I’ll admit that when Suzi first said we were going to see Charo at the Riviera tonight, I flashed back to my parents’ living room, recalling her doing her “cuchi-cuchi!” routine on TV.
She opened her show with the flamboyancy that has long been her trademark, and while that’s not really my cup of tea, I have to admit the act was polished and professional, and her sheer joy at performing infectious.
During the interstice while she changed costumes between the two halves of her show, we were treated to some amazing flamenco dancing.
After the break, though, I had my eyes opened. She returned in a rhinestone tuxedo to dazzle with flamenco guitar playing that absolutely affirmed her claim to have studied with none other than Andres Segovia for seven years. She was nothing short of incredible, and I eagerly rose to join the standing ovation that she so richly earned.
For me any other Boomer anticipating a tired bimbo act from our parents’ era, this was a graphic (though thoroughly enjoyable) reminder that there is often much that we don’t see and know about anyone, performer or otherwise, and that I’m not the only one who has to reinvent myself in response to changing times.
So many lessons; so little time.
Filed under: Cultivate Unusual People, Inspiration | 2 Comments
Entrepreneurs Wade Into the ‘Dead Zone’: Ambitious Bid to Turn Algae Into Biofuel Taps Mother Nature
According to an article by Russell Gold in the August 12 Wall Street Journal online, a major environmental threat may be getting some help — not from passionate enviro activists, but from entrepreneurial capitalists who see it as a potential solution for another environmental threat. Here’s the lead from this “two-fer” story:
“Every spring, fertilizer runoff from the U.S. Mississippi River floods into the Gulf of Mexico, causing a massive algae bloom that leads to a giant oxygen-deprived “dead zone” where fish can’t survive.
Now, this annual problem is getting new attention, not from marine scientists but from entrepreneurs looking for a new domestic source of fuel. And one start-up sees fish themselves being part of the process.
The algae blooms are spawned each year as the farmland runoff from as far away as Montana flows into rivers, eventually reaching the Mississippi and flowing into Louisiana bayous and out into the Gulf of Mexico. These nutrients are a buffet for the floating algae, or phytoplankton, which are simple sea organisms that eat and reproduce quickly. This algae bloom eventually sinks and feeds an array for bacteria, which suck up so much oxygen that fish and plants either move away or perish.”
Read the entire article at WSJ.com.
This type of symbiosis, if it proves feasible, may illustrate the way that we must re-orient ourselves away from single-purpose, stovepipe solution thinking toward more integrated approaches to the complex problems that have environmental, economic and political ramifications.
Filed under: Energy, Read Unusual Things | Leave a Comment
I’ve been reading a lot lately about crowd-sourcing which according to Wikipedia, is “a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call…The term has become popular…as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies…”
On the Sgt. Pepper album, the Beatles said it more succinctly: “get by with a little help from my friends.”
So, with that, I’ll attempt to crowd-source some aspects of the project that Suzi and I are working on right now.
We invested in Speed Raceway, an indoor electric go-kart track under construction in a former Home Depot facility in Highlands Ranch, a Denver suburb. We’re pursuing LEED certification, and intend for it to be the first green racetrack in the U.S. Keeping with that theme, we plan healthy (organic, wherever possible) food and drinks in minimal-waste, recyclable packaging.
Much of the basic description is found at the Speed Raceway Facebook page. This is an exciting new family recreation category at an early stage in the U.S., where there are only 20 such facilities, compared with over 600 in Europe.
As you see from the FB comments, our pre-construction reception in Denver has been fantastic, suggesting a lot of pent-up demand for our category and facility. No surprise there, really. Who has ever gotten off a go-kart expressing anything but enthusiasm for the next ride?
Here’s where the crowd-sourcing comes in. We want to deliver a Nordstrom or Ritz-Carlton level of customer experience and service. Here are just a few of the things we’re investigating:
- RFID-tagged key fobs or racing gloves connected to membership accounts to eliminate unnecessary delays at check-in, food ordering, payment interactions, etc., or awkward cash transactions for hosts and their guests
- Maximum use of social networking media to create real community and constant feedback
- Trackside webcams to enable real-time remote viewing by friends and family unable to join the racers in person
I’m soliciting ideas to make this consistently a “wow” experience that people will buzz-, blog-, post- and Tweet about. Your thoughts most welcome.
