Stormy's Corner

Fun with branding

Brand tags shows you a company logo and asks you "what's the first word or phrase that comes to mind?" Then you get to see what other people said. I saw Pepsi and said "not coke" - turns out "coke" was the most common response. I hope the Pepsi brand people see that! For Pizza Hut, I said greasy - it  was the second most common response. (Pizza was first.)

It was kind of fun if you have some time to kill: brand tags. I wanted to put in our company name but I'm guessing not enough people have heard of it yet for it to be meaningful.

Can you guess what the brand at the left was?

(Pabst Blue Ribbon.)

Doing business from a payphone

  IMG_2635 
  Originally uploaded by Storming

This is a picture of me negotiating a contract with a Global 2000 company and several attorneys over a pay phone.

Friday I had it all figured out. I had a five minute meeting in our home town at 8:00, then I'd drop the baby off at day care (20 minute drive), and then do my conference call in the car on my way to the 7 year old's school (another 20 minute drive) where I was helping out with the jogathon. The problem? I left my cell phone at home!

If you are ever looking for pay phones, try looking for liquor stores and convenience stores. And hope you are calling a 1-800 number because they cost 25 cents a minute!

Why $9.95 really works

From Scientific American, Why Things Cost $19.95:

if we see a $20 toaster, we might wonder whether it is worth $19 or $18 or $21; we are thinking in round numbers. But if the starting point is $19.95, the mental measuring stick would look different. We might still think it is wrongly priced, but in our minds we are thinking about nickels and dimes instead of dollars, so a fair comeback might be $19.75 or $19.50.

Would you do it again for free? My LinuxConf Australia keynote

A number of people have asked about my "Would you do it again for free?" presentation. It's a talk about why open source developers started working on open source software and how money and companies have changed that. 

One of the things about the open source community that continues to baffle those non-open source people is, "why do you do it?" Open source developers work on open source software for a number of reasons from scratching an itch to gaining a reputation to building a resume to contributing to a good cause.  The interesting problem comes when money enters into the equation. Research shows that when someone works on something for free (for internal rewards) if you start paying them you replace those internal rewards. Then if you stop paying them, they will stop working on it. Does that hold true for open source software?  Are commercial companies killing open source by paying people to work on it?

You can find the talk in ogg format. (Note the file is about 100MB!) You can also get the audio and the slides. If you know how to convert from ogg to something I can embed in a blog post, please let me know!

I gave this talk again at SCALE and there I added more of "here's why developers work on open source software and here's what they can do to help companies work with them effectively."

As an FYI, I normally post about open source topics on my OpenLogic blog.

Let people talk about you.

Let people talk about you. It's free advertising.

I saw some cool art in the French Quarter yesterday. I would have posted a picture so that you could see it and maybe decide to buy it. But the artist wouldn't let me take a picture of her art.

Did she think I could copy it? Did she think I could get a good enough picture to frame the picture instead of buying the painting?

Ban laptops and cell phones at meetings

I've been known to ban all laptops and cell phones in meetings. I understand that sometimes people use them to take notes or look things up - but most often I find people use them to concentrate on something else other than the meeting. This is bad because:

• If you are sitting there obviously not participating, it makes the other people in the meeting feel like you don't care.
• If someone actually has a question for you, the meeting has to stop while someone catches you up. Then the meeting takes much longer.
• Since you were at the meeting, everyone thinks you agreed to what was discussed but not only do you not necessarily agree, you might not even know what's going on.
• You were invited to the meeting because the organizer thought you had something to contribute to the discussion and you are not giving 100% thought to the meeting.

Meetings without electronics are much more productive, more fun and shorter! So I was happy to see this article today, Companies go 'topless' at meetings.

Many companies are banning electronics during meetings after getting increasing complaints of sidetracked workers slowing down productivity, the Los Angeles Times reported Monday.

"Laptops, Blackberries, Sidekicks, iPhones and the like keep people from being fully present. Aside from just being rude, partial attention generally leads to partial results," said Todd Wilkens of Adaptive Path, a San Francisco design firm

I have my doubts about how wide spread it is, but I wholly endorse it.

