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By Krishna, July 29, 2007

The Peter Principle states that in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence. In other words, every employee gets promoted until they reach a level where they are unable to perform their duties well and hence cannot be promoted. A variant I have noticed on the Peter Principle is this: If you are sufficiently capable in certain activities, you will find yourself getting involved in other activities, voluntarily or involuntarily.

Suppose you are hired to do a particular job, maybe let’s say a programmer. If you do your job well on time, people will notice you and they will think that you are capable of greater things. It does not matter whether you are capable of those new things. The fact that you are good in something shows that there might be the potential for you to do more.

Showing capability draws the attention of both your peers and managers. And they start asking you to do things that are beyond what you initially signed up for. For example, your fellow programmers may ask you to help them with their coding problems. Your manager may ask you to help out with some of the management activities like planning and reporting.

This situation may also happen voluntarily. If you are sufficiently capable, you will find yourself finishing work faster than other people. Instead of sitting idle, you will start trying to find ways to contribute to the team or doing more work. Most capable people find it really difficult to pass their time doing nothing.

However it occurs, this situation poses a few management problems both for the capable employee as well as the manager:

1. Any additional activities done by the employee cannot usually be compensated in real-time by the manager, regardless of the benefits to the project or the organization. The actual reward may come much later in the form of a promotion or a good opportunity and this time lapse makes it difficult to establish the correlation between the reward and the prior work. In the meantime, the employee may feel short-changed.
2. The additional activities may overwhelm the employee and affect their normal work. When this happens, the employee stops taking responsibility for their primary work. Sometimes, this results in even basic tasks in their domain of expertise going on the backlog. The tolerance for additional tasks varies from one employee to another, but once it crosses the threshold, even one additional task beyond regular work is intolerable.
3. Extra voluntary contributions from an employee, like a new innovation, may sometimes be interesting, but not of use to the project or organization. Rejecting such contributions can cause them to lose motivation and not spend further time and effort in additional activities in the future, even though they still have the potential of doing something useful.

This issue is sometimes referred to as  the “over-qualified employee” problem. Most management books talk about hiring the best employees. But hiring a highly capable employee can backfire on you if they are hired to do something entirely below their capabilities. You will find them contributing beyond what they are hire for. At the same time, you cannot compensate them enough or help them focus on what they must do.

In some environments, such as product companies in a rapidly evolving market, this may work out well. In stable environments with limited product and service profit margins, this is not the case. Capable employees in such environments may find themselves like space travelers in the Stone Age. Managers also find it difficult to manage the expectations of such employees.

What should a manager do with such capable employees? The most important thing is to establish the right expectations between effort and reward. If there is no guarantee of rewards, then the employee should be asked to scale down their efforts or do it on their own interest or risk. Discourage activities that may at some time overwhelm the employee.

But before all that, hire the right person for the position.

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By Krishna, July 28, 2007

Users of web visitor analytical data from applications such as Google Analytics and other programs use them to understand more about their visitors. They use the information to better design their website layout and content. But Google Analytics also provides other pieces of interesting information.

Using some of the statistics (over the last 6 months) from the visitors of this blog (generally people interested in technology), I am going to formulate some questions and answer them. Here you go:

Question: What are most people interested in when they search?

Trouble-shooting. Of the top 25 keywords, 15 related to “problems”, “shutdowns” and other technical issues (Yahoo! Mail, Windows Vista, Office 2007). People come to search to find solutions to problems they are facing and usually these are pressing, immediate issues. Then come the news and people related searches (Dale Carnegie, Barack Obama, Jan Grzebski, etc.). Finally, there are people who are interested in various technical and management issues.

Question: How do people find out about and visit web sites?

No marks for guessing the top answer: Google. But the next common is direct visits, which means people typing in a URL or using a bookmark to return to the site. The most-likely pages to be bookmarked are the home page and pages that have more content – it is likely that people cannot read them immediately and therefore bookmark to visit them at a more convenient time. Trouble-shooting pages that have the potential of being useful in the near future are also prone to bookmarking.

