Answer Guy Central

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 . . .

Sounds like fait accompli, does it not? Google enacts one form of business change or another pretty much every day, and every one of their changes puts someone else out of business. Yesterday, they outdid themselves.

Google’s business change (and business changing) idea o’ the day was the introduction of a feature that lets Google Toolbar users comment on web pages they visit. Interesting? Stupid? A little of both? I say “genius”.

If we start with the very idea of people being interested in other people’s comment on the items they’re reading, we immediately get to what’s driving the Internet. For better or worse, we’re all reading the rantings of strangers who may or may not have expertise in the subject they’re writing about. You’re reading this because you’ve come to believe that I have some expertise in business change, business operations, technology, business ideas, or . . . something. OR: you’re here because you followed a link. And that link may have been one I planted out there to draw you here, or it could have been put up by somebody else who thinks I’m smart. BUT YOU’RE HERE.

(Thanks, by the way!)

There are any number of web page commenting platforms out there, and Google is saying something clear by launching their own: they want a piece of everything we do. Now, tie it to their toolbar. The toolbar drives adoption of the new feature, and the feature drives adoption of the toolbar. This may not be business change for Google, but if they change the way you do business, it sure is for you!

My concern is this: Google is controlling which comments actually get posted. They’ve detailed the rules in typically non-specific Google fashion, which in itself is fine, but by being both the people who show us search results and controlling which results are available for search, they’re going a bit too far. I commented earlier this week about Net Neutrality, and Google’s been a big proponent. Now this?

When technology, business change, and ideology cross paths, this is what we get. Let The Answer Guy help manage your business change.

So here we go: The government is finally going to do what everyone thought they would do months ago: it’s time to control bankers’ compensation packages. Talk about Business Change!

Start here: I think these guys make WAY too much and there’s NO reasonable way to justify it.

Continue: as “investors”, the government has every right to have and attempt to put forth/impose an opinion.

But combine those statements with federal position when Goldman Sachs et.al. started showing good numbers again. There was an outcry, and they said that the goal of the bailout was SO good results would happen, and the position that the government needs to intervene at all fell down, hard.

What’s lacking is consistency. And even in change, consistency matters

OK, So Computers Don’t Care that the ongoing demise of the printed word is their fault. The Internet doesn’t care either. But there sure is a lot of talk about this kind of change floating around lately!

This week, there’s an article in Time Magazine bemoaning not the death of newspapers, but their new form as they struggle for life. And the answer? Maybe newspapers need to be in the local news business.

I was watching RealSports on HBO the other night, and Mr. Gumbel and Mr. DeFord were bemoaning the death of local sports coverage. And their point was well-taken: where will analysis of local content (like sports) come from if newspapers die?

The bigger question of course, is about the form of change, and not merely that change in business, the world at large, the media business in particular, or whatever is happening. Newspapers have always been best at serving their local audiences; listen to how almost everyone talks about USA Today, for example. Do you know anyone that likes it?

As the Internet continues to evolve, we’ll see more and more local content produced. It’s a question of hitting your niche. Newspapers may in fact stop “printing”, but they’ll continue to be needed in some form. And so yeah, computers care about newspapers, because without them growth will stop. And that’s not good for computers, businesses, or you and I.

Imagine someone asked you to completely change the way you do business. Then they offered you insurance to make sure that the business changes you were taking on would work. Would you do it?

Your answer is probably “yes”, if only because of the insurance component. Or maybe it’s still no because change scares you, but the insurance part at least made you consider the idea.

There’s a fascinating article in TIME magazine this week, about how in poor countries where insurance is a new idea it’s viewed with suspicion. The very idea that you are protecting against bad things happening makes insurance a tough sell, even if the ‘price’ is free. Even when, as in the case of poor people receiving micro-loans, it clearly improves their lives! Look; it’s universal: change is hard. Change needs to be managed. But how can you manage something that’s new to you? Seems hard, right?

One part of our company offers managed computer care for small business. Another does traditional break/fix computer care in New York City. The managed computer care option is almost always a lot cheaper and keeps them running better, yet we find that when New York City businesses hire us to handle their computer care they almost always opt for the break/fix model.