I should point out that I'm one of the worst - if I have my laptop at a meeting there's a very good chance I'll end up not listening to at least part of the meeting while I answer an email or check some fact online. You simply cannot read and listen at the same time.

So here's to no laptops and no cell phones at meetings!

Humans were not made to work in groups of a 1000

I read an interesting essay by Paul Graham today, You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss. Paul theorizes that humans are meant to work in groups of 8-20. So when you put more than that in an organization, you start to lose freedom in order to keep organization.

A group of 10 managers is not merely a group of 10 people working together in the usual way.  It's really a group of groups.  Which means for a group of 10 managers to work together as if they were simply a group of 10 individuals, the group working for each manager would have to work as if they were a single person—the workers and manager would each share only one person's worth of freedom between them.

He then goes on to explain that working for a large organization is like eating junk food.

The average MIT graduate wants to work at Google or Microsoft, because it's a recognized brand, it's safe, and they'll get paid a good salary right away.  It's the job equivalent of the pizza they had for lunch.  The drawbacks will only become apparent later, and then only in a vague sense of malaise.

Anyone who has watched a big company struggle to make a decision, or been part of that struggle!, will find themselves nodding at some point. Something to think about.

Everything is getting cheaper ... will it all be free?

Things are getting cheaper.  From food to clothes to housing.  If you don't agree (and most people don't initially) - I'd argue that you aren't comparing apples to apples.  Food in the grocery store is cheaper now than it was 20 years ago.  You spend more on food now than 20 years ago because you probably eat out more, not because it's more expensive.  (And don't forget to take into account inflation.  A $1 20 years ago is more than a $1 now.)

Kevin Kelly has an excellent article on how things are getting cheaper, why, what it means and how it affects technology and business.  He explains how some some things are getting cheaper (like copper) and some things are becoming free because you pay for others (Rynair airfare is cheap because you pay for food, luggage, etc).  And lots more.  It's an excellent article if you've ever wondered why things are getting cheaper and how some things can just be free.   Here it is: Technology Wants to be Free.

9 Things Amazon Needs to do to Make Book Readers' Lives Perfect

Here are the top nine things that Amazon could do to expand their business model and make book readers' lives perfect.

1. Electronic copies of the books in your library. One of the things that's keeping me from buying a Kindle is the fact that I have two shelves of books that I haven't read yet. If I bought a Kindle, I would want to read those books on my Kindle. Amazon should allow Kindle users to scan all their books ISBN numbers and get an electronic copy of the book in their Kindle library. Unfortunately, there's no information in the barcode that uniquely identifies that book, so it would be too easy for people to scan their library and all their friends' libraries, somewhat like they do with music CDs today. An alternative would be to have kiosks where you could take your books, they would note which ones you had, give you electronic copies in your Kindle and stamp the inside of the book noting that it had been electronic copied once.
   
2. Acquire Paperbackswap. I hate to mention this one because I love Paperbackswap just the way it is. However, it is the one non-Amazon place where I do significant book related things. I used to sell all my used books on Amazon but now I use Paperbackswap almost exclusively. Why? Because selling used books on Amazon is not easy. Just telling the buyer that I shipped the books takes six clicks plus typing a short message, and that's if I know where to go.
   
3. Automatic postage. If Amazon doesn't acquire Paperbackswap, they should at least figure out how to do postage for used books as well as Paperbackswap.  When I sell a book on Paperbackswap they use the fact that they know how much the book weighs, where's it going and what my address is to print out a very nice label that includes postage! It takes two clicks and all I have to do is tape the label to the envelope. With Amazon I have to print their shipping label (multiple clicks since it's not direct linked from the email notification), weigh the book, figure out postage, tape on the buyer's address, put my address sticker on and then put real stamps on. Real stamps on any book weighing over 13 ounces means I can't drop the book in the mailbox but now I have to go to my local post office, walk inside and hand it to a post office employee. If Paperbackswap can do it, Amazon should be able to!
4. Manage my own data. Amazon has a lot of data about my books. They have ratings, reviews, books I own, books I've looked at, etc. I'd love to be able to look at those lists, edit them, export them, save them, and so on. Because Amazon doesn't allow me to do this, I double enter a lot of information into LibraryThing. What a pain! I'd love to spend that time on Amazon.
5. Publish my data easily. I'd like to keep a recently read list on my blog with my ratings and reviews. Ideally with my associate-id embedded in it. Right now I have to create a widget and manually enter each book. (After I enter my rating and review into Amazon central.) There's no way to sort chronologically and it adds new books to the end, so if I want to show the most recently read books at the top I have to manually drag the book up the list a few steps at a time. It's too much of a pain so the widget at the right is now randomly sorted - not exactly the information I wanted to share but as close as I could (somewhat) easily provide.
   