Blog sites are likely to get many visitors through various uses of their feeds. For example, your feed (if it has the appropriate license) may be syndicated by another blog or it may be shared through a blog reading application like Google Reader. Blog search engines, directories and hosting sites also send traffic.

Question: Is there a difference in the quality of traffic sent by various sources?

I used to think so when I had less data in the form of visitors. Nowadays, I find that there is no difference from the major source of traffic in terms of order of magnitude. The only poor quality visitors are referrals from web sites that have a different subject matter. For example, posting a comment on a comic strip website may bring some visitors, but they are not going to wait around to read a technology blog.

Google visitors comes right in the middle in most visitor properties. This is not surprising since it accounts for the majority of the hits and influences the statistical averages. Webmasters would be well served to spend more time ensuring that their site appears favorably in Google search results, since the aggregate benefit is much greater than other sources of traffic.

Question: What city has the most people interested in technology?

According to my data, these are the cities with the most people interested in technology (in order of priority): London, San Francisco, New York, Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Sydney, Los Angeles and Singapore. It was surprising to me that London beat out San Francisco, but then I remembered the many recent trips my software friends in India have been taking to England. There is a lot happening there.

If you want country data, it reads: United States, India, United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Australia, Sweden, Singapore, Germany and Philippines. And as far as continents go, the Americas (primarily North America) lead the way, followed by Asia, Europe, Oceania and Africa.

Question: What browser should I design for?

Ah, that age-old question. Many years ago, I had been asked to design different versions of corporate web sites to cater for Netscape Navigator versions, Internet Explorer, text browsers (Lynx), WAP, etc. Now, the main browsers are definitely Internet Explorer and Firefox, but Safari and Opera also command a significant number of visitors, even if the percentage of visitors may be lower.

All 4 browsers are now available for Windows, so theoretically you should be able to test for all users without switching to a Mac. Designing for mobile devices is a different ball game, though Apple may be changing things there with a regular browser on the iPhone. A good simulation of what your site looks like on a mobile device is available at Mowser. (thanks to Manoj for that last link)

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By Krishna, July 25, 2007

Management is tough. It takes years of experience and learning to understanding how to manage people and resources well. While some managers get lucky and have an easy time, most managers find the going tough. Management is fundamentally a balancing act between several conflicting priorities and an assumption of risks and responsibilities over which one has limited control.

The most difficult thing that managers, particularly less experienced ones, find it difficult to digest is the phenomenon of bad things that happen despite their best efforts – bad things that they could have done nothing to prevent. When someone lands in trouble because they have been slacking off or neglecting something, they reconcile themselves to the fact because they understand that they are directly responsible for the failure.

That is not the case with incidents of pure bad luck. Sometimes, superstitious managers feel that there is some curse on them when that happens and they get terribly depressed and helpless. Here are a few incidents of Murphy’s Law in action:

1. Losing an important team member at a critical juncture: The person falls ill with some disease or meets with a road accident at the time that you least expect it to happen. One day, he or she is helping you day-dream about great possibilities and the next day, they are calling you from a hospital bed. Suddenly all your plans are not worth the paper they are printed on.
2. Getting hit by some unexpected technical glitch: You suddenly help Microsoft or Oracle discover that obscure bug in their system software in that important functionality that must work for your application to be useful. What is worse is that you think it is your fault and then spend hours chasing that non-existent programming error.
3. Being strung along by the ups and downs of business cycles: You suddenly get several customers in a week and cannot possibly get enough staff quickly enough. Or a large customer lands into a business crisis of their own and has to downsize. There is never a perfect staffing situation, even if you are the best resource allocation expert on the planet.

How does one cope with such situations? By definition, I am talking about unexpected situations, for which you didn’t plan. For example, if you did take into account the loss of every team member, then that particular situation does not apply. But even with your best risk management, there will be other cases that you did not consider and then found yourself totally dumbfounded when it happened.

