Text doesn’t express your feelings brilliantly 
Most email is misunderstood by recipients. 
Same probably goes for blogging, Facebook, Linkedin, Youtube comments, and other things that mostly use text like chat apps and forums.
Archive for the ‘Doing Business in Public’ Category
Andy’s Rules #1524 – Words and Pictures
Andy Parkhouse - June 4th, 2010Working Out
Andy Parkhouse - June 2nd, 2010Working remotely is something Team Rubber does with mixed success. Sometimes we’re very good at it. Sometimes we’re not so good.
I’ve found working in a remote (or distributed) way massively productive, but I don’t think remote working looks like as much fun for other Team Rubber staff as it should be, so I’ve been thinking about how we could and should do it better.
It was a handy co-incidence that I found this piece from Jason Z at 37 Signals about remote working and team parity.
In short, when most of a team work together in one location, it’s very hard to prevent remote team members becoming second class citizens. It’s very easy for the people in the same location to share information and solve problems with quick conversations, white boards, a quick sketch or a quick list of actions on a post-it note. They can also have lunch, tea and banter together.
Those working remotely miss out on this shared ‘stuff’, or worse, get the negative side-effects (“we were just talking about the project and we’ve decided xxxx”, “sorry we missed your call, we were having a meeting” etc.). I’ve seen this happen and it doesn’t look like much fun
Meanwhile I collaborate almost every day on open source projects where all work is distributed. Using tools like internet relay chat (irc), forums, and web-based project management apps, I get stuff done with people in different countries and different time zones (I’m currently collaborating with people in Canada, Germany, Holland, Spain, Sweden and Russia). We use English, we use a lot of short written communication, a few pictures, and an awful lot of emoticons (to indicate when we’re really not cross…or when we really are). It’s fun and we get stuff done.
I’m not advocating that Team Rubber works remotely by default. Having a base is really important to us, and by working together closely we’ve built strong personal ties, developed seriously impressive capabilities to get stuff done, and had fun. That’s massively valuable – but we should get better at working in a distributed way, because it’s also fun and valuable, and because we already have people in multiple locations.
Wednesday is a great day to work from home – or somewhere else out of the studio/office (get out in the world!). It won’t be compulsory – and some jobs are tied to a office phone – but I’m strongly encouraging distributed working on Wednesdays, and I’m going to be very interested in how we do do it better. Our tools are things like email, irc, trac, and (omg) “picking up the fricking phone”. We’re going to learn how to do it right, and it’s going to be fun 
cheers,
Andy
6’66″ – Sympathy For The Devil (…or how to make Powerpoint interesting)
Rory Ahern - May 26th, 2010Originally posted at Rubber Republic
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[Image courtesy of : Wendelboe on Flickr]
The *devil* in question was indeed the force of office evil that is Powerpoint, and Tom Alcott from the Social Network Company gave us a masterclass in how to keep presentations succinct, engaging and conversational while remaining in total control of your material.
His PechKucha style talk on social network analysis lasted exactly ’6 minutes & 66 seconds’ and covered everything from a crash course in social psychology, the ambiguity of what being ‘connected’ actually means to mapping the *viral* spread of information within networks.
At the heart of it was that key question: Who is the most valuable node within any social network? The ‘hub’ (the most connected individual within a community). Or the ‘broker’ (the person who bridges between two communities and therefore allows that idea to spread to new audiences)?
Finding this overlap is something we are fascinated by, as it potentially allows the conversation to evolve and new participants to join. This was also a central theme to ‘Connected’ our last Rubber Book Club mail-out which explains the various ways information travels with some very entertaining illustrations.
So all good stuff and many thanks to Tom for coming in on a very warm and humid Friday afternoon.
Incidentally if ’666′ is the number of the beast, does that ’668′ the neighbour of the beast?