Why? Because change is hard to accept, even when it makes sense . . . even when the change is good for you. Even when the change saves you lots of money.

But change is coming. More and more. Embrace change; it’s way better than having change squeeze you.

I try to think each day about funny things, at least for a few seconds. Now while my view of funny might be different than yours,  one of the ways I meet that quota is by reading Dilbert and Doonesbury. Are they funny? Dilbert almost every day, Doonesbury rarely if you don’t understand the context. And unless you’re into the silliness of what happens at businesses, maybe not Dilbert either, come to think of it.

Nevertheless, the few seconds I spend on these comic strips help keep me more or less sane, and since they deal with what I do for a living (Dilbert in particular), I get to do two things at once. Efficiency! Hooray!

Dilbert’s creator also writes a more-or-less-daily blog, and I’m not embarrassed to say out loud that I think Scott Adams is one of the smartest guys alive. Today, he’s asking for help deciding what his next product should be, and here’s what he’s written to point out how silly it is to ask people what they want to give him money for:

MY GOD, DON’T YOU MAKE ENOUGH MONEY WITH DILBERT ALREADY?? WHY MUST YOU USE YOUR BLOG FOR COMMERCIAL PURPOSES? WORSE YET, YOU ARE TRYING TO TRICK US INTO DOING YOUR WORK! YOU SUCK! I WILL NEVER COME HERE AGAIN! AND MUSIC SHOULD BE FREE! RADIOHEAD RULES!!!

Now THAT’S funny.

Is the humor in making fun of his readers (yes), or himself (yes), or the Internet in general (yes) or the way blog readers think (yes)? And that’s the point: we’ve entered a time where you need to have close enough relations with everyone you touch to be able to joke, or you’re doomed.

Laugh. Poke fun at yourself. Do it publicly. And then go on to do what you’re great at. In other words, Change.

Who says Twitter does nothing important?

For the record (again), I think Twitter is one of the silliest things, ever. It adds very little to anyone’s life, almost anywhere, and is really only useful as a marketing tool.

Now: everyone please sign up for a Twitter account, and show the National Football League what you think of them.

If you’re not a sports fan this may mean nothing to you, but if you’ve ever watched sports on TV or listened on the radio you’re familiar with the phrase “unauthorized use of the pictures, descriptions and accounts of this game without the express written consent of . . .” . Now, Twitter will be the test ground for what that really means. Facebook, too.

The NFL, notoriously aggressive in protecting their assets (ever notice how commercials always refer to The Super Bowl as “the big game”?), has issued rules that prohibit players and basically anyone associated with players from tweeting, not only during games, but for 90 minutes after games end.

If this were about on-field conduct, I could see it. But it isn’t. The NFL is literally trying to prevent anyone from speaking (OK, typing) in a way that might lower the resale value of broadcast rights for their games.

I think I want to go watch a football game at a bar, stand outside and tell passers-by what’s happening, because that’s what talking about a game on Twitter or Facebook amounts to.

Chad Ochocinco? Terrell Owens? Are you listening?

No, I’m not about to say I think marriage is an archaic institution, or rant against it in any way. In fact, I believe in marriage, and not just in a  “we need to do this so we can have children and not create social issues” way.

I’m talking about change.

An old business partner of mine recently pointed out that men enter marriages expecting their wives not to change, and women expect that their husbands will. Surprise! You’ll both change, and likely in ways nobody saw coming. The trick to success, therefore, would seem to be navigating the change together.

Business is the same. We enter into contracts, take on partners, hire employees and engage contractors expecting that things will go a certain way. Then something changes and we wonder why we weren’t prepared.

It’s about expecting the change, recognizing change is happening or has happened, and effecting change of your own to act on it.

Even the partnerships you make change, and sometimes you can’t foresee how that will take shape.

At Answerguy Central we do various things for our clients so they can concentrate on running their businesses. Sometimes we “run their businesses for them” so they can concentrate on the thing that makes the business viable instead of checking nuts and bolts. What’s the right amount to pay us for this?

