The dream employee for a lot of companies is a twenty-something with as little of a life as possible outside of work–someone who’ll be fine working fourteen-hour days and sleeping under his desk. But packing a room full of these burn-the-midnight-oil types isn’t as great as it seems. [. . .] You don’t need more hours; you need better hours. When people have something to do at home, they get down to business. They get their work done because they have somewhere else to be. They find ways to be more efficient because they have to.
The 37 Signals team behind the project management software I and thousands of others use daily (Basecamp) published a new book laying out some of the principles behind their success. They call Rework a “by product” of their business; the equivalent of a cookbook written by a chef confident enough that their mastery will still trump any upstart competitors armed with detailed instructions. One of the ideas promoted in Rework, after all, is to strengthen and promote your business by teaching–customers, other business owners, even competitors:
[E]mulate famous chefs. They cook, so they write cookbooks. What do you do? What are your “recipes”? What’s your “cookbook”? What can you tell the world about how you operate that’s informative, educational, and promotional? This book is our cookbook.
And it’s full of direct, combative, written-with-purpose recipes for running an un-apologetically small but thriving business. The book is organized into a series of brief essays on a variety of work topics; read on for a few passages I found particularly compelling and a special video dialogue where Jarred and I discuss the book:
As Ezra Klein neatly summarizes in his link to this story (an old link, but worth revisiting), “Opening a coffee shop is really hard.” And yet, be honest: some part of you has imagined doing it.
I’m intrigued by the types of businesses that are so romantically attractive to would-be entrepreneurs (yours truly), midlife crisis corporate types, and ambitious retirees…despite being nearly impossible to launch successfully. From the Slate story Ezra references about a nice couple who decided to chase their dream and open a coffee shop:
The dream of running a small cafe has nothing to do with the excitement of entrepreneurship or the joys of being one’s own boss—none of us would ever consider opening a Laundromat or a stationery store, and even the most delusional can see that an independent bookshop is a bad idea these days. The small cafe connects to the fantasy of throwing a perpetual dinner party, and it cuts deeper—all the way to Barbie tea sets—than any other capitalist urge. To a couple in the throes of the cafe dream, money is almost an afterthought. Which is good, because they’re going to lose a lot of it.
[...] Guess what, dear dreamers? The psychological gap between working in a cafe because it’s fun and romantic and doing the exact same thing because you have to is enormous. Within weeks, [my wife] and I—previously ensconced in an enviably stress-free marriage—were at each other’s throats. [...] Two highly educated professionals with artistic aspirations have just put themselves—or, as we saw it, each other—on $8-per-hour jobs slinging coffee.
I had somebody approach me who had a very good job with a major company and an MBA from a prestigious university [and wanted to open a restaurant]. I looked at him and asked, “Is your career in danger?” He said, “No, but I’ve always loved food. I love to cook. I love to have parties.” I told him to invite 20 friends over, throw a great dinner party, and then take a stack of $100 bills and burn them one by one. It will be fun—and cheaper than opening a restaurant.
It’s easy to confuse the types of establishments we like to frequent with the types of enterprises we’d like to run. Coffee shops embody a tremendous mythology based on the notion that since it’s so relaxing and fun to be a coffee shop patron it must similarly be painless and joyous to create that space for others. Unfortunately, customers people can be unreasonable, stingy, fickle, and downright unpleasant when they’re low on caffeine or faced with a slightly-stale scone.
Almost any business can seem more glamorous and, frankly, easy to manage from the outside. The trick is understanding enough about the good, the bad, and the ugly reality before jumping into a new industry or setting out on your own…while maintaining enough of that naivete and idealism to succeed, even in impossibly difficult endeavors. No one dreams of owning a joyless moneypit that serves coffee or Italian food. But the great coffee shops and Italian eateries are run by people who knew the risks and decided to give it a shot anyway.
Image of a presumably very happy and well-run coffee shop used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user pellesten.
The New York Times recently issued the ninth edition of its annual Ideas feature for its magazine. I’ve read through most of the entries and found several really fascinating; others were also interesting but neglected to surface other important angles. I thought I’d use this space to highlight both, seeing as Tropophilia is all about ideas that may bring about change in our world.
The Advertisement That Watches You - I’ll leave the details of this particular implementation to the article, but the essence of the technology is a billboard with a built-in camera that, through facial recognition technology, can tell when anyone within a certain radius of the advertisement is looking at it. This one, interestingly, changes to its main message when people are not looking. You can imagine, however, how this technology might develop over time: electronic ads could be powered off until it new there were passersby actually looking at the space. Facial recognition could also be used to power an impressions-based ads payment system, much like exists on the web: advertisers would only have to pay per “view” or elapsed “eyeball time” on the ad. Of course, such commercial use of facial recognition technology also raises enormous privacy concerns (How long are camera images kept? Would the technology eventually be used to identify people and serve ads based on their personal interests, or even the clothes they were wearing or the book they are reading at that moment?). It will be interesting to see how this area grows, if at all.
Bicycle Highways - I thought this was a cool idea, but I’m not sure I see it gaining widespread adoption outside of cities that have significant numbers of bike commuters. What I think is really clever is the possibilities raised with GPS and RFID technology that would allow for bikers to create on-the-fly pelotons, which in turn would be able to gain privileges for traffic lights and such: a mix between EZPass and carpool lanes. Throw in a custom social network for the city so you could plan your departures in order to meet up with a regular riding group, and this could be really great for those cities with big biking cultures.
