Ged Carroll

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  • Measure What Matters by John Doerr

    I was recommended Measure What Matters by my friend and fellow ex-Yahoo Cathy Ma. Cathy found the book useful in her way through managing teams. In Measure What Matters, John Doerr explains the idea of objectives and key results or OKRs.

    Measure What Matters

    About John Doerr

    If you’ve worked in or around the Silicon Valley technology space from the PC age through to the 2010s Doerr’s name will have a passing familiarity to you. Doerr was a salesman at Intel in the 1970s, realised that there were too many good people ahead of him and took an over in venture capital instead. Doerr was involved in funding:

    • Compaq – Compaq kicked off the market for ‘IBM compatible’ PCs and made the first portable ‘IBM compatible’ PC. Soon after IBM was no longer the dominant player in personal computing leading to the Wintel duopoly. Compaq eventually offered a full range of large servers, workstations and PC when it acquired Digital Equipment Corporation and Tandem Computing. Compaq was in turn bought by H-P
    • Netscape – Netscape Communications mainstreamed the internet browser, email client, web servers and email servers. The server software lives on in Oracle’s product line via the Netscape – Sun Microsystems alliance. The browser indirectly carried on through an open source project Mozilla
    • Symantec – Symantec started off as a natural language processing company in the early 1980s, it became famous for its Mac antivirus software and then went into the DOS and Windows market after merging with Peter Norton Computing. It now has a consumer facing business called NortonLifeLock and the business focused software part of the business was sold to Broadcom
    • Sun Microsystems – Sun Microsystems started off as a UNIX workstation manufacturer. Over time they built up a healthy server and software business that supported much of the infrastructure of the web. They were instrumental in the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix – which influenced parts of the macOS that I am typing this post on, RISC processors in your smartphone, thin client computing like Google Docs, and virtualised computing that is instrumental for cloud computing. Sun Microsystems workstations were popular with investment banks, telecoms companies and internet startups bought their servers. The company’s decline can be marked by the dot com crash. Oracle bought Sun Microsystems and their technology lives on
    • drugstore.com – was a first generation e-tailer in health and beauty products. Walgreens bought the business in 2011, and shut down the website five years later.
    • Amazon.com – needs no introduction
    • Intuit – Intuit sells financial software in the US. TurboTax helps Americans do their tax returns, Mint provides a personal finance dashboard for consumers and QuickBooks is accounting software for small and medium sized businesses
    • Macromedia – Macromedia was a software company that developed tools for creatives and programmers. It was eventually acquired by Adobe. Macromedia products live on in the Adobe product range
    • Google – the search engine.

    About OKRs

    For all of the companies that Doerr has funded he has advocated OKRs. The idea of OKRs came from Doerr’s colleague at Intel Andy Grove. OKRs are a collaborative process. The idea is that it is used with teams and the individuals who make up the teams. Management seeks to set challenging, ambitious goals with measurable results. The key results in OKRs are how you track progress towards the objective, create alignment within the team, and encourage engagement around measurable goals. They are also supposed to flex with circumstance, which is one of the key points of separation from Peter Drucker’s management by objectives (MBO).

    The first part of the book Measure What Matters explains the origin and process behind OKRs.

    You can get everything that you need in the first two chapters covering 35 pages.

    The Cult of OKR

    The rest of the book is a series of self aggrandising endorsements of OK from senior executives who are OKR advocates:

    • Larry Page of Alphabet
    • Bill Davidow of Intel
    • Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook
    • Bill Gates on The Gates Foundation

    It crosses the line for me and almost reads like a high water mark for Silicon Valley hubris; Doerr’s book was published in 2018. Three years later and:

    • Bill Gates is in the most trouble he has been in since the Judge Jackson ruling
    • Alphabet and Facebook are being assailed by regulators around the world
    • Intel looks like a shadow of its former self. Its fabrication process are three years behind competitors. Customers are designing their own chips and AMD is eating their lunch in high performance processors

    Secondly, Doerr’s book, whilst acknowledging Andy Groves role of OKR creator; fails to acknowledge that Andy gave a good descriptor of OKRs in his 1983 book High Output Management.

