Pulse Club Shooting and Reopening
As we all know by now (and if you haven’t, you’re probably living under a rock), the Pulse Club was a primarily gay dance night spot located in Orlando, Florida. Unfortunately, as a deadly shooting unfolded, it has now become the unwitting site of the worst mass shooting in the US so far. Should it reopen? Let’s explore.
Shooting Aftermath
After that 3 hour massacre ended in the death of the shooter, this situation now leaves more questions than answers, especially for the victim’s families and those who were injured. In fact, my heart goes out to each and every one of the victim’s families. Those people who had gathered at that club that night arrived to have fun, drink and dance. Many had done so on many previous nights. Nothing wrong in that.
Unfortunately, the shooter had other plans. He entered this night club with the intent of taking lives. After 3 hours of standoff with law enforcement, the situation ended with the death of the shooter, but not before 49 people were dead and 53 others were injured and sent to hospitals. Let’s not forget about those who were not injured, but who were there witnessing this horrific event unfold. These victims may not have physical injuries, but they now have emotional injuries that may take decades and therapy to resolve. Survivor’s guilt is a real thing. A horrible situation for any business owner to contemplate.
Club Reopening?
The manager of the club, Barbara Poma, is trying to salvage this situation with her business and has vowed to reopen this night club. Unfortunately, the Pulse Club has now become a victim in its own right with a massive stigma attached: the massacre and all of those brutal deaths. This situation never spells a good end to any business. Barbara, if you are in fact reading this, I’d strongly suggest not reopening this club at that location. However, before considering reopening, you should most definitely wait (see below). There are a number of reasons why it shouldn’t reopen in its current form:
- Macabre thrill seeker tourists. Your club has now (and will for a very long time) become an unwitting tourist destination for those seeking a brush with the macabre. Yes, your club will now have people seeking to stop by and talk about the massacre, the deaths, the victims with anyone who will talk about it including to your customers, your staff and you. This will eventually become distracting and annoying to your customers who are there just to party. It will drive your existing customer base away. This will not be forgotten quickly or easily.
- Ghost hunters. Because of the 49 deaths in your club, inevitably someone will claim they have seen or heard the ghost of one of those who died on your premise. I’m not here to argue the merit of that type of claim, but I will state that your club will become a destination for ghost hunters looking for ghosts. Again, this will be to the distraction of your paying visitors simply there to have a good time. It will also become a distraction for your bartenders and other staff. This will also drive your existing customer base away.
- Regulars will shy away. For those who were regulars to your club and who were there that night, they won’t be back. Your club is forever tainted as that club that had a mass shooting and now holds that stigma high and wide like a badge of honor, except there’s no honor in that. For anyone who was there that night, the memory is just too painful and few will be back to avoid reliving that memory, especially those who were trapped in there for hours.
- Tainted by death. The Pulse Club brand has now become the unwitting poster child for mass shootings. What I’m about to write may seem a little crass, but you might as well re-theme your club to have heart monitors, hospital beds, and nurses running around if you want to move forward with this name. This is what people will forever link to this club’s name. People will not remember it for the fun party spot. It will now be remembered for the deaths and those living victims still in the hospital. If you don’t have any intent on capitalizing on this notoriety, you should change the name and move the club to another location.
- Because of at least number 4, you may find that your original customer type no longer visits your club. You may find that types 1-4 make up the vast majority of those who visit your club. They are not there to have a good time, they are there to take pictures, vlog, gawk, talk to your staff and generally be a nuisance to your club. It might even lead to confrontations that you and your staff might not want to deal with. You can never know the intent of a single person requesting access into your club.
What this basically says is if you reopen the club, your clientele will drastically shift from that happy-go-lucky dance place that it once was to that-place-that-had-a-mass-shooting. The above are not necessarily the reasons you want people at your club. The Pulse Club can never live its now-infamous past down. Even if you change the name of the club, paint it, redecorate it and refurnish it from top to bottom, that location won’t ever forget what happened.
Rebuilding the Pulse Club
The only way the Pulse Club can ever live again is by moving it to an entirely new location somewhere else in the city and rebranding it. You must abandon that building and let it become someone else’s problem and stigma to solve. What happened there is something that stays with that building, not with your business. If you want to get your business back the way that it was, you cannot reopen in that location. You must move your business to a new building. This is the only way to free yourself from the thrill seekers, from the macabre, from the ghost hunters and from those just morbidly curious. These people are not the reason why you opened your club and these are not the reasons you should want to continue with your club.
These are distractions that only serve to taint your establishment, chase off would-be new customers and cause your staff daily grief throwing random lookie-loos out. You need to ask yourself the hard question, is this really the reason you opened the Pulse Club?
Before you contemplate reopening the club, you need to let the legal dust settle. And, settle it will, I can guarantee that. Before making plans of spending money to renovate your club, you should reserve those funds for the upcoming legal battles that are about to ensue… and sue they will.
Lawsuits and the Future of Pulse
We haven’t seen the last of what is in store for this club. Just you wait. Some of the victims will file wrongful death suits at someone, anyone, for negligence. Where to start? The club’s owner. It’s as good a place as any.
Was the Pulse Club negligent in what happened? Well clearly, if the club’s staff had been properly enforcing at least metal detection or a pat down at the door, the guns might not have gotten into the building. Unfortunately, it now appears that this club was not enforcing any safety best practices when allowing patrons into the establishment. This could very much appear as negligent actions by the club’s owner. And, there are 53 living injured who can file lawsuits against this club. There are an additional 49 families who can also file lawsuits against this club. There are additional people like employees and those who suffered severe mental anguish at the horrific events that night who can also file lawsuits.
Unless the Pulse Club owner has engaged in specialty insurance in high amounts to cover such occurrences (probably not), she may find the Pulse Club out of business and her personal finances spent covering each and every one of those yet-to-be-filed lawsuits. It’s way too early for this club’s owner to be thinking about reopening the night club when the legal battles have barely even begun.
Clearly Barbara, as the club’s owner, you should wait out the legal battles before making plans to reopen this club. You may find that you can’t actually afford to reopen the club after the legal dust settles.
Victims
If you are a victim of this shooting, you should contemplate all of your legal options and you should do so quickly with your lawyer. If you are intent on filing a lawsuit, you should do it as fast as possible. The first to the table are usually the first to walk away with settlements. If you are one of the last, you might get nothing.
Was this club negligent by allowing a shooter with a Sig Sauer MCX rifle (every bit as deadly as an AK-47, just quieter) into this club? Clearly, the Pulse had very little in the way of security due diligence at the door. Is that considered negligent? Only a court can decide.
For whom does the bell toll? Microsoft’s Xbox.
In case you haven’t been reading recent news, here’s an article that might wake you up… especially if you happen to be an Xbox platform fanboy. What is this alleged article? Microsoft has stated it will merge the PC and Xbox platforms into a single unified platform, ending the sale of dedicated console hardware. Let’s explore.
Xbox and Xbox 360
When the original Xbox arrived in 2001, it received lots of fanfare. The console market now had a competitor against the PlayStation 2. The PS2 had released only one year earlier in 2000. Though, the Sega Dreamcast had promise, Sega pulled the plug in 2000 citing lots of reasons including bad sales, competition and poor platform reception. The Xbox’s controller, architecture and speed quickly ended up competing with the PlayStation 2.
A few years later, we went through the second iteration of this console war when both Sony and Microsoft released the PS3 and the Xbox 360, respectively and near simultaneously. Once again, we had our next generation console in our hands and we gamers were happily playing with better graphics and sound quality.
The Xbox 360 took the lead in the console market over Sony’s PS3, but only by slim margins. Though, the XBox 360 managed to stay one step ahead through out the lifespan of both consoles.
Xbox One and Ps4
Unfortunately, Microsoft would not be able to maintain its fleeting lead it had won with the Xbox 360 with its blundering Xbox One E3 announcement in 2013. Here’s what they had wanted to do:
This announcement in 2013 would set the tone for all things to come including the next iteration of the Xbox platform. Within a week of their E3 announcement, after facing Sony’s harsh rebuttal at E3, Microsoft reversed all of its DRM and privacy invasion strategies after the gamers clearly spoke with their wallet, PS4 orders surged and people cancelled their Xbox One orders in droves. It’s clear, this blunder was Xbox’s first death knell and set in motion many future problems to come for the Xbox. Unfortunately, neither Microsoft nor the Xbox has been able to recover from this blunder.
Elite Console and Controller
Immediately prior to this Windows platform integration announcement, Microsoft had just released the Elite Console and Elite Controller. This controller being a much more costly update to its existing hardware ($15o vs $60). This console and especially the controller is Microsoft’s nod to a more professional gamer. That is, a nod to those gamers who want to play games using higher quality contollers, button remapping, changeable controller features, more inputs and faster consoles. I’ll tell you what, though. The Elite Controller is actually quite nice, but very very pricey. Yes, some of us do want these advanced features from our systems. However, it’s entirely disingenuous for Xbox to release the Elite controller and system only to see Microsoft announce the death of future hardware systems just a few months later. Really, what does this say to would-be gamers about Microsoft’s commitment to the gaming market?
To me, this says that the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing in Redmond. On the one hand, you have the Xbox engineering team trying to drum up new gaming interest by releasing high quality experiences for the gamer. On the other, Microsoft itself is trying to reduce costs by getting rid of costly hardware projects it deems a loss. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean good things for Microsoft as a whole. This ultimately means that the whole company is fractured internally and doesn’t have a proper focus on its products or its markets. Instead, it is making rash decisions without thinking through the long term ramifications of those decisions. A death knell.
