Creating a customer obsessive culture

I read a post from Harvard Business recently that was so head spinning I have to share. I have subscribed to the HBR Ideacasts (easy to add to your iPod via iTunes) for a while and listen to them on my commute to work. They are both insightful and quick and easy to understand. I have access to their published components through work and the electronic lead ins provide a great way to focus on the stuff that actually matters.

An example of that is a post titled Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit - And You Should To. The idea of giving people a $1000 bonus to quit sounds absolutely insane when you first look at the surface of it. Especially when you consider the high cost of talent acquisition, nut then when you think a little deeper it starts to make sense.

The people who would take such a bonus and leave are people who are asking themselves the question of "what have I gotten myself into". They may be thinking, "this is all well and good but is this really for me?" In most situations when you start a new job you are so focused on pleasing everyone you hardly stop to think if the fit you thought was there really is. As an employer you are also focused on trying to make sure someone fits and gets all the opportunity to succeed they may need. The perception of someone leaving is so very negative that no one wants it.

By taking this approach Zappos short circuits all of those negative items. It becomes not just ok, but encouraged to consider your fit. It becomes not anathema but perfectly acceptable to call it quits when there is not a fit.

It may not be something that every company goes out and does right away (or potentially even should ever do) but I certainly applaud the Zappos team for thinking differently and realizing how to get to their real goal of excellent customer service with fanatical employees.

Brilliant.

Enterprise Architecture is not technology selection

Now that I have extolled the virtue of standards like muscle building and listed our current set I wanted to post a bit on why I believe having a consistent Enterprise Architecture is important.

First and foremost on the list of why an Enterprise Architecture is important is that for a company to be successful it needs must build IT Solutions, not IT Capabilities. What is the difference you ask... (or even if you didn't I am going to tell you anyway) Capabilities can survive in non-integrated verticals but Solutions require integration. An End to End view of paths and functions is required to get a solution. An IT Capability is something like storing a customer information record in a database. A Solution provides the customer with value because it can use that information and to customize a trip.

One of the fundamental rules of development is breaking things up into smaller, solvable pieces. At the individual system level this makes perfect sense. However, when you start to look at things at the enterprise level, things implemented in pieces build piecemeal solutions. Then, these piecemeal solutions need to be integrated. This is what I have referred to in previous conversations as the fiefdom effect. Essentially, this is where individual systems or areas have their own fiefdoms and protect their system boundaries and "control their own destiny". While this may be fine a micro level, the independent pieces work fine after all, at the macro level this increases the integration burden and decrease overall company agility.

This is where we get to what Enterprise Architecture is all about... Enterprise Architecture's (and Engineering, YAY Engineering!!) job is to take a long term view so that teams can build capabilities not just fulfill the short term order of the day. If we have a solid base upon which to build (and this is an art in itself, not building the Taj Mahal or better yet the Winchester House when an outhouse will do the job) we enable everyone to move much faster and make integration between components that much simpler.

Yet another argument for a seamless SOA infrastructure. Or at least that's what the vendors are touting as the latest Technology Software solution for this problem... but we will save that post for another day.

Solaris vs. Linux

As mentioned in my post Sun gets a new spark I recently had the opportunity to visit with some of the folks from SUN and get some visibility into the efforts they have under way. One of the things that this visit caused me to ponder was Solaris 10. When Sun open sourced Solaris I wrote it off as the death throws of a previously strong giant and it made me sad. I originally cut my Unix teeth on Solaris and did a lot of work with it as the stable foundation on which to build open systems. However, as Linux came into its own I have also been one of those folks who has systematically been replacing Solaris in the data center with Linux. For the most part going with the masses to Red Hat but with occasional forays into others as well.

Some developers that I know have stuck with Solaris for their development environments even through the Linux craze due to tools that they liked. Originally I had gone the other way, moving development environments to Linux and deployment environments to Solaris. Solaris in prod for stability and Linux for tools and speed in development.