Filed under: Speed Raceway | Leave a Comment
I know I’ve gone dark for a couple of weeks since my return from Silicon Valley. Suzi and I have been absorbed by due diligence for an investment that we’ve now decided to go forward with. More on that in a later post.
We’ve also been thinking through Suzi’s new consultancy. It’s based on her 30-year immersion in the most advanced wellness, nutrition and alternative health philosophies and practices. More on that later, too.
Today’s thoughts organize around the challenge of extracting something actionable and useful out of the tons of topical reading I’ve been doing since firing myself from the training biz. In support of my strategic goal of identifying an emerging, high-impact problem upon which to base a high-value new business, I embarked on the (indulgent, though necessary, I felt) first step of reinserting myself into the idea stream. It proved as intellectually stimulating as I’d hoped. Unfortunately, each blog exposed me to other interesting ones, etc., until the stream became a torrent, fed by a fire hose. My RSS reader is now at paralysis density, so it’s time to thin the herd in a serious way.
One benefit of ingesting so much information in a short period is that you’re able to see patterns. One that I’ve noticed is the degree of product-centricity that defines much of the dialog, i.e., most of the innovation conversation is about product. Far less is about distribution, pricing, business-building, etc. This appears true to a lesser degree in the tech world, where there is a robust debate about how pricing, distribution and user behavior are driving entirely different business models. So many other industries, however, appear to be focused largely on divining ways to revive dissipated demand within their existing business model, which implies — to me, anyway — that they may not see or acknowledge the need to do things completely differently.
This brings me to a wonderful, feet-firmly-on-the-ground blog post today in Venture Beat by Dharmesh Shah, “10 Things Business Schools Won’t Teach You.” It qualifies as a wise reminder that although much is changing radically in the global economy, certain principles never fade in importance. Number two on Mr. Shah’s list is “There are always more things to do than there is time to do them. Startups are a continuous exercise in deciding what not to do. You can sometimes win by just not doing things faster than your competition.”
These two sentences crystallized for me my need to dial back the information flow, arbitrarily if need be, and start testing some of the “seems like…” observations I’ve accumulated in recent weeks.
Filed under: Inspiration, Read Unusual Things | 2 Comments
If you’re as new to this space as I am, a definition is probably in order. According to Sarah Perez in ReadWriteWeb, “‘Real-time’ – as in the ‘real-time web’ – has certainly become the buzzword du jour. It’s even possible that the move of web services to support a real-time, immediate flow of information is what will ultimately define the next version of the web.”
As my rookie ears absorbed the CrunchUp discussion, “real time stream” refers to receiving updates, e.g., Facebook status, Twitter feeds, and other types of data, as they occur, rather than your having to go to those sources and request them in virtual batches. Veteran angel investor Ron Conway who, having invested in over 500 tech startups (many of which are now household words) now focuses on this space, described it as the next multi-billion dollar market opportunity, and offered his Ten Ways to Monetize Real-Time Data.
My “guide,” Trevor Goss, West Coast Biz Dev guy for startup DubMeNow, helped me understand the gist of what this was all about. The whole thing was interesting in a Next Big Thing way, although mentally fatiguing given the firehose pace at which information was blasted at us all day.
My total lack of previous orientation to this world caused me to feel a bit like an anthropologist inserted onto an island populated by a totally different culture. They have a noticeable language, salted with buzzwords like “monetize” and “curated” referring to content. One particular oddity was the frequent usage of “corpus,” e.g., “a corpus of work” which, while technically within the definition (“a large collection of writings of a specific kind or on a specific subject”) seems oddly and inaptly formal to this ear.
This culture is not diverse. I would guess the 300-person audience to be 90% male, overwhelmingly white or, to a far lesser extent, Asian. The after-event party at August Capital had a similar demographic profile.
The most consistent thing I saw, though, was the inordinate degree of product orientation. Everything is about the product. Not much conversation about marketing, selling, distribution, people or other critical success factors. I can’t say that it’s not happening, just that it was absent at this particular event.