Microsoft’s confusion
With this announcement of the integration of Xbox with Windows, Microsoft has likewise announced that it also intends (see article) to stop making future hardware and will instead focus on the Xbox platform as a subcomponent of Windows. Just like Windows Media Center, it will become an add-on to Windows. You might think that this is a great idea, but it isn’t. Let’s understand why.
Windows itself already offers developers a solid gaming development environment to produce native games on Windows. Most AAA game titles are made not only for consoles, but also for Windows and sometimes even Mac. The question is, would that spell the death of the Xbox platform? Yes. The reason the Xbox platform exists is as a gaming hardware platform independent of Windows. It does not exist for Netflix, Amazon or for any other non-gaming entertainment. Sure, you can play movies and music on the Xbox, but that’s not the platform’s intended purpose. Microsoft is seriously confused over the reason the Xbox platform exists and why it continues to exist. This confusion spells yet another death knell. Basically, if Microsoft thinks that the non-gaming aspects of the Xbox will survive once in Windows, it won’t. You can already use native Windows apps to get access to all of the services like Hulu, Netflix and Amazon… and the native apps are usually better.
The Death of the Xbox
Because Windows is already a solid gaming platform in its own right (in addition to being an entertainment platform), integrating a second gaming environment into Windows means that only one of these gaming platforms will survive the transition. Game developers will also only choose one platform to develop. Assuming status quo for the Xbox platform, the Xbox will be the clear loser. It’s simple to understand why: high priced licensing fees. It costs developers substantial amounts of cash to license and sell games branded with the Xbox moniker. It costs far far less to develop games under Windows directly. Unless Microsoft substantially changes their Xbox licensing model, this platform is entirely dead for gaming. Game developers won’t be willing to pay the excessive licensing fees on top of producing the game twice (Xbox and Windows) for the same hardware platform. Why would any game developer produce the same game twice that is destined for the same platform? They wouldn’t. A death knell.
So, what does this mean for gaming? PC gamers win a feather in their cap. Xbox gamers lose a platform entirely. Once games stop being produced for the Xbox platform, and they will stop, the only thing left to use the Xbox platform for is Netflix, other media activities and already purchased digital content. As I said above, you can already crack open Chrome or Firefox and do video streaming and music playing better. So, the answer, there will be nothing left to use the Xbox platform for except for legacy digital content that you may have purchased on an Xbox One/360… assuming that content even remains compatible after the Windows PC migration. Another death knell.
Digital Content
So, what does this mean for already purchased digital content? It means that you better hold onto your working Xbox One and Xbox 360 if you want to continue to use this content. Though, Microsoft may eventually force users to move to the Windows integrated platform and sunset the use of Xbox hardware entirely (and cut it off from the Xbox Live service).
This means that, at some point, you may no longer be able to download your digital content to your Xbox One and you may be forced to buy a PC. Depending on how Xbox One’s content activation system works, it may even prevent you from using the digital content you’ve already downloaded depending entirely upon how far and deep that Microsoft takes it.
Of course, this is still years off yet. But, once that time arrives, your Xbox One and 360 may become paperweights. A death knell.
Why this change?
From Microsoft’s perspective, I can understand the value and cost savings that integration (and lack of hardware) brings. No longer does Microsoft have to design, build and sell hardware platforms, no longer do they have to compete with Sony, no longer do they have to support this finicky hardware (a highly expensive ongoing investment). This means they can reduce their costs for all of the above. Instead, they can push the hardware costs back onto PC manufacturers to support their new Xbox platform.
Unfortunately, expecting PC manufacturers to support the Xbox is a pipe dream fantasy. There are far too many PC manufacturers who don’t follow the rules 100%. Instead, they get about 90% there and call the system done. This means that instead of having a fully 100% reliable Xbox platform, you’ll end up with a crashing behemoth of a system that, once again, barely works. The clear benefit to designing exclusive hardware is to achieve reliability by design. Leaving it to third parties to provide that hardware support means that some PC manufacturers will flat out not support the Xbox platform and those that do will charge a hefty premium. This ultimately means that buying a PC that properly supports the Xbox platform will likely mean a significantly higher cost than older far less expensive dedicated gaming console hardware. Not to mention, the clunky and ugly tower and desktop shapes of PC manufacturers which can no longer be used as a set top box.
This means that not only will the PC-based Xbox experience falter badly, you’re likely looking at 2x, 3x or more the price of today’s Xbox One to invest in a compatible PC-based Xbox platform. This puts this platform so far out of the price range of console gamers, this is yet another death knell for the Xbox. I won’t even get into the peripheral issues. Okay, I will a little. If Microsoft stops the hardware entirely, they’re likely to stop the controllers and leave that also up to third parties.
We all know how well PC controllers work with many games. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. They are usually not wireless and when they are, they are chock full of wireless issues. The whole reason the Xbox One works well is because of the wireless controller and its close integration with the hardware.
Throwing the Baby out with the Bathwater
Ultimately, Microsoft is throwing away all of their hard earned gamer loyalty. They are effectively closing the Xbox and throwing away the key. What this ultimately says is that Microsoft has no long term commitment to the gaming market, the console market or the gamers. What was formerly the green glory will fade into Microsoft’s Windows obscurity.
Overall, this is the worst of all possible fates that could befall the Xbox. A console is not a console without hardware. We all know how well gaming platforms work when they offer dedicated hardware. We also know how well they don’t work when relying on third parties. Think Steam. Perhaps Microsoft is deluded enough to think that Steam is the model of the future? I can tell you that Steam isn’t it. Steam works, but for limited purposes. Effectively, Steam is the app store for gaming. Since most app stores don’t focus on gaming, it was inevitable that someone would put one together. Hence, Steam. But, the Xbox platform, regardless of its current strength in gaming will die a quick death once there is no more console hardware to be had. Gamers aren’t likely to spend their efforts chasing down third party hardware platforms that might or might not work. The whole point of a console is that it “just works”. The Steam model simply won’t work for the Xbox unless you’re talking about $2-5 pricepoint games which could run on Facebook. That’s not the class of gaming that Xbox One is today.
We all need hardware to make our lives better, yes even in gaming. You can’t game without hardware. Relying on PC manufacturers to get you what you need isn’t the answer. Worse, Windows native games and developers will kick the Xbox platform to the curb. No developer in their right mind would consider spending extra money to develop on the Xbox platform when they already have Windows development efforts underway. Why would game developers choose to redundantly build their game twice for the same platform? That’s just stupid.
Sony, Nintendo and, yes, Apple
All of the above is actually very good news for the remaining console developers. Once the Xbox platform dies quietly inside of Windows (and it will), Sony only need worry about Nintendo for the foreseeable future. However, with Apple’s recent foray into gaming with the latest Apple TV, this could mean Apple now has an opening into the console market. What I will say about the current Apple TV for 3D gaming is that it’s still very rudimentary. The textures are low res, the environments look like something out of the Nintendo 64 and there’s not a speck of realism to be found… yet. However, Apple can up the ante a lot in the next Apple TV console iteration. Assuming they wedge in a much higher end GPU and a lot more RAM into the Apple TV, they could easily match the specs of the Nintendo Wii U, but perhaps not yet approach the PS4… it will take quite a bit more effort by Apple to match Sony. For Apple, the door for the console market is quite clearly open. For Microsoft, the door is quickly closing.
Yes folks, the Xbox is officially a dead platform. With this integration announcement, this is the Xbox’s final death knell.
If you are considering the purchase of a new gaming console, you should steer clear of the Xbox One unless you really enjoy buying into dead gaming platforms.
Rant Time: Event planning and food
In recent months, I’ve visited several corporate events. One thing I find that is becoming increasingly common place is the way food is being described at these events. Not only is this a disturbing trend, it’s amazingly discourteous to the attendees. Let’s explore.
Catered Events
If you’re an event planner and you put the word Dinner on your invitation, you need to serve an actual full sit down dinner meal. So, whether that’s catered from a buffet style table or directly from the kitchen of a restaurant using a menu, a full sit down meal is what your guests are expecting when you use the word Dinner. However, DO NOT use the word Dinner on your invitation and solely serve appetizers, finger foods and small plates. Unfortunately, this is becoming an all too disturbing trend in event planning.
Appetizers, Small Plates and Finger Foods
When guests attend your sponsored event at dinner time (6-10PM), you need to feed them some kind of meal… especially if they’re paying you for the event. There is nothing worse than showing up for an event only to find out that the food consists of small fried unhealthy average to low quality food. Your guests attend your event not only for whatever the event represents, they attend for the meal as well.
If you have no intention of supplying a meal and you only intend to supply small appetizer plates, then you need to let every guest know that in advance. Stating this on your event notification is sheer common courtesy. It might dissuade some attendees from attending by making this notification, but that’s better than having your guests walk in the middle of your event. Not only will they walk, they will never attend another one of your events due to your stunt. Tricking people into a Dinner only to serve them appetizers is not only a low thing to do, it’s just not cool. Your guests are like everyone else, they want to eat a healthy meal not a bunch of fried foods. In fact, when you preempt their dinner time with your event, they are expecting to eat dinner there. So, don’t abuse that expectation and serve them a crap meal.
Be Honest
When you send out your invitations, be honest with your guests. If you only intend to serve appetizers and small plates, kindly state that on the invitation. It’s not only courteous to your guests, it lets them know exactly what to expect when they get there. It also allows your guests to make an informed choice whether to attend your event and how to plan their meals. There is no point in letting your guests think they’re about to be served a meal and then serve them tiny hors d’oeuvres all night. Doing this is a sure fire way to make your guests realize just how cheap your event is.
Don’t lead your guests into your event and then pull this kind of stunt. This will completely backfire on you and your organization. In other words, don’t expect those people to ever attend again or indulge in whatever your company has to offer.
