The Diminishment of Don Draper : Andrew McAfee’s Blog

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Interesting post by Andy McAfee about what he refers to as the Oracular approach to decision making. (Andy took over the Entrepreneurship course I taught while on sabbatical at MIT a few years ago. By all accounts he did an (even) better job than me!)

The above lists of characteristics are focused on a single fictional character in the advertising industry, but in my experience they’re fairly common across business oracles and their decisions in many real-world settings as well. When I reflect on how I’ve seen strategy, marketing, planning, and product design decisions made at large organizations, I see a lot of the stuff listed above.To be sure, I also see business oracles gathering lots of data, commissioning studies, and sometimes even running experiments. But I often get the sense that the point of all this activity is to confirm the soundness of the oracle’s initial idea, rather than to test it a state of affairs captured elegantly by this New Yorker cartoon. Several people at last week’s workshop on business experimentation observed that it takes months for many companies to set up even a simple experiment today, and opined that this is because of the great care taken to ensure the outcome.

via The Diminishment of Don Draper : Andrew McAfee’s Blog.

I’m not going to try to summarize  his post here, but I would add that a good Oracle is called an expert. And expertise is real – and it’s necessary at the Craft end of the Craft-to-science spectrum.

Research faculty are retiring too slowly!

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Late retirement is a paradoxical problem. In most of the economy, we want people to delay retirement, if only to keep a reasonable ratio of workers to retirees (which is needed for Social Security and for retirement financing in general). But at research universities, “new blood” is especially critical, and 70-year old faculty tie up slots for new hires.

Many workers yearn for retirement — the goodbye parties, the golf course, maybe even a gold watch. But Stanford University has the opposite problem: Nobody wants to leave.Hoping to create more space for young scholars, Stanford has revamped its generous “Retirement Incentive Program” — for the second time in a decade — to nudge more old-timers toward the door.”Our senior faculty are wonderful. I love them all,” Provost John Etchemendy said at a recent meeting of the Academic Senate, publicizing the plan. “But we’re getting fewer people into the faculty, and that’s because people are staying longer,” he said. “The faculty is aging.”

via Stanford University confronts the graying of academia – SiliconValley.com.

Perhaps a solution is in the article’s observation that foreign universities are hiring like mad, hence have very young faculties. Better for US would be to bring those students here; but if we can’t do that, I know some of my colleagues who are “retiring” abroad.

Shut off Internet access – voluntarily

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For those  who have trouble staying on task for hours at a time. Which probably means most computer users. Several applications now exist to block off Internet access, selectively block programs, etc. I do this by not turning on my wireless – but then I can’t stream music. So I’ll try something more elaborate.

Economist article: Software that disables bits of your computer to make you more productive sounds daft, but may help keep distractions at bay

Freeware: SelfControl 1.2.2 Block distracting websites for predetermined periods of time   SelfControl is an OS X application which blocks access to incoming and/or outgoing mail servers and websites for a predetermined period of time. For example, you could block access to your email, facebook, and twitter for 90 minutes, but still have access to the rest of the web.

via Download SelfControl for Mac – Block distracting websites for predetermined periods of time. MacUpdate Mac Software Downloads.

Your Brain on Computers – NYTimes.com

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Article yesterday on the brain-altering effects of constant computer use. It’s a complex topic and I think a lot more research is needed, but there is certainly something going on. The reporter, Matt Richtel, won a Pulitzer last year for his series on distracted driving while using cellphones. (I’m quoted in the article, but not by name.)

Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. They say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information.These play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement — a dopamine squirt — that researchers say can be addictive.

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A new idea on mass-customized clothing

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Seph Skerrit was a student  when I taught an entrepreneurship class at MIT a few years ago. (Thanks to Michael Cusumano and Ed Roberts for arranging the very interesting year as visiting prof.)  He seems to have found a new idea in mass customization – congratulations!  I don’t recall my reaction when he proposed the concept, but I might have guessed that “all the good ideas have been tried already” — a classic error. The students in that class were amazingly entrepreneurial – I now think that “serial entrepreneur” is a personality type.

Custom clothes are not my thing, but this would make a nice Father’s Day present. Seph’s team seems to have done a nice job on PR, too, with lots of press coverage in  Style sections.

Today, Mr Skerritt is the founder of Proper Cloth, a New York-based e-commerce dress shirt company that allows shoppers to mix and match fabrics, using computer-generated tailoring for the right fit. Its early success largely derives from being one of a growing number of start-ups that use blogging and social networking websites in place of conventional, more costly marketing. Revenues since launch last year have grown at a rate of 40 per cent a month, and it is on track to be profitable by July, with earnings of about $30,000 a month.

Mr Skerritt emptied his personal savings, scraped together about $50,000 of leftover student loan money, and racked up his credit card debt before raising about $100,000 in seed money from friends and family. He says that the use of social media, as well as being a less expensive form of marketing, provides an easy way for customers to interact with the company and each other. “We want to hear what our customers have to say,” he says. “It’s useful to us and lets our customers feel connected to and engaged with Proper Cloth.”

via FT.com / Entrepreneurship – Custom-made for success.

Disposing of old hard drives – do it right!

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Here’s an expanded comment I posted to Computerworld recently. Re-using an old hard drive yourself, by putting it in an external drive enclosure and using it for backup is fine. (I have one in a safe deposit box, in case my house burns down). But don’t donate it, sell it, or even recycle it unless you destroy the data on it properly first.  RB

Recycle an Old Laptop Hard Drive

A reader, I’ll call him \”S,\” wanted to know if there’s a hard drive enclosure that can \”accept the thicker hard drive out of an old [laptop].\”

RB comment: Just be sure to destroy the drive if you are finished with it. Unfortunately, donating it /selling it are not wise. You can also do a “secure erase,” which encrypts the old data and allows the drive to be safely reused. Reformatting the drive, and running the various utilities that supposedly overwrite old data, are NOT substitutes, because they don’t get at the underlying data thoroughly. And tests of drives purchased on eBay still show about half of them have proprietary data, including financial records etc.

Here is one such academic study: Remembrance of Data Passed: A Study of Disk Sanitization Practices. There are many others.   Here’s a good popular article.

Here is an explanation of safe erasure. http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/DataSanitizationTutorial.pdf

For physical destruction, the easiest method is a hammer applied to the spindle. Once the bearing has “wobble” in it, the drive can’t read the tracks any more, and it would take an NSA-level lab to recover data, even partially. You can also smash the circuit card. It can be replaced, but the thief has to work much harder to find a compatible card.

NYT discovers mass customization

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Mass customization of clothing is at least 10 years old – even Levis does it. (The concept goes back to a book written in 1987, Future Perfect.) The NYT just wrote about it  – the wrinkle is that it’s now called “customer design.”

Still, the article is nice because it shows how low the barriers to entry are. It also has a good description of how the company learns rapidly from customers, with real time chats and phone calls.

Since last Halloween, when the company’s dress shirt design application made its debut at http://www.blank-label.com, Mr. Bi and his three partners — ages 19, 22 and 30 — have joined a small but growing co-creation movement that uses the Internet to let consumers have a hand in making the products they buy. Web ventures have already popped up that allow shoppers to customize granola MeAndGoji.com, jewelry gemvara.com, chocolate CreateMyChocolate.com, handbags LaudiVidni.com and clothing for girls ages 6 to 12 FashionPlaytes.com. There are also online competitors selling design-your-own shirts, while Brooks Brothers is one major retailer that offers the service on its Web site.

via Prototype – Putting Customers in Charge of Designing Shirts – NYTimes.com.