Answer Guy Central

I’ve always known I would have made a good billionaire. I’d give my money to people that need it. You know: charities, children’s organizations, the downtrodden in general. Even my wife.

Sergey Brin, founder of Google, and all-around-decent-if-incredibly-arrogant guy, loaned ten million dollars to his wife’s company, 23AndMe. This is a company that Mr. Brin’s wife started, and which is mapping the human genome. Not being a genetic scientist this leaves me unable to say much beyond “I’m sure that’s really important and will eventually lead to lots of amazing medical benefits”.

I’m guessing that the business change in this story is the very act of turning genome mapping into a business. Which also may be a good idea at some point. But Not Yet. 23andMe is laying off some of their staff. I find this amazing gven that they had to know right from the start that their business would takes years to be viable. And when Mr. Brin made that loan, no matter how great a guy he is he had to have understood that it was a long-term commitment to both science and business. So why not loan the company more money now? For that matter, given Sergey’s absolutely immense wealth and his very personal connection to 23andMe, why not just buy the company and finance it until Mrs. Brin gets bored?

Because it’s a bad idea.

Business Change can be engineered, but there has to be something to change from and something to change to. What did they think would happen; 23andMe would automagically make money at something with no practical application (yet) just because the founder of Google was married to its CEO?

Maybe I can change myself  into the next Perez Hilton by using this post to suggest that Sergey Brin is about to get divorced. Nope. Too creepy.

Even for Google, ideas aren’t good just because you say they are.

Is your web site yours? Does anyone disagree? Is your business change, business practice, or any other part of your business REALLY yours?

How do you know?

I was working on a few domain transfers this week for a client. And it wasn’t fun. There’s a process in place for doing this that’s supposed to protect everyone, and when it works it does its job wonderfully. When it doesn’t, though, business change becomes business impossible. And the clock is running, both on the client’s business change choices and on my “meter”.

I got through it, because making business change happen is what I DO. But not without some pain. I may write about this in detail some time, because having a road map of someone else’s pain is the kind of thing people can benefit from.

Here’s another: this, as well as the issue of communicating in a way that doesn’t infringe someone else’s rights, could come in handy. The Electronic Frontier Foundation talks here about the latter. Unless you’d prefer to hire a few lawyers it’s an important read.

Nothing about the work I was doing today or what’s in that document should be too much of a surprise. But it’s real. It stands in the way of doing business or changing your business. It’s what Business CHANGE means.

I talk all the time about managing the business change that social networking through sites like Twitter and Facebook necessitates. Well here’s a change: what if using Facebook or Twitter was illegal?

This week, Richard Ketchum, CEO of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, suggested that social networking might be against the law at US banks. Facebook and Twitter? Not for them. And not for their employees, either.

If you’re a banker and this idea has escaped you, well, you’re welcome. Ditto that if you work in any kind of regulated environment. Insurance Company? Doctor’s Office? Uh-Oh.

Aside from saying that here at Answer Guy Central we’re very good at navigating regulatory red tape, I won’t make this about anything other than how important it is for you to understand all the ramifications of any business change you enact at your business. And I’ll go on to suggest that most of this issue boils down to the steps that you must take to protect your patients / customers / depositors information when you possess it. Listen, apply the same idea that Mr. Ketchum is talking about to your business: what do you do with credit card information? Is it safe and secure? Are you sure about that?

When it’s time for business change you have to be ready to move fast. But sometimes enacting business change needs to be a slow, careful process, affected by lots of things you might not have thought of when you had that “a-ha!” moment.

A-ha!

Question: What do you get when you ask a question and the answer just raises more questions? Answer: Pretty much nothing.

In fact, less than nothing, since it usually means you have to circle back, form a new question, and hope an actual answer comes out. Or give up and start on something else.

Have you noticed how often people avoid business change by just not giving an answer to direct questions? The answer guy says it’s time to stop that.

Here’s an example: you have a license to use a piece of software, and it limits you in some way. One computer. One processor. One site. Something. Business change happens. You have the software running on a computer with one processor and upgrade the computer to have more than one. Now what? Do you not do the upgrade? Maybe, but . . . I know lawyers, computer geeks and business people, all of whom will have different opinions on what you need to “do” (or more to the point, not do). So do you . . . just . . . stop?

Always keep moving forward. Business Change may be painful to deal with, but sitting around and waiting for things to just resolve themselves is not the answer. Ever.

Umm, No.