6. Spell checking in the search box! When I use Google search, I know if I misspell a word or don't know an author's name, it will say "Did you really mean ..." and in one click I can fix it. In Amazon it just doesn't find what you are looking for. Surely they can figure out that when I type "lois mcmaster bujould" I really meant "lois mcmaster bujold." Google figured it out.  Amazon told me "Your search "lois mcmaster bujould" did not match any products." The problem for Amazon (and me) is that if you use Google, Amazon is not even in the top 5 results. They are in the business of connecting customers to books and they are losing business.
   
7. Navigation. In addition to their website being visually cluttered, I find it really hard to find things like: "who just bought that book they said I sold?" and "when is my next shipment of diapers coming?" I can find those now but I had to learn where to look - it wasn't intuitive.
8. Related books. Amazon does a really good job of pointing me at similar books that I might also enjoy. However, if I'm looking at a book in a series, if the book itself isn't numbered, the only way I've found to figure out which book is first is to either compare all the published dates (assuming they went in order) or look for a user generated Listmania that lists them in order. Either Amazon needs to make those lists easier to find or they need to provide the data themselves. That would make it easier for customers to buy the next book in the series.
9. User-weighted recommendations. I love Amazon's recommendation feature - I use it a lot to find books that I really enjoy. It would be even better if I could remove or change the weighting of some topics. Once I've looked for barbecue and smoking books for Frank for Christmas, I'm done with that topic. Unless he really enjoys them and asks for more, I'm never going to look at cooking books again. Now I have to manually tell Amazon that I'm not interested in cooking books - again and again for each cooking book they recommend to me.

I like Amazon. I love books and they make it easy for me to find and buy books I enjoy. If they did all the things on this list, not only would I love them more, but their business would get even better!

Book Review: The Company

If you ever worked for or with a big company, you'll find this book Company hilarious.  Things like these will actually make you laugh:

• Endless voicemail forwards: "This is Greg Smith, Gretchen, can you please forward this to my staff.  <beep> This is Mike Jones, Mary, can you please forward this to my direct reports. <beep> This is ..."
• Nobody really knows what the company does or wants to have to explain it to someone else.
• All your "customers" are internal customers.  (I remember a big campaign ... nobody was allowed to call a company team a customer even though we made tools for other teams.)

Company is a funny book and a fast read.  Good entertainment.

Newspapers with agendas: Would you rather Google or Amazon bought the New York Times?

I read an opinion piece yesterday that speculated that Google should buy the New York Times.  My first thought was outrage that a newspaper would have an agenda.  My second thought was wow, I'm naive, newspapers are businesses and businesses can be companies and companies can be bought.  (Strangely enough though a company can't own a newspaper and a television station in the same market.)  My third thought was would it be cool if Google owned the New York Times, what could they do?  My fourth thought was why not Amazon?

Google and Amazon may be in different businesses but there's a lot of overlap.

	Amazon	Google
Why you use them	buy books, store data	look for information
Looking in books	look inside books you are interested in	search inside books for information that you are looking for
Search	search for books that have information or stories you want	search for information
Publishing	publishes author's blogs pushes news content and books to Kindle shows indexes and chapters	serves up all sorts of content, mostly summarized publishes your documents and email
User data	allows you store your own data and search it (S3 storage business) stores your ratings, reviews and wish lists	allows you to search your data that you've stored stored on the web or on your computer stores your email, contacts, and documents
How they make money	makes money from selling things (like books) and content (like newspaper feeds)	makes money from selling things (like books) and content (like newspaper feeds)
How they allow users to make money	gives referral fees for book sales	gives ad money for selling ads on user content pages

So what would owning the New York Times buy them?  They'd be buying a brand.  People respect the New York Times and trust the news it brings them (some people trust it more than others) - it also has a dedicated readership, so they'd be buying readers.  So they'd buy brand, trust, influence and readers. 