The first thing as a manager is to remember that “stuff” happens. This has the unfortunate side effect of becoming a person who is not overly enthusiastic about anything good happening, because you are just waiting for the inevitable downside. The good thing about this pessimistic outlook is that you are not totally surprised by bad things happening. The older you get, the more likely you are to have this attitude towards life.

I think the people that really get hurt when bad stuff happens are the innocent and the idealist types. They naively believe that if they do the right thing, everything else will automatically fall into place and fit into their well-laid plans. When they get a dose of reality, it does not meet their perception of fairness and they just cannot accept it. Unfortunately for them, life is never fair.

The second step is to not panic. In many bad situations, there are always other options. Although those options are not necessarily perfect, they are usually much better than the worst case scenarios that you start building up in your brain during a crisis. What I have seen is that in many tough situations, being honest and transparent with the stakeholders gains you support and allows you to manage the situation with less stress.

Sharing your problems with people who can help is very important. A very counter-productive step at this juncture is to gripe about your problems to someone who cannot or will not help you. It only increases your frustration and feeling of helplessness. If no one can help you, talk to someone who can comfort you, like your spouse or best friend.

Finally, gain a sense of priorities. Most bad things in the business world are really nothing compared to the troubles faced by people in under-developed and developing countries. You are not starving or having to worry about being maimed, killed or imprisoned. Apart from the crisis, most of the things in the rest of your life are just fine. The few irritants today will disappear at some point in the future. Don’t get too stressed out!

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By Krishna, July 22, 2007

Everyone wants to be more productive and there are literally thousands of books and web pages to cater to them. In this article, I want to focus on technical people because they exhibit certain special behaviors that get in the way of being productive, even if they want to. Here are some productivity tips for them:

1. Stop trying to be an early adopter for every product: Technical people go gaga over every new application or consumer electronic product that comes out. They must get a hold of it, even if it means starving for the rest of the month. This is such a waste of time and money. Only 1-2 products truly succeed in any problem domain. Trying out all the possible products consumes enormous amounts of time without much return.
2. Learn to switch off electronic items: Switch off your TV and your computer. Stop picking up your phone. Most technical people find this impossible to do. One friend told me that the one thing he needed for survival (other than air and water) was an active Internet connection! But if you manage to turn off, suddenly you get this huge slab of free time which you can use to do all sorts of interesting things.
3. Focus on quality instead of quantity: Don’t try to learn 10 different languages or platforms at the same time. At a time, learn one really well and understand its nuances. Don’t try to swallow hundreds of feeds, articles and books. Instead, select the few that would be really useful. In any case, life is too short for you to consume everything. So be selective and make effective use of your time.
4. It is okay if you are not busy: Some technical folks treat busy work as a badge of honor. They actually love complaining that they have no time to do anything because it proves that they are doing something important and they are wanted. So much so that they have withdrawal symptoms anytime the work load comes down. Having free time is not something to be ashamed of. Use it to refresh your mind and body. Plan for future work by learning something new or advanced.
5. New technology is not necessarily more productive: Email and chat can be more time-consuming than phone calls. It takes less time to call someone and resolve a problem than exchange emails all days long. In development work, a newer technology may have some cool feature that saves some effort, but you also waste a lot of time learning how to do the regular mundane work in it. Choose technology for its utility, not its newness.

The addiction to being connected is something all technical people share. Many people don’t switch off because they are afraid of missing an urgent message. But the fact is that if someone sending an email really wanted to get an answer immediately, they would call you. If someone calling you really wanted to talk to you, they would leave a voice message. So most of the time, there is no reason to respond in real time. (This does not mean that you should be a jerk and not pick up the phone at all, just that sometimes you need to be able to get away from the need to be always available.)

Also imagine if you had an accident and were in a hospital bed unable to move. Would you care about calls or emails? You may be worried, but you cannot do anything about it. And your contacts would have to wait until you got better. Most things in life are not really as urgent as you think or as people would like to have you think.