With the new innovation going into Solaris, things like ZFS, zones and Grid it gives pause. The difficulty now is that everyone and their kid sister has run Linux, known Linux etc. There is a wealth of Linux talent out there and the Solaris admins are much harder to find. Of course Red Hat has been getting more proud of their products and pricing their support accordingly which also adds to the mix. With all of the recent silliness from Microsoft on their FUD around Open Source and indemnity clauses things get even more interesting. (I personally am of the belief that if they thought they could win they would already be in court... but I am sure the FUD is the real goal)

So given your choice... which would you pick?

SUN gets a new spark

I recently had the opportunity to go out to California and visit SUN. It was just a short period of time but it was an information packed couple days. We discussed topics ranging from Sun GridEngine to strategic direction, from Developer Tools to hardware threading.

I was particularly happy to see that SUN appears to have obtained a dose of humility. Where their previous corporate strategy seemed for a while to be "ABM" (Anything But Microsoft) they are now focusing on understanding their spot in commodity markets and differentiating based on service. The previous approach and Scott McNeely's top 10 lists was certainly entertaining it didn't do much to further the companies goals.

SUN has now taken a page out of the RedHat handbook on making money with Open Source and are trying to make money with service differentiation. I had written off the initiative to Open Source Solaris as the dieing throws of a declining giant. But listening to the vision that they have and what innovation Sun is now building into Solaris 10 with things such as ZFS and Virtualization such as Zones.

Their approaches with Silicon and drive to innovate there was also interesting. They now sell Sun boxes with AMD and Intel processors. Talk about Cats and Dogs living together. We even discussed a current effort sun is working on with Microsoft for a large system provider where they are serving real time video off of Sun hardware running Windows. ... Let that sink in for a minute...

Another interesting point that was brought up was how Moore's Law and fitting more onto the same bit of silicon applies to RISC chips as well as CISC chips. Since RISC is smaller (Reduced Instruction Set) they can then fit more processors on the wafer. So they are legitimately talking 32 and 64 core processors. Talk about the need to thread your application. Initiatives such as Niagara and Victoria Falls also provide low energy approaches.

Just read some of the press of the days for a glimpse of some of what they have been up to.

Now that I have posted about Google and praised them in several regards I will point
out how silly that is. The Halo Effect is the general belief that because a company is successful it is successful because it is brilliant, innovative, has a great culture, [insert appropriate praise here]. Conversely when that same company stumbles it is because they have "fallen away
from that brilliant, innovative, great culture, [insert appropriate praise here] that made them great. Therefore management books, methods, papers, research, Blogs (heh) are written on this company and how you can be successful like them by following "these 12 easy steps".

The reality of the situation though is rarely that either one of those items is absolutely true. Good companies can have problems, and bad companies can have success. A recent article in the McKinsey Quarterly even suggests that "Suggesting that companies can follow a blueprint to achieve lasting success may be appealing, but it’s not supported by the evidence." and "The delusion of lasting success is a serious matter because it casts building an enduringly high-performing company as an achievable objective. Yet companies that outperform the market for long periods of time are not just rare but statistical anomalies whose apparent greatness is observable only in retrospect."

Wow.

This effect is referred to in psychology as the Halo Effect. Just we tend to be nearly binary in how we view others attributing positive traits to those we like and negative traits to those that we don't. Rarely viewing the people with a mix of positive and negative. The book The Halo Effect: ... and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers covers this topic in some detail and relates it to businesses

So what does that mean? It means that success is hard... go figure. It means that you need to constantly adjust your strategy and approach to be relevant to the times and business environment in which you find yourself. The approach that got you where you are today simply won't continue to work. It means that if you stand still, you die. From a corporate perspective and a management and directional challenge perspective this is a whopper of a concept.

A great quote on this topic from US Treasury Secretary and Goldman Sachs executive Robert
E. Rubin “Once you’ve internalized the concept that you can’t prove anything in absolute terms, life becomes all the more about odds, chances, and trade-offs. In a world without provable
truths, the only way to refine the probabilities that remain is through greater knowledge and understanding.”

That's almost grounds for a philosophy debate. Up there with "Only the insane have the strength to determine that which is sane."