No Off Switch

Management Consulting. What’s it all about?

Coming from a business school education, I had learned quite a bit about the career path of management consulting.  In the end, it was not a path that I took, an as an outsider looking in I often wondered “What’s it all about?”, and why are companies paying top dollar for consultants to come in?  

So why are these consultants getting hired?  Of course there are a number of logical reasons.  The consultants may actually be providing ideas that improve businesses.  Well, we can be quite sure of that.  But, there are probably quite a few more reasons.  One reason that I recently heard from a fortune 500 COO was that these management consultant firms also gave the c-level execs a bit of a CYA.  If the new direction failed, they always had something to point to!  ”Hey, Bain told us it was a good idea!”.  There are also other reasons to be sure.

Freakonomics radio recently did an excellent job of covering the topic on their podcast, I Consult, Therefore I Am.  I recommend a listen.  They talk over the topic in full and also try to evaluate whether consultants are worth their pay grade.

Disconnect. Turning off the Wifi

Another day in a startup started with me jammed into the back of an Acura TL with my laptop opened in front of me.  We were on the way to meet with investors, and I had to grab some statistics from our database in order to improve the presentation.  Being the programmer, I took the time to write a PHP script to do the task, because I knew these statistics would be important metrics for evaluating the progress of our company on an ongoing basis.

So there I was, jammed into the back seat of a sedan on a 6 hour trip to Nashville with my laptop open and no WIFI.  Luckily, I had some foresight, and I had downloaded the PHP documentation to my laptop.  I had thought this would definitely help, since I would be disconnected on the trip, and because I can’t remember a damn thing about any programming language.  I was worried that being disconnected would slow me down, but instead it had the opposite effect. I was free from the distractions of email, messaging, my friends and my girlfriend. I couldn’t kill time by going to hackernews, or by looking at my fantasy football matchup.  The net effect of all of this was that I was able to concentrate on the task at hand, and the results were a beautiful script written in a short amount of time.

This got me thinking, though.  Why don’t we disconnect?  Set your daily goals, download the tools that you need and DISCONNECT.  Remove the distractions, and focus on the task at hand.  I believe this approach is not only possible, but desirable.

I’d love to hear others thoughts on the subject as well.  Feel free to post your thoughts in the comments section if you have stories about disconnecting.

Sign on Top to Reduce Dishonesty

A recent study conducted by researchers at the Harvard Business School, the University of Toronto and Duke University found that putting the signature line at the top of forms can reduce dishonesty in form-filling.

The researchers teamed up with an automobile insurance company and had 101 participants fill out insurance forms.  Some of the participants signed at the top and some signed at the bottom.  The participants who signed at the top reported roughly 2750 more average miles per year usage on their car than the participants who signed on the bottom.  Admitting to a higher usage rate would raise the participant’s rate on insurance, so this finding is quite significant.

Keep this in mind the next time you create a form.

More details can be found on the Harvard Business School website: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6728.html

My note to Apple regarding their review process

Hello Adam,

With regard to the Apple Review process, we are very disappointed.  As a business with mission critical applications in the field and our ass on the line, we find it really frustrating that we are in the same 7 day pipeline for review as your weekend warriors making light saber, sex position and fart apps.  I really think that Apple needs to have a business pipeline for businesses that have passed an up front review process.  In this pipeline, apps could become live nearly instantaneously after a release, much like your major competitor’s developer friendly process.

We already go through rigorous processes in-house to ensure that our applications are tested and buttoned up for our clients and users, and there’s not a chance that a 2 hour review by an Apple employee is going to cover the rigor that we already have in our processes.  But, even with the most rigorous testing and review processes, something can always slip through the cracks, and that’s where the Apple review process is frustrating.  Does Apple wait 7 days to ship out an embarrassing or critical bug fix to their clients?  Do you even wait a minute?  Probably not.

On our consumer parking application, we have no choice.  We will be creating an app for iOS.  But we also make B2B products for parking.  Right now, we make none of these for iOS for the reasons stated above, and we never will as long as this system is in place for us.

I highly doubt our thoughts are alone with regard to your processes.  Your competitor is so much nicer to the business with regard to their release process, it’s really not comparable.  Please think it over, because I think Apple’s Review process has a serious problem with it at the moment.

-Charlie

How could a tech boss say no?

<?php

require("passportparking");
require_once("wedding");

$passportparking['sankaran']['available'] = true;

for($leave = ($wedding['date'] - 4days); $leave <= ($wedding['date'] + 7days); $leave++) {
	$passportparking['sankaran']['available'] = false;
	if($leave['date'] >= 30may) {
		$passportparking['sankaran']['remotelyworking'] = true;
	}
}

$passportparking['sankaran']['available'] = true;

?>

(ignore the blog cutting off the post on the right hand side)

Great Crab Stuffed Salmon..oh wait!

• Bob: how was the salmon
• Khristian: i texted you
• it was literally one of the best meals ive ever had in my whole life
• thank you so much
• jesus
• my mouth orgasmed
• fucking nuts
• Bob: haha
• nice
• joesph has my phone
• i forgot
• need to get it
• Khristian: lol
• how the hell did you guys make it
• salmon+crab+ ????
• Sent at 10: 11 PM on Wednesday
• Khristian: brb
• Bob: ok
• Sent at 10: 13 PM on Wednesday
• Bob: my stomach is killing me
• Sent at 11: 38 PM on Wednesday
• Khristian: YA ME TOO
• FUCKKK
• Bob: must be the damn salmon
• wtf
• Khristian: ive been complaining for the last 20 minutes
• Bob: im dying
• ya
• Sent at 11: 41 PM on Wednesday
• Khristian: ha, wow. first the peas. now the salmon.
• geez
• Bob: ya something is not right
• Sent at 11: 43 PM on Wednesday
• Khristian: just threw up
• Bob: FUCK

Global poverty halved from 1990 to 2010. But is it just China?

The Economist reports that the UN has reached its goal of halving world poverty 5 years earlier than expected.  But, apparently, the UN should thank China.  In the early 1980s 77% of China’s population made less than $1.25 a day.  In 2010 only 14% of China’s population makes less that $1.25 a day.  (numbers adjusted for inflation).

I love other nerds

I’m a big fan of basketball and stats, so when I saw this link analyzing shooting effectiveness in the NBA, I just had to share it.  It’s some excellent work done by Kirk Goldsberry.  Here’s a shot of one of the charts to pique your interest:

Google Cloud SQL

Google recently announced a new feature into their Google App Engine cloud.  That feature is a MySQL-like datastore called Google Cloud SQL.  This new system is no doubt a response to the highly successful MySQL support over at Amazon AWS.  The huge benefit that Google Cloud could present, though, is high availability and data redundancy built in across multiple geographic regions.  This presents a one-up over Amazon’s RDS service, which only allows for redundancy and failover in the same geographic region.  Any sort of redundancy should be leveraged and sought out, but if you have an application that just cannot go down, you should definitely take a look at Google Cloud SQL.  Multi region redundancy can protect your business from not only a datacenter going down, but also from geographic catastrophes, and major geographic internet outages.