And tell people about when you normally respond. If they expect you to be responding 24 hours a day, they will send emails or call you 24 hours a day. On the other hand, if they know that certain hours are off-limits, your volume of emails and calls will automatically go down. Unless of course, you want to be masochistic.

A final point: Reduce the need to repeat yourself. When 2 people ask you the same question, send the reply to all possible interested parties. Or post it on your website or blog. I have found the last technique quite useful. When people ask me something and I already have an article on it, I just send them the URL. That really saves a lot of time.

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By Krishna, July 21, 2007

I recently heard an audio tape of the book, “Coping with Difficult People” by Robert M. Bramson. This is one book that every manager should read. In fact, probably every person should read this book. If they have to interact with difficult people, then they will learn how to manage such behavior. And if they are themselves difficult people, they may recognize themselves and try to correct their behavior, but perhaps I am being a tad optimistic there.

The author identifies seven different types of difficult behavior:

1. Hostile-aggressive: These people use hostility as a means to get their agenda done. There are 3 variants of such people – the “Sherman Tank” who rolls over anyone in their path, the snipers who take potshots at people from behind a facade of humor and sarcasm, and finally the exploders who are normal most of the time, but erupt when they are threatened and frustrated.
2. Complainer: These people keep complaining all the time about silly matters that normal people wouldn’t pay attention to. They poison the environment and make it miserable for everyone. I had previously covered a particularly nasty type of complainer in a previous article, “The Martyr Complex“.
3. Clam: This type of person does not open their mouth even when asked direct questions. Normal people cannot bear silence in a conversation and hence the clam’s opponents are forced to end discussions without any resolution of outstanding problems. Clams make it impossible to establish trust and transparency in an organization.
4. Super-agreeable: They cannot say “No” to anyone. They will agree to whatever you say and then fail to deliver. Each time, they will find some excuse to explain their behavior and with their pleasant behavior, make it difficult for you to truly confront them.
5. Negativist: These are folks who keep throwing a wrench into the works. They oppose any initiative and exaggerate reasons for not doing something. They can destroy the growth of a company by opposing any change, regardless of the advantages.
6. Know-it-all: This category contains experts who think they are right and bully you with facts and figures. Their fanaticism for their point of view prevents them from seeing opposing arguments and addressing real concerns. Frequently, know-it-all “experts” contain just hot air and use the behavior to seem like experts, instead of actually knowing anything.
7. Indecisive: They cannot make a decision. They are victims of what is termed as “analysis paralysis” – they analyze everything to death and take forever (sometimes literally forever) to make a decision. When faced with a problem, such people can bring the company to a standstill while they fight with their inner demons.

Most people are not difficult. They may exhibit some difficult behavior from time to time, but it is not a pattern. In fact, the author mentions two possibilities for difficult behavior from non-difficult people. One is that a person may be genuinely blind to his or her faults and you just need to have an honest talk with them. The other case is where the behavior is the result of a negative interaction cycle, triggered by some incident.

With difficult people, fixing problems or talking to them does not help. The root causes of their behavior are deeper and sometimes impossible to change. So the only way to interact with such people is to understand and cope with the behavior. This also helps one from reacting counter-productively and worsening the situation.

The book contains really practical advice. In other books, you read advice that seems to have been written by someone cooking up theories in solitary confinement. Not this book. You really gain insight into what drives the behavior of difficult people. Remember that they have a rationale for doing what they do. Remove the fears that result in such behavior and prevent the reactions that would give an advantage to such behavior, and you can cope better.

A word about the audio format of the book. It uses different narrators to convey a sense of different real-life situations. The example interactions are intriguing and at times, hilarious. I liked the calm, analytical voice of the author as he goes about explaining the behaviors and the techniques for coping with them.

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By Krishna, July 18, 2007

The recent acquisition of FeedBurner and the subsequent quick integration with Blogger was a superb move by Google. Recently, Google has made many integration efforts between various applications and many of them have been really beneficial to both web authors and end users.