My perception is that all these B2C applications are the bright, shiny objects that capture everyone’s attention with their cool factor, but that the real money will be made in B2B, i.e., the enterprise versions of these tools, sold to corporations.
I had an opportunity at the August Capital party to speak briefly with Ron Conway. After explaining that I was a complete neophyte in this space and was trying to learn about it, I asked him if my initial conclusion was on target or completely off the wall. Ron graciously allowed that I had the basic idea right. Now, from that a reasonable person would properly conclude that I now am in the dangerous position of someone with two weeks of karate lessons: just enough knowledge to think I know what I’m doing, and hurt myself.
As alien as all this was, however, one thing was easily recognizable: the entrepreneurs’ need for coaching, e.g., how to set a specific goal and get a measurable return on the time invested in conference attendance or networking events; how to approach and gain access to luminaries; how to escape from conversations that run too long, etc. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Who knows, maybe this old dog can turn his old tricks into new ones in this new game. We’ll see.
Filed under: Cultivate Unusual People, Real-time web | Leave a Comment
This article, by FastCompany staff writer Douglas Rushkoff, appeared in the July 10 issue of Fastcompany.com. It offers one of the most unique — and, perhaps, controversial — views I’ve encountered regarding our current economic difficulties.
In essence, Rushkoff argues that after the dot-bust, there was nowhere for all the Fed-created bank money to go, so Alan Greenspan okayed making residential real estate the asset class to receive all this money chasing a destination. That way, the banks could continue lending, speculators could continue speculating, etc.
I’m real interested in your reactions to Rushkoff’s case, particularly those of you in CA or associated with the technology industry there.
Filed under: Online economy, Read Unusual Things | Leave a Comment
I’m writing this in real time on Virgin flight 901, while traveling from LAS-SFO for the Real Time Stream CrunchUp & August Capital Party.
How civilized.
Now, compare that with the silly lie the airlines have been spouting forever, i.e., that no electronic stuff can be on during flight. I’m not an engineer; nor have I played one on TV. However, in the course of many years of business travel, I’ve had more than one occasion to be seated next to engineers of various stripes, including, once, an avionics designer.
Whenever the Sky Nazis deliver the “off position” speech, many passengers comment about its absurdity in the face of overwhelming personal experience that electronics are, literally, everywhere in modern life without triggering disaster (and that planes manage to fly through lightning without frying their avionics).
In each such ensuing discussion, every technical expert has told me that there is no technical reason for the “off” requirement. As one engineer pointed out, in flight the plane is already immersed in and bombarded by radio waves of every description. The only difference between our devices being in the “on” vs. “off” position is whether or not we’re receiving or contributing to those waves.
Call me cynical, but I can’t help but suspect that the electronic prohibition related less to technical concerns and more to economic ones, i.e., the airlines weren’t making money off it. Years ago, when AirPhone made its appearance, all of a sudden you could make calls from a plane — for a usurious fee per minute. Let’s see, my phone will wreck the plane; theirs is benign. For years they’ve intimated that if you turn on your phone or Blackberry you’ll risk the plane crashing in a fiery ball. Now, for $9.95, miraculously you no longer endanger anyone.
I don’t begrudge Virgin the $9.95. In fact, I paid it happily for the welcome luxury of being able to catch up on email and online reading while en route.
Besides WiFi, the seatback touchscreen also offers music, TV, movies, games, seat-to-seat-chat and, in future, external chat.
This, my friends, is the way to fly. It’s the domestic version of our incredible experience last Summer when we used up a ton of AmEx points on 1st class tix to London via Virgin Atlantic. It was an incredibly cosseting experience.
Today’s flight tells me that, just as Microsoft views the automobile as the next major computing-delivery platform, creative airlines can view their seats as a way to sell value-added services that we can opt into — or not.
With that, I’m back to my RSS Reader. See you at the CrunchUp in S.F.
Filed under: Personal view | Leave a Comment
When I left the law industry, one major contributing factor was my frustration over my belief that law firms were deluding themselves that their current difficulties were merely caused by a down cycle — a very deep one, perhaps, but temporary — with a return to better times expected just around a macroeconomic corner of unknown length. So much of their (lack of) strategic behavior suggested to me that they really didn’t grasp the nature, magnitude or permanence of the seismic shift rumbling under their feet.
