09/27/2011

As soon as I get a chance I will blog about last nights class. The video was so good I had to get my ideas about it up first.

Why do I do what I do?

On Tuesday at the end of class we watched a video.  I took the scenic route home so I could think about it more.  Simon Sinek was the speaker and he kept repeating: "People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it."  This inspired me to think about why do I do what I do?  Since I am a geek, I usually approach things from a technical view and am scared to abandon that view because I don't want to fall behind with the tech.  (That would make me look stupid in the eyes of my fellow alpha geeks.)  But the tech is what I do ... why do I do it?  People don't care that I "build distributed cloud applications on Amazon EC2 using node.js that can be leveraged by mobile clients and rich internet applications using HTML5 and CSS3."  In my mind they should care because otherwise they wouldn't reap the benefits of the tech.  But why do I do it?  What do I believe that makes me choose this?  I'm not doing it for money right now (although I hope to one day).  Last week, Eric said that people should be valued over ideas so how does this concept affect people?

My first belief is that each of us have unique talents that have to be discovered in our own personal way.  These talents cannot be discovered by standardized testing or jobs training programs.  We must have the freedom and flexibility to leverage our talents to their fullest degree.  Also, I believe that given ample opportunity, everyone has the potential to achieve this.  Notice I said ample opportunity and not equal opportunity.  While equal opportunity must be decided and guaranteed by an outside influence, ample opportunity is measured by the individual.  The moral of the story is that opportunity must not be limited.  The pair of unique talent and ample opportunity, can be enhanced or hindered by technology.  Technology that enhances must be flexible and accessible enough so that it is usable by a broad range of interests.  

For business a standard platform makes sense internally.  Standards are easier and cheaper to deploy and maintain but they also hinder individual traits.  This actually is (sadly) desired as deviances from procedures can take more time and money.  An simple example: using technology, you can play chess with someone on the other side of the world who you have never met and you don't even have to speak the same language.  You can be paired with an opponent who has a skill level like yours.  You can choose to have your pieces be maple wood while your opponent sees marble.  This is all impossible in the physical world.  Therefore technology has increased opportunity to leverage individual talents in unique ways.  A geek would ask "What language was the application written in?", "What OS is the server running on?" or "What browser is most useful for this?"  People shouldn't have to worry about that.  (If this sounds like I am saying geeks are not people that's another topic for debate.)

A few years ago I was a hardcore Microsoft fanboy.  I wouldn't touch anything that hadn't been blessed by the Redmond Gang.  I would wait with great anticipation for the next release of Visual Studio or Windows and then when it arrived, wait for the next one.  I'm not putting down Microsoft's products.  I am a huge fan of Windows Phone 7 despite its limitations which I think will be fixed soon.  I was not focused on using Microsoft technology to do what I believed.  I was a 'Microsoft' developer and not an 'application' developer.  If it couldn't be done using Microsoft software (a limitation/constraint) I didn't do it.  I was focused on what I was doing, not why I was doing it.  

Glance through the listings for IT professionals and you'll see descriptions that sound like what I wrote above "5 years of experience writing messaging applications using Sharepoint with C# 2.0"  When they are this specific ... they mean it!  The standard is set and no deviations are allowed.  Consumers who download smartphone apps might want to connect with Facebook.  They have a goal in doing this.  They want to be able to communicate something unique about themselves to others with similar interests.  This is why they use Facebook.  They don't want to connect to Facebook because it runs on XYZ nor do they care.

There has to be a summary in here somewhere.  I say that the reason I do what I do is because I believe that when people are not constrained by the technology, they can leverage their own unique talents.  That sounds like something from a marketing campaign.  But (and no offense to marketers) the goal of marketing is to make people think that your product is the only one to purchase, despite its constraints.  Marketing does not educate people to make up their own minds because that means they might decide to purchase a competitors offering.  Is it possible for me to be more specific? (without being limiting)  I also have unique talents and interests.  I want to create applications which enable people with those same talents and interests to communicate, collaborate and progress their contributions.  The set of talents and interests I have is not served best by a particular language or OS.  I doesn't matter which I choose as long as it doesn't constrain the users of whatever I build.  My choice of technology is driven by this goal.  So that is why I do what I do.

