Results tagged “business”

It's been demonstrated over and over again, but businesses refuse to learn the lesson: Homogeneity is its own punishment in the world of business. From the Washington Post today:

[T]he experience of the past year suggests that we desperately need to bring more women into leadership positions on Wall Street, in politics, in regulatory bodies and in American life generally. For decades, corporations and financial firms have sponsored expensive training programs to promote more women into their ranks. They have launched much-needed maternity policies and flexible work arrangements. Most of these initiatives, however, have been pursued to make life easier for the women involved — or, more cynically, to remove the threat of lawsuit or adverse publicity for the firms.

The financial crisis has exposed a quieter but equally pressing concern: We need women in leadership positions not only because they can manage as well as men but because they manage differently than men; because they tend — over time and in the aggregate — to make different kinds of decisions and to accept and avoid different kinds of risk. We need women who will say no to bad decisions based on male-dominated rivalries and clubby golf course confidences. We need women to blow the whistle when risks explode and to challenge the presumptions that too many men, clustered too closely together and sharing a common worldview, can easily indulge.

As the constant wail from Wall Street should remind us, diversity isn't just nice in theory. It makes for better business.

There's a related question here which no one is asking, which is whether the economic catastrophe facing the global marketplace is a result of a failure of white culture in America. The media is always quick to ask whether problems like violence plaguing minority communities are symptoms of a toxic culture in that community, but I haven't seen any questions to that effect in regard to this financial meltdown.

I've written a good deal about monoculture on this site over the years; The correlation between diversity and success has been repeatedly demonstrated.

Bill Gates has pulled off one of the greatest hacks in technology and business history, by turning Microsoft's success into a force for social responsibility. Imagine imposing a tax on every corporation in the developed world, collecting $100 per white-collar worker per year, and then directing one third of the proceeds to curing AIDS and malaria. That, effectively, is what Bill Gates has done.

The unofficial goal of Microsoft in its early years was to see a computer on every desk and in every home, presumably running Microsoft software. That sort of vision, put forth in a time when the conventional wisdom dictated that personal computers might disappear entirely, was astounding enough. But by the year 2000, just 25 years after its founding, Microsoft had achieved that improbable goal, at least in the developed world.

The story of the Gates Foundation is well-covered, but it's important to consider the context in which the Foundation was created. What would you do if you defined the most ambitious goal you could imagine, and then achieved it just 25 years later? And what if you had done so while still relatively young, not even fifty years old? That's the position Gates found himself in just a decade ago.

Most people, when faced with the realization of their greatest dreams, will respond at first with elation, and then later settle into melancholy or even depression. It can be overwhelming to think that there's nothing left to do. Instead, Gates upped the ante.

How high did he set his new goals? How about curing AIDS? Or ending the spread of malaria? What about improving life expectancy and quality of life for the poorest people in the world? After achieving a goal that seemed outlandish, it's clear that the only logical next step is to try to achieve a goal that seems nearly impossible. I have to point out that sense of thinking "Okay, we won -- what next?" is extremely unusual.

Plainly, I admire Bill Gates for this. I think there are few people who, instead of resting on their laurels, decide to stake their reputation and fortune on goals that are not only altruistic, but that conventional wisdom dictates may not be achievable in a single lifetime. There are many other ways to measure a man, and I'm not diminishing at all the fact that Microsoft as a corporation has made regrettable, unfortunate, and even illegal decisions during Bill Gates' tenure. But imagine if someone had defined an explicit goal of a "cure AIDS tax" for corporations, and then tried to get that enacted. The fact that, effectively, this has happened is remarkable.

And there are many who still want to think, despite the commitment of incredible resources and formidable talents to support the Gates Foundation's mission, that all of this philanthropic work is an attempt to simply generate good PR. But that simply doesn't follow the facts.

A Family Tradition

The truth is, Bill Gates doesn't just come from a family tradition of philanthropy: It's actually a significant part of the reason he got the single biggest opportunity of his professional career. You can see the family tradition today, with the founding chairman of the Gates Foundation being William Gates Sr., Bill's father. But you have to go back twenty years earlier, to Gates' mother Mary Maxwell Gates, to understand how philanthropic work opened doors for a fledgling Bill Gates and Microsoft.