Maybe you go into business with someone. Maybe one of you brings money to the table while the other is running the business. Who should own what? Should it be 50/50? You may think so on the day you start things up, but I promise that if the business sells for a large profit three years down the road the one of you running the business is going to think his contribution was more important that that of the guy who “only” made an investment 36 months earlier. Of cource, the money guy will feel ripped off if everything happens overnight.

Be ready for the changes coming at you. We see it all the time, and the only constant is change.

OK Seriously, this is getting out of hand.

I’ve been pretty clear on how I feel about Twitter, and despite using it, my assessment isn’t pretty. So let’s look at it from the opposite side:

Now open for “business”, or whatever they do there, is Woofer. It looks like Twitter, it acts like Twitter, and people are using the darned thing. But instead of forcing you to compress your thoughts, Woofer sends you away unless you have quite a bit on your mind: No entries of less than 1400 characters are accepted.

There’s a part of me that loves this. Now, speaking your mind and backing it up is encouraged! Woofer is a vehicle that proudly proclaims that soundbites are NOT a good way to communicate. I like VERY much that Woofer says “be literate”.

On the other hand, who has time? Forget how long it takes to write something Woofer-able; People don’t seem to want to read even the short messages that Twitter demands, so how can we get them to read long ones?

BY THE WAY: EVERYTHING WRITTEN BEFORE THIS LINE ADDS UP TO JUST 783 CHARACTERS.

Whichever side you come down on in the verbose vs. taciturn debate that Twitter vs. Woofer opens up, the one thing clear here is that change, as always, is what our business lives have become all about.

Will you change? Let me know . . .

This post owes its existence entirely to Nicholas Kristof and Michael Moore.

You probably know Mr. Moore’s work. The guy has been churning out one left-wing documentary after another for about twenty years now, and when Sicko came out a couple of years back it managed to get enough attention to finally catapult Moore into the mainstream.

Kristoff, on the other hand, is not someone with whom very many people are that familiar. A columnist for the New York Times, he spends a lot of time in the third world trying to do good. Yes, he too is pretty far left. Sorry about putting you in that box, Nick.

This week, Kristof wrote about Wendell Potter, a guy who you’ve probably never heard of. Mr. Potter spent a similar amount of time serving as a health insurance executive trying to deprive premium payers of their benefits as Moore has spent making noise about people like him. And he’s switched sides.

This is not a small shift.

While Mr. Potter’s new position may never translate into the kind of change that President Obama is trying to make happen in health care, it does show one thing: You can change the way you do things.

Open your mind. Change is all around us, and it’s driving the way your business and your life will look next year.

Want to change your business forever? Change the way you look at meetings.

I’ve recently noticed how much I want to change the way Outlook schedules my meetings. You’ve probably noticed, too;  it always wants your meetings to be exactly 30 minutes long, or 60 minutes, or whatever you change it to use as a default.

I understand why software needs a basepoint and I need to implement change to make it happen. So why do we all schedule our meetings like software robots, incapable of change?

I once made a successful bid on a house by offering a figure with an unusual number. It implied to the seller that I had done my homework on the house’s value, got their attention, and got me the house at way below the asking price. I CHANGED THE BALANCE OF POWER.

How about if you change the way you schedule meetings? Say, start at 3:25 instead of 3:30?  See what that does? Your colleagues get the sense that you are in control, precise, and busy enough that they need to respect your time. Talk about change!

Now that you’ve started something new, change what’s expected of people: give them action items to accomplish ahead of the meeting. Not prepared? Not welcome. Now set a hard limit on the end of the meeting. We start at 3:25, we end at 3:50, and when the appointed end-time arrives, Get up and walk out.

You know how hard change seems? This change isn’t hard at all. It takes little preperation, and just a small amount of strength. And you’ll be more productive, and change the way you’re seen.

For the better.

Wow. I don’t know which troubles me more,  this post’s title, or the time I spent trying to spell out Ho in the plural and have it still be a recognizable word. At least Skanks was easy.

