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Business @ the Speed of Stupid
Alan Morrison and Dan Burke have written the first meaningful post-mortem on the New Economy in their new book Business @ the Speed of Stupid. At its core the book clearly explains how the disregard for strategy and sound management principles doomed many a company and Internet project. If this sounds like a lot of other books currently hitting the shelves, then I should point out that Business @ the Speed of Stupid is one of the only books not willing to pull punches.
As you can probably tell by the title, Business @ the Speed of Stupid is not one of those cutesy sugar-coated business books. Consider the opening of Chapter 1: "Most companies of any size have a Web site. Most suck! They suck because they simply fail to communicate with the intended audience." And there's a lot more where that came from! The book is divided into two sections: "@ the Speed of Stupidity and Accelerating" and "Decelerating the Stupidity." This format proves to be a good way of presenting their observations and recommendations.
The "@ the Speed of Stupidity and Accelerating" section is filled with stories about companies that remain nameless to protect both the guilty and the innocent. Some readers may be disappointed that Morrison and Burke have chosen not to reveal the true identities of the companies and people they profile, but I think it actually strengthens the usefulness of the stories. You're not distracted by the sensationalism, and you're not fed the rose-colored version that things just didn't work out for these companies or their ventures. The stories are even more useful because they reveal the real situations, conversations, and decisions that led to failure.
Morrison and Burke are able get their ideas across without sounding like dusty old professors or techno-Latin writers trying to sound intelligent. They are quick to point out that there are no silver bullets and that cutting corners is a recipe for disaster. Consider their take on phantom sales predictions: "A common and widely held misconception is the idea of magic conversion ratios that convert the number of hits on a site to projected customer leads, e-commerce sales, or whatever. Let's be clear: This type of thinking is 100 percent crap."
A major theme in the first section of the book is how the apparent simplicity of the Web lulled business leaders into a trap. The brochureware sites that companies first launched appeared to be simple. But when it came to real e-commerce or real e-business companies quickly learned that these projects were much more complicated. The notion that you could throw together an Internet project without any planning, without any processes, and without experienced professionals was foolhardy. As the authors accurately point out, "the frequency of this type of foolishness is increasing dramatically as more and more projects are sponsored and managed by nontechnical professionals and staffed by zealously ignorant technologists."
This comment illustrates another main point of the "@ the Speed of Stupidity and Accelerating" section: "Get the right people in the right roles or you will find yourself facing insurmountable problems." The wrong people are those that consistently contradict their words through their actions. They say they want things done right, but they end up cutting corners to get the job done fast and cheap. They hire the best people or companies to do the work, but want to totally ignore the processes that create good work. The authors quip, "it is amazing how often executives hire experts and then completely ignore their advice" instead of remembering to "hire smart people and listen to them." Balancing people, processes, and systems is critical to being successful.
Business @ the Speed of Stupid also provides readers with a much needed smackdown about the importance of sticking to the "old rules" of business. Morrison and Burke contend that "technology must take a back seat to core business and customer needs, not the other way around" and that "the 'new rules' are simply a recipe for disaster, and those who continue to propagate them are completely irresponsible." The technology shakeout taught many business leaders just how important planning and communication were to developing successful initiatives. Of course Morrison and Burke get that point across in a less subtle way: "There is a generation of lemming managers who actually believe that telling people 'Just do it!' is the right way to manage because that's the way they've read it in a book or magazine."
The "Decelerating the Stupidity" section of the book tries to bring a lot of the key messages and concepts together, and offers a well-presented framework for putting the brakes on stupidity. I think the "Do's and Don'ts" at the end of each chapter of the first section will give readers more immediate solutions to their problems, but the second section takes a much more big picture approach. The framework the authors put forward is based on the concept that thinking strategically means always balancing the "Organizational Domain" and the "Competitive Domain."
The "Organizational Domain" is made up of the people, processes, and systems that allow your company to get the job done. The "Competitive Domain" is made up of your presence in the market, customers, and your competitor's presence in the market. The connection between these two domains is your strategy, and it acts as the ultimate fulcrum to keep things balanced. The authors note that "to emphasize one thing (e.g., technology) while you slight another (e.g., people) guarantees you will look stupid."
Business @ the Speed of Stupid is a well thought-out book by two people who actually know what they're talking about. The 230 pages of content move at a steady pace, and the accompanying charts and illustrations don't require a PhD in fluid mechanics to understand. Footnotes throughout point readers to other outside resources and a handy "Glossary of E-Terms and Phrases" are nice touches as well. I'm sure you could scan through a lot of the book over an over-priced cup of coffee at one of those bookstores, but I think you'll quickly find it's a book you'd be stupid not to buy.