Cheapskate Events
I fully understand why it happens. I do. You’re at the run of your event and this is your ‘last thing’ and your budget has run out. So, the best you can afford is appetizers. Fine, let your guests know that this will be an appetizer only event. And specifically, if it’s roaming appetizers (i.e., people carrying them around the venue), you need to let your guests know that too. Roaming appetizers typically mean some of your guests will get an unfair share of food and other guests will get very little.
In fact, if you can at all avoid roaming appetizers, do so. Roaming appetizers do not at all help your party. Sure, it looks cool to have the staff roaming around with plates. Let’s be honest, it’s not the best way to serve your guests their food. Sure, you can start off with a couple of roaming appetizers, but then have the rest brought to tables where guests can serve themselves.
If you do intend to serve appetizers all night, then make damn sure you serve enough for every person at that event at least three times over. You also need to make sure the kitchen has enough to serve the most popular item at least 5 times over. In the end, your appetizer only event might actually cost you more than if you had just served a more satisfying meal.
Event Planning and Courtesy
If you’re in the event business, you need to understand just how discourteous it is not to inform your guests of the venue, the types of foods that will be served and how and when they will be served. If your event is short, is planned after the dinner hour, and you make no mention of food or dinner, then people won’t assume they will be fed a meal. This is a perfectly fine expectation to set. Just make sure to set the right tone regarding food when sending out your invitation. Don’t rope people into an event by making them think they’re going to get a dinner and then serve them a small handful of finger foods.
I don’t know what this trend is all about, but it needs to stop. It’s probably one of the worst trends I’ve seen recently in party planning and it’s definitely one of the worst if you want your guests to actually listen to what you have to say. That even assumes your guests stay along enough to hear your message.
In so many cases today, common courtesy is entirely dead. More and more, I see event planners playing this game. This is not a game that will win anyone over to whatever it is your event is supposed to represent.
Don’t let your event become a victim of this huge event fail.
Rant Time: iOS 9.1 and iCloud Backup == Fail
This rant will be relatively short and sweet. I recently upgraded my iPhone to iOS 9.1. Not only were there some stupid issues around their new and improved upgrade process, iCloud backup is entirely broken. Let’s explore.
Pre-upgrade problems
Apple has introduced an upgrade after-hours process. What that means is that you need to agree to some terms and then the iPhone will upgrade between 2AM and 4AM as long as your phone is plugged in. I thought, “yay” until I got the agreement screen at which time I promptly yelled, “what the hell?”. Let me explain…
Apple forces on top of all else this automated upgrade agreement screen. It even disables the home button so you can’t get out of that screen by accidentally pressing the home button (like that would ever happen). That means you’re firmly planted on that screen (or so it seems). Anyway, on the agreement screen, you have to type in your Apple login credentials to verify you and to help you with that process, the iPhone conveniently pops up an on-screen keyboard like it typically does. Except, the Apple developers forgot one crucial detail. They forgot to give you a way to get rid of the keyboard when you’re done. Pressing the Enter button at the bottom right of the keyboard does absolutely nothing. The keyboard remains firmly planted on top of, you guessed it, the submit button. This means you cannot press the submit button… and, you can’t press the home button… and, you can’t do anything else.
So, now you’re literally stuck. You can’t press the submit button to complete the action and you can’t get out of this screen, or so it seems. I decided to take matters into my own hands. I pressed and held the power button until the Slide to Power Off slider appeared. Lo and behold, doing this actually made that screen go away. This entire debacle should have been my warning. But noooo. I didn’t listen to that little voice saying not to upgrade now.
Can’t use Automated Update
So now that I forced my way out of that screen with the power button, there is no way to go back in and resume the process. You’re probably wondering why I might want to do that? I had planned on hooking up a bluetooth keyboard to the phone so that on screen keyboard would not present. This would allow me to enter the data and then have access to the submit button, but noooo. Can’t make it that easy now can we Apple? So, I performed the upgrade in the normal way, by going into Settings=>General=>Software Update and used the standard method.
iCloud backup and 9.1 fail
To a lesser degree, I had this same problem in 9.0.4 (or whatever the last 9.0 version was). When I attempted to backup my phone to iCloud, for whatever reason the iPhone decides to back up every app on your phone by default. Mind you, I have several gigs worth of apps on my phone on top of the 15G or so of images/videos in my library. I spent a good day working on getting my iCloud backup working on 9.0.x. It took me the better part of several hours working through stupid Settings app bugs just to get all of my apps excluded from backups. Let’s understand that Apple requires you to manually disable each and every app separately from being backed up. Let’s also understand that in order to do so, each time you click to green slider to the OFF position, you have confirm a popup that asks ‘Turn Off and Delete’ for every single app separately. Let’s consider that my phone has hundreds of apps installed. So many apps, in fact, that Settings crashes about 1/4 of the way through the ‘Turn Off and Delete’ confirmation banners. It’s an arduous task at best and it’s frustrating and aggravating at worst.
Yet, rolling into 9.1, Apple promptly reverts everything I spent 1-2 hours doing and now defaults back to turning every app ON (see left image) for backup yet again. How do I know? I get that very annoying ‘Not Enough Storage’ notification on my lock screen. I spent valuable time setting all of that up and Apple promptly forgets my settings. The very definition of bad user experience (UX). Instead, this time I can’t even stop the backups of any apps. Apple only gives 5GB of data storage for free. I had all of my devices comfortably making backups on iCloud using maybe 3.1GB total (4 devices), after the excruciatingly aggravating task of finally excluding all of the unnecessary crap that Apple insists on including. Perfect… until 9.1.
Now, I’m in a catch 22. I can’t make a successful backup because iOS continually resets all of my apps and forces me to back up everything to the iCloud the first time. Yet, iOS won’t allow me to change settings to deselect the apps because it must have a successful backup first. FAIL. You can go try to deselect apps, but that’s all for show. It doesn’t actually work. Oh sure, the green ON buttons turn OFF, but it’s not as if that actually works. It doesn’t respect that those apps are now OFF and the backup fails. Once it fails, all of those buttons you’ve spent tons of times clicking to OFF will all be automatically reenabled after the backup failure.
I have no idea what Apple was thinking here, but they clearly had their heads in the iClouds. This problem has gotten progressively worse with each release and has culminated in iCloud backup being entirely unusable unless you feel the urge to spend at least $1/mo for 50GB of storage so you can work around Apple’s stupid bugs. I have no intention of working around any developers bugs by spending money. Either provide workable functionality or don’t. But, there is no way I will ever spend money to a company to work around bugs in software. Apple, if you really want to force us to pay you to get more than 5GB, then just charge us up front for any space issued. Don’t beat around the bush by introducing bugs that make the freebie you’ve given become worthless. Let’s just be honest here.
If this is about spending yet more money with you to get people to buy into your iCloud storage, then just tell us that’s what you want. Don’t force us to go buy more because you want to force everything on our phones to back up. That’s not how you do it. Just change the terms and send everyone a notice that the 5GB storage you’ve issued us is no longer free and at the end of the month you lose it or you pay for it. Just tell the consumers what you want. You don’t need to do it by introduction of bugs that forces phone owners to backup everything on their phone.
Seriously… 5GB?
In this day and age when Google is giving practically terabytes of storage for free, Apple can only afford 5GB a month? Really? How much money does Apple make off of their products and they’re going to be that stingy with storage? On top of that, they force you to backup your entire 16/32/64GB phone over to iCloud. Not only is that stupid from the 5GB free perspective, it’s just asinine that I can’t control my bandwidth to this service. Seriously, I don’t want to send over 10-20GB of data across my network bandwidth. I want to control what I send and how much I send. Since I can no longer do that…
Buh Bye iCloud Backup.. it was nice knowing ya!
I’m done with iCloud backup. Not only is it stupidly designed, what real purpose does it serve at 5GB? I can backup my entire phone’s contents on iTunes on my local machine(s) as many times as I wish. There are no bandwidth constraints or disk space issues. Yet, I can barely backup my contacts on iCloud at 5GB. I have no intention of dropping $1/mo to get to 50GB, which is still only a pittance, let alone $10/mo for 1TB. Who knows how secure the data really is in iCloud? One breach and Apple will be run out of town on a rail.
I’m tired of dealing with Apple’s stupid developers who can no longer code their way out of a paper bag. I’m tired of dealing with bugs that shouldn’t even exist on a device that used to be the most intuitive device built. Now it’s a device that is merely following behind Android’s, ahem, innovation. So, I’ll happily head back to the time before iCloud existed. I’m done with that service for backups. I prefer to keep my backups local anyway. Buh Bye iCloud backups.
Apple, figure it out !
How to stop Mac dock icon bouncing
When an application starts up in MacOS X Yosemite, it bounces the application dock icon a few times, then stops bouncing once the application has started. For me, this is perfectly fine because at least there’s a positive response. Positive response is never a bad thing in operating system design.
Unfortunately, Apple decided to overloaded this same bouncing behavior for notifications to get your attention by bouncing a dock icon. For me, this is definitely not wanted. Not only is it extremely annoying, it never stops until you go touch that icon. It also performs this bouncing way too frequently. There are much better ways to get user attention than by bouncing the dock icon. Thankfully, there’s a way to stop this annoying and unwanted UI behavior. Let’s explore.
Defaults Database
Apple has what’s known as the user defaults database. It is a database of settings not unlike the old UNIX .files system, but much more extended. Unfortunately, most developers don’t document which settings can go into the defaults database and many of the settings may be hidden. However, you can easily find them by reading the values by opening terminal.app and then typing:
$ defaults read com.apple.dock | more |
This command will spew out a lot of stuff, so you’ll want to pipe it to more to page through it. Each app has its own namespace similar in format to com.apple.dock that you can review. Not all apps support changing settings this way. For other apps, simply replace com.apple.dock with the appropriate application namespace and you can read up the settings for that application. If you decide to change any of the values, you may have to kill and restart the application or log out and log back in.