A few examples from Blogger itself:

1. Integration with Google Custom Search: With no coding, you can now add a custom search widget for your blog. You can see an example to the right of this post. This is much easier to do than trying to set up a Google Custom Search separately and then include it in the Blogger template.
2. Search Engine Optimization: Google has included a robots.txt file that now excludes the pages of the various blog categories. This avoids the need for bloggers to do more house-keeping by using sitemaps in tools like Google Webmaster Central. I expect that Google will now start to exclude archive pages and thus avoid duplicate content search result issues. Strictly speaking, this integrates with all search engines supporting robots.txt, not just Google.
3. Integration with Picasa Web Albums: The images in Blogger posts are now stored in Picasa Web Albums. This has the potential of allowing tools like Windows Live Writer to post images to Blogger, and also allow blog authors to understand how much space they have left to upload images.

Other integrations I liked were the email capability in Google Reader, saving of Google Talk chats in Gmail, Orkut message alerts in Google Talk, Google Maps in Google Search results, etc.

Here are some other possible Google product integrations that would add value and reduce duplication:

1. FeedBurner statistics and Google Analytics: While FeedBurner does have the functionality of serving feeds, its statistical component could be integrated into Google Analytics so that webmasters could see the information in one place.
2. Blogger and Google Page Creator: Although blogs can exist as web sites in their own right, sometimes there is the need for creating additional content that exist as static or dynamic web pages. WordPress already allows one to create separate web pages.
3. Gmail and Google Reader: Many email clients (including Outlook and Thunderbird) already allow one to read blogs. Why not Gmail? Combining it with Reader will make it easier for users and result in a killer application. Gmail has a very rudimentary blog reader – it should be replaced by Google Reader.

An aspect of integration that is not quite getting the press that it deserves is the fact that Google is able to make its flagship Search product much better. The concept of PageRank basically boils down to what content is rated high by persons of authority (primarily web authors) on the web. But web authors are only a very small minority and not even representative of Internet users who are consumers of web search. Content should be really be rated by how users behave when they see search results and choose what they believe is relevant.

The data from Google Reader, Google Analytics and FeedBurner provide valuable information in this regard that keeps Google quite ahead of competitors. These products allow Google to understand what content users find valuable. Spammers may try to game the system, but this does not distract from the fundamental benefits obtained through this integration.

A couple of times, I have stated on this blog that Google is way ahead of competitors on search. I didn’t provide any references, but that is what the data shows. My Analytics statistics show that Google currently brings 75% of the traffic to this site – a share that has been growing. Yahoo! is at 1% and Live and Ask are not even in the picture.

Internet users are continuing in increasing numbers to express their confidence in Google results. And all signs indicate that Google Search will be much more relevant than ever before, consolidating Google’s hold on the market. Google is doing this not just through algorithmic competence or infrastructure capability, but also through increasing understanding of real end user behavior. And that is a great winning combination.

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By Krishna, July 15, 2007

Nobody wants failure, but success brings its own challenges and problems. I don’t know if you have experienced this, but every time you cross a new milestone, there is some other new issue waiting to be resolved. It is not that you don’t want to succeed or you would be happier being a failure. It is simply that any success brings you into a different situation with its own issues.

Business situations are like that. If your company is not doing well, then you are constantly worried about paying the bills, keeping employees onboard and getting more funding to keep afloat. But if you are growing, then the previous problems go away, but are replaced by new issues. You are happy that you don’t have to worry about money, but you are still fighting with problems.

I have heard these situations referred to as “high-class problems”. The reason why they are called so is that they only occur when you have encountered some success and taken care of problems mostly associated with achieving that success. And usually these problems fall under the “we will cross that bridge when we get there” category.

Here are some examples of high-class problems when a business becomes “too” successful:

• Needing more people than you are actually able to hire.
• Needing more servers and hardware than you are able to buy or deploy quickly enough.
• Too many users with more special requirements than you have the ability to address.
• Conflicts between newly-joined and older employees about strategy, direction and tactics.
• Insufficient processes to handle new needs.

