Chasing the Power Curve

Someone asked me recently about my leadership style and how I approach building great teams.  That’s not a question answered in a few minutes – there’s a lot to the subject, as far as I am concerned.  I have blogged before about “How to Build Fantastic Engineering Teams” but I wanted to add a few thoughts.  First of all, leadership is a learned skill.  You might disagree, thinking that leaders are born, not made.   That’s partially true, I admit.  But non-leaders can learn leadership skills and become better leaders, and those with natural attributes for leadership can accomplish a lot with pure talent.  But apply some practice and learned skills to that talent and you have a winner.

I think the most important trait a leader can have to ensure long-term success in leadership is integrity.  I’ll post a lot more on that another time, but if folks cannot trust you – if they don’t believe that you can be trusted to do the right thing, to be level with them, to have a wider view of what’s best for everyone – then no amount of skills will make you a good leader.  You’ll sabotage yourself and then you’ll have no chance at all to repair it at that organization as a leader.

The second most important trait you’ll need is good judgment.  You cannot learn that.  In my experience you either have good judgment or you don’t.   Most people can learn from their mistakes, but when you most need your judgment is when something totally new comes up – and it’s often in the heat of a fire with customers breathing flames down your neck and serious money on the line.  You either have it or not.  Spotting this trait in others and cultivating those people is a major part of being a good leader.

Leadership requires constant learning – especially as you move up the ladder.  First you have to lead yourself, then others.  Moving into line management is the natural first step:  the direct management of other people. This can be a very difficult stage for some people since the natural tendency is to fall back on what you know best: the skills that likely got you noticed and promoted.  Only those individual contributor skills are not what makes for a great manager (or even a mediocre one).  Learning to manage others is a new skill, and it exercises parts of a person that are different than they might have learned before.

Moving to the Director level – managing managers – is *really* hard.  It requires a whole new set of leadership muscles in order to get results.  I think of it in old C programming terms: it’s pointers to pointers thinking.  You are not working directly with the folks actually doing the work, but rather with an indirect entity: their manager.  If you fall back on your newly acquired manager skills you cut off the line manager and you suddenly *lose* the line manager.  That’s going to undercut their authority and you’ll end up confusing the whole staff – and that will affect the productivity and efficiency over the long term.  Worse, you’ll end up losing the manager skill development in the manager you cut off.  And you’ll need that to scale.

I’ll write more later about the transitions needed to go from the Director level to the Functional Manager level.  It’s a whole new set of skills and approach to solving problems.  In the meantime, the excellent book I got all this learning from is available from Amazon.  I highly recommend it for anyone interested in really mastering the skills needed to become a better manager – and in building an organization around you that reinforces you as well as grooming your replacement.

After all, you want to move up, right?  That’s a lot easier to do if the organization has qualified folks in place to take your spot.  Dedication to this approach requires that you not be afraid of growing qualified staff around you. If you are afraid that they might overshadow you and take your job then you probably are not a good candidate for real leadership anyway.

Much to my wife’s displeasure I’ve done a lot of foursquare check ins over the last months.  The whole notion of it always seemed to be an invasion of my personal privacy, but hey, this mobile thing is really the next wave (I *still* know that in my bones) and somehow foursquare had some buzz, seemed relevant.   There’s a lot of possibility in it:  a way to tell a location that you are there, and if you are a valued customer maybe they reward you.  It’s a way to crowd source what’s cool and hot (though I’m past that part of my life, I guess).  It’s a way to signal to friends where you are, so they can join you for a beverage (or whatever).  The promise was worth dorking around with it.

But this past few weeks I have struggled.  I try to check in on my Nexus One and I get server time outs.  And then again.  And then again.  I’d try a few times and give up.  Then it would not use my current location but would recall where I was last, it seemed (maybe a bug in the android client?) and give me a list of venues that were totally WRONG and force me to do a refresh.  And then the server would time out.  AGAIN.

After months of using it, I still have no reward for doing so.  No promise of it either.  So it’s become a frustrating experience of revealing my private location information.  Uhm, why?

So, at least for awhile, no more.  I’ll recover those moments of my life and see what service comes along to replace foursquare.  Surely someone will.

AT&T will no longer offer new subscribers buying an unlimited data plan (starting June 7).  This has been predicted for a long time, but it’s sad to see it actually happen.  In my mind it’s a naked grab for cash.  The mobile web is the fastest growing segment of the Internet and clearly AT&T wants to glom onto as much of the new iPad craze as it can.  The crazy thing is that I really don’t understand the thinking behind the new plans.  You can buy the DataPlus package with 200Mb/month for $15, and can add second block of 200Gb/month for another $15.   Uhm, #fail!  You can buy the DataPro package with 2GB/month for $25.  You pay more for less?  That’s stupidity!

