What’s wrong with the scene? Too much honesty. Too much honesty can deliver the opposite effect.

As a for instance if I were to tell you “Hey… I’m not going to steal your wallet” I bet you hand would go straight to your wallet pocket to check if its there. Why? Because I got you thinking about your wallet and the likelihood of it getting stolen. That’s why pickpockets try to get your attention as far from your belongings as possible. They need you to block sensation in the part of your body they are targeting.

In sales there’s such a thing as too much honesty as well. A sales rep in one of the companies I used to work often told me to tell prospective customers we were a good, sincere company that kept their promises. That is another example of too much honesty. If we are good and sincere our clients will find out once they work with us and analyze our delivery. Lets not get him thinking of the likelihood we are not.

Going back to my now favorite bakery: I have been told that La Higienica has been in business forever and they do quite well which makes me feel eccentric when I state that I would never buy food in a place with such a name.

El Shuje

On my next post I will teach you how to shave using your left hand and how to properly bandage deep cuts in your neck and face.

I had recently delivered three or four proposals to prospective clients and had had no answer in weeks. So I was kind of edgy. Whenever I would nudge them I would get an elusive nudge-back or no answer at all. I then proceeded in a George Costanza like manner to rant about the status of society and how we don’t care about one another. Until I had one of those introspective moments I seldom have and asked myself: “What do YOU do in these situations?”.

Then I remembered the four or five prospective offices I was considering when we were office hunting and noticed how once I decided in favor of one I never took the time to contact the real estate agents for the remaining 4. They were so used to the situation they did not even bother re-contacting me, except for one to whom I politely told I decided to go with a different option and another who spams me on a regular basis with offers of just about anything from offices to condos to viagra. I guess I deserve it.

So… what to do about this? Two things to improve the sales ecosystem and beat karma:

1. Feedback pull: Demand to know what happened with your proposal to those who have it in their desks.

2. Feedback push: Be considerate of people who are expecting your answer and provide it.

This is what Michael Jackson aptly referred to as “starting with the man in the mirror.” Think of it as your little contribution towards making this a better world for all of us involved in sales.

El Shuje

On my next post I will put you to sleep with paragraph upon paragraph of boring stuff. Then I will steal your TVs.

Against the collective desire of the development community, I still, every now and then, do a bit of coding. It doesn’t happen all that frequently, but when it does… I enjoy it very much. I enjoy the thrill of the chase. The relentless pursuit of the binary state of done.

However, since I wrote my first line of code my career had a bit of everything and eventually landed in management. And that was it for me. Although I’m not particularly fond of all management work, I thoroughly enjoy dealing with people.

Smart, silly, hateful, passionate, lazy, dumb, lovable people.

When dealing with people you seldom have a state of done or even know what the state of done is. You can never consider all variables because variables become infinite. The human being is not only unpredictable per se but is also affected by a millon contributing environmental factors ranging from weather to a sports result. Nothing prepares you 100% for the task of managing people.

I find that fascinating.

That is what I love the most about my trade and generally about anything in the world. For the most part, I love people. I ocassionaly hate them. But I always love working with them.

It’s unpredictable, brillant, capricious, endearing people that makes it all worth while.

Shuje

PS: On my next post I will show you how to make a sound in a frequency that only dogs and Lady Gaga can hear.

After that, and if you are lucky and talented and determined and corageous and strong-willed enough to succeed, then its success that makes you glamorous, not the fact that you are an entrepreneur.

A month or so ago, the doctor told me I might require knee surgery due to some self inflicted injury while moving the furniture from our first office to our beautiful new one. As it turned out, I did not require surgery but the message was clear: Starting your own company hurts to the bone. Literally.

So why is the word entrepreneurship often associated to glamour?

Because of the fantasy of no bosses, no time restrictions, no nothing: False. You have now more bosses than you ever had. Investors, creditors, employees, partners, clients; all demand a commitment harder that just saying “yes sir!” to someone that gives you an order.