Mary Maxwell Gates was deeply involved in the work of the United Way for many years before her passing in 1994, most notably as its first female chair. And one of the connections she made through that work back in 1980 was to John Opel, the chairman of IBM who was also a member of the United Way's executive committee.

It's become fairly clear in the years since that at least part of the reason IBM was willing to hire Microsoft to create an operating system for the initial release of the IBM PC was because of the introductions made through that connection. Taking a risk on an unproven small software company was a big leap to take, and it's one that ended up being the greatest turning point in the history of the biggest software company that's ever been created.

It's fitting, then, that that opportunity is honored by having the founder of the company return all of his efforts and the vast majority of his wealth to an even more ambitious new vision for philanthropic work. So, congratulations to Bill Gates on his new job, and I hope this hack is even more successful than all the ones that he's done in the past.

Essential Links

A few recommendations for those who want to understand more about Bill Gates and his legacy:

• Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews published Gates: How Mirosoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry, back in 1992. I have been a big fan of this book since it came out. It was released before his period of greatest fame after Windows 95 launched, and perhaps as a result is more insightful than later efforts that tried to case Gates' entire life and career merely in the context of post-monopoly Microsoft. (I've shown the original, gloriously awful, cover photo above, but I think the paperback edition has less floppy-disk lunacy.)
• Fortune has a slideshow covering 30 years of Bill Gates' career, narrated by the man himself.
• Gates' 2003 rant about the shoddiness of the Windows user experience. Though this has prompted lots of "haw, haw, Windows sucks!" responses from geeks, I though it was interesting to look past the memo as merely a document of a typically dysfunctional large company. What struck me was a founder, nearly 30 years after starting the company, and decades after becoming wealthy beyond his wildest dreams, still obviously had both great passion and an enormous amount of technical knowledge.
• Those same themes of passion and technical competence are echoed in Joel Spolsky's essay about his first BillG review. Joel revisited this in a less-geeky version of the essay published in Inc. magazine.

In the world of business, and especially the world of technology, we have some archetypical stories of entrepreneurs in the garage, working to create new products and new companies. But too many of those stories seem to neglect the creative environment in which great ideas and inventions happen.

This is especially unfortunate because inspiration for this type of work doesn't seem to come from being surrounded by market analysis data, or charts and graphs about return on investment, but instead happens like so much creativity does, with a blaring soundtrack while sitting on a folding chair, inspired by the music, movies, books and art that surround us.

Worse, we hear about things like Celebrity Playlists and the artworks that people appreciate long after they've been successful, after they've already proven they have the ability to achieve, but seldom with a focus on what was playing at the time when they did the first work they were recognized for.

So, some time ago, I began a project to start to document some of these environments, inspired by the entrepreneurs and creative talents that I've had the chance to work with or be inspired by. Among others, I've gotten some great responses from Ray Ozzie of Microsoft (and of course Lotus); Jeff Bezos of Amazon; Pierre Omidyar of eBay; Dan Bricklin, co-creator of VisiCalc, and some more contributors along the way. As I start to share what I've found, I'd like to ask the same questions of you that I've asked of these people already.

1. What music, books or movies do you remember paying attention to at the time when you did your signature work? (This can be your "best" project, or merely your best-known, or the one you're most proud of.)
2. What do you remember of your physical workspace -- clutter on the desk, notes on the walls, whiteboards or blackboards, etc.?

The goal is to evoke a sense of what more subtle things may have been influencing the work that's created. There have, of course, been many similar or related efforts over the years, and I'll be trying to share and document of number of fantastic responses to these questions that I've collected.

If you'd like to participate yourself, you can answer the questions here in the comments, or post a reply on your own blog using the tag "createnv" (since it seems that's not taken yet) and/or embed this post on your own site with the code below. I'll be collecting responses from the blogosphere along with my own research and posting it all here in the days to come. (Thanks to Travis Isaacs for the image.)

One of my favorite parts of my job is getting to write posts for some of our dozens of company-run blogs. I'm particularly pleased with two that went up today:

Step Away From Your Computer:

As a lot of people have noted, Vox isn’t just blogging, it’s blogging enhanced by the power of a smart social network. But if your social network doesn’t work when you’re not sitting in front of your computer, your social network doesn’t work.