But the thing that really gripes me is that they want to add a $20 kicker for tethering.  I realize they stupidly have already been charging for tethering and I did not understand it then.  I still don’t, especially now that they had a chance to make a big splash to change it.  They are selling BANDWIDTH.  They actively want to sell more devices to sell more bandwidth.  Yet if you have two devices, you have to pay nearly double even if you consume the same total number of bits! They clearly either think we are ignorant savages who they can exploit, or more likely, see that for some period of time we have no choice so if we want to connect we will pay their stupid fees.  Cash grab.

The reality is that Sprint, Verizon and T-Mobile have a golden opportunity here:  buck the trend and don’t just play follow the leader.  Go the other way and offer 5GB for CHEAPER.  And let folks tether!   It’s the same bandwidth after all, it’s no skin off the carrier.

AT&T has just exposed a soft underbelly.  Will the other carriers have the courage to do something about it?  Or will they just follow along and play gouge the consumer again, and then whine like babies about churn?  Time will tell.

The last few weeks have been a twisted series of thoughts for me about the Nexus One.  The event that started it all was a drop.  It slipped, from belt level to the ground.  And shattered the glass.  Considering that I have dropped my Blackberry Bold before – oh, a hundred times or so and never got ore than a scratch on it – I was shocked.  My good friend Rainer Zwing at CRS iiMotion kindly offered offered to help defray my costs of repair since it occurred at his offices.  Very nice of him, but it’s my problem to solve.  Thank you Rainer for your kindness!  What’s interesting to me is the series of thoughts that went through my mind over the next few weeks.  Before I dig into my story let me say that my phone will arrive back to me next week.  I chose not to use HTC repair and instead shipped it to Dr. Cell Phone.  As advertised they turned it around in less than one day.  The longest delay was the shipping.  Cost:  $150.

Turns out I was not alone in having a problem.  N1 glass was breaking from being put in a pocket, from small drops, and sometimes for no apparent reason.   Folks are saying that the gorilla glass used is vulnerable to edge hits.   I don’t think it’s irrational to expect that I can drop a phone from my belt to the ground and not shatter it.    In my mind, there’s clearly a problem with the physical design.  To what extent did Google’s smart Engineers specify the design to HTC?  Did some really smart person require something that had an unintended consequence of being overly fragile to edge hits?  We may never know.  I don’t know if this glass quality problem affecting other devices, so the fact that the N1 is a unique beast for Google does make me wonder.

Recently we hear that Google has changed policy on the availability of the N1.  Seems that none of the carriers (other than T-Mobile, the launch partner) wanted it in their line up.  Now, the glass issue may have been part of that.  Or, it might be that in my opinion the default applications on the N1 don’t seem to have the same level of quality that my Blackberry Bold RIM apps have.  Case in point:  seems that on my N1 at least if you add a second alarm in the alarm clock application it forgets to make the first one go off.  I use my cell phone alarm as my morning wake up alarm clock.  Bad form to oversleep when you are my age.  I may be spoiled, but I do expect that apps installed on a commercial device actually WORK.   Google’s famous “everything is beta” may be fine on the web (actually I don’t think it’s OK there either) but it’s definitely not OK on a device I use for important things.    So maybe the carriers looked at the beta quality level of some of the apps on the N1 and decided that they’d have to do too much to really support it.   I suspect that a major part of the problem was that HTC leapt ahead and made the Incredible (Verizon) and the EVO (Sprint) which both may be better hardware anyway.

So I found myself debating whether I dump the N1 and wait for an EVO or an Incredible.  But then I have to switch carriers (I’m still on contract to AT&T).  Not a show stopper, but a pain (and the prorated early termination fee is still a cost, no matter what).  I swung back and forth for a week, waiting to repair my N1 while I decided.  During this whole process I realized that for Corporate Email use my Blackberry simply cannot be beat.  I can’t browse the web on it without being in agonizing virtual pain, and it’s slow and clumsy in the apps department compared to anything Android.  But it boots in seconds once a plane lands and I need to check email while racing to the next gate.  And it just works.  And I can type fast on the keyboard.  And the alarm clock app actually goes off in the morning.

Alas though, I’ve decided to keep my N1.  I like it’s camera (a lot).  I like the desk dock.  I like the browser and the apps I have installed.  It’s a highly useful mobile internet device that I find myself reaching for as I want to use networking software while not at my desk or toting a notebook.  I don’t like it’s call quality compared to the Blackberry Bold (more tinny, more dropped calls).  Yes, I could convert to the EVO or Incredible but they still lack a decent physical keyboard.  So I wait.  Maybe AT&T will reach for a high end Android phone with a real keyboard once they lose the iPhone exclusivity.  I can only hope.  Until then, I’ll continue with my N1 and play with Google Voice and call forwarding and such and carry two phones just to get the functionality I really want out of a single personal communications device.

