Management by fooling around

In my column this week for Baseline magazine, I give some advice for getting managers on your side.

We all have worked for lousy bosses, but how about the boss who does his (and they usually are men) best to be unproductive?

You know the type: the ones who are playing video games when they should be writing up their strategic plans, or who seem to spend more of their time arranging their golf schedule than the product schedule. Or they take time sending out memos about the latest social gathering for the office, rather than focusing on setting up a social network for your customers.

I call it MBFA, management by fooling around.

Blogging your way to success

If you are in the St. Louis area on the evening of May 14th, I will be giving a workshop here in Des Peres. The session is geared toward self-publishers, and attendees (there is a fee if you aren’t a member of the organization) will also get a copy of my screencast how-to video CD for further reference. I’ll show you why blogs are a powerful book marketing tool. I will demonstrate the different blogging technologies that are available and how they differ. Finally, I’ll talk about coordinating your blog with your own domain and mailing list names and identity.

Guest on Computer America Radio Monday night

Tune in tomorrow night (Monday) at 10 pm ET, I will be talking about becoming master of your Internet domain for less than $20 a year. Here is the archived recording.

Becoming accidental fundraisers

This is a little different, and more personal essay. I hope you don’t mind the slight diversion.

When we receive a cancer diagnosis we realize that we cannot always choose what we want to do and how things should be done. We call ourselves victims and stumble along at the mercy of the disease. I disagree, and since my diagnosis I have been making decisions to bring awareness to my community and contribute where I can to help find a cure for cancer. As a result, I have become passionate about my survivorship.

So wrote my sister Carrie on her application to become a Yoplait Champion. Each year the yogurt company selects 25 cancer survivors and promotes their lives and triumphs over their diagnosis. This year I am very proud to say that Carrie was one of the women selected. You can view her details here.

I think about Carrie whenever I am barefoot. You see, a few years ago we both were walkers in one of the three-day Komen walks in Philadelphia. My toenail broke and was a reminder of her diagnosis and how she became a true cancer survivor. champion.

Carrie didn’t just accept her diagnosis, get treatment, and move on with her life. Instead, she has taken control over treatment, channeling her energies into being a mentor and a source of support for others who have been diagnosed. Along her journey to come to terms with cancer, she has built a Web site for survivors, raised more than $25,000 to support cancer research, enrolled in several clinical trials, and served as an advocate and peer reviewer. She has been an inspiration to all of us, and it is great that Yoplait has honored her this year.

Cancer runs deep in our family: we lost our mom to lung cancer more than 20 years ago, and many other family members have died from a sad array of several other kinds of cancer too. But Carrie has become this beacon of support and inspiration for all of us, even those who don’t have any chronic illnesses. Interestingly, it didn’t start with her diagnosis, or even her treatment. It started when she came back from a retreat called Life Beyond Cancer. That transformed her. She has since returned there for a third year last fall, this time as a motivational speaker and to help our 45-year old cousin deal with her own cancer diagnosis.

Let me talk about her Web site, SurvivorsRetreat.com. She put this thing together on her own, paying for the graphic designers and hosting costs with her own money. It took months to assemble the information on various retreats that are available to survivors, but Carrie wanted others to have the opportunities that she did, and help motivate and inform others the same way she was when she went on her retreat. And even her doctor has blogged about her here.

But wait, there is more. Carrie has been volunteering on several peer review research committees with the Lance Armstrong Foundation, the Department of Defense Directed Medical Research Program, and others. Over the past several years, she has helped identify promising protocols and worked alongside oncologists and researchers. And the stipends that she receives for these activities don’t go into her own pocket, she turns that over to Komen or Avon or wherever she is walking.