In short, there is a way to stop the bouncing using the defaults command. To do this, you will need to update the defaults database for com.apple.dock with the correct setting to stop it.
Stop the Bouncing
To stop the bouncing of dock icons, open a terminal shell and at a command prompt, type the following:
$ defaults write com.apple.dock no-bouncing -bool TRUE |
|
$ killall Dock |
Keep in mind that this is a global setting. This stops the dock icon bouncing for every application on your system for all notifications. The launch icon bouncing is not controlled by this setting. For that, you should visit the preferences area.
You can always reenable the bouncing at any time by opening terminal and then typing:
$ defaults write com.apple.dock no-bouncing -bool FALSE |
|
$ killall Dock |
Note that the defaults database is stored locally in each user account. So, if you log into several different accounts on your Mac, you’ll need to do this for each of your accounts.
Please leave me a comment below if this doesn’t work for you.
How not to run a business (Part 10.2) — Case Study: Trust
A business is as good as the trust it practices. Trust is a crucial element in gaining new business. If prospects cannot trust you or what you offer, trust that your business is genuinely there to help your customer, trust that you will provide a high quality service, your business will not succeed. Trust is mission critical to business success. Let’s explore.
Kickstarter
Recently, you may have heard about the H+ Holus project on Kickstarter. Its premise is to create a display device that can provide a wide variety of viewing angles. Some words used to describe the device include ‘holographic’, ‘holographic experience’ and ‘3D’. From the link above, the description states,
Holus provides a blend between the digital and real world by converting any digital content into a 3D holographic experience
To visually get the point across, H+ uploaded some CG representations of what the finished product might look like… including this video….
By Day 3 of this Kickstarter project, the project had already been funded the amount of $200k CAD. So here’s where things get a little dicey with both this project and Kickstarter when complaints begin to roll in. At the end, the Holus project raised $297,790 CAD. Some sites are already asking if the Holus is the most expensive scam in Kickstarter history. Reddit readers state these grievances of the Holus device.
Kickstarter’s rules are clear on misrepresentation. In the above video, it is clearly shown that as the camera moves, so does the 3D of the imagery. With Pepper’s Ghost and a flat screen, this is not possible which misrepresents the capabilities of this device. In other words, Kickstarter doesn’t allow realistic 3D rendered concept photos or videos as part of the project. Including photos of the prototype or drawings of the concept is perfectly fine. However, 3D realistic images depicting a concept are not acceptable and Kickstarter’s rules prohibit the use of such imagery.
3D Displays
We all know what these are. They’re basically your flat screen TV with shutter glasses. They’re cumbersome to use, give you headaches and, in general, are mostly a novelty. Yet, this is the state of 3D displays in 2015. No, we do not yet have floating displays such as what’s shown in Minority Report or Avatar. These displays, if even possible, are years away from becoming reality. Yet, here we are on Kickstarter with a small company claiming they’re about to produce a 3D Holographic display. Frankly, it’s not possible. What Holus offers is no better than Pepper’s Ghost.
Pepper’s Ghost is a technology that dates back to 1862 and is named after John Henry Pepper who discovered the illusion. A Pepper’s Ghost display has no relationship to holograms or holography, further misrepresenting the display. What Holus offers is a flat screen reflected off of a transparent surface. Because the screen located in the roof of the cabinet is flat, it’s definitely not 3D (without using glasses). Worse, there are already devices like this available on Amazon right now for the iPhone for $10.99. Visit Amazon and compare.
Holus Deception
Whether the H+ folks intended to deceive or were naïve about what they could show on Kickstarter, it doesn’t really matter from a fraud management perspective. The listing violated Kickstarter’s rules. Yet, Kickstarter did nothing to stop or prevent this listing from continuing. In fact, it seems that Kickstarter even awarded the Holus Kickstarter Project as a staff pick at some point. When this listing was brought to Kickstarter’s attention for misrepresentation, they ignored the warnings and allowed the project to fund anyway.
Trust
As a CEO, it is important to maintain trust with all of your customers. If you don’t attempt to maintain that trust, your business is hopelessly lost. Case in point… Kickstarter CEO Yancey Strickler leaves a comment on Joanie Lemercier’s ‘covering up a scam’ blog article after she and several others unsuccessfully attempt to bring this misrepresented project to the attention of Kickstarter. Strickler’s comment is defensive and deflecting. Here’s what Strickler has to say (full comment below):
Hi Joanie —
Yancey from Kickstarter here.
I’m responding, in part, to thank you for the attention you’ve paid to the Holus project. We’ve seen a lot of debate and strong feelings around the project, and we’ve heard a lot of questions about our policies and how we enforce them. I’d love to clear up a few things about how we did so in this case.
Part of the issue we’ve seen with this project revolves around words like “hologram,” “holographic,” and “holographic experience,” which people have come to use in so many different colloquial ways. Some of our most-discussed “holograms” — Tupac Shakur’s appearance at Coachella, CNN’s election-night guests — aren’t holograms at all. Even Microsoft bills its HoloLens as a holographic product. There’s an odd lack of clarity involved in what many people mean and understand when they say the words.
So in this case, our approach was to focus in on how Holus actually worked. We asked the Holus team to post an update that demonstrated, clearly and openly, exactly what they were working on. They responded with a public update that outlined the technique they use. That update was emailed to backers of the project, to help make sure everyone involved was fully clear on what they were supporting and what they could expect.
Then there’s the question of our rules for hardware projects. First, we require creators to show prototypes of their work. Second, we prohibit them from using photorealistic renderings.
Holus satisfied the first rule, posting a number of demo videos and documentation showing working prototypes. But when the project originally launched, it included CGI renderings. We informed them that this was strictly prohibited; they promptly removed the material. They also emailed backers to clarify their process, including a video demonstrating their iterative prototypes.
And last, there’s the question of the staff pick. Holus was originally selected as one, until we spotted and received reports about CGI renderings. We immediately removed the staff pick status, and asked the Holus team to remove the badge they’d added to their project image. (Staff pick badges aren’t a part of our system; we don’t create them or provide them. Actually, we strongly advise creators not to use them at all.) They promptly did so.
In other words, the project conformed to our stated rules, added more information on request, and made a transparent, good-faith effort to thoroughly inform backers about the nature of their work. Based on that, we continued to monitor it, but allowed it to remain on the site. The question then became: were people interested in backing it?
And this is the part where you — and the broader Kickstarter community watching these projects — become invaluable. One of the reasons Kickstarter uses all-or-nothing funding is because it gives everyone involved in a project time to really research what the creators are doing, discuss it with others, and come to a collective decision about whether it’s still worth supporting. Ultimately, it’s backers who decide what gets funding, not us.
That’s why we’re always grateful to anyone who joins in the public debate about projects, asks tough questions about the claims they’re hearing, and shares their expertise with other backers. That kind of discussion is crucial, especially when it comes to new technology. It helps our Integrity team monitor projects for problems or violations of our rules — as we did throughout the Holus campaign. It helps backers vet ideas and make the most informed decisions possible. It holds creators to a high standard, and helps them build stronger communities. It does all these things no matter what action Kickstarter winds up needing to take, and whether projects succeed or fail.
And that’s why I’d like to thank you — and to say that, if you’ve chosen not to get involved in any more projects, we’re sad to hear it. The role you played in this one is incredibly important. Members like you are welcome in this community any time: you make things better for everyone involved.
Cheers
Yancey
This is not the type of diatribe I expect to hear from a CEO. CEO’s are the top agent of the company. They are the person who investigates wrongdoing and the person who puts a stop to it. No where above did Yancey even mention investigation, taking the strictest action or in doing anything to prevent such an occurrence in the future. Sure, they requested the prohibited content removal, but only after the project was already mostly funded. Kickstarter also didn’t apparently require full disclosure of this content removal to the backers.
Instead, he defends the project and states that it is the backer’s responsibility to post meaningful discussions, debate the project and then choose or not choose to back based on these comments. That’s all well and good until Joanie points out in a later blog post that in among other behaviors by Kickstarter to ignore the project and let it proceed, Kickstarter also
…DELETED the embarrassing questions asked in the project comments (see screenshots).
When Kickstarter deletes comments that could help backers make informed decisions, that ultimately means that Kickstarter no longer respects the backers and is in it to make sure the project succeeds whether it’s a real project or not. This also means that Kickstarter is in it for the money they will get from the project rather than protecting backers from fraud. This is a serious breach of trust and one that should resonate to every backer who has ever backed a project at Kickstarter.
In fact, Joanie points out all of the trust related issues around this Kickstarter project:
– YOU DID NOT REPLY to the official ‘reports’ made from day 1 (except email auto-replies).
– YOU DID NOT LISTEN to the experts: Jason Sapan has been making real holograms in NYC for over 40 years, he warned you about the fraud.
– YOU DIDN’T CARE TO COMMENT the 3 in-depth articles (1 – 2 – 3) written by Raphaël de Courville about his investigations on the scam.
– YOU DELETED the embarrassing questions asked in the project comments (see screenshots).
– YOU DID NOT MODERATE messages from suspicious accounts (1 – 2) and Holus partner comments (1) who broke another rule.
– BACKERS WERE NEVER INFORMED about the replacement of prohibited CGI and removal of staff pick status.
There were probably even more behaviors not documented here, but these are enough to show that even though Kickstarter was made aware of the project early in its life, Kickstarter ignored it all and even colluded in making sure the project appeared to be legitimate.