Onward: this week a ruling came down in a court in New York City (Download the 3MB PDF File for the Skank and Ho Ruling) compelling Google and anyone else who has information regarding a Blogger’s rantings about a fashion model to give up that information so he can be identified. And then presumably sued for defamation, libel, or whatever else a group of lawyers can invent. This post tells you everything you need to know about the decision, by the way.

No problem. We’ve talked about getting sued for posting opinions in a public place before, and the rules (and laws) are still being written.

What you need to think about, though, is this: in the changing world that the internet is creating, everything you say (or that is said about you) is public.

Just keep that in mind.

OK, stop laughing. The Beast of Redmond has been breaking its word on a variety of things for as long as I can remember. Not news. The next version of Windows will take too long to get here and when it finally arrives will stink (Hello, Vista). At least Windows 7 looks promising, and it took way less time to crank out!

This, though . . . I’ve never seen Microsoft do anything as blatantly ugly as this.

You know how every time a new version of Microsoft Office comes out you ask yourself whether to bother upgrading? It stopped being about features a decade ago, right? Word and Excel don’t need new features, PowerPoint adds things that only real gurus can use, and let’s face facts: you don’t use Access.

I’m still chugging along with Office 2003, and with Office 2007 long past and Office 2010 on the horizon, I don’t see the event that’s gonna make me change my mind; I don’t care about the “Ribbon”, thanks, and the file format change means nothing to me since disk space is now all but free and the new format is really just the old format in a compressed file and there are free tools available that open them anyway.

Well, hang on:

Microsoft has just been granted a patent on technology built into the Office 2007 version of Word‘s file format. The not-so-funny thing about this is that Microsoft pursued this patent after first taking steps that looked like they were trying to create a real file “standard”. Pretty much the whole world got on board with this standard, and now Microsoft is in a position to go back and start playing rough with Google, OpenOffice, Zoho, and anyone else using the “open” technology.

Those big companies can defend themselves, and little companies are less and less able to compete in the software world anyway, so before this turns into a rant, let’s get to the point:

You Have To Protect Yourself.

The chance of Microsoft knocking on your door or even on IBM’s or General Electric’s looking for licensing fees is approximately zero. But the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, the folks who put the whole idea together, fell asleep at the switch, and are going to find themselves obsolete if their member companies aren’t protected from the wrath of Microsoft’s Patent Attorneys.

And you, too.  Watch out for the “gotchas”. Change may be good, and staying ahead of its curve will take you a long way, but if you don’t manage change, one day you could find yourself looking at the same kind of problem that Microsoft is about to make for the rest of the software world.

OK, I already know the answer to that one. You might own a sewing machine, but it’s pretty likely that unless you’re one of an all-but-vanished breed, you don’t.

But there was a time not all that long ago when everyone did. My father’s wife, for example, owned a sewing machine, and it did all kinds of neat stitch things that she never used when sewing on a button or fixing a hem that had come undone. Oh, and she sure never made a dress.

Marketing guru Seth Godin recently made a point, and I’d like to expand on it. Sewing machines, like so many things we never thought would go away, are now meaningless. Twitter may already be on the way out, and even Facebook, in spite of still adding users at an impressive pace, is starting to look to an awful lot of people like one more transient fad.

The solution to this problem (folks, it is a problem if you’re trying to stay ahead of change)? Win fast. Kill it, in whatever you’re doing, and if you’re going to, then exit the field before everyone else realizes it’s time to do so.

EMBRACE CHANGE.

Tell me how you plan to do it!

Sometimes, I can just point to someone else’s work, step back, and tell you how great it is.

This is almost one of those times. Check out this article in Wired.

Aside from my concern with the author’s statement that you should leave your WiFi connection open to the public, pretty much everything here makes sense. And seriously, in a Blog about Change, this article is fun, on-message, and . . . well, just great!

So if I send you all to that article, add a comment or three, and step back, have I changed your life? If you weren’t gonna see it otherwise, you bet.

Lives changed . . . movin’ on . . .