    I think one of the reasons that I am not that keen on Measure What Matters, is that the book doesn’t work for culturally as a non-American. Instead I would recommend Andy Grove’s own book High Output Management. More books that might be of interest here.

  • Eliot Higgins & things from last week

    Eliot Higgins

    Eliot Higgins talks about the origins of Bellingcat. The investigations that Bellingcat has done to date and some of the techniques that it uses in investigations. Higgins has written an account of Bellingcat which goes into open source intelligence and new investigative journalist techniques. Bellingcat are also famous for their courses, where they pass on their expertise in open source investigations.

    The Go! Team

    The Go! Team released a new video which makes good use of a photocopier effect to animate the band members. Pow is the usual mix of genre bending power pop that The Go! Team are known for.

    SK-II

    SK-II has commissioned some lovely films to support their ‘Change Destiny’ brand purpose. You have a mix of gaming, 3D animation and anime in these films. Working on Dove, there was the mantra real women; which went into the core of the brand’s creative. But that misses the online world which we now operate in and is often more keyed into our inner world than the real life around us. SK-II is owned by Procter & Gamble; who have been making leaps and bounds in terms of their approach to brand purpose. More related posts here.

    https://youtu.be/pguAbHCrxzA
    https://youtu.be/pmZr-AcYQs8

    This was something I hadn’t come across before, in 1974 a set of 4 LP records were released that had actor Nicol Williamson reading The Hobbit. Williamson is better known for his role of Merlin in Excalibur. One of his last film appearances of Williamson was the role of Cogliostro in the 1997 live action adaption of Spawn. This film is still vastly underrated. Williamson left us in 2011. This recording just hints at his acting skill. During the 1960s and 1970s he was considered one of the greatest actors of his generation alongside Albert Finney which is high praise.

  • Digital hucksters + more news

    Digital Hucksters

    The Digital Era: A Golden Age for Hucksters | EE Times – interesting take on UX. Digital hucksters use dark patterns and behavioural understanding to sell to customers. These customers are looking to mediate their interactions online rather than with a real sales person. On a semi-related note, check out the ludricous experience of needing an app to order in a pub – Interesting post on ordering in a UK pub. More ethics related content here.

    Hong Kong

    More American Chamber of Commerce members say they are considering leaving Hong Kong, with many citing national security law | South China Morning Post – numbers have doubled compared to last August. This might not be a bad thing from the perspective of the Chinese government, but it is also likely to drive further trade decoupling

    Luxury

    The evergreen nature of preppy style. A classic example of everything old is new. The main thing of interest for me is the way Princess Diana has been resuscitated as as a fashion icon over the past year or so – Buy Yuppie Scum: ’90s Rich-Guy Gear Is in Style | GQ

    Stocks as luxury consumption, I imagine that this might start to hit jewellery sales as well – Young Korean Couples Are Gifting Each Other Tesla Stocks, Not Flowers 

    Discover VS Series & World of SK-II | ChangeDestiny | SK-II City

    Media

    Brands don’t need to avoid violence – just make sure it’s right for your audience | Campaign – guessing Xaxis must be having brand safety related issues

    Security

    UK to ban default passwords for smart TVs, speakers to boost security | Reuters – this is big if it gets more widely adopted. Not sure how this will deal with all the products that are bought on Amazon Marketplace etc though

    The Crypto AG scandal rumbles on – Swiss spy chief exits after reports of row over CIA-linked firm | Reuters 

    The digital detectives searching for North Korea’s disappeared | Financial Times

    Technology

    No sooner has Elon Musk shown a decline of interest in bitcoin due to its energy impact than this news comes out of Microsoft – Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service | ZDNet 

    The lack of semiconductor manufacturing in Europe by Jan-Peter Kleinhans of Shiftung Neue Varantwortung eV – Could they be driven by pushes from the current fabs owners not to have any competition?