What would Amazon do with that?  What would Google do with that?  The scary thing they could do is influence the news and therefore what we know, think and believe, but they already do that.  Getting past that, what cool new things could a Google or Amazon do if they owned the New York Times?  Both could do cool things with old content. Speaking of which, somebody should put all the New York Times photos on Flickr like the Library of Congress photos.  That would be cool.  I think Google would be more likely to do something like that than Amazon. 

What else could they do with it?  They both could help me find news stories I'm interested in but Google already does that and I have my own cool ways of doing that (primarily del.icio.us.)  I keep getting back to seeing Amazon as a content seller so they'd just be investing in the content they sell (not a business they are in) whereas Google is an information finder so they'd have more information for you to find but I feel like I'm missing something bigger. 

There's an a-hah, big opportunity moment waiting for the person that sees it ...

Trash in our oceans the size of Texas

I don't suppose it died because it's stomach was full of trash or anything...,
originally uploaded by zooromancer.

Did you know that there are islands of floating trash in the Pacific Ocean that are bigger than the state of Texas?  There are.

Did you know that birds in Hawaii and the North Sea are routinely found with over a pound of garbage in their stomaches?  There are and it kills them.

The solution to this problem is given as reuse, recycle.  While I think reuse and recycling are important, I think that's trying to put a band aid on the problem.  We need to invest in figuring out what to do with our trash.  When you throw a plastic bag in the trash, you should feel confident that the right thing is done with it and it doesn't end up as litter in the ocean.  (Right now you should not feel confident of that!)  We need better garbage disposal, better laws and regulations around garbage and ultimately better technology that can create biodegradable waste instead of the plastics we currently use.

So do your part: reuse, recycle, vote and invest in the right technologies.

Netflix or Amazon.com

Yesterday I wrote that Blockbuster has lost to Netflix.  Today I think the new battle to watch will be Amazon.com Unbox versus Netflix.  They both have downloadable movies and tv shows that you can watch on your computer.  Right now Amazon has the better solution because it has a much better selection of movies.  Amazon lets you "rent" movies or TV shows for $.99-$1.99 and you can watch them for 30 days.   You can also buy them so that you can watch them whenever you want.  Netflix program is similar but the movie selection isn't nearly as good - mostly old titles.  The main advantage to the Netflix program is that if you are already a Netflix customer, you don't need to pay anything for the service.

Watch any movie, anytime you want where ever you are.  (As long as you have a computer - which for people like me is all the time.)

Blockbuster loses to Netflix

It looks like Blockbuster is finally losing to Netflix. Based on my personal experience I would have predicted this a long time ago - I've been a happy Netflix customer for 5 years now and I haven't been to Blockbuster in at least 5 years.  Three reasons I think Netflix rules over Blockbuster:

• No late fees.  It wasn't convenient for me to return my movies to Blockbuster as it was out of my regular way so I always paid a day or two of late fees.
• Convenience.  Movies just show up in my mailbox with Netflix and they come with a return envelope with postage already attached.  I just drop it in the mailbox the morning after I watch it.  I always have a good movie or two at home to watch.
• Ratings.  I can shop for movies on Netflix and see the ratings so I know if they are good or not.  At the Blockbuster store I have to guess if the movie is good or not.  (I have the same problem with bookstores now - I have to look up every book on Amazon.com on my phone to make sure it's good before I buy it.  And the I see that it's cheaper on Amazon ...)

And just to make the problem worse ... movies aren't like books - I don't need to see them and hold them and read the back to know if I'll really like them or not.  (Although even with books, I find that I'm more and more comfortable with Amazon.com.)

Never forget the diapers (or toilet paper) again!