Because there’s no picture of those who do not make it. You know the stories of the Twitters, Zyngas and Dell’s of the world, never the stories of the guy that finishes from second to last and the financial and emotional pains they endure.

Because of douche bags who brain wash you. People that teach (teach! mind you) about being a successful entrepreneur and have no real accolades. It reminds me of the “How to get rich” seminars in Las Vegas taught by people who are not rich (WTF?). You also have the insecure moron that leans against a wall and tells girls “You know babe… I’m an entrepreneur” as if the term held some cache of its own.

Here’s a reality check for you, in order to counter-brain-wash you:

1 You will perform mundane, often boring, sometimes degrading tasks.

2 You will perform said tasks on a minute basis, all day, every day.

3 You will estrange people you love: friends, family, significant others. Even your mascot will give you attitude.

4 GOTO 1

You won’t be a rock star. But you will definitely rock and roll.

Shuje

PS: In my next post I will blow your minds to pieces using nothing but words and a pistol.

2010 marked the year I felt out of love with Google. I mean… I still love Google, but I’m no longer in love with it. I’ve started seeing other companies.

Google has changed. It is impossible for a company as big as the big G to maintain a “do no evil” policy when evil is subjective. If you grow as much as Google grew then you are bound to rub people the wrong way even if other people think it’s the right way. And last year some things by Google I did not find 100% evil free.

But that is not why I’ve kicked them off the pedestal.

Google produced some serious product flops last year; maybe also as a natural consequence of growth. It’s not always easy to keep the highest standards. Sure, it had produced some crappy stuff before: Google X, Jaiku, Web Accelerator, etc. but these last few crashes were resounding and occurred in products that I believe were aligned with their strategy for the year.

As an obvious for instance Google Buzz. Seriously? That was your best attempt at kicking Twitter and FB in the groin? A poor looking, security fissured, opt in required crap-o-rama with some sharing capabilities?

Another not so obvious seriously bad thing is the Open Social Standard (although it has been around for quite a few years now). Not only Facebook’s single handed defeat of all other social networks put together is the reason this flopped. I fail to see how this might be called a standard when you need to write custom code for every single platform you want to deploy your app into.

But to me, the most resounding one was Google Wave. What happened there? The techiest of my tech friends and acquaintances all say it was by technology standards groundbreaking, a great idea. Tech and idea were cool, what went wrong?

Lesson #01: What’s good for the goose is not always good for synchronous stuff.
By goose I mean gmail and Google’s “You like it? Well you can’t have it!” brilliant marketing approach to beta testing and product distribution. I read my e-mail invite for wave a good three hours after the sender delivered it, got absolutely thrilled and entered the wave playground excited to collaborate with… no one. I was alone. My inviter then told me the same thing had happened to him. So, using an asynchronous invite method for synchronic collaboration might have not been the greatest idea.

Lesson #02: Less is more.
The Wave was a lot to take. It had to live up to the self imposed challenge of being the thing that would kill e-mail (really?) so I guess they packed it with everything they could short of a flame-thrower: it was an open source, real-time, expandable, extensible, embeddable, younameit-able set of collaboration tools including video, chat, drawing, infinite gadgets. When I finally got around to testing with a few buddies we played 5 minutes with something then moved on to the next thing. We did not get enough of a chance to let the WOW factor settle in.

Lesson #03: Don’t target nerds.
I get the feeling that at some level the wave was targeted to a nerdy public. Here’s a piece of news for you: Nerds don’t want to share. Gmail was something for everyone, in spite of nerdy Google tech lovers being the ones that absolutely had to have it, everyone else could gain what at that time was a groundbreaking approach to e-mail in size, organization, presentation, simplicity, you name it. If you target something solely for nerds, they will flock in and close the door behind them.

Lesson #04: Enterprise is not a bad word.
Google wave was clearly a great instrument for enterprise collaboration, and yet the idea of using it in the enterprise was not as apparent to me and most of the people I queried on this. Instead of pitching the “e-mail killer” maybe they should have pitched a “Google Docs on steroids”. We’ll never know.