Had a crashed disk that took my blog out just before a planned trip to Tahoe.  The blog is restored – this time in the cloud at SliceHost.  Sorry for the inconvenience.  I have some posts planned for the near future:  Android Development, more comments on Apple’s Evil Moves, and some pictures from my Tahoe vacation.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

Lately I’ve seen a flurry of postings about patents that clearly indicate a lack of understanding about patents as property. Before I write anything more I have to say that I am not an attorney or a registered patent agent.  I have a lot of experience with patents though.

Like any other property right, patents may be sold, licensed, mortgaged, assigned or transferred, given away, or simply abandoned.  This is clearly stated in 35 USC 261.  It says:

Subject to the provisions of this title, patents shall have the attributes of personal property.  Applications for patent, patents, or any interest therein, shall be assignable in law by an instrument in writing. The applicant, patentee, or his assigns or legal representatives may in like manner grant and convey an exclusive right under his application for patent, or patents, to the whole or any specified part of the United States.

This is why they call patents a form of intellectual property.  It’s because you can own it.  Now, some people don’t like the idea that ideas can be owned.  It does not sit well with me either, sometimes.  But the fact of the matter is that the law says they are property.  You can sell them.  That’s why there’s a market for them.  That’s why there are companies that buy them and then try to make money off them by asserting the rights that the patent provides to the owner.  So called patent trolls do exactly that.  Folks use that term as a slur, as if it was some horrific beastly illegal thing that they are doing.  In fact, it’s no worse than real estate sales for investment:  buy some land, find someone to buy it for more than you paid for it.  Frankly, it’s just simple capitalism.  Of course if you think that ideas should not be owned then you might have the ‘troll’ reaction… but that reaction is based on a misunderstanding of the law.

So if we are going to have a conversation about patents let’s move away from inaccurate statements like some that have been tweeted to me – things like “A patent is not a form of property. It’s a temporary monopoly-like lease ‘to promote the progress of science and the useful arts’.”  WRONG.  Or, “Let’s not use the term ‘owned.’ #Patent is a limited right to exclude in exchange for an enabling disclosure.”  WRONG.  A patent is most definitely and clearly defined in the law as a property.  But hey, don’t believe me: go get 35 USC for yourself and read it.

Now, we can think about what it means to be property, and the different kinds of property.  I’ve read some good things on that.  But I’ve also seen some posts that are really rather silly, like this one where the author claims that since a great invention could not be copied by several manufactures his price was higher than needed, thus the market advantage was all wrong.  Huh?  The whole idea of patents is to reward the inventor for taking the time and effort to invent something useful.  The patent system worked well for that child clock inventor.  Patents are not to make products as cheaply as possible for the masses.

Where it does get fuzzy is in the area of software patents.  Clearly there’s a lot of meaty discussion that has already happened, and more that will happen.  I myself am woefully behind in following the reasoning of the bright minds in this space.  I’m trying to find time to listen to a podcast by Eben Moglen which I’m told is the definitive argument in this area.  I may or may not come to agree with the arguments presented, but I look forward to thinking about it.

But the fact of the matter is, if you want to argue about what should and should not be patentable, don’t weaken your argument by wrongly stating that patents are not property.  That’s just plain wrong.  Get over it and make some better arguments.

Wordpress is pretty heavy on resources for my needs.  Even if I tune Apache and MySQL it’s hard to get it to perform well on a 256MB machine.  Why 256?  That’s the lowest offered from Slicehost.  By the way, I like them a lot.  You get a great server in minutes.  256MB with 100MB in/100MB out for $20per month.  Nice.  RackSpace has a seemingly better deal – 512MB for $22.  But you have to pay for bandwidth separately.  The same deal (100MB in/100MB out) is $52.  Not such a good deal.  Slicehost is better.

But 256 is not really enough for Wordpress.  I went with Wordpress since having the ability for folks to leave comments seemed like a good thing.  But I really don’t get many comments. I turned off the Amazon stuff – it was generating no clicks at all and I didn’t like that I could not pick the products shown.   Most of the plug ins for Wordpress don’t solve any of my problems, really.  It’s easy to post new stories, but really, I do HTML and CSS so I could just as easily make my own static pages… and then not need any silly database at all anyway.

So here’s a chance to prove me wrong – leave a comment.  What should I do?  Ditch the heavy Wordpress stuff?  Suck it up and pay for more memory?  You tell me.

It’s almost comical now.  Apple is really getting silly.  According to PC Week Apple has banned the word ‘Android’ in apps submitted to the App Store.  The article has a great summary of the evil doings of Apple around the iPhone so I won’t reproduce it here.  But it’s clear that Apple is feeling a lot of pressure from Android.  I think we are seeing the opening shots of a much bigger business war.  And actually, that can be a good thing for us consumers since ultimately better products will come to market.