Why do people and businesses land in such situations?

1. They don’t have time to think about these problems: When a business is struggling, the owners are anxious about how they will release the product or make their next sale. The most important thing at this moment is working hard to make things happen. Even if people think about some issues, they are usually analyzed in the most elementary way.
2. They don’t think they will succeed: At times, success seems like a pipe dream. You have done your best and worked really hard, but nothing seems to happen. Then although sales starts picking up, you don’t really believe it for a long time until you finally realize that the success is here to stay. Most people are internally very pessimistic and invariably believe in Murphy’s Law.
3. Success hits them out of the blue: Sometimes a business is on a slow growth strategy when suddenly they hit a really good prospect. Sales may double or triple and the organization is totally unprepared to handle the situation on any front.

Some of these problems can be fixed easily enough if you pay attention to them. In fact, the very fact that a business is successful allows you to spend money to solve some of these issues. Problems around human resource interaction and management are more tricky, and they need more time and thought. Using money to resolve a time allocation problem and vice versa can be harmful in these cases.

Other problems can be very difficult to cope with. For example, fulfilling a very large sales order may be impossible for the company and you may lose a valuable customer and a great opportunity to grow the business. Some issues do not manifest themselves immediately. Problems with processes are usually realized after something bad happens.

Can one be prepared for such situations? Theoretically, of course, you can. Try to predict the possible success scenarios and plan to handle them. Unless something extraordinary happens, you should be well placed.

Practically, most people find it difficult. Planning for success takes a lot of vision and optimism. It is very easy to get frustrated and dragged down by the inevitable troughs and setbacks in business. You don’t want to tempt fate by thinking of success. Try asking a student how they plan to reduce their taxes when they get a job and you will probably get the blankest stare you have ever encountered.

The other problem is that success changes some people to raving optimists. At this point, success has spoiled them so much that they think they can handle all the new problems using old techniques and it just doesn’t work. When you are successful, you cannot afford to rest on your laurels. The new situation demands new thinking and you will have to work just as hard as, if not more than, you did before.

A final point: Businesses or people who have not experienced the success may find the problems of the successful ironic and funny. They aren’t, actually. If left unresolved, the problems during success have a way of destroying what has already been created. For those who encounter them, they are definitely not less serious than the problems before success.

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By Krishna, July 14, 2007

There are a lot of useful books and articles on business management. But many of them have a particular problem: The advice works only in a startup or a non-startup, but not both. Unfortunately, many articles do not clearly explain the context under which the advice is applicable. This has the result of confusing readers, who then go about implementing wrong policies in their organizations.

Every company or market goes through 3 distinct phases: rising, stable and declining. The declining company is not of interest in this article. So let us focus on the rising company (or startup situation) and the stable company (or non-startup situation).

Here are some fundamental differences between a startup situation versus a non-startup situation

1. A startup is about creation: doing something new. A non-startup is about sustaining: maintaining something already created (in addition to any creation work).
2. A startup has nothing to lose. A non-startup has a lot to lose.
3. A startup dies by not making decisions. A non-startup can die by making a wrong decision. Sometimes, the best thing for a non-startup is to do nothing.
4. Every second and every dollar counts for a startup. A non-startup can afford to accept imperfection and wasted time and money.
5. Lack of passion in a startup can lead to delayed product launches. Passion in a non-startup can result in costly mistakes and cleanup.
6. You need people with intelligence and ingenuity in a startup. You need people with the ability to follow processes in a non-startup.

