Winning versus Not Losing
This week, one of the big names in the DFW area, AMR, filed for bankruptcy. AMR is the parent company of American Airlines. The management team is trying to spin this as a business decision, but ultimately this is a major failure of leadership, and the wrong people are going to pay the price for it.
Adam Hartung has an excellent write-up over at Forbes outlining how this is a major failure on the part of the AMR management team. I can sum up the failure in even fewer words: AMR was not playing to win, they were playing not to lose.
Playing not to lose is, unfortunately, the typical death spiral today of our corporate giants. Instead of wow’ing customers and delivering outstanding products customer want to pay for, they hunker down and try to squeeze as much cost savings as they can out of their current, failed strategies. They think they can survive until better times if they just save a few more pennies. Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen. Cost cutting without innovation is a race to the bottom. You can’t out cost-cut your competitors, so you’re just racing to see who fails last. The game becomes about not losing, even though you really do lose.
Top companies play to win. I’m sure Apple controls costs, but their first priority is to delight their customers. You don’t see Apple trying to undercut Samsung and Dell to stay relavent. They build a product people want to buy, and as a consequence, can set the price point where they want, and not worry about the competitors.
Being in IT, it is incredibly easy to tell when a company isn’t playing to win. The first sign is usually having a bean counter in the IT management chain. Bean counters are usually 100% about not losing, instead of winning. Robert Crandall at AMR was a bean counter. He was proud he saved $700K for the company by not putting olives in the salad. Yet he was completely oblivious to how all those small cuts affected his company’s brand and destroyed customer loyalty, costing him 100x what he thought he saved.
The second sign you’re company is only playing not to lose is when you hear IT management start talking about “running IT like a business”. This means your senior managers failed to run the business like a business, and now they’re just looking to trim corners to stay alive. Unless you’re in the IT business, you can’t run IT like a business. IT is cost center. Can IT implement a chargeback model and increase billable hours to the business? Or increase rates? Maybe even increase production support costs and start charging per deployment to create extra revenue? Of course not! You would only be a paper profit center, robbing from Peter to pay Paul while having a zero-sum impact on the company’s bottom line.
So “running IT like a business,” when IT is a cost center, is a fancy way of saying “we’re going to cut costs in IT to try and hide our inability to run the business like a business.” It means they’re playing not to lose. But you can’t win by playing not to lose.
A National Shame
I was sick to my stomach this morning when I read the news reports from the GOP debate this weekend. The candidates were asked a very simple question: is waterboarding torture? All but John Huntsman and Ron Paul failed the test.
I spent 10 years in the United States Air Force, including 5+ years on flight status flying missions aboard various specialized reconnaissance aircraft as a Russian linguist. I enjoyed my time, but I also got to see things that no sane American would ever want to see for real.
After language and intel training, the next step to aircrew status was survival training in Spokane, Washington. I attended the basic wilderness and water survival courses, but also less pleasant courses including POW training and another classified survival course which no attendee will ever forget in their life.
There should be no aircrew member who has gone through the training at Spokane who should not say, unequivocally, that waterboarding is torture. Yet last night, nearly a stage full of men and women seeking this nation’s highest office failed this simple question.
This should absolutely outrage any American, and every veteran, as it does me. Throughout history, there has never been a doubt waterboarding was torture. We prosecuted Nazi’s during the Nuremberg Trials for waterboarding. We hung Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American POWs. We prosecuted our own soldiers for waterboarding during the Vietnam War.
Yet when given the chance to demonstrate moral clarity, all but two of the Republican candidates failed the test. Even more appalling is that these same candidates have somehow deluded themselves into believing waterboarding is acceptable even though they profess to be good Christians. You cannot be a Christian and believe waterboarding is acceptable.
If a candidate cannot pass such a simple test of morality, they unworthy of our nation’s highest office and are a stain on the honor of America’s veterans and our forefathers.
Building Art
I’ve been a bit a slug with the blog for the past month mostly because I spent two weeks being the most ill I’ve been in a long time. Between an anti-biotic happy doctor, a trip to the ER, enough steroids to make someone psychotic and a nasty chest cold on top of it, the past few weeks have been anything but a joy.
The only good side is it slowed me down enough to get caught up on some reading. The big project was Neal Stephenson’s Readme. I killed all 1000+ pages in less than a week. Yes, I’m a fan. No, it wasn’t as good as Snowcrash or Diamond Age, but it was still a good romp from one of my favorite authors.