To participate in these walkathons, you have to raise several thousand dollars. Carrie and I have well-developed networks of donors, but what she does are sheer genius: she throws a party at a local New York restaurant. Last year more than 250 people attended, and every one of them donated at least $25. But she doesn’t just take these funds and send them in. She – and I – find people who are walking who are having trouble fundraising and help put them over their minimum. It is just another random act of kindness and inspiration. We had a wonderful time hearing other survivor’s stories as we walked around the city. It made me realize how far she has come with dealing with disease and how many people she has touched as a result of her efforts.

Carrie is truly the embodiment of a Yoplait champion, and I can’t tell you how pleased I am that she has been selected. She is an example to me daily of how not to be complacent about your diagnosis, but to take control over your cure, and bring this message to others. She has shown me that the healing process has to start from within, and involves more than just eating more fresh fruits and vegetables and getting regular exercise. She has mobilized her family, her friends, and now thanks to the Web, anyone that comes to visit her site, to take control and to move beyond being victims of cancer.

During the Philadelphia Komen walk we had awful weather, so bad we had to be evacuated. We spent one night sleeping on the floor of a local high school. Despite the bad weather and the blisters, it was an experience I won’t forget. My only regret is now my toenail has grown back. But I still think of Carrie when I am barefoot, and being a Yoplait champion will give others the opportunity to be inspired by her example as well. As she says, “my passion is for my cancer survivorship projects.”

We both share this passion. Indeed, I have coined the term “accidental fundraiser” for these efforts, and have since gone on to work with Carol Weisman, a professional speaker, author and philanthropy adviser, to create a series of podcasts at accidentalfundraiser.com to talk about some of the issues involved when ordinary people decide to become involved in their causes. I would urge you to listen to a few of them for your own inspiration and enlightenment.

So what can you do? If you are looking for a charity to support, please take a moment and write a check to help support Carrie’s Avon walkathon this fall. Please make out your check to “Avon Walk for Breast Cancer” and email me for instructions on where to send it. Carrie is asking for checks, rather than using the online donation system, so that your donation can go to other family members who are less adept at fundraising – she is walking with all of her sisters-in-law this fall, and I have volunteered as one of the support crew.

You can also send in an online donation for my own charitable fundraising effort to support the National MS Society at the link below. I will be riding my bike with my friend Steve, who has MS and who joined me on last year’s ride.

If you are going to be in New York or Southern California in October, let me know and I can give you instructions on how to cheer us from along the route.

Thanks for your time and anticipated support. I really appreciate your readership and comments over the years as I continue to produce these weekly essays about technology. I promise this will be the last fundraising solicitation you will receive from me this year – think about my request as a subscription fee. And to give you another incentive to donate, I promise that if you have become an accidental fundraiser of your own, please send me a link to your personal project and I will match whatever donation you give to us this year. We all have the ability to become accidental fundraisers and inspire others to do good deeds. As my sister says on Web site:

Ask yourself, “What am I proud of? What do I enjoy?” How can I become more inspired today than yesterday? How can I bring a little light into my life?

Becoming master of your own domain for less than $20 a year

No, this isn’t that certain Seinfeld episode, although the level of frustration in setting up your domain DNS, Google email hosting, and WordPress hosting can be close. For those of you that want to have the least expensive and most capable collection of tools, I show you how to navigate the screens and get things set up. I use GoDaddy for my registrar, but you can substitute anyone. WordPress will host your domain for $10 a year (you can forward for free but then you can’t get the emails from Google).

It is a short 4 minute screencast. I go through the steps quickly, but you can pause or rewind if you need to.

Online backup for the channel

As more small businesses expand, they need to protect their data in case of disaster, theft or user error. A number of online backup companies have entered this market, and some even have well-developed channel programs for which they are recruiting VARs. Those companies include Asigra, Zmanda, LogMeIn, Storage Guardian, Vembu Technologies and Intronis Technologies.

Before selecting a backup partner, VARs should consider several things. You can read more of my story, which ran in eWeek’s Strategic Partner site here this week.

Buying XP laptops shouldn’t be this tough

Over the weekend, I helped a friend of mine buy a new laptop. What was amazing was we actually went into a retail store, found the model she was most comfortable with and was in stock. We actually left the store with it under our possession.