Consider an example of the startup vs. non-startup mentality from real life, namely, youth vs. old age. When you are younger, you can take more risks in life because time is on your side. But as you grow older, you start accumulating things and it is much more difficult to make a clean break. Take a look at the following questions:

1. How much of your wealth are you willing to lose in a disaster? Is it 10%, 25%, 50% or even 100%? When younger, you have more time and opportunity to recreate the wealth you have lost. As you get older, your tolerance limit keeps going down.
2. How willing are you to relocate to another job or city? Yes, the grass is always greener on the other side. How much greener does it have to be for you to start grazing there?
3. How difficult is to say you were wrong about a deeply held belief, related to religion, culture or politics? You find the older people get, the more conservative they become because saying you were wrong has a greater cost in social and professional acceptance. Young Turks are not old.

These answers vary from person to person. That is why you have so many different opinions about anything, because each person has a different ratio of startup versus non-startup mentality. The more a person wants to create, the higher the startup mentality. The opposite is true if the person has already created and seeks to maintain.

When you come to business management recommendations, they follow the same pattern. Recommendations that focus on leadership and innovation are meant to increase risk and are ideal for startups. Recommendations that involve management of people, projects and processes are meant to reduce risk and are ideal for stable organizations.

Depending on your personal outlook, you may feel that the startup mentality is better or worse than the non-startup mentality. It may feel good to be the dynamic, risk-taking adventurer or you may like to be the mature, option-weighing strategist. But logically speaking, the choice has been already made for you.

Action is the default choice when you or your company has nothing to lose. Planning is the default choice when you have a lot to protect or maintain. Changing the default choice is an emotional choice that has no foundation in logic.

For example, a startup that spends months implementing internal processes that guarantee excellent quality code is foolish, because it is not creating anything of value that would bring revenue. A stable company that ignores internal processes to speed up work will drown in customer complaints and lower their market share.

This sounds depressingly like a Greek tragedy, where people don’t have any control over what they should do. But I think these are just guidelines for better management and have room for initiative. Here is how I interpret it. Startups grow by doing more and taking on greater risk. Non-startups grow by doing better and reducing risk. In each situation, there are many things people can do that can manage the company’s destiny.

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By Krishna, July 10, 2007

Steve McConnell, the author of the programming Bible, “Code Complete“, has a blog called “10x Software Development“. I am a huge fan of McConnell and actually buy his books to use as reference material, instead of my usual method of borrowing them from a library. His blog is pretty good and I would encourage you to subscribe to it, except that it has the irritating flaw of not offering a full RSS feed.

So if you want to read his article, you have to click through to the blog website. The only advantage of subscribing to his blog is to know when he has posted a new article. McConnell is not the only one to do this – others include the web design site A List Apart, the New York Times technology Pogue’s Posts site and Paul Graham. Also, people like Jakob Nielsen do not even seem to believe in blogs or feeds; instead, Nielsen loves email newsletters.

I don’t understand this for several reasons:

1. First of all, some of these sites do not seem to have any tangible benefit for the author by forcing you to visit the website to read the article. As far as I could see, there didn’t seem to be any ads on McConnell’s and Graham’s sites.
2. A typical user who reads blogs subscribes to many blogs. It is very tiresome to keep switching from the blog reading software to separate browser windows or tabs to read the articles. This increases the probability of losing readers, especially during inevitable periods of poor quality posts.
3. The number of feed subscribers is a small minority of the total readers of a blog. So offering full subscription does not hurt page views or visitor count at all. At the same time, it offers a great benefit to people who like your content.
4. Feed subscribers are more tech-savvy. They may have blogs themselves and link to you, share your post or email it to others. For example, Google Reader offers the ability to email a post directly from within the application. When there is no full feed, it takes more effort to do the same thing and many people do not bother.
5. Feed subscribers are more likely to participate in the conversation. If you have a good post, they will come to your website and post comments, or email you. That increases the value of your blog.
6. There are many ways of getting people to visit your website even if you offer full feeds. You can provide links to similar articles in the past. You can also have ads in your feeds if your intention is to make money. You can blog about your work or company if it brings value to your audience.
7. Finally, offering only partial feeds affects search results in blog search engines like Google Blogsearch, Ask and Technorati. Don’t believe me? Search for the heading of the blog – you will find it. Search for some words within the content – the post will be missing.