Media Buys are a Viral Insurance Policy for Creative and PR Agencies
Andy Parkhouse - May 17th, 2010(Originally posted at the Viral Ad Network blog)
Everybody likes to think their viral creatives are going to go viral without any kind of push – but here’s the bottom line:
| No Media Spend | Media Spend | |
|---|---|---|
| Asset Production | -£20K | -£20K |
| Media Spend | -£0.00 | -£7.5K |
| Total Cost | -£20K | -£27.5K |
| Organic Views(Worst case) | 1000 | 1000 |
| Organic Views(Best case) | 500,000 | 500,000 |
| Bought Views | 0 | 50,000 |
| Total Views (Best case) | 500,000 | 550,000 |
| Total Views (Worst case) | 1000 | 51,000 |
| Cost Per View (Best case) | -£0.04 | -£0.05 |
| Cost Per View (Worst case) | -£20 | -£0.539 |
Summary:
How much would you enjoy reporting to your client to tell them their average cost per view was £20? (even if you don’t phrase it like that, they will be calculating it).
Including a bought spend reduces their (and your) risk – in very worst case above you’d be entering that meeting reporting an average cost per view of around 1/40th of that price – that’s 40 times more ROI for them, and a more economically viable campaign.
What’s missing from the above?
Quite a bit – for a start, the more that your content is seen, the more likely it is to get organic views – so a bought media buy makes it far less likely that you’ll be hitting anywhere close to the worst case. For simplicity I’ve left this at the most basic calculation I could.
(Disclaimer: these numbers are estimated and may not necessarily reflect real-life results, which will depend on individual campaigns)
Profit…Smells Like Diesel
Andy Parkhouse - May 12th, 2010Profit is a thing that some people are much too embarrassed about or scared to think about, and it’s also a thing that some other people make too much of. I drafted this post over a year ago, I sat on it for a long time for whatever reason…now I want to put profit in a clear context.
I’m a big fan of Ice Road truckers. This is a show about truckers moving supplies in the frozen far north of Canada, in temperatures as low as minus 34 centigrade.
One thing that truckers need is diesel. Not just for the simple reason of getting their trucks from A to B. The reason ice road truckers need diesel is to run the heater in their cab. If they run out of diesel, the heater goes off. If the heater goes off, they die. It’s minus thirty four. So no heat, they die.
Ice road truckers devote time and effort to ensuring they have enough diesel. It’s a major concern for them. Because if they run out, they die.
Profit for a business like ours is rather like diesel for ice road truckers. It’s not the aim of the game.
The aim of the game for an ice road trucker is to get the goods from A to B, safely and in good time. It’s customer service, solving the customer’s problem, meeting or exceeding expectations; businesses have the same goals the world over. Our aims are no different.
We need profit in the same way a trucker needs diesel. We don’t seek it for its own sake, but we have to have it, otherwise we die. That’s why we spend time and effort making sure we have enough. We’ve always had profit and we intend to keep it that way.
For truckers, the business of maintaining diesel levels requires five simple steps: get large tanks on the truck, fill them up before starting a job, check the levels often, be vigilant for leaks, and take measures to fix leaks immediately. Five simple steps. Then they get on with the job of solving the customer’s problem, getting from A to B and providing service.
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And because no blog post is complete without some truck pictures…
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tth91722/3414501485/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/naturallight/142953959/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gr8_pics_4_u/4379003289/
Leaders’ Debate Live Blog from Bristol
Andy Parkhouse - April 22nd, 2010Politics is changing – and it’s happening right in our backyard. Follow us live blogging from the venue of today’s leadership debate, and on Twitter.
Get your copy of the Good Online Policy-Making Guide
Ben Witnall - April 14th, 2010We made these rather nice 24-page booklets full of advice and examples about connecting people with decision-making online. We’d like to share them with you. There are 100 up for grabs. If you’d like your own copy, drop me a line and we’ll post one out to you.
Lessons from Toyota
Andy Parkhouse - February 10th, 2010Toyota has problems. Eight Million problems. It’s interesting that this has attracted so much attention from mainstream quality media such as the Today programme. My own interest in Toyota – of which some of you are well aware – is driven by their principles and product development techniques, which are fascinating, and provide some of the foundations for currently ‘buzzy’ things like agile software development.