You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.
If I had to name a book like this, I would have chosen "Business at the Speed of Blight". It is so easy to create a book like this right now. The reviewer was right -- it would have been more delicious if we could point at real companies and real people.
Can we really point at companies that failed and say "they were stupid"? It may be the case for some, but a number of companies run by very smart people failed the same way. They were just experimenting, and now thanks to the companies that failed and those that succeeded, we have a better idea of what works on the web, and what's "stupid".
Ceci n'est pas une sig
Unfortunately, the managers who need this the most will never see it. The ones who read this stuff are the ones who already have a tech clue.
1Alpha7
Live to be Moderated
Sometimes I wonder if the only real thing that happened during the last 8 years since Mosaic was exploitation, lies, and hype. Even Netscape itself, when it went public, was largely an exploitation of Mosaic. I refused on principal to buy into their IPO.
There's still only one good way to success. And that's hard work. (Maybe a little luck)
A good review, tho.
Having met both great and terrible programmers, periodic weeding is a necessary part of every industry. Books like these are no different to books that analyze the early years of a new industry. Perhaps a better question to ask or better book to write about is "why don't people learn from history?"
But then again maybe this book is written for a laugh and some humor.
I wish the authors would have included all the details, instead of protecting the guilty by anonymizing individual failure stories.
Well, the bit about "karma prostitution" and "John Dogz" in chapter 5 certainly was enough detail to clue me into what site he was talking about in that section.
1) Best viewed with IE/NS
2) "This page requires flash" (non skippable intro)
3) Be sure to click one or more of the dozen pop-uder ads!
4) PSST! You must have cookies enabled (a la microsoft.com) with big brother overtures.
A host of others I forgot that said "Warning! WARNING! Danger Will Robinson".
Oh, and didn't www.cluetrain.com do something like this?
Suppose the summation of most business plans/venture capatialists could have come down to one question:
Got Clue?
Cheers.
If it is not on fire, it is a software problem.
Actually, as the son of one of the authors, I know that this book was actually in the pipeline well before the bubble burst. I think the title may have changed, though.
I talked with United Airlines a couple years ago about how bad their site was, bulky, difficult to navigate, lacking information and the IT guy I talked with agreed, but it was already their *new* site.
Too many minds don't think three dimensionally and others think a presense on the the web is all that it takes to succeed, although that old paradigm should be breathing its last gasp, after the fall out of the past year.
It's the duty of every websurfer not just to point out difficult to navigate or uninformative sites to webmasters. I take the opportunity whenever I can. Some appreciate input, others seem to ignore it (maybe it's a precious design, close to their heart and criticism hurts too much to ever consider that they may be wrong.) Telling someone their site or design sucks isn't going to improve anything, now it's worth emailing bad site hosts and designers and telling them about a book they might read. Include this link, too.
FWIW, I come from the school of design where it doesn't have to look pretty, but better work. Checkout my own site and feel free to tell me how much I don't live up to that ;-)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I've noticed that for a lot of companies, their web presence isn't measured up to the same standard as their bricks and mortar company. One of the best examples of this is publishing companies, mostly because it's these that I would expect to have the best idea of what constitutes a good looking site. An early poor example was apcmag.com which had a complete refit of their web site a few years ago, even involving the server being down for a few days. When it came back up, it had a new look. One of the factors in the new look was that the link for the contact addresses was in blue type on a blue background.
I'm sure that everybody else here has examples of the same problems.
I'd like to pose a challenge:
Give one example of a site which uses java, javascript, or frames, where the same think couldn't have been done better with simple, single frame HTML.
Implying that no one who reads Slashdot is an MBA, or even has any intentions to run or control a company is rather narrow-minded of you. I'm sure a large portion of the /. audience may find this sort ofthing interesting, even if the "typical (read: stereotypical) /.-er" may not.
Even smart people can benefit from reading about mistakes that stupid people (or even other smart people) have made.
In other words, the word "fail" sorta implies that there was a snowball's chance you would succeed. I mean, let's say that I'm going to create a business that will build rockets and provide vacations on the moon. When the business fails, you don't do a post-mortem and ask why it failed. It doesn't take a genius to figure that out.
The same was true of the dot-com era. There was a suspension of disbelief -- people actually thought we really could provide moon vacations. BTW, I use "rockets" because I suspect that the next overhyped tech bubble is going to space (that, or biotech).