Even Yancey’s comment to Joanie attempts to justify the above actions in an obtuse fashion.
Business Don’t — Don’t allow fraud on your service
This is probably one of the biggest business don’ts I’ve ever documented in this series. You don’t do what Kickstarter did. If you establish rules by which the community must follow, then you need to ensure they are enforced regardless of outcome. Even if you stand to lose 20% of that 200k or whatever Kickstarter’s commission is, that is chump change compared to the trust you’ve lost from your community and the possible legal ramifications you face (which I guarantee will cost you more money than any commission you’d make from the fraud). Your community keeps you in business. For this reason, this trust case is worth studying. It’s worth realizing what not to do when running your business.
In Kickstarter’s case, the appropriate action would have been to delist and refund all backers before the project closed. Then, request the project owner to relist the project using drawings or other imagery that doesn’t violate Kickstarter’s terms… instead of silently requesting the images be removed without letting the existing backers know… instead of removing key discussions from the project to inform backers of what this project really is… instead of ignoring emails ultimately saying that the project is fraudulent.
Fraud is a very real possibility anywhere and everywhere, especially with crowdfunded projects. Fraud is intentional misrepresentation of something. It’s against the law in the US and the US government investigates and takes legal action against those who commit fraud against buyers. Allowing fraud to exist on your own web service and then doing nothing about it once you become aware is collusion and makes your business as much liable as the person who set up the fraudulent listing in the first place. The one thing you cannot know is intent and intent is the difference between innocent misrepresentation and outright fraud. However, to the government, intent doesn’t matter, only the outcome. As a business, you must error on the side of caution and assume the intent is intentional misrepresentation, which means taking the strictest action possible and forcibly removing the offensive content from your site. If your business cannot protect its own customer, then no one will and you’ve lost your customer’s trust. They trust you to be their advocate against thieves, scams and fraud when they are using your service. When you fail at protecting your customer from fraud, your company has failed.
Were someone to bring legal action against Kickstarter and H+ for the alleged fraud of this project, there is definitely enough evidence that Kickstarter could be held liable and culpable in this activity.
Enforcing Business Rules
Once you establish business rules by which your clients must abide, you need to absolutely enforce those rules by the strictest of actions in every case. If you allow even one client to slide by the rules, your business could end up in court. If you are on the other end of a Kickstarter project and you choose not to deliver on your backer rewards, the US Government will come after you. Fraud is a federal crime and can lead your business into a lot of federal legal problems. Ed Nash found this out the hard way when his company, Altius Management, failed to deliver the $25k Kickstarted funded Asylum card game in 2012.
Failure to provide the necessary level of trust through enforcement of your rules could lead your business into bankruptcy. In this case, Kickstarter’s woes are just starting. How this all ends for Kickstarter is yet to be known, but it’s probably not going to end well. How this ends for H+ and the Holus device is yet to be seen, but delivering a Pepper’s Ghost to backers will likely lead to outrage.
← Part 10 | Chapter Index | Part 11 →
Rant Time: Google+ is finally dead
All things must come to an end, some sooner than others. Google+ is now officially dead and being withdrawn from Google’s product suites one at a time starting with YouTube. To Google I say, thank you.
Good riddance to bad rubbish
I’m not saying that Google+ wasn’t well conceived, it just wasn’t well designed. As with a lot of Google’s products, they are created with the best of intentions, but the actual deployment of the idea leaves a lot to be desired. Google+ was definitely one that falls into the leaving-lots-to-be-desired category. It’s sad too because had Google done it right, they could have overtaken Facebook.
Instead of turning Google+ into a system that was actually useful, they used it as a back end single-signon product. Meaning, instead of being actually usable as a social platform to meet and discuss cool things with people you didn’t know, it ended up being just another single-signon tool. Yet another profile to be managed in thousands of other profiles. Not only that, they tied it into every product in the Google chain. This meant that in order to use any other Google product, you were forced to sign up for a Google+ account whether you used it or not.
The Real Problem? YouTube
Google+’s main bane was YouTube. Once Google got it into their heads that this was the end-all-be-all platform, they integrated it into YouTube in a way that made YouTube practically impossible to have discussions any longer. So, you would watch a video and then try to comment. In some cases you could, in other cases you couldn’t. The Reply link was sometimes there and sometimes not. I realize the reason why. It had to do with Google+ permissions. If the user didn’t allow people outside the ‘circles’ to comment, their thread was closed. This made it almost impossible to have decent conversations with people. Additionally, all of the old YouTube comments prior to the Google+ integration were entirely closed. You couldn’t comment on these at all (even if they were a month old). Frustrating.
A Social Platform?
Hardly. While Facebook isn’t the best at being a social platform, it is still a whole lot better than Google+ ever was. In fact, Google+ was so convoluted, you’d sometimes get comments from YouTube, sometime from Google+ and sometimes from both in your inbox. There was no rhyme or reason as to why it was this way. It just was.
I know what Google was trying to do here, they just didn’t do it well. Their version of a social platform was so all-over-the-place that it just wasn’t fun to use. It was even harder to find people on it, though they tried to make it easy through the Google contacts and circles. But, it just wasn’t easy or fun to use.
Google’s overreaching TOS
Worse, violating Google+’s terms and conditions could get your Google account closed, no ifs, ands or buts about it. If you valued your Google account, you really didn’t want to muck with Google+ for fear of writing the wrong thing and triggering the wrath of Google down on your account. With Facebook, no problem. If your Facebook account is closed (not likely), it wouldn’t affect your email accounts or any thing else in Google’s network. With Twitter, also no problem. If either of these social accounts are closed, it’s an inconvenience. If your email account closes, that’s a major problem.
Tying this supposed social platform to all of Google’s terms meant you were very limited in what you could say or do without accidentally triggering the wrath of the Google admins. If you did manage to trigger the wrath of the Google admins and they closed your account, there was no easy appeals process. It was simply better to play it safe than endanger your email account. It was far easier to participate in Twitter and Facebook and not worry about that problem.
Distractions
At best, Google+ was an unnecessary idea that didn’t need to be realized. In fact, for far too long Google has been distracted. Distracted with Android, distracted with Google+, distracted with Gmail, distracted with Google Apps, distracted with Postini, distracted with Blogger and distracted with Ad Words. It’s not that these other platforms aren’t worth it to the people who use them, it’s just that Google’s bread and butter is still Search. But, what of Search? When was the last time Google really made any innovations around search or in making searching better? Not recently. The last innovation to Search was Ad Words and that was less about innovation and more about monetizing it. That was also a very long time ago.
It’s time for Google to shed many of these silly distractions and get back to their core business… Search. Let’s get rid of these unnecessary distractions like Google+ and shed the baggage that has been encumbering Google as of late. Until Google can really focus on its core products, it will continue to flounder with these dead and dying products like Google+.
It’s long overdue for Google to kill off some of these useless unnecessary products and I’m glad to see that Google+ is the first to go. Perhaps Google is now on its way to recovering from this string of recent bad decisions it has been making. Though to see this, we will have to wait as only time will tell.
For now, I say with passion, “Good riddance to bad rubbish. Goodbye Google+.”
How not to run a business (Part 10.1) — Case Study: Startup Funding
Note, for this case study article, I have abandoned the Don’t phraseology to allow studying this topic in detail.
A few months back, I was thinking how I had previously used GetSatisfaction to, of all things, try to get some satisfaction from would-be shyster companies. It wasn’t that I was in need of that type of service by the time as there were plenty of other functional and more effective complaint sites (i.e., Twitter, Ripoff Report, Consumerist), but I was interested in checking in on what’s up with some of those forums where I used to post.
Interestingly, the site had drastically changed. No longer was the once familiar interface there. Instead, the site was now closed. No, no in the sense that they were out of business, but more that when you visited the home page, consumers could no longer start or post to individual company complaint sites. Now it was designed to be used by companies to direct their own customers to getsatsifaction.com when the customer had a comment. Indeed, it was no longer the same GetSatisfaction that I knew. I also knew something was up, but I didn’t know what. Let’s explore.
GetSatisfaction sold to Sprinklr
In April of 2015, GetSatisfaction was bought by Sprinklr for an undisclosed sum of money, apparently on a fire sale. What this meant was that the new owners likely wanted some parts of GetSatisfaction for their own purpose, but not to keep it whole or intact. That’s quite obvious merely visiting the new www.getsatisfaction.com today.
In that sale, the founders of the site (some had been pushed out as early as 2010), received nothing from the sale. Indeed, according to Lane Becker (one of the co-founders), the company was sold to Sprinklr for less than the amount the company had received in initial rounds of funding (~$16 million). Additionally, the original founders also apparently didn’t receive a dime from the sale, but that’s kind of to be expected since they were no longer at the company at the time.
A Case Study
According to Lane Becker, the two initial rounds of funding accepted by the executives at the time led them astray from the beginning. He also states that it wasn’t so much the $6 million in Series A funding, but it was the additional $10 million they also accepted far too early in company’s lifecycle.
So let’s understand the problem in this scenario. While Lane doesn’t elaborate on the above statements, I take them to mean that for the $6 million, they likely signed over at least 20-30% equity in the company. With the extra $10 million, considering the company valuation was $50 million, they were likely required to sign over another 20-30% (pushing them into the high 40s percentage range for equity ownership given over to investors. Once you’ve given over that much of your company to early investors, your company is no longer safe from outside influences. Indeed, for that money that you’ve just accepted, you’ve just paid the highest price of all: loss of control.
This is what I assume happened at GetSatisfaction and why the founders were ousted from the company. After all, when you give over that much equity to investors and when your company doesn’t perform as the investors expected, out you go.
