Month: May 2007

A message for “Reply All” people

/ Robert Pease / 1 Comment

Dave Barry of The New York Times recently did a review of the book Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home that I previously posted on here.  Maybe it has something to do with one of the authors working at the NYT as well, but Dave is pretty positive on the book although the review is more about how email is broken than the actual book itself.

That said, he sums up the essential message in two rules:

1.  Think before you send
2.  Send email you would like to receive

Eureka!  I think they are on to something…

Easier said than done for sure and, as previous posts on SenderConfirm highlight, the answer to this problem resides with the person sending first and foremost.

Another thing that I thought was hysterical and is why my blog is titled as it is –

"Please do not take this personally, “Reply All” people, but: everybody hates you."


I originally picked this up from Scott Niesen at Attensa – a company down in Portland focused on bringing RSS to the enterprise – something that I think is really cool and very needed.  I’ve downloaded their trial software and plan on setting it up this week.  I’ll let you know how it goes.  More on enterprise RSS later…

A study of extremes

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Came across an interesting read this morning via Barry Briggs about this post by John Hagel.  Take a deep breath and power through the write-up as I think there are some good nuggets in there.  These concepts are also brought to life in Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail

Here’s my layman’s bullet points preceding the graph below:

  • This article is about the difference between standard distributions (Gaussian bell curve) and extreme distributions (Paretian power law)
  • You should understand the basics of a Pareto distribution from the "80/20" rule
  • Examples of Paretian distributions are frequency of word use, sizes of cities, internet traffic, etc.
  • Gaussian distributions can become Paretian distributions when "tension" increases (like competition or businesses evolving faster than capacity) AND the costs of connections are decreasing
  • Extreme events become more common and are larger/of greater consequence and the natural reaction is to treat them like "outliers"
  • The business challenge is to identify emerging extreme events that could impact the landscape as the costs of connectivity decline

Ok..now I have to go lay down.


Edge_perspectives_blog_power_law__3







(Image courtesy of Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, "Linked: The New Science of Networks")

Emails ruled public records

/ Robert Pease / 1 Comment

Now this is interesting and will have pretty far reaching implications if it holds up.  This ruling (via Information Governance Engagement Area) by the Idaho Supreme Court says that email exchanged between government employees is a public record.

"The e-mails are public records and not exempt from disclosure under either statutory exemptions or constitutional law," the court said in its unanimous five-justice opinion.

"The e-mail’s content is related to the public’s business because the public’s business includes job performance by a county employee, the spending policies of a county program, the issues surrounding that program’s demise. . ."

"…the high court rejected Kalani’s contention that disclosing the e-mail would violate her constitutional right to privacy, saying Kalani had no reasonable expectation of privacy because of the county e-mail policy that she signed. The policy says employees have no right to personal privacy when using e-mail systems provided by the county and that e-mail messages are public records."

Fed meeting transcript from days after 9/11 – a crash course in what matters to our financial markets

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Paul Kedrosky posted on this amazing document and it is covered on the Wall Street Journal’s Washington wire blog.  This is the transcript from the 9/13/2001 FOMC – two short days after 9/11.  If you ever wanted to understand what happens when the Federal Reserve folks get together, read this.  It not only frames the discussion in a significant historical event but provides a fascinating view of what really mattered at that point in time – from being able to place phone calls to getting the major trading exchanges back up and running.  This statement about long-term capital investment decisions got my attention:

The shock event of this past week is clearly a negative one. It is negative in the most important sense that it presumably increases the real risk premium for long-term capital investment, for fairly obvious reasons. That is, the longer-term environment for which capital investment decisions currently are being made must be perceived to be less certain and potentially of considerably more concern than one would have felt earlier.


Also, as Paul points out, Greenspan’s scenario of a more stable Middle East as a remote consequence did not pan out.  One thing that I thought was particularly omniscient is the following quote:

There is a shock; the shock wears off; there is a period of mild euphoria as the shock wears off; and then there’s a secondary negative effect. With this extraordinary outpouring of activity favorable to the United States position, we may well be looking at part of the euphoria phase.

New study identifies 5 trends in information security

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We released this study today based on a series of discussions and events across the US with senior information security and IT professionals in collaboration with The Roundtable Network. 

Pam is a great person to work with and if you are interested in getting the chance to have face-to-face interactions with your target prospects, her roundtable events can’t be beaten.  They are a great lead source, but the conversations will educate you on the operational realities of the problems you seek to solve – great stuff!

The goal of this study was not to prepare a self-serving piece of "research" designed to reinforce all the ills that our products magically fix.  Rather, it was to put together a snapshot of what people responsible for information security are dealing with and what they see coming down the road for the future.  There are several areas where we are relevant, but some issues don’t have the consensus in place yet to justify a technology investment.