So last week, AOL’s latest CEO Tim Armstrong started talking about some plans afoot at the once-and-never-again online activity leader. And I’m glad to see that Tim has a plan.

And it isn’t going to work.

The good news: Mr. Armstrong has quite the media pedigree. Seriously, this guys the real deal, experience-wise. The bad news: this is the same plan AOL used in the 1990s. It created mediocre content then, and will do something even worse now. It is not business change.

AOL used to produce their own content and hoped people would buy/follow it. “Buy” is a reference to the position AOL once held as huge (paid) ISP to the non-tech-savvy masses, and “follow it” is about AOL’s total control over what appeared on their closed service.

The other thing AOL did was license content, and pay pretty solid commissions. I wrote IYM Software Review between 1989 and 1995, and in the final four years of that period watched both my readership and income soar under a deal with AOL. And then they proposed cutting what they paid me by 99%. And so I discovered the Internet

Back in the day content producers were on staff (or in the case of IYM contracted) and well-enough paid to be controlled . What is AOL going to offer content producers today?

So that’s the bad news. While business change can sometimes be repackaging of old ideas, this is an idea with nothing behind it. Journalists and media producers are paid less and less as the number of choices increases, and AOL is not going to magically create enough mass to get folks to write for them exclusively without paying them; and they can’t afford that.

Silk Purse/Sow’s Ear, understand?

I’m all about business change. This isn’t it.

OK, I pick on Twitter a lot, but now I take it back. Twitter does so have a use. Change comes in many forms:

If you’ve ever watched a student struggle over a piece of “classical literature”, only to shorten and simplify things by turning to Cliff Notes or Monarch Notes, you’ve . . . probably been upset. Good enough.

But what if you want to embrace change and go even shorter? Two students have taken on the task of converting already-shortened classics to a form even the attention-deprived generation can wrap their minds around. That’s right; literature 140 characters at a time!

I’d say more, but I’d probably run past your attention span . . .

I was resisting the impulse to say anything at all about Microsoft’s <ahem> lovely new operating system, Windows 7. And then I read this.

I really don’t care about the new version of Windows very much. I’m happy that I can buy it (we’ve actually paid extra at Answer Guy Central just to stay away from Windows Vista on computers purchased in the last couple of years), but I have no plans to upgrade any of our computers. I just don’t see the point.

But if the article above is any indication, it seems that Windows 7 is Microsoft truly enacting business change. The software may not be all that important, but the issues surrounding it sure are! Breathe easier, friends.

And now for something completely different:

Hmm . . . it’s just this moment occurred to me how brilliant the Monty Python guys really were. Business Change is sometimes about making the same old thing look different. And now, through new partners Google and Bing, Twitter is making their stuff matter. In a way that scares me. Don’t worry: I will figure out how to take advantage of that for you.

Yesterday, Google Goddess Marissa Meyer announced the search monster’s new deal with Twitter to use tweets in real-time search results (Microsoft’s Bing got a similar deal). Everyone wins.

Then, Ms. Meyer announced a new feature of Google called Social Search. It’s a way to look at YOUR SOCIAL NETWORK and see what the people you know are up to right now. Yikes.

Don’t get me wrong; you know I’m all about this business change thing. At the same time, I always recommend taking care while using Facebook, Twitter, and the like, lest your private business become more public than you intend.

Google’s about to make keeping your secrets secret just . . . about . . . impossible.

Manage your business change. Engage help if needed. This is about to become not fun.

File this under “Don’t let your kids . . .”

Google Founder Larry Page’s Too-Social Behavior

And I thought I had a problem with texting at the dinner table.

Did you hear the one about the CEO who wanted to create business change that would hurt his company?

No, I’m not talking about Miley Cyrus killing her Twitter account. Yesterday, Evan Williams, CEO and founder of Twitter, said that he wants, really, really badly to kill off the “suggested user” feature of Twitter. I say “hooey”.

Make no mistake: Mr. Williams doesn’t want to kill that feature; he just wants it to be of more utility to Twitter (and, I’m happy to say, to users).

If you think about who benefits from Twitter, it isn’t the “user”. It’s Ashton Kutcher. It’s the aforementioned Miley Cyrus. It’s anyone who can convince many, many people to follow them, and then somehow turn that into a marketing machine. So no, Evan Williams doesn’t want this feature to go away; he wants more people to get value from it so that they will keeping using Twitter.

Done right, this can be a business change that will help Twitter survive. To find the business changes that will help you, just ask yourself what has to happen to keep people coming back. If you like, you can even ask me.