Garrick van Buren – Page 237 – About time. And product. And being more deliberate.

Overtime Hurts the Everyone

Late last week, a client and I were discussing a struggling project. The client mentioned his project team regularly works nights and weekends to meet the deadlines he had scheduled. I was stunned. This was months into a years longs project.

It devalues both the worker and the work.
If the work doesn’t need alert, well-rested, and focused people – a machine should be doing it. Conversely, if the people don’t need to be alert, well-rested, and focused to accomplish the work – they’re on the wrong assignment.
It hides the need for additional people and better tools.
Regularly working overtime means there’s demand for more people and the company would rather exploit their existing staff than fill the demand. Productivity actually decreases throughout the day and after long enough, turns negative. This work-longer mentality keeps helpful people unemployed while others are overworked – both cases destroy health and families.
It hides the need for realistic project scheduling.
We all may be able to work faster, 9 women can’t have a baby in a month. Things take as long as they take, regularly working overtime hides this fact. Putting lower-quality time (overtime) into project introduces more defects, actually prolonging the project.

For other arguments against overtime, crunch time, and aggressive planning, I recommend:

Not Sold in Stores, Art by an Autistic Boy.

For as long as I can remember, my mom has taught developmentally-disabled children. I’ve always been in awe of her patience with these kids. Each year, the level of functioning can swing from nearly “normal” to extremely trying. A few years back, she told me about a specific autistic kid, functioning on the low side and unable to communicate. He was a constant distraction for the rest of the class and at times could be violent. To calm him down, my mom gave him any markers and loose paper she had on hand. From memory, he would draw what he saw on television the night before.

I was enamored of his work and asked my mom for a selection of the drawings. This morning, while doing some spring cleaning, I re-discovered his work and thought I’d share some of them with you.

Series 1: TV Show Promos

Alex Trebek with moustache!

Series 2: Not Sold in Stores

For example, compare this one…
…to this one. (Hint: “Ineopnenes”)
I’m still unsure if these next two are selling the same product or not
The red lines bordering the phone number really grabs me in this one.

Even as the spelling for ‘beauty’ alluded him, his accuracy in depicting Disney’s logo is astonishing. Especially in the ‘t’, ‘D’ and ‘i’.

I hope you enjoyed these. Let me know.

All Failures are Boring

The thought for today is brought to you via Seth Godin:

“All marketing failures are boring. Most are self-centered.”

Ankle Bracelets for Immigrants Good and Scary

This morning, NPR had a segment on Homeland Security requiring illegal immigrants to wear electronic monitoring ankle bracelets (read the comments). Yes, I’m all for reducing the load on the detention centers and allowing the immigrants to contribute something to America while they prepare an asylum claim.

This program needs to be closely watched. Closely. It, combined with other secret laws, has the potential to slide us down a slippery slope destroying the American Dream and accelerating the emigration from America described by Richard Florida in his latest book (The Flight of the Creative Class).

Norwegianity, thanks for the link.

Circling Vulture Part 2

A couple days back, I wrote a half-formed rant on the current state of department stores (Picky Customer or Circling Vulture). This morning, while skimming my blogroll [opml] in search of a pick-me-up, Hugh McLeod 1) knees me in the groin 2) points and laughs. He did both in his Cheapest or Best post.

First, his enigmatic business card cartoon:

“if the f’r doesn’t cost you your life, it isn’t a quest.”

Hugh, thanks, I needed the reminder. Today especially.

Second, the post reads like a better Picky Customer, with fewer words. Actually, I should just replace that post with these 2 thoughts from Hugh:

“You have no automatic right to revenue.”
“We are now moving into a world where you have two basic survival choices:”
1. “You can be the cheapest.”
2. “You can be the best.”
“There is no middle option.”

Amen. Why are department stores, commercial radio stations, hub-airlines, and advertising agencies failing left and right? In Hugh’s list of survival options, they are neither.

Choosing either cheapest or best will give people a reason to do business with you more than once. As an added Free Prize, it will inspire passion (positive and negative) all around – in customers, employees, the press. Passion always means people care and that’s why we’re all here.