The other book I finally killed was Seth Godin’s Linchpin. I had been reading it during lunch for the prior month, and finally just sat down and wrapped it up. This is really a book more of my computer geek brethren should read. Seth points out what looks pretty obvious in hindsight: base a career on building “art”, not on building widgets.
Art in this context is doing something that amazes people. In our current economic climate, being a widget builder is the surest way to work yourself out of a job. Following directions and building widgets is a commodity, which means some dude in India or China will be happy to do it for a quarter of your salary and they won’t whine about the increasing costs of the company health benefits.
The guys who actually think outside the box and create things are the linchpins, the irreplaceable assets that separate the average from the exceptional. Jonathan Ive is a linchpin. Linchpin’s are the people every company wants to have because they are the ones with the ideas who take risks.
So I recommend reading Linchpin if you care about your career. If you’re passionate about what you do, the book should confirm you passion. If it is a blinding flash of revelation, you have a lot of catching up to do.
NodeJS is the new Java
I’ve been getting a kick out of the thrashing NodeJS has been taking recently. The whole situation reminds me of a similar world about 15 years ago. At the time, I was working at a consulting company in France with this newfangled language called Java. Me and three guys (Remy, Laurent and Jacques) were working on an embedded Java operating system for a smartcard terminal. We were the company’s only Java developers. At the time, everyone was either doing client-server development in PowerBuilder and Visual Basic, or hard-core C and C++.
Java was a paradigm shift. But it also had a lot of warts. It was slow. Dog-ass slow. AWT was a nightmare. But everyone was attracted to it because of the cross-platform promise and the simple API. In the JDK 1.1.6 days, here is what the documentation looked like:
The API was pretty basic. It provided the essentials for network IO, file handling, collections and the object hierarchy. While others saw limitations, my team saw a unconquered world of possibilities. If was fun finding solutions to problems learning Java. But Java was a disruptive technology for a lot of people. As Ghandi said, “first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” I went through every stage of it over the span of a decade with Java.
Now, fast forward to Java 7. Java is now the establishment. But Java picked up a lot of baggage along the way to earning that crown. Here’s what the current API documentation looks like:
A new developer does not see a world of possibilities, they see a world of hurt. Hell, even the old timers see a world of hurt. Nothing about this gives you the feel of Java’s original, nimble roots. Which is a shame, because what made Java great is all still there, just wrapped in a crap sandwich.
Which brings us to NodeJS. To the uninitiated, NodeJS is server-side javascript. It is on the tipping point between the “ignore you” and “laugh at you” phases, and it is progressing along faster than Java. So why would anyone be interested in a limited, single-threaded language? The documentation tells the story:
Compare this to the original JDK 1.1.6 API documentation at the top. One would dare say it’s a pretty close clone. And that is why people like it. They see a world of possibilities in that basic API, warts and all. I see in NodeJS the same spark I saw in Java a decade ago. Everyone jokes Java (and .NET) are the new Cobol — NodeJS makes them both look like the new PowerBuilder.
So I believe the original JDK perfectly nailed the API hackers want. It provided the essentials, but no more. It ran pretty much everywhere. And it was fast enough. NodeJS has perfectly replicated that, and there is no reason it won’t become as big a success. The only challenge will be keeping it lean. NodeJS has a higher chance of success than Java because Sun wanted to court the enterprise market, whereas as the NodeJS crowd, to steal a DHH-ism, doesn’t give a shit what the enterprise thinks about their language.
The Spark
Amazon announced their new Kindles today, along with their much anticipated Android tablet, the Fire. I’m a big fan of the Kindle, and was looking forward to this, but in the end, the best I can say is meh. The new, smaller Kindle with the touch interface looks the most impressive, except for one “small” problem: the size.
My normal daily companion is a Graphite Kindle DX. It is the Ultimate Reading Machine. I love it for the large screen. My eyes aren’t what they used to be, so I appreciate still being able to get a lot of text on the screen even if I jack up the font size. The Kindle Touch is just too small.
The Kindle Fire is really just a media player; a distraction. It’s like the iPad, just smaller! They will probably sell a billion of them at that price, which is going to force Apple to innovate, so there is a plus side.
@Amazon, if you really want to get my pulse up, here’s what I want to see: a new device with the Kindle DX screen size, but with the improved e-ink display and faster processor. Ditch the keyboard too, and go for touch controls, but keep the page flip buttons so I don’t have to keep poking the screen to turn a page. The whole package should be smaller, thinner and lighter than my DX but with the same screen size. The rumors are you’re going to build one for next summer. How about Christmas? Pretty please?