I signed up for Amazon Subscriptions a couple of days ago and today we got our first shipment - a big box of diapers and a big box of toilet paper delivered free to the door.  Free shipping, 15% off and they will send us diapers on a regular schedule!  I signed up for diapers once a month and toilet paper every three months (they have all of the non-spoilable grocery type stuff available) - their website and email reminders make it really easy to change how often you want to get things, add a shipment or skip a shipment whenever you need to.  You get the 15% off and free shipping every time. Hopefully once I get it set up we'll never have to think about diapers again ... except when we are changing a particularly stinky one that is!  Now that's my kind of shopping.

Thanks to ParentHacks for telling me about Amazon Subscribe & Save.

Selling used books online

I love books so when I stumbled across a blog post about creating your own online used bookstore, I read it and then googled some more and then read some more.  Supposedly there are people that scout for books at estate sales, thrift stores and used bookstores and then sell those books online.  Sounds kind of fun.  Spend all day looking at books, find treasures and sell them.

What I can't figure out is how they make much money.  Let's assume you want to make $50K/yr.  You'd have to make $2K/wk which means you'd have to sell 20 books a week at $100 profit (how many of those can there be??) or 200 books at $10 profit (still not a lot) or 400 books at $5 profit (most likely.)  That means you'd have to find 400 books/week!! 

How many estate sales and garage sales would you have to go to to find 400 books worth $5 used?  Even if you found two $100 books and 100 $10 books, you'd still have to find another 160 books that were being undersold by $5.  That's a lot of books.

It sounds like a better hobby than a career.

5/1/07

So I thought about this some more and realized that I was wrong because I forgot about inventory.  From what I've read, you can assume 30% of the books you list sell in the first month and that each month you sell 10% of your inventory.  That makes $50K/year much more realistic.  Here's the logic:

• To make $50K/year, you have to make $1K/week.
• Assume 4 weeks/month for simplicity reasons.
• If you find $4K/month (in profits, regardless of what the books sell for), you'll sell $1200/month of that.
• You'll put the remaining $2800 into your inventory.
• Assuming your inventory has $28K in profit, and you sell 10% a month, you'll sell $2800/month of that.  And the stuff you found this month that didn't sell will replenish that.
• So you:
  • found $4000
  • sold $4000 ($1200 of what you found plus $2800 from your inventory)
  • maintain an inventory of $28000

So all is good.  And finding $1000/week in profits sounds hard but much more doable than my original assumptions.  Assuming you work five days a week, you can find 20 books a day for a dollar that will sell for $11 or you can find 2 for a dollar that will sell for $101.  Not easy but perhaps possible.

 

How to Go Through Airport Security Like a Pro

Ok, so nobody goes through like a pro anymore.  The ever changing rules are made to make it as awkward and silly as possible.  But since I can still get through quickly if not easily, I thought I'd share some tips.

First off, if you are checking a bag, check everything except your book and life will be much easier.  Just remember to take off your shoes and belt (or don't wear a belt), and you'll be set.  Oh, and your jacket.

If, like me, you hate checking a bag, here's what you need to do:

1. First, put all your liquids, like toothpaste, in a plastic baggie.  You can do this at home, but if you forget most airports have plastic baggies handy for you. DIA does.  Make sure that none of your liquid containers hold more than 3 ounces.  (That's like one of those travel size bottles of mouth wash or toothpaste.)  No full water bottles.  (You can take an empty bottle through and fill it at the fountain in the terminal.) Then take all of the liquids and put them in a ziploc bag and put it in a very easy to access pocket of your carryon. I've found that liquids are the most overlooked thing in security, so if you forgot to put your toothpaste in the baggie, don't panic.  When you go through security you will need to take this baggie out and put it in one of the plastic bins.
2. Next, everything in your pockets should be stowed away in your bag.  You can do this while you are waiting in line. I have a pocket in my briefcase I reserve for the "everything in my pockets" including my watch.
3. Laptop. Your laptop will need to go through in a bin of its own so have it handy.  I put both my plastic baggie of liquids and my laptop in the outside pockets of my rollaboard all by themselves so it's easy to pull them out.
4. Jacket.  Jackets must come off.  Sometimes if you're a woman they'll let you slide by in your suit jacket.  Sometimes they won't.
5. Shoes.  All shoes must come off and go through the xray machine.
6. Belts.  Not all belts have to come off but it saves a lot of time to just take it off and run it through the xray machine with your shoes.  If the machine you walk through beeps, you might have to go through extra security steps like being wanded.
7. Boarding pass.  In some airports you will need to hold your boarding pass in your hand as you step through the scanner.  (You don't in DIA but you do in San Jose, San Francisco, etc.)