UPDATE: Brand Autopsy dissects JC Penny’s Missing Middle strategy. While McLeod and current market conditions are promoting cheapest (Wal-Mart / Target) or best (Neimann Marcus / Nordstroms), JC Penny’s is firmly planting themselves in the middle. Short term, it seem to be working for them (year over year sales up 3.3%), long term it sounds like a strategy to be bought by Kmart’s real estate arm.

Picky Customer or Circling Vulture

Jen and I went to a mall on Saturday. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to a mall on a Saturday afternoon. I left buying nothing and feeling extremely uninspired to shop.

I now know why Target sold Marshall Field’s last year to May Department Stores and why May Department Stores is praying to be bought by Federated.

Like advertising, commercial radio, and the airline industry, the entire department store model is broken. It’s no longer useful to customers like you and me. Every store looks exactly the same. Each store offers the same products under the same brands, in the same colors, at the same price, with the same reason offered to buy from them – none.

Perhaps, like in commercial radio, this homogeneity is a result of consolidation. That may be. I submit consolidation itself is a result of:

a business unable to be successful on its own,
the belief sustainable margins could be reached with enough volume.

Even if stores aren’t sharing inventory, they’re striving for blandness by stocking the few items that move at competitors and dumping the unique items – the ones that don’t sell. Leaving me, and I suspect, you, with a strong sense of blah.

As we walked through Marshall Fields (or was it Herbergers or was it J.C. Pennys?) the majority of the customer activity was in the inter-aisle sale racks. 50% off jewelry, 60% off menswear, racks and racks of stale inventory clogging up the aisles. That’s where the customers were. The full-price stuff getting no attention. The scene reminded me of my mom – doing the bulk of her furniture shopping at Going Out of Business sales.

Retail stores traditionally mark up their products 100%. That covers things like: the staff, the building, and the products that aren’t selling. Things that keep the business running, that keep the jobs in your neighborhood. If stores get the bulk of their business when they run sales (going out of business or otherwise),

stock things worth buying not on sale?
differentiate themselves from their competitors?
stay in business?

This relationship is like that mean, yet popular high school girl telling the infatuated A/V club president, “We can be best friends as long as we never see each other.” Yes, we’re the popular high school girl and the stores are the geeky boys.

A handful of questions come to mind:

Is this Wal-Mart’s fault for teaching us that stores should strive to squeeze the livable-wages out of margins?
Is this the fault of stores like TJ Maxx where the department store’s unsold inventory lands a season later? Thereby reinforcing the ‘if you wait, the price will be lower’ lesson taught to us by the frequent sales.
Is this the result of a society so plush with potential options we need the threat of something being gone tomorrow to make a purchase decision?
One last question: If turning customers into circling vultures is the only way to make them buy, are the products worth selling?

Fact Checking My Own Ass

Google alerted me to MarketWatch’s Bloggers won’t keep a secret article where my mis-quote of Dan Gillmor got a mention.

Some bloggers are almost proud of making a mistake. It gives them a chance to make a correction and appear oh, so humble and honest. Garrick Van Buren, who blogged about a showing of “Blogumentary” at the University of Minnesota last week, made a typo in his report of the event. He wrote that Dan Gillmor, author of “We the Media,” said blogs are “an early and still cruel tool,” but that things would change. What the author really said, Gillmor wrote in an e-mail to Van Buren and me, was “crude.” Certainly more in keeping with Gillmor’s view of the future of blogging.

This paragraph brings out the core difference between internet publishing (or weblogs) and traditional newspaper, book, or magazine publishing, or any kind of big media publishing.

Traditional publishing is hard, expensive, and time-consuming. It costs piles of money for press time and distribution. Because of that, publishers need to make sure everything is juuuust right – so, there’s layers of proof-readers, editors, typesetters, and other QA people between the author and the reader. Each layer adding more money to the pile, compounding the problem.

When mistakes are made, typographical or otherwise, it might be found in the ‘Corrections’ section of some future issue. Here in the dub-dub-dub, each story is a living breathing, growing entity with links, comments, corrections, additions, all inline and all published immediately and transparently. Operating under Joy’s Laws states (“No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else”). Bloggers and readers alike aren’t just fact checking the ass of traditional media, they’re fact checking their own ass.

