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Perseverance is the most overrated of traits, if it is unaccompanied by talent; beating your head against a wall is more likely to produce a concussion in the head than a hole in the wall.
-- Sydney Harris
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What if I told you that you could take a phone call, record the details of it, create an action item from the phone call, deftly filter through hundreds of people to find exactly those who might be able to help you, and send them each an email to see who might step forward to make themselves available - all in 3 minutes? You can. (You can also track it to see when it's completed!) |
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I just finished the migration to the new Liquid Web server. beatcanvas.com has been running on it for two days, and the other 30+ sites are now moved over and fully functioning. Whew! It's very much akin to moving from house to another. Gotta make sure that everything is packed up and moved, nothing left behind. But I did some tests during the migration, and the new server is faster. The six-core machine runs on 64-bit Windows Server 2008 with a ton of RAM. The sites employ IIS 7 and SQL Server 2008 Web, and each site has its own application pool. Beefy. Throughout the process, the people at LW were wonderful. Savvy, friendly, quick to respond, and they feel like a partner in my success. I couldn't ask for anything more than that. When I wake up, I have more coding to do to wrap up this phase of Project Management in 247Toolset; then I'll tie that into Job Orders for my recruiter clients. But knowing that I have a solid basis for my clients lets me launch back into sales, which should be fun with the new capabilities of the 247Toolset platform. |
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Today was an interesting day. After a long and drawn out fiasco with Hosting.com, I made the decision to try a new host. As I write this, Liquid Web is building my new server. While it's a pain in the ass to move, Hosting.com couldn't have done more to blow their relationship with me. They used to be HostMySite.com, which rocked, and that's why I've been with them for 8 years. But under new management now, Hosting.com simply sucks - hence, the big move. While the server was cooking, I needed to finish up a big piece of 247Toolset. For a long time, I've had the piece developed where you can search your talent pool for the right resource in a very user-friendly fashion. But as I've been creating the Project Management module with its ability to create Project Roles, you could assign a confirmed resource to the Role, but you couldn't search for available talent via the Pool Search - until now. They're now connected together.  I have a lot more work to do to polish it up, but being able to drive through to solicit your resources to fulfill a Role - it functions as expected. I've done some things to make it easy - such as when creating multiples of a Role, all of the Roles are put into a Role Grouping behind the scenes so that the search you do will be associated across the multiple. If you solicit 8 people for 4 Roles in the grouping, and 5 affirm their willingness, you'll be able to assign the 4 Roles from the pool of 5. That's powerful, and I think maybe even unique in the world of resource allocation. One foot in front of the other... and I just got an email that my server will be ready shortly. Gonna be a long night! |
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Long ago while in college, I met a girl named Barb, who more popularly went by the name Lupi. She was a grad student in chemistry. It was one of those relationships where we got along famously, but never would have dated. More like brother and sister... Rode bikes together, listened to similar music, cracked each other up... I remember once that she and I rode our bikes through a park in Ames late one night and I didn't see the wire stretched between two posts and I did the most spectacular header into a gravel parking lot. I just lay on my back staring upward, laughing into the clear sky above. Lupi gathered my bike from its awkward twist and then sat next to me. For the next 20 minutes, we had a beautiful conversation about the things we can see and the things we can't. It started from her wondering if I was unhurt because I couldn't see the wire and its trip took me by complete surprise. Years later, we fell out of touch, but she found me on the web and emailed me and then called. At this time, we were both married and I learned of her most loved husband. We talked of getting together. A few months later, her husband emailed me. He told me that she was in the passenger seat as they drove across rural Iowa. Another car ran a stop sign and t-boned them, hitting Lupi squarely. She died instantly. He contacted me after the funeral and just wanted me to know how much she was looking forward to seeing me again. I miss her laugh. And also racing shopping carts across the Cub Foods parking lot late at night. And then there was that incident of the frozen peas in the cereal aisle. What made me think of her was listening to Sting's "Why Should I Cry For You." I wonder if she ever found out what the "Stones of Pharaoh" were...  |
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I'm listening to The Wall this morning as I work, and not only is the album still great, but I'm reminded that Comfortably Numb is such an incredible song. My first real girlfriend was Margaret, and Floyd was her favorite band. We were both stupid teenagers, but she sure nailed her selection in bands. It's funny where life takes you over three decades in time. It's also weird to write "three decades." As my wife kissed me as she left for work this morning, I marveled at all of the right things taking place in my life, all good and solid. I've enlisted my son, Aaron, and his skills with graphics to help me set up 247Toolset portals. He did his first one yesterday, and he did a great job. What's good about demos and sales is that each one ends with "Hey, you know who needs to see this?" I love sledding. |
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The most effortless force in the world is gravity. Once something is at a height where gravity can have an effect, you just let go and - ta da! - the item moves without any more effort on your part. Amazing. But you have to expend the energy to lift it before gravity can have an effect. Here in my home office, I generally have a fire burning in the fireplace. Occasionally, I have to get up and manage the logs, but once lit, the fire kind of manages itself. The hard part is getting it going in the morning. It takes some time (I'm an old school fire starter - no cheating here.) But to get the fire going, you have to expend energy to start it before it manages itself. A lot of people talk about viral this and viral that, catch fire this and catch fire that, and buzz this and buzz that... but consider... The most natural thing in the winter here in the Midwest is a child's desire to go sledding. Kids won't clean their rooms or put away their dishes, but they'll struggle with snow pants and boots and excitedly scramble to the family van with the trusted sled to have a go at a few moments of fun on a hill. They'll eagerly trudge up the hill, pass after pass, to take advantage of gravity's pull. When it's all said and done, they're cold and wet and they have a mess of things to put away, but inevitably they utter, "Dad - can we do it again tomorrow?" Customers are no different. There's a thin line between marketing and harassment. There's an even thinner line between marketing and sledding. Business is best when business is sledding. Inside a company, it's tough to tell between when customers are eagerly lining up to go sledding and when customers are being harangued to show up. Customers usually don't tell you. Gravity is invisible. But you can tell when it's in effect when objects move by themselves with the smallest of nudges.  |
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Happy Birthday, Steve Neal |
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I got my Harvard Business Review in the mail yesterday, and aside from RomneyCare architect Michael E. Porter as the centerpiece of the mag discussing "how to fix capitalism" (spare me), there's a little callout in another article that contains a Drucker quote: Study what your customers are doing with your product. Be aware that, as Peter Drucker famously said, "The customer rarely buys what the business thinks it sells him." The callout is entitled: "Four Ways to Uncover Unmet Needs."Unmet Needs = Vacuum Your product can be what gets pulled into that vacuum, if you're paying attention to the fact that there is a vacuum. In this online HBR article, disruption expert Scott Anthony comes up with 31 innovation questions. He too cites this quote from Drucker. What should I look for? As Drucker said, "the customer rarely buys what the business thinks it sells him;" look for a job-to-be-done, an important problem that is not adequately solved by current solutions. That right there encapsulates the difference between a successful business and a soon-to-be-bankrupt business. Some businesses come to the market with an offering already defined, and the business pushes its offering harder and harder at the market. Other businesses let the market shape them by listening closely to the discomfort of the market's unmet needs.There is no need for pushing the business at people when the right solution is crafted - the business and its targeted solution get pulled into the vacuum. The more effortless business is, the more sustainable it is. Discern the vacuum, craft the solution that gets pulled in fastest by those needing an answer, and then scale upward. |
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