So at this point you will have your suitcase, your purse or briefcase and two bins (one with your laptop or video camera and one with your shoes, belt, and jacket) plus you will need to hold your boarding pass in your hand.  So as best you can slide the bins and your bags through the xray machine.  Walk through the scanner with your boarding pass and then put yourself together on the other end!  I always store my laptop first and then put on my shoes - but that's all personal preference.  (I walked off without my laptop once which is why I always grab it first.)

Lately I've found that getting in line behind kids is actually a good thing.  They take off their shoes much faster than the adults, don't wear belts, and don't carry suitcases full of things that might make security suspicious.

Photo by plugimi.

Great Online Tshirt Business

I found a great online Tshirt business.  You upload any picture you want and then you can offer that image on Tshirts, buttons, mugs, etc ...  Cafepress tells you how much it costs them and you mark up your Tshirts with your design however much you want.  When people order your Tshirts, Cafepress makes them to order, sells them to the person that ordered it and pays you the markup.  Pretty cool way to get custom Tshirts made ... or to make some extra money.

There are some great designs already up.  Some of the most popular themes are:

• anti-Bush
• army wife
• autism

It only takes minutes to get setup.  Have fun!

Photo by redune.

Negative Google Ads Associated with YOUR Name

I ran across something interesting yesterday.  If you search for "Joe Vitale" (the author of The Attractor Factor) in Google, the top two sponsored ads are extremely negative:

• Joe Vitale Sucks www.RichJerkWebsites.com      Don't buy anything from Joe Vitale until you read this.
• I was scammed 37 times Dannys-Scam-Review.com      These websites are absolute scams I will show you the ones that work

Now these are sites that paid to be put at the top when someone searched for "Joe Vitale."  They didn't show up when I searched for Vitale.  Nothing on their websites mentions Joe Vitale and nothing I found anywhere suggests that Joe Vitale is either a jerk or a scam artist.

A couple of salient points come to mind:

• Obviously, these people have found it financially advantageous to buy ads for the words "Joe Vitale" - they are assuming people that have read his book or heard about it might think he's a scam or at least have enough doubts to read their websites.  (I did.  I thought, wow, is he a scam artist, and I clicked on the link and looked for information and couldn't find any but in the meantime I read their website and saw all their ads.)  So these people drive traffic to their website by picking names that people might believe are scam artists.
• Poor Joe Vitale.  These people are making it look like he's a scam artist and as far as I know, there's nothing illegal about it.  The second one doesn't even say anything about Joe Vitale - it just says "I was scammed 37 times" when you search on his name.

I don't know whether to be impressed or horrified.  Luckily when I search on my name there are no sponsored links, good or bad.

Hard Work is the Secret to Success

They've proven again that hard work, not talent, is the secret to success. Secrets of greatness: Practice and hard work bring success - October 30, 2006.

Research now shows that the lack of natural talent is irrelevant to great success. The secret? Painful and demanding practice and hard work

Even when you consider people like Tiger Woods and Warren Buffett.

A Teacher’s Year, a C.E.O.’s Day: The Pay’s Similar - New York Times

CEO's now make a teacher's annual salary in a day: A Teacher’s Year, a C.E.O.’s Day: The Pay’s Similar - New York Times.  Now I'm sure there are less people qualified or able to be good CEOs than teachers, so supply and demand says they should probably make a little more, but 365 times more?!?

Is Your Boss Killing You?

I've always encouraged people who dislike their jobs to just leave or look for another one.  (I had a friend once who spent at least 50% of the work day chatting with other people because she couldn't stand her job.  She even told her manager in hopes they would fire her - she wanted the severance pay.  It didn't work.  Five years later she finally quit!)  I know that quitting is much, much harder to do than it is to say, but here's a factoid that might help convince you.

employees who felt their supervisors treated them fairly had a 30 percent lower risk of heart disease

Find the right job and boss for you - your health might be at stake! Here's the rest of the article Is Your Boss Killing You?.