 

What wasn’t amazing was how hard it was to purchase it, and how much Internet research I needed to do to enable this fabulous shopping experience.

 

You see, my friend wanted to stick with Windows XP. And the moral of my story, which I will provide up front, is that if you want XP on your future laptops, you better buy it now because it is only going to get more difficult.

 

According to Microsoft’s own Web site, XP Pro will no longer be available in the retail channel after July 1. Although OEMs and system builders will have until Feb 1, 2009.

 

There is an exception — for the immediate future the XP Home version will be available for ultra-small PCs, but these are probably not the PCs that you want to outfit your corporate fleet with.

 

Before heading to the Office Depot that is literally a block from my house, I spent some time looking over the major PC vendors’ Web sites and seeing what they had. Here is where the story turns ugly. My friend wanted to spend less than $1,000, have a 15.4-inch screen, and a keyboard that was solid enough for a demanding typist. That seemed easy to satisfy, until I started looking around.

 

None of the major PC vendors make it easy for you to buy a pre-configured XP laptop. They all “recommend Windows Vista” and hide their XP models several menu layers down or just don’t tell you where to find them. The two best vendors for XP are Lenovo and HP – possibly because they have standardized on XP for their own employees, possibly because they understand that this market segment isn’t going away as fast as Microsoft would like. HP sells actually two different versions of XP Pro – one is called a “business downgrade” that sounds ominous, the other is just the standard XP Pro. They cost the same, and they have fairly wide support for XP Pro across their laptop line. Lenovo has equally wide support. Both sites make it easy to figure out which laptops can be configured with XP Pro pre-installed, even if you can’t sort by operating system directly.

 

 

The two worst vendors are Sony and Gateway. I couldn’t find any XP models on either site, and Sony makes it almost impossible to determine what operating system is running on its machine until you get into the details on each individual model. Toshiba’s Web site isn’t much better.

 

I had better results going to Office Depot’s Web site, which was fortunate because as I said the store is very close by. There you can quickly search on XP Pro and find a dozen models from several different vendors, including Sony and Toshiba, which come with this operating system. It is ironic and cruel that you have to go to a retail vendor’s site to find the details about a product that you can’t get on the actual vendor’s site. This should be a lesson for those of you designing Web sites, but I will leave that for another column and another day.

 

In fact, the major PC retailers have done a much better job at finding XP from their home pages – often a few mouse clicks is all that it takes to narrow the field. BestBuy.com and CDW.com both will show you which models come with XP: in CDW’s case, they had nine results but only two Toshibas were in stock. (Best Buy’s business site has more than 100 listings for XP models today.)

 

So off we went to Office Depot. Amazingly, the Lenovo model they had on display was the sole laptop running XP, and it was one that my friend liked. We had to deal with a salesperson, who made several mistakes and tried to get us to purchase the extended warranty, but we left the store with product in hand.

 

Microsoft is making a mistake discontinuing XP to retail and corporate customers. There are many people that aren’t enamored with Vista, and I have heard from many corporate IT managers that are going slowly on its adoption. Buying a laptop is more of an issue, because many vendors are making laptops that have network cards and other gear that doesn’t have XP drivers. If you have plans for major XP laptop purchases this year, spend the money now while you still have a choice.

 

(This column also appeared today in Baseline magazine.)

Larry Hertzog, RIP

One of my guiltiest of guily pleasures has been listening the past couple of years to Drinks with Larry and Lauren.

A mostly weekly podcast that ran 90 minutes, the show was conversation between Larry Hertzog and Lauren Proctor, two show biz types that have been involved in many different TV and movie projects over the years. I am not one of these E-channel, Spears-addicted, star-tracking types, so it is an odd show for me to listen to. But the conversations were wonderful ways to fill an hour or so in the slower late afternoons and had lots of laughs.

Larry, sadly, passed away this weekend.  The show will be missed, and if you haven’t seen Nowhere Man, go to Netflix and rent a couple of DVDs.