El Shuje

On my next post I will replace all the a’s with smileys. Just for the heck of it. In the meantime… as always… comment, share, tweet, retweet, and mail me at shuje@holoom.com

Around this time of the year anyone with a keyboard and anything remotely resembling a blog starts churning out predictions for 2011. It’s actually a very cool thing to do, because generally speaking, no one will ever revisit what you said a year ago because… well.. who cares? And even those wise people that say they analyze how their predictions did last year, find a way of lying themselves into a winning position. “I said the iPad was going to be used a lot and I was right!” said someone who predicted iPads were going to be used as paper-weight.

I for one, did no predictions. I openly mocked the iPad and I still stand by the idea that it is something that Apple pulled off because it is Apple (which is awesome by the way.) Imagine instead of the Apple iPad the “Microsoft Brick” with all of MS credibility (not!), spot on aesthetics (not!) and great eye for usability (not!) and (mal)functionality.

But enough with paralell universes. Since I do not like predictions I’m going for something entirely more sophisticated… a 2011 horoscope for IT personas. It kind of resembles the chinese material / animal approach, but not quite.

Fire belching steel dragon (i.e. Security engineers). This year you will hate everyone that holds a computer within the organization you work in. They will still all be dumbasses that do not care for the safety of the network. The ones that do not hold a computer, are also dumb asses, but less hazardous at that.

Floor crawling crap weasel (i.e. Social Media Guru). People will start demanding some return on the hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in Facebook and Twitter that have not rendered them a single penny still in ROI. Be in the lookout for payed hitmen.

Java spewing dirt goat (i.e. Backend Developer) The world will continue to deny you the glory you deserve for being oh so great and having the solution to all problems. They will complain about how complex and ugly your interfaces look and how long it takes to process something and all because you had to add 19 layers of framework upon framework to produce a hello world application in record time (2 and a half weeks).

Excel wielding stone fox (i.e. Old School Project Manager). Things will be exactly as they should be. Always. Things will happen for a reason and when they happen they will be dealt with accordingly, always in time and within budget.

Smile faking poop hiena (i.e. Sales Representative) People in your company still will not understand your sales strategies. So what if your company sells software and you struck a deal for five thousand flat screen TVs? How hard can it be?

Table pivoting cardboard rat (i.e. CFO) Everything and anything will be overpriced and unnecesary. The organization will still try to spend money on superfluous things such as toilette paper and surveillance and you will be the only voice of reason.

That’s all I have for now.

Happy new year everyone!

Shuje

PS: On my next post a picture of myself in my cutest jammies. It’s all for charity people!

Although we in Argentina make a habit of being fashionably late, we are usually punctual to serious affairs like a doctor’s appointment, a business meeting and such. So, when we travel to Peru on business, the locally called “peruvian hour” shakes us a bit, and might affect our business.

Different degrees of compatibility between cultures like the one above can make a business deal sink or swim (or secret option number three: paddle doggy style in circles). This is not limited to things lost in translation, like the marketing myth of the chinese “Coca Cola” which apparently in mandarin translates to “Bite the wax tadpole” (not a very attractive name for a canned product).

For example, Argentina has beaten India to business in more than one occasion due to the “excessive politeness” of Indians. Clients have told that “They keep saying ‘yes’ in conference calls, but two weeks later when delivery time hits you realize they did not understand the requirement”. That is a huge cultural gaffe and a sure advantage for a more feisty competitor.

Not to worry my Indian friend, we have flaws of our own.

For instance, we tend to take things overtly personal and that sometimes poses a serious problem when interacting with, for example, the US. Business in the US is conducted by straight shooters. They use small talk because it’s appropriate, but there’s rarely genuine interest there (“How’s the weather and who cares?”) They much rather jump straight to business but because they are excellent at business ettiquete they will put up a reglamentary amount of small talk. Then after asking you about your kids and husband they will shoot “Your work sucks”. You must not take this personal. It’s business; when the clock strikes 5 pretty much as in the cartoon of the wolf and the sheepdog they will offer to buy you a beer.