It seems that they’re not alone.
The Shift Index, a paper released a couple of weeks ago by Deloitte, says that most companies are similarly blinded to larger forces by the recession, and establishes a new metric to gauge performance independent of its short-term effects.
This excerpt from the Executive Summary will give you the essence:
In the midst of a steep recession, when it’s all too easy to fixate on dramatic, cyclical events, there’s real danger of losing sight of deeper trends. Strictly cyclical thinking risks discounting or even ignoring powerful forces of long-term change. To provide a clear, comprehensive, and sustained view of the deep dynamics changing our world, Deloitte’s Center for the Edge has developed a Shift Index consisting of three indices and 25 metrics designed to make longer-term performance trends more relevant and actionable.
The Shift Index highlights a core performance challenge that has been playing out for decades: return on assets for U.S. companies that has steadily fallen to almost one quarter of 1965 levels, while labor productivity has continued to improve. Some additional findings that highlight the performance challenges facing U.S. firms include the following:
- The performance gap between winners and losers has increased over time, with the “winners” barely maintaining previous performance levels, while the losers experience rapid deterioration in performance
- The “topple rate” at which big companies lose their leadership positions has more than doubled, suggesting that “winners” have increasingly precarious positions
- U.S. competitive intensity has more than doubled during the last 40 years
- While the performance of U.S. firms is deteriorating, at least some of the benefits of the productivity improvements appear to be captured by creative talent, which is experiencing greater growth in total compensation
- Customers also appear to be gaining and using power as reflected in increasing customer disloyalty towards brands
- The exponentially advancing price/performance capability of computing, storage, and bandwidth is driving an adoption rate for the digital infrastructure that is two to five times faster than previous infrastructures such as electricity and telephone networks
Download the full report and begin tearing apart the old to enable the necessary new.
Your thoughts?
Filed under: Capital | 2 Comments
More from Booz & Company’s strategy+business:
“Companies that are not in financial services are sitting on as much as US$950 billion of excess working capital on their balance sheets, untapped and wasted, according to a Booz & Company analysis of North American stock exchange–listed businesses with annual revenue of more than $1 billion. All this potentially available cash is tied up in a vast array of receivables, payables, and inventory that is being neglected or that could be better handled.”
Example: “A leading consumer products maker had a cash position of about $290 million at the end of 2008. A closer look at the accounts suggests that a few deliberate measures — speeding accounts receivable from 69 to 55 days, constraining accounts payable from 48 to 56 days, and reducing inventory turns from 99 to 68 days — could improve this company’s cash position by $670 million, an increase of more than 130 percent. Those actions would move the company to the top quartile in its industry.”
The article goes on to suggest a list of specific tactics to free up this trapped cash.
These are stock exchange-listed companies with annual revenue in excess of $1 billion each, it’s a decent bet that they’re in relatively mature categories. Some of the recaptured latent capital they’ll apply to their most pressing needs, and will likely allocate some to fund transformational initiatives to secure their futures. But, since they haven’t had it available to date and really didn’t expect to have it, they may not be able productively to invest it internally, immediately.
Let’s qualify the ensuing paragraphs with my declaration that I have no background in finance, so if my logic is full of practical holes I’m prepared for wholesale flaming from knowledgeable readers. With that, here goes…
What if enough companies achieved this net recapture that, after satisfying their internal investment needs, there remained a virtual pool of “found money?” Might it be possible for someone to aggregate that into a fund to invest in emerging opportunities?
During the first dot.com boom, many industrial companies invested in startups and emerging companies. Despite the broad-brush distaste many associate with the ensuing dot.bust, in 1999 the WSJ reported that Delta Airlines made more from those investments than from airline ops (no shock now, but newsworthy then).
If Booz is right, maybe there’s a way to ease some of the current liquidity squeeze for both old and new companies.
Your thoughts?
Filed under: Capital, Read Unusual Things | Leave a Comment
The Summer issue of strategy+business, the consistently excellent publication of global consulting company Booz & Company, features an interview with thought leader, entrepreneur and investor Esther Dyson. This “long-standing champion of high-tech innovation foresees a fundamental shift toward more transparent institutions and a more relationship-driven economy.”