9/22/2011

Tonight Eric Matthews spoke to the class.  There were several ideas he spoke of that I think are significant.  The first was his two steps to starting a business:

1. Start
2. Keep going

As simple as they are to remember, they are very difficult to do.  For me, it is not easy to start because I have so many ideas and I want to pick the best one.  Keeping going is also tough because I am easily distracted by some shiny new idea which makes the one I started look like a dead end. 

The other idea was that you should value people over ideas.  This kind of solves my above problem.  It doesn't matter what idea I choose as long as there are good people working on it.  As an introvert and control freak, this unnerves me some because I don't like to trust other people all the time. 

Expansion coming soon ...

9/20/2011

Business planning is the topic of Chapter 5.  Most of the details are oriented towards those who are seeking investors or venture capitalists and I think even some of those are too far.  Do we really need an example of what a cover page looks like?  At any rate, the process is valuable for anyone.  The text does mention that many business concepts fail because a lack of understanding by the owners of the business model.  While that is valuable, other details such as a tagline seem to be overkill in my opinion.  Another thing that I keep remembering is an interview I saw with Rob Howard, the founder and CTO of Telligent in Plano, TX.  Rob talks about how he spent many hours writing out a business plan to a set of specifications he found and how proud he was of the final revision. However, six months later, reality was nothing like what the business plan has provided for.  He also talked about how difficult it was to jettison that business plan since he had worked so hard on it.  This could be a trap for nascent ventures as well.  If they follow the business plan because they don't want to 'waste' all the time investing in creating the plan, they could be ignoring the reality of running the company.

9/15/2011

Austin Baker visited the class this evening to share his experiences of becoming an entrepreneur at a very young age.  Austin is involved in a service oriented business as opposed to my goal of having a product oriented business.  However, there were two things he said that I wrote down because they had a special impact.

• "Avoid people who have a victim mentality."

The moral of the statement is that people who feel they are a victim will constantly feel that they are owed something and might go to extreme lengths to claim what they feel has been kept from them.  Sadly, these people are becoming harder to avoid as the victim mentality is spreading in this country and in the world.

• "I know I'm on to something when people think I'm crazy."

In the RSAnimate video from several classes ago, it was mentioned how a survey was given to a group of students throughout their time in grade school.  The higher the grade, the worse the students scored on creativity and innovation.  Most likely, the students who did not score well all had the same ideas and thought that the more original ideas of the higher scoring students were 'crazy'.  Perhaps 'crazy' is just another way of saying 'outside the box'.  

I'm not sure why this is the case but I have a theory.  To me, human beings crave innovation and creativity.  We always want something new because otherwise we get bored easily.  For this reason, we value those who have not had the creative and innovative abilities 'educated' out of them.  This can also cause some envy or jealously.  Therefore, in order to make themselves feel better, those who do not innovate call the others 'crazy'.

Personally, I have violated - at my own peril - both of the statements.  So it was very motivating to hear someone who had been through the same scenarios.  Also, more motivating was how he dealt with it.  So it is possible to come back from it.

9/8/2011

Dave Barger from LunaWeb visited the class tonight.  I have known Dave for about a year so I was excited to learn that he is one of the top resources for small business building in Memphis.  What I found most interesting about his presentation was what he said about keep of top of new inventions in technology.  He said it is exhausting.  I can see how this would be this case for a service oriented business that does custom software.  To compete with others, you have to be able to offer the latest 'toys' to clients whether they need them or not.  This can be both good and bad.  First, it makes great marketing pitches.  People love to see the 'sizzle' with the animations and pretty pictures and this certainly can be appealing to the customers of clients as well to help distinguish them.  It can also be a distraction.  There must be enough attention given to the business that the client is trying to conduct.  This could be difficult when implementing new features and techniques all the time.  This is another reason why I think I am more interested in a product oriented business.  In a product oriented business I would get to choose the business goals and then I could spend more time using technology to pursue those goals as opposed to learning a new business model for every new client.  I'm not saying that one is better than the other, but rather this is helping me learn which is better for me.