We geeks are often frusterated by websites that come up blank because we use Netscape on Linux without Flash. This isn't the cause of their failure, but a symptom that businesses were run by people that didn't understand business.
For example, in order to tested out the famous flop "boo.com", I attempted to buy something from their website. It was very pretty and artistic, but no matter which browser combination I tried, I simply could not get the website to work. To the business owners, actually fulfilling customer wishes was a minor details that the techies could work out. Like building rockets, business owners couldn't build what they were promising -- an much of what they were promising would be impossible to build.
BTW, I created an enormously successful new-economy business that was profitable for 3 years. We had to be profitable. We went to the VCs with the business model that we were going to build a better mouse-trap, and leverage word-of-mouth. They laughed at us and told us it wasn't about product, but "branding", and how naive we were. Since we got no VC funding, we didn't have the luxary of building a loss making business.
There are no lessons to be learned from the failed dot-coms, any more than lessons to be learned from a failed moon vacation business. This means that there is no magic formula for building a successful new economy business.
PS: The funny thing is, despite the lack of super bowl commercials and absolutely zero advertising, we built a strong brand. The VCs are right -- you do need branding, it's just that vapid commercials don't build strong brands -- satisfied customers do.
Slashdot must have some sort of contract to sell only books from FatBrain (stupid name, BTW). If you want the absolute best price on a book, check out Add All.
Step 1. Use words and phrases such as 'sucks!', '100 percent crap', 'let's be clear', 'lemmings', etc.
Step 2. Complain about everything anyone does in the field you are studying.
Step 3. Forge a 'correct' way of doing things from whatever someone else is not doing. Do not actually spell out this 'correct' way of doing things using full descriptions or logic - but through insults of the current methods and twisted catch phrases.
Step 4. Edit, publish, and hope people can use your book as an excuse to use common sense.
(Optional) Step 5. Wait one economic cycle, go to step 1.
Ryan Fenton
that there are a lot more bad ideas still out there. Okay maybe they're not all bad, but I still don't want to:
Use wireless when I could be using a cable
surf the web on my phone.
have my personal documents on somebody else's computer.
do anything in virtual reality.
oh, and I'm never going to bug groceries, clothes or pets over the web, or install linux on my grandmother's computer.
Here's a great business plan: If nobody wants to buy what you're selling........
Sell it on the web.
There were a whole lot of really smart business people who seemed to turn their brains off when they started talking about making money on the web. They thought that since they were doing business on the web, then needed the newest technology, to give them the competitive edge, when the reality was their sites sucked because their content sucked, and their business was crappy because they had ignored all of the basic principles they should have learned in Business 101.
Stupid people exist in all professions. As a race at least 90+% of people are idiots. I've yet to work for a company that doesn't have an idiot for a boss, nor yet seen a company without at least one primodana engineer.
If your full of sh*t to begin with, you're not going to listen.. REALLY listen to others opinions because you're too judgemental already.
Open minds, good reserach, well thought out plans and executed strategies will give you the best survival ratio out there.
-M-
Ps.. Schooling really doesn't matter.. School gives you a foundation of knowledge. I've had little schooling but I've been a magazine cover artist to Manager to Director of technology .. Its all about how you apply yourself and having the will to get there.
"Life is all about strategy, mathematics and psychological perceptiveness."
Real eye openers, these:
"There's no point in flash intros".
"Website hits don't mean instant cash."
"If you hire experts, listen to them."
"Get the right people into the right places."
Seriously, I don't think any of this is a problem anymore. Perhaps this book would have made sense two years ago, but working in the business today is a totally different experience. VC funding for the stupid dried up a while ago, and this just seems like a dumb attempt to cash in on hindsight.
Speaking of other media where ideas failed.. Who remembers the goofy Commodore Amiga ad that ran during a Super Bowl? Science fictiony man walks down a hallway of shimmering walls, climbs a stairway and puts his fingers on the keyboard of an Amiga as a voice over says something like "get ready for a whole new experience in home computers" They shot around $1 Million for 30 seconds and left everyone thinking, "Huh?" IIRC, at the same time IBM was using a Charlie Chaplin look-alike to successfully move PC's and sign businesses.
Communication is the key, but often the suits pay too much attention to style over substance, as presented by ad or web design agencies. A good web designer should care about the welfare of a client, because repeat and ongoing business with a client is less costly than trying to bring on new ones, also works great for building good references.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar