.

An interesting week. Several of the team have been in Texas this week running to ground some pretty interesting opportunities to lead an initiative to create some standards in our fledgling industry. Oh, and to try and get some deals done to help drive the quarter as well! Only one month to go and as always this one will go down to the wire. Anyway, sounds like we made some good progress but it's clear we've started something that may be bigger than the company is really set up to handle just now. The next few weeks will be very interesting as we strive to stay in the saddle and steer this one into the stable. Still, this is a nice problem to have, although we are going to have to figure out how to juggle both the short term, Q-by-Q needs of the business with these - necessarily longer term - initiatives. Anyone fancy sending us a few extra $$$s to help out???

Earthquake this evening ...

... but no dogs were hurt. In fact, no dogs even woke up, in our house at least. It was a 4.2 magnitude quake centered about 80 km away. My wife and I felt a single jolt but that was really about it. Surprising we got any effects at all really from what was a relatively small event in a location over 50 miles from the epicentre.

Commute #4: Energy stop

Only after I looked at this on a PC did I see a much better shot that would have focused on the manhole covers over the underground tanks. The contrasts there, especially with the light and dark from the wet forecourt, would have been more interesting I think. Oh well. Next time.

Close to the end of another week. Travelling again next week so apologies in advance for more shots of aeroplanes, departure terminals and random foreign stuff.

Adobe goes on-line

From The Online Photographer
Interesting report that Adobe will be offering a basic set of Photoshop's capabilities as an on-line software-service. Strong defensive move (as the article points out), especially given Google's ravenous appetite for all things Web-ish. I think it will also open up new opportunities for Adobe to connect into the Flickr/YouTube worlds and truly develop a web presence to complement their strong "off line" tool suites. Nice to see a more mainstream company catching-on, albeit a little late, and being able to respond effectively to a fast-changing world. Personally, I look forward to Adobe hosting a web-served back-end database so I can keep my images somewhere safe and secure but also have access to all the power of the Adobe tool set to create web pages, blog entries etc. directly. Can't say I'll give up my own copy of Photoshop - have to fill those long flight hours somehow - but I'd welcome the additional capabilities this could bring.