Laptops and modems, c. 1987

I could have been cute and posted this with the original date, just to throw all of you that read these via RSS. Instead, I will just put the scanned file of one of my earliest columns for PC Week up with today’s date. Back then, we used these things called modems on our laptops — you know, that other hole that is too small for the Ethernet cable to fit into? And if we were really lucky, the hotel phone jack would take the RJ11 cord directly, rather than having to take the whole thing apart. Of course, nowadays we just use Wifi!

Fail frequently

How many of us remember our failures more than our successes? My own divorce, the time I didn’t get a research grant, the last job that I was fired from (come to think of it, there were some other messy situations that I still recall), the I time I rear-ended someone on a slippery freeway. The list goes on and on. You could say that I have had a full life.

Those of us in technology are fond of the line from the Apollo 13 book and movie: “failure is not an option.” Back then, it was something to revel in, a bunch of NASA nerds working around the clock to figure out a strategy that would save the three astronauts’ lives and get them back to Earth safely. It was a good story then, and still is.

But I wanted to talk to you today about a somewhat different point of view, that failure is an option, and in fact, those of us that fail frequently are better for it. The trick is to think of each failure as a learning and growth opportunity, especially how you can learn to triumph over your own business adversities. Easy to say now, especially as these failures are illuminated in the dim light of my faded memories, but still.

This isn’t a new concept. For example, Jeff Atwood in his blog, Coding Horror, says, “Fail early and often.”
And Mitchell Ashley in his blog says: “If you aren’t seeing some failures along the way, it’s a pretty good idea you’re not stretching, challenging and really going for it. You’re probably believing in your own assumptions and plans too much.”

Other people have called this concept rapid prototyping: put something together quickly, barely working, to show your customers or clients. Then, based on this feedback, you go back and make small changes, get more feedback and sharpen your ideas.

And really, when you go back to our childhood, this is how we all learned a new skill, whether it is in playing sports, mastering the piano, or whatever. We took small steps, saw what worked and what didn’t, and learned from our mistakes.

The hard part is to figure out the right feedback loop so that you aren’t micro-managing everyone. This isn’t good either: you have to give people the responsibility to make their own mistakes, so that they can really learn from them.

I got to witness this first hand this past weekend. I was attending a professional speaker-training workshop, and got to see first-hand how really good speakers can still fail and how they can tune their craft. It was like drinking from a firehose, but extremely worthwhile as I try to move into that orbit.

Part of the notion of frequent failure has to do with corporate culture, and the acceptance by management of a certain level of risk. After all, who wants a bunch of employees that don’t produce? The other thing to figure out the right amount of freedom to try out new ideas and experiment, and to make these adjustments without a particular timetable or schedule of “deliverables.”

This is the philosophy of many innovative companies. For example, last week I met Keith Sawyer, a professor here at Wash U. His Group Genius book talks about the culture at WL Gore (the makers of GoreTex and other products less famous). Employees have ten percent of their time that isn’t allocated for particular billable projects. They are free to experiment and fail, as long as the other 90% is actually producing results. This is how they come up with some of their most profitable products, and failure at Gore is tolerated within this guideline.

So really, why I can understand why NASA says that failure is not an option, because after all they were talking about actual lives at stake, what we are usually dealing with in our lives is a bit less critical and threatening. Instead, may I suggest a replacement motto, on the order of “Failure is not an only option, but should always be encouraged.”

Now I am not talking about promoting your least productive employees. What I do mean is that you want to give your self the permission to fail, and in doing so foster innovation in your company and make you a more agile business. But unlike the astronauts, by making it easier to fail you can avoid the bigger mistakes, and make smaller steps towards progress.

Start thinking about promoting the culture of frequent failure at your shop. It is the first step along the path towards being more innovative and agile. And if you are looking for some inspiration, it is worth renting the Apollo 13 movie if you haven’t seen it in a while.