The above mentioned behavior clashes with Argentine culture. We tend to have a mindset in which “If you like my work you like me, if you don’t you hate me and why would you hate me if I bought you beer?”

Consequentially, people in Argentina have trouble giving negative feedback. They will tell you you’re doing a great job and then recommend you are fired. This happens. A lot. Everywhere. It has nothing to do with douche-bags who tell you one thing and then do the other, it’s a genuine shortcoming of ours. We need to get past this. Business is business.

Somewhere in the middle of the US culture and the Argentine culture lays the ideal path: Telling things like they are, but with a humane approach.

Brazilians of certain regions tend to take things too easy; people in the UK are very respectful of the clock. Scots are friendly and germans are rigid. The list goes on.

It’s a good thing for people trying to do business offshore to understand and adapt to the clients’ culture. Sometimes you are already a match made in heaven, sometimes it will pay to make an extra effort; whatever you do, do not overlook the fact that culture can make or break deals.

Shuje

PS: On my next post I will present the spring collection: As I suspected female street nudity is making a comeback.

When I started my development career, Google was a few years away of seeing the light, forums did not exist, Netscape was the geek’s browser of choice and only a few select websites could provide any kind of information on development, and that was if you could get to them. So a lot of what you learned, you learned from a book, or the occasional tutorial CD or a savvy tutor near you. But whatever the source was, you committed it to memory. A few months ago I had to get my hands dirty again with some coding and I found myself searching for the same PHP command I had used two days before, because … well… it was two clicks away so why bother memorizing it?

Looking beyond code, the Google + Wikipedia combo has made me lazy all the while freeing up a considerable amount of my brain cells formerly used to memorize stuff about geography, history, literature, or whatever topic. Now, thru a mixture of my own laziness and the fact that the info is at the tip of my fingers, I don’t make the slightest effort to memorize anything anymore.

Another example of external memory: When I was ten years old I could remember maybe ten to fifteen phone numbers by heart (all landlines mind you). Those were basically all the phone numbers that made up my ten year old universe: family, close friends, and not much more. Now I barely have three or four including my own cell phone and the rest are in my blackberry’s address book. I honestly have trouble remembering my home landline and I’m pretty sure ten years from now I will remember one at most or none at all.

So what are we doing with all these extra brain space?

Although we have more available brain space we are also bombarded with a lot more stuff than before and I for one, blame Twitter for this. Twitter has given us access to whomever we care to watch and those individuals use twitter to share a lot of the stuff (links, articles, thoughts, phrases, quotes, pics, etc.) that they find interesting. By transition we would be inclined to find those things interesting as well. I could make a safe bet that if you were to follow all the links and info published on any given day by the people you follow, you could do nothing else in the day.

I find this information overload plus laziness to remember is slowly killing a part of our passion. Whether it is a movie, a book or a music album, everything is out there so fast that you cannot even build the desire and once you have it, you do not enjoy it quite as much as we did in the old days.

Is our passion dying? Or is it shifting? And if so… where? In my case I have yet to figure that out.

Shuje

On my next post I will make you cry and laugh, and then cry again. In the meantime, let me know your thoughts on this. Are we losing our passion? Is Wikipedia making us dumber or is it that I am so dumb I’m missing something?

Generosity 2.0: I wanted a twitter account for my company. Naturally I looked up the company name as a first option but it was taken. I realized, however, that the account was not heavily used so before I started thinking alternative names I looked up the owner’s Facebook account and sent her a message asking of her if she would be so kind as to give up the account for my greedy brand-streaming purposes. Sure enough, she did and in return she asked for … nothing!  A wonderful contrast to the greedy disposition most people have in such situations. Here’s the link. Thanks Miss Uenoyama.

Bad liking ettiquete: I found two types of individuals that truly annoy the hell out of me on Facebook with their “liking” habits. First the suck-up lame little person that clicks the “like” button a nano second after his/her boss publishes anything no matter how stupid or incoherent or lame. This isn’t to say you cannot like something your boss says, but … everything? Who’s your boss? James Bond? The second type is the self liker. You’ve seen them, they publish something and immediately click the like button. Insecure much?