I could get mad and unsubscribe from these blogs. But that is rash – many of the articles on these sites are really high-quality and I wouldn’t want to miss them. But I sincerely wish that they would make it easier. Turning off full feeds just seems like a really unnecessary thing to do.

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By Krishna, July 8, 2007

In a previous post on making your hobby count, I mentioned that when you start making money, the focus shifts from you to your customers. There are 2 logical objections to a statement like that:

Objection 1: When you start earning money for something, isn’t it about you at that point?

It is definitely true that you are benefiting from a commercial activity. But unless you produce something that others need, there will be no money flowing in. Your ideas about your product are incidental to its success or failure – the only thing that matters is whether your customers like it.

Now, there are persons and companies (like Steve Jobs and Apple) whose idea of a product closely matches with that of their customers. But that need not be the case. And if there is a conflict between your idea and what customers expect, you have to be willing to change your idea, not expect the customers to change their wants or needs.

That is why incremental product design works. You identify a customer need. You build something. Customers start using it and/or provide feedback. If you are wise, you will modify the application to suit their needs. The cycle of listening to customer feedback and development continues and your product gains momentum in the market place.

This concept is true of every job, even if you are not in product design. If you are getting paid, the money comes from the customers of your company or organization. Although the company’s owners pay the salaries, it really comes from your customers. If your job does not do anything to help your customers, it is actually contributing to reducing the potential revenues for your company and indirectly affecting what you could be paid.

For example, a recruiter is not really hiring a resource to meet a project manager’s needs; he is hiring the best resource that can make a product better and more attractive to customers. A secretary at the front desk is not there simply to take calls or receive visitors; she can be an ambassador of the company to create a positive influence on potential employees, customers and partners.

If a company’s executives, managers and employees are not customer-oriented, that company will die. No questions about that. It does not matter how big the company is or how brilliant its people are. If customers do not want what the company produces, die it must. That is market reality.

Objection 2: If you are not earning money for something, does it mean that you are not producing any value for others?

Doing free work does not mean you are not producing any value. In fact, open source is all about producing value and giving it away for free. But here is the thing: When you do something for free, it is not necessary to produce anything that someone else values.

You can work on whatever you want. You can spend as much time as you want. You can do 99% of the work and quit without producing anything. You can produce something that solves a problem in a totally inefficient manner. You can even decide to re-create something that has already been done by someone else, just because it is fun.

Since nobody is paying the bills, you have no obligation to anyone. You can do anything you want, within reason and social/legal norms.

Examples abound. People spend a lot of time, effort and money collecting things from stamps to baseball cards. Although sometimes, these activities can be profitable, most of the time they aren’t and people don’t do it for the money anyway. Many people spend a lot of time playing sports and games. Although playing sports is good for health, the reason most people do it is for enjoyment, not for the health benefits.

Why this concept matters?

• Many creative people find it difficult to work at a day job because many of their ideas are frequently shot down by customers. My opinion: It doesn’t matter. You have a duty to provide the best ideas you can to your customers and argue for them passionately, but ultimately it is the customer’s decision. It is their money on the line and they have to make the decision that they are most comfortable with. Whether the customer’s decision is ultimately right or wrong (based on the market reaction) is simply irrelevant.
• Once again, your boss does not pay your salary. Your customers do. Your obligation, whatever your role in the organization, is to meet the needs of your customers. Structure the way you work to provide maximum value to your customers.
• When you do something that you are not getting paid for, other people’s opinions do not matter. You can always listen to people’s suggestions and what they do in a similar situation. But such input should be non-binding and only followed if it makes sense for you. This frees you to do what your heart wants and what your mind feels is right. It avoids unnecessary pressure to meet someone’s expectations of what you should do. This is not just for hobby projects, but for any activity you do.
• Do you keep worrying about what other people will think about your actions? Are they paying you? If not, quit caring about them now.