Be Honest with Yourself
What lesson does this teach small business owners? It teaches to not only be shrewd about your business, but you have to be honest about your goals, what you want out of your business and why you are in business in the first place. If you can’t be honest with yourself and your co-founders, you will fall into traps that can end your business before you get started.
In other words, asking for funding doesn’t come without strings attached. In fact, once you pull the trigger on funding, your world as a small business owner is effectively over. Not only do you now need to worry about becoming profitable, you need to do it on someone else’s agenda, not yours. It also means that the outside investors will steer your company, sometimes whether you like the direction or not.
For all of these reasons, you’ll need to be brutally honest with yourself about what you expect in return from your business. Meaning, if you open a business to create and sell lollipops, investors might step in and want you to expand your business into areas where you don’t belong. Such as not only making lollipops, but also taking in contracting business to create lollipops for other candy companies. They might even have you move your manufacturing to China or Asia to ‘save costs’. Worse, they could steer your company into producing t-shirts or electronics or some direction that makes no sense. Mind you, you just wanted to make and sell lollipops. Investors want a much bigger return, so they’re going to hire and find people who will achieve their agendas, not yours.
Investors Gone Bad
Courting investors to your business isn’t a bad thing as long as you know what you’re getting into and you know how to deal with an investor who isn’t the right fit for your business. In other words, don’t accept any offer that comes along because, as GetSatisfaction is a clear example, your company may cease to exist under the wrong investor. Additionally, don’t immediately dip into investor capital to satisfy business needs. You should sit on that cash and wait until you really need it. This gives you time to pay out the investor and take your equity back if the investor becomes overbearing in their demands on your business.
Not all investors are good for your business. As the saying goes, “Nothing comes for free”. If the investor offer seems too good to be true, it likely is. So, you shouldn’t be willing to accept all offers that come along. You need to not only haggle the equity far lower than what they are asking, you also need to dictate just how much and how far the investor has input into the business. This all needs to be put in writing, so you need to have a good attorney on retainer to help you craft such documents. This also gives you the ammo you need to tell the investor to back off.
Protecting Your Business
When you open your new business, you need to understand that it’s a matter of thirds. One third of your time goes to producing your product and keeping it functional. One third of your time goes to managing your business finances, marketing, employees and protecting your business through legal contracts. One third of your time is spent trying to finding outside funding to help you grow your business. Each of these thirds being equally important.
If you fail to devote enough time to any one of these thirds, your business will suffer. So, while it’s important to produce a functional product that users need, you need to be able to protect your business plan from people looking to take advantage of you. Such attacks on your business can come from anywhere. These risks include:
- Technical attacks (DDoS, hacks, breaches, etc)
- Social engineering
- People sending fake invoices to be paid
- People calling asking to pay for fake yellow pages ads
- People sending toner and expecting you to pay
- Legal attacks
- Lawsuits
- Patents and/or Copyright ownership disputes
- Ex-employee
- Contractual breaches
- Unpaid invoices
- Investors attacks over
- Revenues
- Management
- Budget Allocation
- Direction of Company
These above are just a short list of the kinds of attacks that can be levied against your business. These are risks that you can mitigate if you think ahead and plan for each step of your business. For example, you probably shouldn’t accept rounds of funding unless you already have money in the bank. Basically, even though you may not need the money from the investor, having money in the bank means that the extra investment capital may allow you to take your business to the next level even if you don’t dip into the money right away.
On the other hand, if you accept investment capital because you actually need to use it immediately, your business is vulnerable. Unscrupulous investors will swoop in and take advantage of that predicament. They will then be able to scoop up more equity in your company than they are really due. If you’re in such a desperate predicament, you’re not at liberty to haggle with them over this. If you haggle, they walk and your business may fail. This leads to…
Failing Business
If your business is close to failure, this is the wrong time to be looking for investors. Instead, you should be looking for buyers to buy out your business. The right time to look for investors is when your business is just getting started and still has enough funds to stay afloat. The wrong time is when you’re desperate for a cash infusion or else the doors close.
Successful Business
If your business is in a good place financially, then you can shop around for investors. Again, you don’t want to take VC investment just because you can. If your business is doing well on its own, then you can haggle with investors. If an investor is unwilling to budge on the equity requirements, tell them to take a hike. There are other investors for whom you can seek to fit with your business needs.
Unscrupulous investors are everywhere. Sometimes they’re loan sharks, other times they’re just sharks. So, you need to get your business to a place where you have the ability to haggle and walk away if it isn’t the deal you want. Keep in mind that while the investor is doing you a favor by offering you money, you are doing them an even bigger favor by allowing them to invest. If your company succeeds, they will make a huge windfall from that investment. A windfall, I might add, that you can’t put back into your company coffers. You will be required to pay that investor off. So, for every dollar made, for each percentage of equity, you’ll need to compensate each investor. In other words, with a VC, you might as well consider it a loan with a super high interest rate and open ended payback terms.
What those terms mean is that as soon as your business has the cash to pay off the investor, expect for them to ask for it. This could be an inopportune moment for your business.
Business Loans
You should consider bank loans before considering VC money because with bank loans, the only thing due back to the bank is your payment. No equity is involved. Bank loans are typically for lower amounts than what some VCs offer, but it doesn’t have nearly the strings attached.
Crowd funding?
Sites like Kickstarter or Indiegogo are great for raising funding. But, there’s no free meal ticket here either. Not only does your project need to be accepted by the crowd funding site, you have to be willing to offer something to each investor for investing in your project. While that may not be equity in your company, it is usually something tangible (shirt, trip, book, product, etc). Don’t expect to receive millions in crowd funding, either. In fact, if you get $100k out of the deal, you’re doing well. Though, most projects end up getting far lower amounts. So, while crowd funding might help you get a product out the door, it’s not going be enough capital to run your business.
The Takeaway
You must treat your business as the most important thing. You should always put any money you receive towards your business… not towards house payments, car payments, boats, amenities, personal trips or other frivolous personal agendas. I’ve seen too many startups waste money on silly things like purchasing a company limo, or spending for outrageous parties or other wasteful uses… even so far as sending the CEOs kids to college. As a startup, wasteful spending will only lead your business down the tubes. Oh, and don’t expect the investors to stop you in that. They won’t. Though, they will let you spend your way down to nothing and then take your business away from you to liquidate it. I’ve seen this directly happen at least 5 times in my career and twice were companies where I directly worked.
Being a business owner is tough. But, it’s even tougher to make common sense and rational business decisions, especially early on. If you happen to have an up-and-coming star company that’s winning awards and being touted as the ‘next big thing’, don’t assume that means your business is shielded from bankruptcy or will make it big. No. It means that you’ve worked hard to get to that point and you need to work even harder to get to the next level. Again, I’ve personally seen co-founders wildly and lavishly spend on stupid things instead of investing that money back into the company. Or, more specifically, in finding a way to become profitable faster.
The fastest way to kill your startup is by taking excessive capital, giving away too much equity, wasteful spending and seeing all of those dollars as free loot to do with as you please. This is a recipe for failure. This was also the mentality of so many startups in Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom. This thinking is even somewhat prevalent today. Yet, I don’t see many of those co-founders in jail. Stealing millions of dollars to ‘play’ would land you in jail in any other place. However, in Silicon Valley, startup founders seem to be able to get away with this behavior.
When Lane Becker claims he got nothing from GetSatisfaction’s sale, that’s deceptive. He got to start a business in Silicon Valley. He got to operate that business for several years. He got to control millions of dollars in capital. He took home a salary. If he and his co-founders made the wrong decisions for the company, that was his fault and no one else’s. If he didn’t get anything from that business after having been ousted, then he should have made better decisions. GetSatsifaction’s sale to Sprinklr should be taken as a learning experience. Even though Lane may be somewhat bitter about the whole deal, he and his colleagues made the early decisions. We all have to live with our decisions in life. If those decision led to an outcome where he made no money from a company he founded, he has only one person to blame.. himself.
The ultimate takeaway is to educate yourself. Learn how businesses operate. Learn how venture capitalists operate. Learn how angel investors operate. Understand what equity is and how it can affect your business. This is all education. If you don’t educate yourself, you can’t possibly see when a decision is bad or good. If you feel you can’t learn every aspect of your business, then hire people who do understand it. If you don’t understand venture capital, then hire a CFO that does and who can help protect your business from unscrupulous investors and wasteful spending. As I said above, one third if your time should be spent protecting your business.
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Rant Time: Google should stop producing Chrome
I’m all for browser competition, but only if the organization that chooses to produce such a browser actually takes it seriously. Enter Google. Google’s initial motivation for producing the Chrome browser was all wrong. Instead of wanting to produce a browser because they wanted something technologically better, Google’s reason for producing Chrome was to facilitate their advertising initiatives and agendas. Google should stop producing Chrome. Let’s explore.
What is a browser for?
A browser’s number one reason to exist is to render web sites. That’s the single solitary reason a browser exists. Everything else is just bells and whistles. But you might say, “Well, Chrome does that.”. In fact, it doesn’t. There are many sites I’ve recently visited in Chrome 43 that don’t render. I have no idea why and I really don’t care the reason behind its failure. I just want to know that when I visit a web site that the browser will render it. For example, the same web site that produces a white page in Google Chrome produces a rendered page in Firefox. It’s clear, Google doesn’t care whether or not Chrome works.
Does Google Care?
It’s clear, if you visit the bug reports pages for Google Chrome, there are ‘low hanging fruit’ bugs that haven’t been touched for years. Google doesn’t care. They don’t care if the browser is half-assed. They don’t care that pages don’t render. They don’t care that when the pages begin to render, they show all manner of ugly gobbledygook just prior to applying the CSS… and, in some cases, even fail to apply the CSS.