Wasted bytes & fake news. A few days ago a very young Argentine actress died. 20 minutes later one of the people I follow on Twitter posted something that caught my eye: The status of said actress on Wikipedia was now “deceased”. I guess there is actually nothing wrong with the collective information repository that is the internet being updated fast. The problem is that a couple of hours later a rumor got started by some idiot that a local musician had also died, and roughly ten people in my twitter picked that one up too. I think it did not escalate from there, but it is not unheard of that this fake news are picked by traditional media and passed on as real news. I guess misery loves viral.

BTW I said Godin sized. Not Godin smart

Shuje

On my next post I will show video proof of why men should not be allowed to dance. Did I say men? I meant me. I shouldn’t be allowed to dance.

I am not, by any means, a full fledged entrepreneur; mainly because I haven’t been in the business of being my own boss for a long time. I can, however, try to share a few of the experiences that I’ve lived so far. Here’s the first one: Be mindful of who you choose to team up with.

I have been a part of various teams in many walks of life (previous jobs, music bands, football teams, etc.) with varying degrees of success. Let us clarify here that when talking team chemistry, success does not mean reaching your goals. Success, in this particular context means: Choosing the people that will make your project move forward. The success of the whole endeavor is a different thing altogether and depends on a great deal of factors. To put it differently: Having a good team does not warrant success. Not having a good team almost certainly warrants failure.

I’ve had both great partners and lousy ones. Here’s a few rules I believe can help when choosing who to team up with:

Balance the hard skills: Between you and your partners you should be able to cover the whole set of hard skills required to operate whatever business you run. I have no adequate rule of thumb, but I can say that regarding daily operation you should cover the commercial aspects (i.e. sales) the productive aspects (i.e. whatever it is your company does) and the financial (that crap that no one knows anything about.)

Balance the soft skills: I subscribe to the theory of the executive types by which you need to cover creativity, ambition and organization. All three aspects should be covered by the partners in any combination of partner-to-skills as long as the three are covered in a realistic way (i.e. it is very difficult to find a person who is both creative and organized)

Find mature partners: This may sound ironic when coming from a guy that has more toys now than when he was ten years old. Maturity, however, has nothing to do with the toy count, it’s how you deal with stuff.  Maturity is dealing with crap and finding solutions, confronting your fears, acknowledging them, and occasionaly admiting that they have  bested you, and re-group. Maturity comes in different flavors… physical, emotional, professional, etc. Make sure your partner has a well balanced maturity pack.

Achieve commitment equity: Equity confers benefits but also responsibilities. Basically if you have 20% of the shares of a company, you should contribute 20% enthusiasm, 20% balls, 20% of a lot of stuff that makes things work. Slight variations should of course be tolerated: Occasionally picking up a co-founder with doubts and cheering him up, is acceptable; constantly having to push someone means he is an employee, not a partner (i.e. where an employee would find problems a partner should find solutions.) Both are very valuable members of a company, but each in his/her corresponding place.

Tollerate your partner’s flaws: Pretty much like with your significant other you need to be able to tolerate the defects of your partners. Your marriage works fine because your wife smells in a different direction when you take off your shoes and because you put up with her constant yapping during your sports tv hour. Likewise you need to be able to tolerate with decorum the slight and sometimes not so slight annoyances your partner/s have. There will be differences, but they should be easy to overlook, never a deal-breaker.

Find the correct blend of work and personal affinity: Complementing skills is an essential requirement, but you cannot overlook that you need to share things beyond the professional with your partners. You cannot team up with people you dislike or have no personal chemistry with. Sooner or later you will find that it causes you trouble. On the other hand, you cannot expect to like all your employees, but that’s a different story.

Shuje

On my next post: Coverage of the funeral of Schrodinger’s cat. Yes. It was dead. The box smells really bad by the way.