Two things rang loud and clear from these gatherings:

1. There is a content deluge due to growing volumes of electronic documents that must be retained, stored and made accessible for retrieval

2. There is a security deficiency caused by ever worsening end-user habits as it relates to the use and misuse of enterprise messaging tools

The study goes on to dig into the areas of e-discovery, information safeguards, understanding how people currently communicate, messaging technologies, and archiving/retention approaches as well as how to navigate the organizational aspects of implementing a solid program.

We distilled five key trends from the conversations:

1. Information security and IT have to build expertise in records retention, electronic discovery and legal matters to better manage legal requests and compliance.

2. The end-user is essential; how employees use available technology and their awareness of authorized usage is more of a concern than the underlying technology itself.

3. The next generation of employees will enter the workforce with personal laptops, mobile devices and software instead of having them provided by the company, creating a new level of control and security issues that IT departments must be prepared to meet.

4. Email is not going to be displaced by another mechanism of communication, but it will be augmented; enterprise messaging will expand to include instant messaging (IM), text messaging and other forms of Internet-based communication and collaboration.

5. Companies must have the organizational will to embrace governance issues and be proactive in addressing them, versus treating them as bad news to be avoided.

I also did a short podcast intro to the report that you can listen to here.  The link to the report takes you through a registration form, so if you’re interested in a getting a copy without having to register send me an email and I’ll shoot you a copy.

Venture breakfast recap – learning from failure

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Had the chance to attend another one of these this morning.  The Northwest Entrepreneurs Network is a great organization here in Seattle that puts on a variety of events including these breakfast meetings.  The last one I attended featuring Sujal Patel, founder of recently IPO’d Isilon Systems, was really good.  His point on disruptive innovation having to be 10x better than what is out there still resonates in my head.

Anyway, James Gwertzman spoke this morning at the Bellevue Harbor Club on lessons learned from failure.  There have been some other good blog posts on learning from failure including these by Brad Feld.  I think it is important for everyone to have a flame out at some point in their entrepreneurial careers to drive key lessons home.  I had mine with Idapta although the code lives on at MSA.

James is an ex-Microsoftie that started a gaming company called Escape Factory that went bust.  He regrouped, started another company, and was acquired by PopCap Games where he is now working.  Definitely an "out of the ashes" story.

Gaming is not really my thing or something I know much about, but his presentation was informative and pretty entertaining.  Here’s a few nuggets:

  1. Companies succeed for different reasons, but most fail for similar ones
  2. Spending too many cycles on process and administration out of the gate is a time and money drag
  3. As a CEO you must avoid the tendency to personally fill gaps in the organization – dropping into a line role robs you of the valuable time you need to be doing CEO things
  4. Too many eggs in one basket – they had one major deal and when it was pulled there was nothing else (see above)
  5. Too much office space sucks the energy out of a company – they went from cramped to spacious…and lost something
  6. Manage your business everyday like it is the last – you’ll be amazed at what doesn’t seem important
  7. In people, focus on experience vs. potential – you don’t have the luxury to develop people in the early days of a company (referring to his attempt to implement the MSFT professional development model)
  8. Forgot their unique selling proposition – after landing the first deal because of it, they trimmed features and lost "uniqueness" in trying to unsuccessfully hit a deadline.
  9. Pay yourself first – long leases, deferred salaries, and other debt left him with no fall back after he had stopped taking a salary
  10. Have someone on the team that will always tell you the worst case scenario – he was surprised by how little cash/how much debt they had

Living without email

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Is it possible?  Not likely in the workplace anytime soon.  What has been surprising is that we have seen some companies actually ask this question internally.

"If email is such a hassle, so inefficient, creates so much headache, and is such a source of litigation exposure, why don’t we turn it off?"

After a few moments of nervous laughter around the table, there is a disturbing clarity that sets in – you can’t turn it off.

One of our customers actually conducted the analysis to understand if placing a phone call or sending an email is cheaper.  They have 100k+ employees and have a significant private voice network that drives the cost of calls way down.  That said, email still came in as the "cheaper" alternative.  I’ve not seen the calculations, but it provided them the clarity they needed to embrace email as a core communication platform.

It forms the foundation of all core business processes including how you share information, interact with customers, and generally run your day-to-day business operations.  It is the de facto workflow/file manager/document management system as all of these technologies are at least one if not a dozen steps behind it.   Sharepoint may indeed be the dark horse out there and I can see a path to getting to that type of collaboration, but the majority of workers are deeply rooted in their email lives.  Cliff Reeves has a great post on Sharepoint here.

So, if you can’t live without it, how do you live with it?

US economy most competitive

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A flag waving moment courtesy of the BBC and IMD’s 2007 World Competitiveness Yearbook.  The US topped the ranking of 55 countries with Venezuela coming in last. 

Funny, I thought that whole "nationalize it" thing was going to work out for Hugo.

According to the project director, the US ranking is a function of:

1.  The strength of our financial market (Bud Fox included)
2.  The "ease" that venture capital can be secured (although I am sure there are a few entrepreneurs that would have chosen a different word)

Warts and all, the US economy stays strong due in large part to the free flow of capital and the optimism to build new businesses.