Oh, Chrome didn’t start out this way. No. It started out as a fast browser with independent sandboxed processes. What it has devolved into is nothing short of a dictatorial memory hog of disaster.
“Automatic Updates are nice”, you say.
Yes, they are, until you realize you still have to restart the whole browser. Whatever happened to the initiative of incremental component updates that didn’t require a browser restart? Well, that clearly never materialized. Worse, when the three line menu bar starts to turn colors (green, then yellow, then orange, then red), that’s just the kiss of death for Chrome. The point at which the bar starts turning color, you might as well restart it. If you don’t, Chrome’s developers intentionally and randomly begin breaking web sites until you do. So, until you update, you can expect that some sites won’t load at all, won’t load correctly, or won’t work once loaded. And, this is intentional. It’s a gentle nudge (albeit, stupid) by the developers to force you to update your browser.
Worse, and as the color begins to change, the frequency of the breakage increases. I just don’t get this one at all. Why would you intentionally hobble the user’s browsing experience? But then, not actually just ask the user to update? Seriously, if you want the user to update, just present a notification panel that says, “The browser requires an update, restart” and force the user to restart. Don’t randomly stop parts of the rendering code from working and assume the user will take the hint. Just force the restart on the user… it’s a much more sane experience.
Broken renderer
And the crux of this whole thing is Google’s lack of seriousness (and experience) in producing this browser. As long as Google’s sites work, that’s all that matters to the Google. If you visit some other random site and it doesn’t work, Google doesn’t really care. They might or might not fix it if you report it. Oh, sure, they offer a place to report it, but it’s clear. No one really looks at these. There are bugs outstanding that haven’t been touched for years. So, don’t expect your bug report thrown into the ether to actually be touched in any timely fashion, if ever. Which comes to…
The Wrong Motivation
Netscape was formed to produce a browser. That was the reason for Netscape’s existence. Their commitment was in producing the best browser possible. However, Google’s motivation to produce Chrome was not from the goal of producing the best most compatible browser. No. Google’s motivation was to produce the best experience for displaying its own advertising and search content. If showing Google sites is the only metric by which to assess success of Chrome, then I guess it is a success. But, the rest of the browser experience is a failure.
Failures such as being unable to properly play flash content, failure to play Silverlight content at all, restrictive and unnecessary security ‘features’ and overreaching and heavy handed security tactics. Chrome is not about producing the best browsing experience, it’s about producing a browsing experience that Google mandates on you. In other words, if Google doesn’t approve of the site, then you can’t visit it. That’s not for the browser creator to decide.
A browser creator should remain entirely site neutral. If the user wants to visit a so-called malicious site, that’s their choice. If a user wants to visit any site, Chrome should dutifully render it regardless. Google’s involvement in the Chrome browser should be to produce a browser that ‘just works’. Not a browser that ‘chooses to work’ at some Google employee’s whim.
Technology Enhancements?
As lofty as Google’s initial engineering goals were for Chrome, that whole pretense has been completely dropped today. There have been effectively no browsing experience improvements to Chrome since its first year of existence. Yes, the version number has increased to 43, but there has been little change with each successive update. Oh, they’ve improved the extension system, but not to the point that enough developers take advantage of it. Yes, there are quite a number of extensions that exist, but still no where near the number that exist for Firefox. But, extensions aren’t the reason to use a browser. Sure, they’re niceties, but the reason a browser exists is to view the web. If a browser can’t even fulfill that basic function, what use are extensions?
Technologically, Chrome has also gotten worse over time. The whole browser is predicated on memory use (and lots of it). So, if you want to open 50 tabs, expect your browser to consume 12G of memory or more (depending on the sites you visit). With Firefox, this browser might consume 1-2G of RAM or less. I have no idea what Chrome is doing internally here, but whatever is going on is not right. There is no reason a browser should consume 12G of RAM under any circumstances. Effectively, the only relevant tab is the one that’s visible. This is the ONLY tab that should consume any active RAM (or any tab playing music). The rest of the tabs should be paged out of RAM freeing that memory. Which leads to the horrible tab system…
Tabs?
The tab system in Chrome is not only antiquated, it’s one of the worst implementations of tabs I’ve seen. At this point, I’d even call it broken. Not only do the tabs get progressively smaller as more are opened, there’s a tiny X on every tab to close it. Again, the only tab that’s relevant is the tab that’s visible. All other tabs are there for recall only. This means that the tiny X should not be visible on any tab but the active tab. If the tab is not actively focused, then the X should disappear. Removal of the X means no accidental way to close a tab on activation which does happen in practice far too often. The X should only reappear only when the tab comes into focus, but after the tab has been clicked.
Worse than the usability issues I just mentioned, there is no way to search through the active tabs that are opened. When the tabs get so small you cannot even see the icon, then you don’t even know what’s in the tab. So, the only way to find what tabs you have open is to search. Yet, Chrome provides nothing here. Firefox is at least aware of what tabs you have opened. So in Firefox, if you attempt to open a site that already exists in an open tab, Firefox will at least go to that tab. In Chrome, there’s nothing. Chrome happily lets you open yet another tab for a page you already have open, consuming yet more memory.
Chrome and its Future
It’s clear, Google is not serious about making Chrome better or more usable. Instead, it’s worried about making certain security obsolete to its own detriment. For example, Chrome developers removed certain key SDK features preventing Silverlight from working. Oh, I’m sure those software engineers would argue, that’s our right. Oh, I’m sure that it is. But, removing a key SDK feature that also eliminates a necessary browsing experience is not smart. It’s especially not smart for a browser that needs these features to stay relevant in an ever competitive browser market. I’d call this self-obsolescence.
When other browsers continue to feature this functionality and Chrome doesn’t supply an alternative, this is just stupid engineering design. It’s one thing to replace an SDK feature with a new one that’s compatible. It’s entirely different to remove SDK features that render certain features unavailable.
For example, because Amazon relies on Silverlight for its Prime TV experience, Google’s removal of the key SDK feature that allowed Silverlight to work means no more Prime TV on Chrome. This effectively says Chrome is no longer useful at Amazon. Meaning, if you want to use Amazon, you might as well switch back to Firefox. I ask Chrome developers, “Is it really a good idea to force users away from your browser?” Are the developers really stupid enough to believe that Prime users will ‘live without’ watching Prime TV and Movies and still continue to use Chrome?
Nails in the Coffin
It’s these stupid decisions by Chrome developers that really make no sense. Is it really the wisest of decisions to lock out web sites because your engineering team says this is what should happen? No. It isn’t. It also isn’t for your engineering team to decide. A browser is desgined to be flexible and expandable, not to offer limited browsing experiences. Chrome shouldn’t dictate which sites are ‘allowed’ by making wholesale changes that prevent sites from loading. Instead, Chrome needs to become open and flexible, not closed and unusable.
This software should let the user decide his/her browsing experience. If that leads the user into a trap that gets their computer infected, that’s not the browser’s fault. You can only prevent the user from their own folly for so long. But, the browser should remain neutral at all times. It should offer and allow all commonly used features, tools and protocols (whether they are good, bad, old or new). Who cares that SSL3 is old? Taking it out of the browser entirely will break user experience. It should never be taken out, but it can be set as a user preference to allow or disallow usage. If the user chooses to disable that protocol, that’s the user’s choice. It should never be a blanket choice dictated by the Google engineers.
It’s these stupid global wholesale decisions by the Google engineers that will make Google Chrome a thing of the past. Eventually, Google will become so constrained and so impossible to use that everyone will have to switch back to another browser. We’re quickly approaching that crux point… especially with removal of ‘insecure SDK’ features that remove key features like Silverlight.
No, I am not necessarily a fan of Silverlight, but I do want to be able to use it when sites need it. If Chrome simply can’t even support this most basic of uses, then what’s the point in using Chrome?
Chrome’s Dictatorship
It’s really surprising to me that Chrome’s developers are just pretentious enough to think they can dictate exactly how sites should be built. Meaning, when Chrome engineers remove SSL3 and other ‘weak protocols’ from browser support that these engineers think that sites will be forced to update the outdated protocols on their sites for Chrome. That’s a double edged sword. Chrome doesn’t yet wield enough power as a browser to make that unilateral decision. Oh, the Chrome engineers think that Chrome’s brand is that powerful, but I’m here to tell you it isn’t.
Chrome cannot and should not attempt to dictate what is ‘acceptable’ browser standards. That’s for the W3C to state. If a site chooses to use SSL3, that’s their choice, not Chrome’s. The only thing that removing these ‘features’ from Chrome will accomplish is to make Chrome itself less relevant. In other words, the more of these items that are removed from Chrome, the less reason there is to use Chrome. Sites have no obligation to support Chrome’s browser standards, especially when they become overbearing and unnecessary.
Overall
I am quickly coming to the conclusion that Chrome has outlived its usefulness as a browser. On my notebook where RAM is limited, I’ve already moved back to Firefox which consumes far less memory. On my home system where memory is a little more abundant, I’m still using Chrome. But, there are times where I want to watch Prime TV on Amazon and have to switch to Firefox. Because I’m tired of running multiple browsers and dealing with Chrome’s dictatorial approach to browser engineering, I’m about done with Chrome.
Eventually, more and more users will wake up to Chrome’s lack of basic features, such as viewing Silverlight content. I’m surprised that Chrome developers haven’t stopped Flash from working. That’s probably coming. That would be the ultimate nail in Chrome’s coffin. Once that’s done, Chrome is all but a thing of the past. For me, that day is already here. Bye Chrome.
How not to run a business (part 10): Undermining Your Business
There are lots of very subtle actions that can be taken where you can unknowingly undermine your business success. Let’s explore.