For those who not excited by Toyota, product development or agile software techniques, here’s a cookie for reading this far! Meanwhile, for those who like products, principles, and how the mighty fall, more after this graphical interlude…
So this post offers thumbnails on two topics: (1) why look at Toyota if you’re running an ad agency, digital agency or web app company. (2) what went wrong.
Why Toyota?
I became aware of Toyota principles when we started developing the Viral Ad Network. One of Toyota’s key principles is to control inventory – whatever that inventory might be, you don’t want too much of it piling up around you, the aim is to have just enough while never running out.
‘Inventory’ is a key feature of the Ad Network – in this case ‘inventory’ means space on publisher websites where ads can be displayed. Managing inventory is right at the heart of the network. Too much and space goes unsold (bad for publishers and us), too little and we can’t meet the promises we’ve made to clients. More on how we do this another time.
Way beyond inventory
A little light reading gave me a much more in depth understanding of what Toyota and similar Japanese companies have been doing, where their techniques came from (common sense, rigourously applied), and how they’ve surfaced in lean techniques and agile software development methods. Given that we’re advocates of agile techniques like Scrum and Kanban, it’s seems that we’d have run across the Toyota methods eventually somehow.
…but for agencies and web app startups?
Toyota – and similar lean companies have a bunch of stuff you can use:
- Principles to run a business by – that put people first
- Build in quality, don’t rely on fixing it later (film knows this – bad shots *cannot* be “fixed in post”)
- Get stuff done
There’s way more, but this story about Amazon’s Jeff Bezos sums it up: “stop cleaning and spend your time eliminating the source of dirt”.
So how do the mighty fall?
Toyota’s aim was to be the biggest carmaker in the world. They achieved that a couple of years ago. They got there with a fearsome reputation for quality, customer service, and a certain kind of innovation (excellent engineering, but rarely exciting).
Problems at Toyota have been kicking around for some time. Last year, Toyota’s president went public on his concerns for the company.
Four connected pitfalls (I’m guessing!)
I think Toyota got smacked down by these four nasties. They’re all connected:
- Infallible fallacy
- Engineering is difficult
- Success can kill
- Dissipation
When you believe that you have the best quality, it’s hard to accept you don’t. You know that you have a system for quality, so there can’t be a problem, right? “We’re infallible” <- Fallacy.
Meanwhile, engineering is difficult. Toyota initially traced many of the accelerator problems to slipping floor mats. With this pegged as ‘the problem’, it takes time to identify that there’s actually a secondary problem with the accelerator pedal. So engineering is difficult. Anyone think a similar thing might apply with clients and customers for agencies and web apps?
Success can kill. Nothing or more less than hubris – a fine dramatic staple. Toyota achieved their goal. Hubris makes you think you’re invincible, infallible, it makes you over-expand, and bank on a certain future, but the future is not certain, and you’re not in control of it. Lean attitudes are born in the cash-strapped start up, or the nation desperately trying to win a war. Hubris is the antithesis of this, it makes you fat, arrogant and lazy, and expectant of easy success. It’s a short step from there to…”you’re dead”.
People love a goal. They like a win, an achievement. Toyota hit their goal – become the biggest – and despite being renowned planners (do you have a one hundred year plan? I don’t – they do) – they don’t seem to have lined up much else in the way of goals. They’ve expanded globally and stretched their capability dangerously. Meanwhile the car market has moved on around them. Most carmakers ‘do quality’ now. Toyotas are not appealing beyond their loyal audience. Suddenly everyone wants their lunch, they are in ten places at once, and they have no clear win in mind. Dissipation.
I don’t need to draw a diagram: there are lessons above for any of us.
Say “sorry”
Toyota: say sorry. You probably will. You should. Not just because it’s in ‘your’ character, but because it’s the right thing to do.
Too many brands aren’t brave enough to say sorry. They should get braver.
If you want to talk about lean, agile, or how brands can ‘sorry’ (or ‘thanks’, or ‘how nice to meet you’): andy@teamrubber.com or 0845 680 0575. Meanwhile, it’s nice to finish on a picture
Andy joined Twitter
Andy Parkhouse - February 4th, 2010Short and sweet: http://twitter.com/andyfacts