New Work Blog: Stormy on Open Source

I don't post about work related topics on this blog, as it's my personal blog, but I wanted to let everyone know that I now have a work blog: Stormy on Open Source!

Top executives cutting workers' pay while making millions

In this New York Times article,  Executives Gone Wild: It's Not a Pretty Sight - New York Times, Ben Stein compares what employees and stockholders are losing to what executives are making at a few large corporations.  For example, at Delphi, the chairman wants to cut workers' pay from $25/hr to $12 an hour while the top 600 manages are going to make $510 million.  Read the article for a few more examples like that one.

Paid paternity leave at Google

12 weeks maternity AND paternity leave at 75% of pay at Google! 

At Google, Cube Culture Has New Rules - New York Times.

Do Women Shy Away from Competition, Even When They Can Win? - Knowledge@Wharton

According to this study women not only shy away from competition (regardless of their abilities) but they also shy away from risk and underestimate their abilities.  The article really "rang true" to me.  It matches what I've been seeing among my female friends and their work environments.

Do Women Shy Away from Competition, Even When They Can Win? - Knowledge@Wharton.

What makes a good teacher?

The answer seems to be experience.  From Tenure, Turnover and the Quality of Teaching - New York Times.

The most important single influence is experience: first-year teachers are much less effective than others. The second year is significantly better, and by the fourth year, most teachers hit their stride.

But it's not as clear cut as it sounds. 

It is not entirely clear whether this experience effect is learning by doing (the more you teach, the more effective you become) or survival of the fittest (those who are not good at teaching tend to drop out early).

I think they miss the point though.  What makes a good teacher?  They assume it's a teacher whose students improve on tests.  (And that may be the case but it should not be assumed.)  The business world tells us it's all about metrics.  People will tend to do what you measure them by.  So if good teachers are those whose students get better scores on tests, teachers will work hard to make sure their students do well on tests.

Parents & Promotions

A study featured in Knowlege@Wharton shows that motherhood might affect how much you are paid and how much slack your employer cuts you at work.  Where as motherhood seems to negatively affect women's pay, fatherhood positively affects men's pay.  One of their theories was that single women are dedicated to their careers, mothers might be late more often, but fatherhood might settle men down.  (Single women were given more pay than single men.)

Interestingly, the students ranked women without children as the most qualified on several measures, giving them the highest scores for commitment, competence and likelihood of promotion. Even so, childless women weren't offered the highest starting salaries. Those went to fathers, who also were rated as most likely to be promoted. Childless men didn't fare as well. They beat mothers on most measures but fell behind childless women on every measure but one. Maybe the raters assumed they would spend too many nights out carousing.

If you are interested in reading the whole article, here it is:  Two New Studies Look at Mothers -- and Smokers -- in the Workplace - Knowledge@Wharton.

Pay Cooresponds to Skill and Working Conditions

So one of the factors that figures into how much you get paid for a job is how many people can do the job.  If there are only two people in the world that can do your job, you are going to get paid a lot more than if there are two billion people in the world that can do your job.  Education, talent, skills, and experience all play into how unique your skills are.  For example, the more education you have, the smaller the pool of people that have the same amount and kind of education.

Another factor that plays into how much you get paid is how desirable your job is.  Supposedly, an indoor job is more desirable than an outdoor job, but as a recent interview of a cowboy in the New York Times showed, that's not always true for everybody.

Traditionally, my job, managing a team of software engineers, has been seen as very desirable in terms of working conditions.  I sit in an air conditioned office surrounded by educated, congenial people.  However, I'm starting to think that maybe the 200+ emails/day, numerous meetings, phone calls and interruptions might not be the most desirable of working conditions.  While I'd like to think I'm being compensated primarily for my skills and talents, maybe I'm being compensated for the stressful working conditions.  (And my ability to cope with them! :)

6/23/05 Correction: The article about the cowboy was in the WSJ, not the NYT!

A Bonus Plan That Makes Sense!

Here's a business plan that makes sense, upper management - including the CEO! - do not get their bonus until all lower levels have met their targets and collected their bonus.  What a way to instill into managers responsibility for their teams' targets.

Here's the article: Bottom Up.