The Counterfeit Self - I think this research has implications for the Web. There has long been a debate about authentication online: when writing a blog, posting comments, or joining a social network, is it “better” for users to have the ability to remain anonymous or pseudonymous, or should they be encouraged or required to use their real identity (obfuscated to whatever degree they prefer). Many argue that encouraging or requiring authentication would, for example, solve the problem evidence by the (often hateful and troll-like) comments of any given YouTube video. Opponents summon the right to free dom of speech as a defense of anonymous use of the web. Some governments, like South Korea, actually require what is referred to as “real name verification” for websites in their jurisdiction that surpass a certain threshold of users; users are required to authenticate against a national registry before they can interact with the site. Considering the idea of how behavior is influenced by fake identity could offer a fresh perspective in this debate.
Good Enough is the New Great - One aspect that this idea doesn’t cover (and I can’t remember anymore if the Wired article does or not) is information. Just as consumers are turning to cheap cameras, low-fi music files, and YouTube videos, they are also turning to Twitter for their information fixes. Many argue that in moving from mainstream to social media as our main source of information, we make a similar sacrifice of quality for convenience. I think that may be true in the short-term, but I’m hopeful that just like companies are starting to fit better and better sensors into those tiny Flip cameras, so will Twitter eventually recapture some of the fidelity of the “news” that it carries.
A while ago, I suggested that physical books may become to reading what vinyl records have become to music: produced in limited numbers, used by the very few who know it to be the best quality experience, but mostly collected for their nostalgic value. It appears that this comparison may be inapt, because record companies, with some help from Apple, are trying to bring the vinyl experience back to life.
I am a pretty rabid fan of a little music ensemble called Dave Matthews Band. You might have heard of them. I just returned from a trip with my brother to the ostensible Mecca of DMB fandom: the band’s annual three-night stand at The Gorge Amphitheatre in central Washington. Counting this weekend, I have been to 16 of their concerts. I have all of their studio albums, most of their official live releases (they number in the double digits), and countless (legal) amateur recordings of other shows. The total track count in my iTunes library for the band and their side projects numbers over 800.
But if you think those numbers are sickening, try these on for size. I am such an unabashed fanboy of the band that when they released their latest studio album, Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King, I ended up buying it in two different formats:
the iTunes Pass version ($20), because along with the album tracks it also came with (so far) 16 extra pieces of exclusive video, studio audio, and live audio content delivered piecemeal over time;
the (physical) Deluxe Box Set ($60) which included the same extra studio audio as above, did not include video or live audio, but added in extra artwork and photos.
Let’s pass over the rather obvious and self-admitted fact that I have obsession issues. The interesting thing about the information above is that I had to pay $80 – eight times the album price – to get what might be called the total media experience available in physical or digital form. Isn’t there a way to merge these two, and make it less expensive (and therefore more attractive) to feel like you truly own not only the music, but the album experience itself? This is the question Apple has asked as sales of entire albums in the iTunes Store have dwindled, with consumers instead opting to buy tracks piecemeal. Their first answer was a service called iTunes Pass.
iTunes Pass was Apple’s first attempt at solving the riddle of how to replicate the experience of buying a box set or, to go even further back in time, a vinyl. You pay twice the normal album price, but in addition to the entire album itself, you get extra “special” content: early track releases ahead of the full album sale date, demo tracks, live tracks, the entire cover leaflet, videos, and more. What makes it more interesting is that this extra content is not delivered all at once, but it is sent to you over time. So every week or two, you have a nice little mini-Christmas when you find a new video or exclusive track to enjoy. This rolling delivery method also enables access to content that might not otherwise be available on the album release date — like, say, live versions of tracks from the band’s tour.
I am not aware of how successful iTunes Pass has been, but it apparently was not satisfactory. Yesterday, Apple supplemented that service with the long-rumored iTunes LP. Both Apple and the record labels were interested in going beyond iTunes Pass to renew the “retro” experience of going to a store and buying a big, beautiful LP, and combining that with the feeling of exclusivity that comes with owning an exclusive content-filled box set.
The buzz over the future of news and the fate of newspapers has exploded since I last wrote about the topic in February. I’ve been following the conversation carefully as it has continued to manifest itself across the web as well as in print, but I’ve been reluctant to write too much about it. Hardly an article is written without either a wholesale indictment or wholesale exoneration of Google for blame in this drama, so I decided it was best to keep my thoughts to myself.
This is too important and fascinating a debate, though, for me to be content sitting completely on the sidelines. So I thought I would take some time to write not an argumentative post, but a prescriptive (or at least predictive) one that offers what I think might be a successful model for the future of written journalism.
A little over a week ago, Mike Arrington posed a fairly radical hypothetical: what if the best 5-10% of the New York Times‘ reporters walked out and started their own company? A lean staff count and modest production expenses for this web-based enterprise would allow plenty of budget for investigative journalism and other expensive reporting. ”How many private equity funds would kill to put $100 million behind the ["New" New York Times] to make sure the company had plenty of money until it reached profitability?” ponders Arrington. ”My guess is plenty. [...] And I know a couple of hedge funds that would be right there, too. I know this because they’ve pitched me on a vision not much different than this one.”
Arrington’s proposal was inspired by a recent fascination with Politico, whose leadership he met prior to their interview with Charlie Rose. Profiled by Michael Wolff in this month’s Vanity Fair, Politico is the web-based Bible of political junkies that rose to prominence during the 2008 election season and has sustained more modest, but nonetheless impressive growth. Both the article and Rose’s conversation with some of the staff are worth checking out.
Arrington fails (or declines?) to draw the connection between Politico and his own web publication, TechCrunch, and as a result does not recognize the disconnect between their shared model and his “New New York Times” proposal. It is indeed an innovative idea to take the cream of the journalistic crop, free them from the burden of a bureaucratic and expensive print-based publication, and set them on a new (and hopefully profitable) course of news reporting. But the Arrington hypothetical only addresses one of two major problems with written journalism today.
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The New York Times recently issued the ninth edition of its annual 
The buzz over the future of news and the fate of newspapers has exploded since I 
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