Don’t fire a position multiple times in a row
While this somewhat depends on the position, it’s still never a good sign when you must fire staff from the same position over and over. Even if you’re disenchanted with the people you’ve hired doing the specific work and after firing a position more than three times, this says more about your needs than the position. It’s clear, what you need in the position and the type of people you are hiring is mismatched. You need to rethink the job requirements for the position and hire the correct talent to fit that role. When you fire leaders in this way (i.e., VPs, SVPs or C-Level execs), this situation is even more detrimental to your business.
How will this undermine your business? Firing a position more than three times says several things. First, it says you don’t know what you’re looking for. Second, for all of those people whom you’ve hired and fired, the word will get around that anyone who’s a competent candidate won’t even consider the position. Once you realize that the most talented pools are relatively small and that they do talk to one another, firing a position multiple times means the word will get around to not hire on at that company. Once the word gets around about this situation, it is never a good thing for your business. The higher the profile of the position, the stronger the word gets around and this will severely undermine your ability to acquire top-end talent.
Additionally, the word will also get around in the recruiter community and they also choose not to place talent at your company.
Don’t choose an industry without researching its requirements
When you’re setting up your business plan, you need to thoroughly research the industry your business will be in. For example, selling a product or service to the medical industry is profoundly different than selling it to marketing teams, which is also profoundly different than selling your wares to the government or doctors or lawyers or farmers.
How will this undermine your business? If you fail to properly research the types of clients you are working to obtain, you won’t understand their demands and requirements. Every industry is bound by laws and regulation (some industries more than others). If you fail to realize that the industry you are targeting requires strict compliance to laws, you may also fail to understand how those laws apply to your business and that your company’s compliance may be unattainable and far too costly. If you can’t comply with the laws, you may never be able to land the deals on which your business depends. Yes, for many companies, vendors must comply with certain laws, security requirements and industry standards before a company will agree to close your deal. Failing to research these requirements may undermine your ability to remain in business. Or, it may relegate your business to smaller companies needing much smaller deals.
Don’t fail to underestimate the power of word of mouth
Sites like Glassdoor exist for a reason. Before Glassdoor, there was no transparency except by word of mouth. Now, there is.
How will this undermine your business? Before Glassdoor, recruiters would make the determination of where to place candidates. Recruiters also won’t choose to place prospective employees in toxic environments. That is, environments where firings are common, where turnover is high and where employee morale is extremely low. They won’t place anyone for a very good reason… they know the new employee won’t stay long enough to allow the recruiter to collect their commission. Recruiters only get paid their commission if the placed employee stays for the specified duration of time (3-6 months depending on the placement contract). Recruiters, therefore, will not place would-be candidates into an environment they know will be a short lived role. It also likely means that when you do find recruiters who will work with your hiring needs, they likely are unaware of the problem. Though, once they place and realize they are making no money, don’t expect to hear from them again.
Additionally, with sites like Glassdoor, employees can remain anonymous and be brutally honest about their experiences at the business. This can also undermine your ability to hire. Sites like Twitter and Facebook just compound the problem. As work gets around and your business’s reputation becomes tainted, you’ll find that it can be nearly impossible to not only attract good talent, but also retain it. Word of mouth in an industry is as good as gold to a job candidate, but can be poison for a business. You need to make sure your word of mouth is always high quality praise. Never negative backlash. If you choose to ignore the word of mouth, it will be to the detriment of your company.
Don’t skimp on employee perks
Employees spend 8 or more hours of their day working for you (not to mention commute time). Morale is a big part of that work day. If morale sinks low, your employees will exodus. Perks help keep employee morale up. Choosing the right morale boosters is critically important to employee retention.
How will this undermine your business? The Shining said it best, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”. I’m not recommending that you allow your employees to play. But, offering employees a place to relax when they are having a break is important. You also need to understand what other companies in your same vicinity are offering to their employees. While I understand that every company can’t offer all of the same perks, you need to offer at least some of them. Not offering perks to your employees is tantamount to telling would-be employees and recruiters, “Don’t place people here”. Word of mouth spreads, once again, and you’ll find it hard to hire strong candidates because the perks are better somewhere else.
Secondarily, this goes back to several of the previous Don’ts. Lack of perks in combination with more problematic industry and poor morale, leading to negative word of mouth, could lead your business into a tough hiring spot. You could find that it’s nearly impossible to hire staff across the board. What you’re left with hiring are people who are not the top end of the hiring pool and instead end up the middle to low end staff. Once your business is forced to hire lesser qualified staff, your business will tank.
Perks like free food, subsidized or free daycare, subsidized or free transportation to and from work. Other perks can include tuition reimbursement, travel discounts and store discounts. When you skimp on perks when other companies are not, you will find it difficult to hire and keep any talent, especially top end talent.
Don’t assume you can live without top end talent
Without top end talent, your business is doomed to mediocrity.
How will this undermine your business? Once you hit the mediocrity stage, your customers will, one by one, leave you. They will realize you aren’t providing the quality service that you promised. Oh, you’ll still get some new signups, until they also realize the mediocrity of your business. Competition is fierce and it’s guaranteed that your business will have competition. If your competitors are doing it better than you, then your product/service offering will end up behind all others. It’s important to understand that top end talent drives your business forward. Low to mid level talent, keeps status quo. Top end talent provides innovation, low to mid level talent doesn’t.
Once you understand this fundamental distinction between the levels of talent, you will understand why you pay top dollar to have top end talent. And note, I’m not necessarily talking about top-end talent in Director, VP, SVP or C-Level positions. While it helps to have top-end talent there, those positions do not typically get the work done day to day. It’s those doing the hands-on day-to-day work that are driving your business forward. You want motivated self-starters who are willing to own the work that they do. Low to mid-level talent won’t actually own their work. Ownership of work is critically important when looking for talented staff to hire.
Note that some industries are harder to hire for than others. If you choose, for example, to open a business that does email marketing, you’ll find it very difficult to hire into this industry no matter what the position. Most technical people understand spam and realize they don’t want their resume to contain anything to do with a ‘spam related’ business.
Don’t ignore the value of social media
Social media offers a brand new marketing approach. Social media now offers grass roots marketing team that you have at your disposal. For example, if you can get your business placed onto certain people’s Facebook or Twitter feeds, this can drive lots of people to your business.
How will this undermine your business? If you fail to understand the power of social media either by ignoring it or by assuming that it is pointless, you have deluded yourself and this immediately undermines your business. Every marketing technique is appropriate and should be exploited to its fullest. Interactive marketing is even better. If you hire people to actively scout Twitter and Facebook, they can write comments that counter any negative feedback. By hiring a team of people to manage all social media outlets, they can head off problems before they even start. By having an active team countering Twitter or Facebook posts, it shows your business is proactive and willing to counteract any negative postings by disgruntled customers.
Don’t ignore the power of mobile marketing
Smartphones are now ubiquitous. Yet, this technology as a marketing platform is still in its infancy. While in this infancy, you can latch onto this technology early and get an edge over your competition. Companies that choose to embrace mobile marketing now will have the upper hand when marketing on these devices becomes commonplace in the future (and when email is ultimately dead).
How will this undermine your business? If you fail to understand that mobile marketing is the future, you will also fail to understand how quickly you can reach out to your customers with the immediacy of a phone call. Email, for example, is a slow mechanism by nature. It can take anywhere between 5 minutes and several days for people to read your email. With push notifications, your marketing is given to the user instantaneously. They can then go find out what the hubbub is all about within seconds. Nearly every push notification is read immediately. Emails take far far longer and are prone to spam blockers, image blockers and link blockers. Mobile marketing, at least today, is under no such blocking constraints. If you take advantage early, you can add a significant advantage to marketing for your business.
To take maximum advantage, however, it must be with a solid and useful app. An app you can direct the push notification to and give critical information. If you’re a retail business, for example, offering coupon discounts for purchases can be the difference between a purchase and not, such as 20% off of a product. Discounts are always a good idea when done regularly, but infrequently.
Mobile marketing needs to be relevant, targeted and location based. You need to know exactly what this customer’s interests are and provide them with spot on marketing that gives them exactly what they need when they need it. For location based marketing, if they are close to one of your stores, you should immediately send a push notification to notify them of any special offers located with that store.
Don’t change upper management every year
Or.. even every other year. This is can be a hard one to actually accomplish depending on lots of factors and it can cause severe morale problems.
How will this undermine your business? Whether it’s through a firing, through so-called ‘voluntary’ severance (aka The Velvet Hammer), people quitting, demotions, promotions or lateral moves, frequent or regular departures in the upper management team creates more questions than answers for employees and, if a public company, stockholders. Stability in the upper management team (at least for 4-5 years at a time) says volumes about loyalty, stability and allows employees to recognize the upper management. Changing this team frequently says something is wrong internally. Not only do employees begin questioning what’s going on, these changes plant seeds that “maybe I need to seek employment elsewhere”. Operating a musical chair management team will undermine your ability to operate your business. It takes at least 6 months for any new hire to get his feet in a position. Changing critical management positions often means the person in the position never has time to get an understanding of what they need to get done. Worse, just about the time they are about to get something done, they’re being seen to the door.
You can’t operate your business with a constant stream of new people in critical management positions. If you aren’t absolutely sure the person is the right person, don’t hire them. It’s far better to leave the position vacant for just the right person than it is to fill it with a person you know won’t work out. Additionally, if you can’t ever find someone to fill the role to your satisfaction, perhaps you’re looking for answers in the wrong place. You might want to start by looking at yourself and your expectations of the role. If you can’t clearly define the expectations of that management role, don’t expect anyone you hire to magically gain this understanding and define it for you. That will never happen.
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