Posts filed under 'BizExecToBe'
Got a spam comment today that made me laugh out loud. In amongst the porn spam (mature porn? uh, yuck!), the drug spam, and the vacuum spam (?), I had a spam comment from the Pampered Chef.
I almost left it up, just because it amused me so, in amongst the rest of the trash. I can imagine some housewife sitting at home, trying to expand her Pampered Chef sales so that she can get just one more plastic scraper to round out her set.
Pampered Chef: bringing the ingredients and utensils of spam to my website!
August 16th, 2005
Earlier this year I was given the wonderful opportunity to participate in a program called ‘ACTiVATE’. It’s a program out of UMBC (my alma mater) which pairs women with technologies out of local universities and research centers. The idea is that women would form businesses using these technologies and that the university that held the patent would get the licensing fees associated with use of the invention. This would also help the universities show compliance with federal regulations relating to use of federal funds: the government is very interested in seeing those technologies “transferred” to commercial companies.
The program paired a woman with a technical background with a woman with a business background for each project. There was a classroom component, with instruction in basic entrepreneurialism, and heavy mentoring. The women screened for the first year of the program were screened using resumes, essays, and interviews. The women came from diverse backgrounds, but many had many years of experience in their field and most had advanced degrees. I was inspired to be included in the program.
Sadly, my partner and I realized that our technology wasn’t feasible, due to lack of interest of the inventor coupled with the lack of the specific technical background of our team. That combo is a killer: if you don’t have the inventor’s ear and the team can’t compensate through its own technical background, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to determine what the reasonable bounds of the technology are. It also gives potential investors absolutely no confidence in the founding team. Our technology had already had 1 million plus invested in it by NASA (it’s actually going up in a satellite launch at the end of this year) and was only in the earliest stages of being able to be produced commercially. Neither my nor my partner’s piggybank was going to get us onto that playing field.
ACTiVATE would have been happy to have me continue. I personally wasn’t interested in continuing with another team’s technology: who wants to come in late to the game?
I learned a valuable set of lessons from the program, in terms of the real level of dedication needed to build a tech transfer business. Balancing that with work and family just isn’t possible right now for me. My FT job is already more than a FT job. I can’t handle another one.
I’ll be interested to see where my classmates end up: I’d love to see a couple of them heading companies that are recognized regionally as hot-shot startups. These women are interesting, are dedicated, and are really coming up with some great ideas. I’ll be happy to go to work for some of them someday.
May 29th, 2005
Jeff Bezos lists a new marketing concept on Amazon’s homepage this evening: Amazon Prime. Amazon Prime lets you pay a flat yearly fee of $79 to then get free two day shipping, and $3.99 overnight shipping. If you’re a gotta-have-it-now kind of person, this might be worth considering. $79 can readily be covered over the year, particularly since you can share the benefit with other family members. But this, to me, just highlights how much we’re willing to pay to have something _NOW_. This says some folks think gotta-have-it-now is worth at least $80 per year. Just like it bothers me to pay ATM fees, which are essentially fees for gotta-have-it-now money, it bothers me to pay shipping fees, unless the shipping fee + the cost of my items is significantly less than what I can get the item for locally - not a usual occurrence. My usual gameplan is to order whatever it is I need to order, and then fill in my order, if necessary, with wishlist items or Christmas gift items that I can tuck away for the future. That usually gets me to the dollar minimum for free shipping. That free shipping is slower than the overnight stuff, but hey, it’s free. I can use that shipping fee to go buy something else that I’d like, but isn’t a gotta-have-it-now.
I’m thinking $79 is a pretty high price point. I wonder if they’d have more success if they did it for a shorter time period - say $35 for three months. Then, you could subscribe if you knew you were going to be doing a bunch of ordering over that time period. Of course, then they’d get a bunch of revenue from this right around Christmas and see nothing the rest of the year.
This, of course, doesn’t apply for their various third-party areas. So, if you often buy used books, for instance, this just wouldn’t apply. And there are other various quirks to the program, including ways that Amazon can opt out of it for certain products. All in all, though, still an interesting idea.
February 5th, 2005
Seen in InformationWeek’s Jan 10, 2005 print issue: Mercury Performance Center’s ad, with the heading ‘Application Interrogation’ (Ad’s near the bottom of the PDF file). Ya gotta wonder what a US company is doing with this ad, given the Abu Ghraib scandals. Somebody in marketing just isn’t thinking…
January 18th, 2005
Catching up on the pile of magazines - business and technology - that are stacked up on my desk here. Saw an article that says StarBucks is considering letting suppliers make after-hours deliveries by using RFID to track who’s coming and going. (Starbucks’ RFID Plan, Informationweek, Dec 13, 2004). They must be pretty serious about it (or Laurie Sullivan was running low on material), because when I went to their website to try to find the link to the article, I found articles two weeks in a row saying basically the same thing (Starbucks Considers RFID for Deliveries, Informationweek, Dec 6, 2004).