Vox on the Nokia N93i

That’s a pretty big problem for us — we want everybody to be able to connect and share and blog with the people they care about. So we have been working with our friends at Nokia for a few years to improve the experience. And today, we are extremely excited to announce a huge step forward for Vox, for Nokia, for mobile blogging, and for you actually being able to share and record your life while on the go.

Today at the Consumer Electronics Show, Nokia announced a bunch of sexy new thin phones. But while the press releases and gadget blogs will cover the tech specs of megapixels and memory cards, we think the biggest milestone is that the new Nseries phones will let you connect directly to your personal blog on Vox. Vox is now Nokia’s global partner for blogging and video sharing.

And the one I've been meaning to write for a few weeks, Time Meant "Us", Not "You":

Time made a big splash (and caused a few rolled eyeballs) when they named “You”, the citizens of Web 2.0, as the Person of the Year for 2006 a few weeks ago. But amidst all the congratulations and second-guessing in the blogosphere, one critical point was overlooked:

They should have said “us”.

Because the distinction between Time and the rest of us who blog is imaginary — Time’s writers are bloggers too. And they’ve got a whole bunch of real, honest-to-goodness TypePad blogs, not just some token cobweb-covered corner of their website that’s called a blog. They’re complete with RSS feeds, comments from the community, and tons and tons of regular updates.

Along with my post a few weeks ago about OpenID's growing momentum, I've been really pleased with the quality of posts on that blog. Most people don't know that we maintain over 20 regularly-updated blogs, but I'm hoping in the weeks to come we can help show people all the different things we've been posting.

I'd mentioned that talking to regular people about the potential of blogging is one of my favorite parts of my job, and that's probably reason enough to pause for an unapologetic plug.

We're doing a series of Six Apart Business Blogging Seminars all over the country. We'd done a number of these seminars earlier in the year, and got some very positive feedback, along with requests to include more cities. So we're doing exactly that, and teaming up with some experts to help us tell the story. When you show up, you get to meet folks like the Feedburner team, or D.L. Byron or Alison Byrne Fields, and I'll be attending each event as well.

As I mentioned on our company site, it's a good opportunity to reach both people who are unfamiliar with blogging, as well as those of us who love the medium but might not necessarily get to use it as part of our day jobs yet. So, great, we're telling people about blogs. But the truth is, we damn well should be doing this much to talk to people about business blogging. We've all seen that communicating using all the tools of social media can make people's lives better. The reality is, those benefits can apply just as much to one's professional life as to one's personal life.

More importantly, there's almost nobody else to do it. Most of the giant muti-billion-dollar internet companies see blogging (or other social media tools) as a tiny fraction of a percentage of their bottom line. That's not to question the passion, conviction, and talent of my counterparts on those teams: They're good people who do great work. But on an endless list of priorities, where does "explain blogging to regular people" fall? I'm not sure. Each company places some different significance on the importance of this medium, and the place I work is at one extreme of that continuum. For us, encouraging everyone to take advantage of social media is a fundamental necessity.

On the other end, a lot of passionate people don't have the resources or organization (it takes a number of people working their asses off to make these things happen) to actually go on the road. Hell, we'd love to do even more cities if we could. The bottom line is that reaching out to new audiences is a responsibility for all of us who have benefitted so much from the explosion in popularity of Web 2.0 or social media.

One of the reasons I've been thinking about this was in reading Ev's post about attending events.

...I don't go to a lot of conferences, because it's hard to justify the time. But one thing I always forget is that it's not just the content, and it's not just the schmoozing (which everyone says is the real reason to go), it's that you come away wanting to do better.

I'm inspired every time by the people we meet who start with the curiosity and drive to learn about a new medium, and leave with the basic tools to actually make something new part of their careers and work life. I find that, though we describe the events as "seminars" and I get to speak at them, I learn much more in these conversations than I ever teach to anybody else. An average event is more of a dialogue than simply a seminar. In the real world outside of Silicon Valley, people are busy solving problems that we often overlook, trivialize, or deliberately ignore. It's instructive to be immersed in a culture outside of the one where we create new technologies.

So, if you're in Washington, D.C. next week, or in Detroit, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, New York City, or Miami in the weeks to come, I do hope you'll register for the seminars and join us. Also, I'm tentatively thinking of organizing a bloggers' dinner in each of the cities if I'm able, so if you're interested, let me know and we can start to arrange those as well.