Pick any post at slashdot or 37 Signals’ Signal vs Noise to see this on a huge scale. This is also why Wikipedia has the most comprehensive coverage of anything in a single site.

In the Dan Gillmore quote, I could have quietly swapped “crude” out for “cruel”. Doing so felt a little too 1984 Memory Hole-esque. Instead, showing both the correction and Dan’s message inline seemed more transparent, and yes, honest to you.

Plus, if I made the change quietly, the section in the MarketWatch article wouldn’t have existed.

Email Messages you don’t want to get

I think we may have a squirrel in the walls upstairs
can I name him squirrely?

Jen

Introducing the gFeed

The other morning I was looking for an easy way to test all my feeds. After a few minutes of tracking down the latest magpierss and some lunchtime programming, I’m happy to present the gFeed.

The gFeed pulls all my posts at GarrickVanBuren.com, the First Crack Podcast, MNteractive.com, the Work Better Weblog, and my Flickr Gallery into a single site and single RSS.

Currently it’s a straight text and image feed, no mp3 enclosures (i.e. podcasts) or links in the post’s body. For now, you’ll have to click over to the original post for that stuff.

I’m not sure if the gFeed will be useful to anyone but myself, let me know either way.

If you’re interested in how I modified magpierss to aggregate the sites, continue reading.

Open up a magpie_simple.php and create an array (I put it at line 3) with all the sites you want to aggregate:

$urls = array (
        "http://foo.com/rss2.php",
        "http://foo2.com/rss2.php",
        "http://foo3.com/rss2.php"
        );

After that, create an array for all the posts to live in.
```
$allitems = array();
```
Now replace magpie’s existing ‘if ($url)’ with ‘foreach($urls as $url)’ like this

Change this:
```
if ( $url ) {
	$rss = fetch_rss($url);
	...
```
To This:
```
foreach ($urls as $url) {
	$rss = fetch_rss($url);
	...
```

Next, I grab the title and link from each of the specified feeds and parse through each of the items in the feeds. For each item in the feed, I grab the title, link, description, publication date, guid, and timestamp.

	$channel = $rss->channel['title'];
	$channellink = $rss->channel['link'];

         foreach ($rss->items as $item) {
		$title = $item['title'];
		$href = $item['link'];
		$desc = $item['description'];
		$date = $item['pubdate'];
		$guid = $item['guid'];
		$ts = $item['date_timestamp'];

Before closing out the ‘foreach()’ function, I add all that data to the $allitems array.

    array_push($allitems, array($ts,
          "channel" =>$channel,
          "channellink" => $channellink,
          "title" => $title,
          "href" =>$href,
          "pubdate" =>$date,
          "guid"=>$guid,
          "desc"=>$desc));
	}

Now, sort all the items by their timestamp
```
arsort($allitems);
```

Finally, we spit out the items:

foreach ($allitems as $item) {
	echo $item['href'];
	echo $item['title'];
	echo $item['desc'];
	echo $item['channellink'];
	echo $item['channel'];
}

Hope this is helpful in creating your own personal gFeed, or jFeed, or cFeed, or whathaveyou.

Get Paid to Do What You Love

Jason Kottke is making the biggest decision of his life. He’s testing a hypothesis I’ve had since I started podcasting. I believe the business model of the future is the one public television and public radio have been using for years:

If your customers like what you do, they’ll pay you to continue.

Dean Allen did the same back in 2004 with TextDrive, he raised $40,000 in 4 days. Offering people hosting for the lifetime of TextDrive for a mere $200.

Brilliant.

I predict we’ll see more and more people pursuing this model. As they do, the traditional concepts of media, employer, and job will look archaic and clumsy.

And yes, I’m supporting both Kottke and Textdrive.

UPDATE: I sitting here listening to Dave Slusher’s latest podcast and realized I need to add Evil Genius Chronicles and Chuck Olsen to this Asking for Support to Do What You Love list.