This suggests a couple of ideas to me - one, that Starbucks set up a supply holding area for suppliers to drop things off. Assuming that supplier don’t generally actually put things away, they could drop them off and the RFID system would tag when they got there. It would have to be a climate-controlled system, so that the milk wouldn’t go bad overnight, but Peapod’s already solved that problem for local groceries. Two, that the RFID be mapped to a schedule so that a given tag couldn’t get in at just any ol’ time. If you’re not expecting a shipment at 2:00 am from SupplierA, then SupplierA’s ID shouldn’t let them into your building. That reduces the chance that a stolen RFID token lets Joe Schmoe burglar gain entrance to your facility: they have to at least have done the due diligence to figure out when shipments come in. And three, that the RFID entry system be matched with a camera system to snap pics of the guy coming in with that RFID tag. That way, the access log can be synchronized with the picture of the person who made the access.
Just wanted to jot down some ideas… Carry on with any ideas that I’m a geek. Or, worse, a failed geek.
January 10th, 2005
I write too much in emails, I’ve found. Just chopped a probably 600 word email down to in the area of 100. Decided maybe the reason that some of my emails weren’t getting the reactions I wanted was because they were too long. Too long means either not read, or read and dismissed on a technicality buried in the email, or dismissed based on plans divulged that folks didn’t want to sign up to. Get ‘em in with the light one to get ‘em to the table, then get ‘em with another light one to get them another step further.
Terse. Action-oriented. Against my natural email tendencies, but I like it. Draft the email in my usual style, then chop/cut/axe to get to the bare marrow. Save the expositions for here.
Email, haiku-style.
November 20th, 2004
Noticed a trend in the spam on my website of late. Instead of pharameceutical ads, or sex life enhancement ads, I’m getting more and more poker site ads. Texas Hold’em seems to be particularly popular.
Then I got the latest copy of my campus newspaper in my mailbox. At my Jesuit university, just a couple of entries below the one talking about students parking at the cathedral, is an announcement of a Texas Hold’em tournament on campus.
I’m particularly attuned to this poker thing of late due to something I’ve noticed at work. Used to be, the guy talk around the office centered around the football pool and the latest XBox or Nintendo games. Football’s still big (and, unfortunately for my conversational options, still not high on my personal interest list), but electronic games have been dropped as a topic in favor of poker. Seems there’s a regular game, rotating amongst various folks’ homes, that lots of the guys here are in on.
Note that I say “lots of the guys here”. I’ve yet to run across a woman here who’s been in any of those conversations reminiscing about who’s stash got taken at the last game, or who’s set to lose their shirt (so to speak) at the next one.
Curious. Used to be the golf greens were the place to socialize with the guys while the women weren’t around. At least the guys could claim to get some exercise that way, little though it may be for the majority of golf-cart renting golfers. Building business relationships out in the open air, learning how the other guy approaches the shot - is he overconfident? Risk averse? Does he cheat on his score card? There’s a lot to be learned from observing a golfer, I hear. I assume the same’s to be said of how a person plays poker - how high does he bet? Does he bluff often? Can he keep a poker face? How big a pot does he come to the table with? When’s he tend to fold?
Again, just curious. Interesting dynamics in the study of work.
October 7th, 2004
When you’re an interviewee, interviewing for a position that will involve programming, interviewing with a guy who does programming for a living… don’t tell him that programming is easy, and that there’s no point in asking you about that stuff because you’ve done all of these other “harder” managerial things. Probably a poor move, if you actually want the job.
September 23rd, 2004
“Tina - If you can write this up, that would be great.” - from email from someone up the management chain from me, in an email sent over the weekend, referring to work that needs to be done by Monday. “Heard” as the boss from the movie Office Space. “yeaaaaah… that would be great.”
August 29th, 2004
Spent several hours this weekend working on my self appraisal. These are tricky things. You want to honestly evaluate yourself against your goals so that you know what to do better next year. The trick, though, is to figure out just how honestly to write your failings. Failings jump out in an appraisal. Successes, poorly expressed, end up buried. Business is a game - almost like a card game where you bet the number of hands to win. Aim too low, and even if your estimate is spot on, you still lose. Bet too high, and even if you win more than the next guy, you still don’t end up ahead. I think I bet too high this year. My goals outstripped my ability to deliver. (My project also outstripped any reasonable estimate of how much time and energy work should consume, directly contributing to my delivery problem.) What I did do was great work. What I didn’t do was check off the list of skills enhancing, career development goals - the goal of quickly assimilating new technologies to build a dependable solution that met my clients needs within a very tight timeline overtook all other career development goals. It also overtook a great deal of other time I hadn’t exactly earmarked for career stuff. Luckily, my husband and family don’t keep a file on me, and my pay rate of baby kisses and hugs isn’t tied to a requirements checklist or a timesheet.
Crystal ball in hand, I attempt to set new goals for the next review cycle. Will I bid too high? Settle too low? Bleah - settle, period? Not in my nature. I’ll probably be in the same spot next year. The consolation is knowing how much I achieved. The pain is in knowing how much higher I set the bar.
August 9th, 2004
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