This lengthy interview covers a wide array of topics, including the broad one of the evolution of marketing and marketers. She describes Google’s business: “It’s just-in-time marketing to people who are already looking,” and argues that there’s no way to build that kind of business in traditional ways. Within this framework of how people interact with the Web, I was particularly struck by her concept of the Nonmonetary Economy.
S+B: What impact will this have on the economic future of, say, the media industries?
DYSON: “As science fiction writer William Gibson put it, ‘The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.’ We’re starting to see the impact, first in professions like journalism, where the boundary between professional and amateur is unclear. But one underlying issue is a decline in the importance of monetary rewards for work, at least in the part of the world where people’s basic needs are already met.
Businesspeople still don’t get the strength and importance of nonmonetary markets. Marketers assume that people want to do things that cost money — and therefore generate revenues for someone. But using Facebook doesn’t cost anything. Yes, some resources are consumed, and the site needs to be paid for somehow, but from the users’ point of view, it’s mostly outside the commercial sphere. In general, more and more people will spend their time on free entertainment and activity, just as they did a century ago. Twenty or 30 years from now, you’ll see some parts of the world much richer, the West relatively poorer than it is today, and much more of the economy returned to a nonmonetary, non-transactional, relationship-driven base.
S+B: How would that be different from what we have today?
DYSON: “A lot of people in the West are discovering that they have more things than they really need. Now [on the Internet] they have a way to spend their time that costs almost no money. The economic downturn will accentuate this trend, and many people won’t ever really go back.
S+B: Do you really think that could happen on a mass scale?
DYSON: It’s already happening. Many people work much harder on a World of Warcraft role-playing team than they ever work in a paid job. They are very skilled and they do painstaking work, usually for only brownie points and recognition, because that work gives them a feeling of control and camaraderie.
Inventory management requires many of the same skills as World of Warcraft. Could you actually get teams of 12-year-old boys to do inventory management? They would do very well at it if they saw it as a game. But how could you motivate them?
It’s a mystery, and as an investor and as someone who’d like a better-run world, I’d like to solve it. Whatever makes work unpleasant, it’s often not really the nature of the task itself; it’s the involuntariness, and the fact that you can be punished by the person running the game.
But if World of Warcraft isn’t work, it’s also not traditional consumer entertainment. People pay to use the platform. The challenge for marketers is to fit into that model. And so far they’ve been clueless.”
To the degree that Ms. Dyson proves correct (and her investing record makes me like her chances), the implications are staggering. It got me thinking of the evolving future of education and training as game-based exercises in which participants don’t try to learn new skills, but use available tools and rules to accomplish goals — which is the point of every game extant.
To use Esther’s inventory management example via 12-year-olds turned loose on the challenge, it requires a fundamental shift away from skill development to outcome production. If your team figures out a way to produce the desired outcome, do I really care whether or not you’ve acquired specific skills, in the traditional sense? Which is more costly, developing courseware, training and paying salaries for a dedicated population of instructors and inventory management apprentices, or the cost associated with hosting a robust game environment in which a large, ad hoc, virtual team crowd-sources a tested solution by expending hundreds of hours each in trial-and-error experimentation to figure out the best way to get all the goods from various suppliers to various customers in different places on different dates?
I’m not a gamer, but just from all the reading I’ve been doing recently, it appears that most games include a large number of variables and the most intentionally vexing obstacles the game developers can concoct. And thousands or, in some cases, millions, of gamers globally pay money to see who can figure it out first and most elegantly.
In this context, aren’t Linux and Wikipedia really just global games, in which countless wizards voluntarily spend a lot of their time, unpaid, trying to perfect a constantly moving target, purely for the psychic reward of having accomplished some noticeable aspect of an unattainable goal, and the acclaim of those they consider peers?
Henceforth, I will read all those gaming blogs very differently, now with an eye toward shifting from my long held “learning” perspective to an “outcome” perspective.
Your thoughts?
Filed under: Marketing, Online economy, Read Unusual Things | 1 Comment
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