    Daimler decentralises spare parts production – via 3D printer 

    Breakthrough for room temperature quantum computing | EE Europe 

    Google has been designing a new category of chips for their own needs and has even developed its own tools used to help in the chip design process. This software is used in conjunction with Mentor Graphics EDA software – Google BigChip? | Digits to Dollars 

  • The Exponential Era by Espindola & Wright

    The Exponential Era is a business strategy book published by the IEEE Press as part of its series on technology, innovation and leadership. David Espindola and Michael Wright work at Intercepting Horizons and advise at the University of Minnesota.

    The book is a concise 182 pages including its index. It has a satisfying hard cover about the height and width of a paperback book. The book proportions reminded of many of the books that we used to have my secondary school’s library. It felt right in my hand. Its a small thing, but it matters.

    The exponential era

    The secondary school analogy goes further; the book summarises knowledge and makes it relatively easily digestible.

    The Exponential Era includes:

    • The threat of platforms and their ability to disrupt market sectors
    • Why people find it hard to grasp the change brought about by the future
    • Megatrends with the kind of utopian tone that reminded me of Alvin Toffler, George Gilder and John Naisbitt
    • Horizon monitoring
    • Agile approach to development
    • Test and learn
    • Feedback based strategic decisions which relies extensively on the technology sector’s fetishisation of John Boyd’s OODA model
    • The Innovator’s Dilemma
    • Future business ethics

    The book consolidates the kind of reading that people in technology and marketing would likely have read anyway. Chances are if you’ve already read books like Saving Big Blue, Measure What Matters, The Lean Startup and Zero to One, then The Exponential Era isn’t written for you.

    Who should read this book?

    Instead this book seems to be an increasingly diminished audience. A company too small for it’s management to have been lectured on disruption by McKinsey, Bain, BCG or Accenture. But still large enough to be concerned. Like McKinsey et al Espindola and Wright are looking to create disruption fear and sell their SPX methodology to re-engineer their business. I would have thought the c suite in most businesses would have at least done enough reading to have a high level understanding of the content in the book.

    The book’s relentless utopian optimism reminded me a lot of business works from the 1970s to the dot com era. I think that The Exponential Era will be of most use to junior people at the start of their career looking for a primer rather than its intended audience.

  • Harmony Korine & things that made last week

    Film director Harmony Korine has shot a number of spots for convenience store 7-Eleven. If Korine’s name sounds familiar he is most famous for writing Kids and directing the dystopian 1997 movie Gummo – that paints an unflattering picture of midwest America. Much of the rest of his work has been making music videos and brand movies for luxury fashion houses Gucci & Dior.

    In his posts for 7-Eleven Harmony Korine riffs off the American Graffiti vibes of the convenience stores with parking around them and combined that with sub cultures on YouTube. Most notably the Japanese dancing rockabilly gangs of Yoyogi Park, Tokyo. (More Japan related content here.)

    https://youtu.be/hBCf83SA9j4

    Another video riffs on the recently raised profile of African American culture in skating rinks following the documentary United Skates.

    https://youtu.be/kEOzBqOjWGU

    If you had caught the The Lord of The Rings bug before the Peter Jackson movie adaption, you would be familiar to with two things. The first was the Ralph Bakshi animated adaptation, which unfortunately didn’t see its second part made due to faults mostly on the side of United Artists. The second would be Brian Sibley’s radio adaptation for the BBC, that still remains in publication as a CD audio book. Sibley did this fantastic interview on the the making of the radio drama and the reaction to it. Back in 1981, The Lord of The Rings adaptation had been destination radio, with listeners being sure to tune in to each episode.

    Really interesting interview with plus size influencer Saucye West. It highlights a new economy in plain sight. It is also interesting how the the body positive movement has bifurcated along racial lines, partly due to body shape. The business aspect of it is really interesting. She is an influencer and also advises brands on size 26+ products. There is the discussion about the lack of brand purpose in plus size clothings.