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Prairie Trail Software, Inc. |
A View from The Prairie, 2017
January 2017
Addicted to Losing
Some problem gamblers are not addicted to winning, but addicted to losing. They are more comfortable with losing than winning and will self-sabotage any winning streak in order to feel the pain of losing. Some business people are the same and stay a failing business complaining all the while as the business goes under. Business is a tough field to be in and we can have bad luck but our choices make the difference in how we handle our luck. We can choose to bounce back from bad luck.
The Power of Regret
Have you ever regretted anything? Many people stay with a losing stock till it becomes worthless. People put old items in a closet or spare bedroom never to use them again. All of these are signs of the power of regret. We fear the future regret of needing that item if we don't have it. Yet, we can have freedom from regrets.
February 2017
The International Opportunity
Large multinational companies are in trouble. They don't generate enough profit while being highly vulnerable to political trends. This offers hope to those companies that are smaller, better focused, and can fit in with the local communities around the world. Why is the return so low? The most obvious factors include nationalism, and loss of labor price arbitrage. But the most important is
Edge Computing
With the rise of the Internet of Things and the revelations of how deep the investigation agencies have tapped into nearly everyone's communications, there is a renewed interest in what is called "Edge Computing". This includes local networks, mesh networks, and running servers on cell phone sized equipment. Edge computing is the opposite direction from "Cloud Computing".
March 2017
The Stupidity of Artificial Intelligence
From the stock market "flash crash" to "bots" running up huge text messaging fees to self-driving cars crashing into trees they can't see; Artificial Intelligence is showing just how stupid it can be. Much science fiction has been written about our fears of the super intelligent computer. But the real danger is giving too much power to these very stupid devices. There are two very important skills that computers lack; the ability to take a lesson learned in one field and use it in another, and the ability to see when a proposed answer is not just wrong, but way off base.
Run a Tight Ship
Every business wants to run without wasted effort. There are two main ways that can be done. They are very opposite in style and results and in the amount of effort needed to accomplish them. One is control, the other is through persuasion.
April 2017
Where is the Goal Line?
Does everyone on your team agree as to what it means to "win"? Do you even know what the different people on your team think is "winning"? When different people have different ideas, it can lead to a total mess and might cause major problems with the company. When everyone agrees as to the one top priority, the whole company can work together towards that goal.
Wakeup Call
When hackers set off 156 tornado sirens in Dallas at nearly midnight on April 7, that should be (quite literally) a wakeup call on how vulnerable our critical infrastructure is to a cyberattack. The US is not prepared for the type of cyberwarfare that is happening in other parts of the world. The quick push into the Internet of Things is making the situation far worse.
May 2017
Telling Stories Around the Fire
Studying other cultures can help identify what people are actually doing in the office culture. In many cultures, much time is spent sitting around the fire telling stories instead of working. We see a similar action with many a corporate meeting. But, we can do better. Meetings need to do only those things that can't be done any other way. The best meetings are those where multiple minds see a better solution to the problem.
Pivot or Mutating?
We can learn a lot from some far-flung science. For example, in studying viruses, it turns out that the rapid mutation of a virus is an important factor in how lethal a virus is. The viruses that mutate faster are better at killing the host animal or human. This can be a metaphor for companies also. The companies that "mutate" faster are better able at "killing their targets" in the marketplace.
June 2017
Are You Solving the Right Problems?
It is so common when we are trying to get out the door after a long day of problems only to get caught near the door by yet another person with yet another problem. It is so easy to jump in to solve that one more problem. But, is that really the best way to handle the situation? We can so easily get distracted from our real job by all the problems. Our job is to direct others so that they can solve the problems. We need to recognize which details and problems are important and which need to be delegated. We must not get too busy to lead.
How are you hiring?
Over time, businesses have gotten far more selective in hiring and many have dropped their training programs. We hear about the labor shortage, but the normal response to a labor shortage is not happening. In general, businesses are expecting others to do all the training that they used to do. The businesses that are still hiring on attitude and training new employees are still finding workers. When we are hiring properly, there isn't a major labor shortage.
July 2017
Power in the Unseen
On those hot, muggy, sticky days, have you ever wondered just how much moisture actually is in the air? Someone at the USGS decide to look at how much moisture was being carried from the warm ocean up to the coast of California. He figured that each day, that "river in the air" was transporting more than the volume of water put in the ocean by the Amazon river in a year. There can be a lot of power in the stuff that we don't see but is all around us. This is also true in business. There are a number of things that are not easily measured that have a significant impact on our business.
It was Too Fragile
Scientists were wondering why Bird Flu spread so quickly through chicken farms when only a few people caught it. By digging into the DNA of that flu virus, they were able to identify that the virus is too fragile to be able to spread between people. We see the same thing with a lot of new products and services: they are just too fragile to spread rapidly through the general public. Only a few people will be able to use those products or services.
August 2017
Modern Data and Corporations are Fragile
In 410 AD, the Roman army pulled out of Britain. The collapse of the Roman society in Britain was fast and pronounced. In less than 50 years, Roman Britain was a faint memory and former Roman towns were being farmed with nobody living there. The prior widespread trading was gone. The Roman society in Britain had totally collapsed. It was far more fragile than nearly anywhere else in the Roman Empire. We, too, live in a fragile society and businesses are at risk from both internal and external fragility. Our society is quite fragile and the speed at which we discard technologies and move on to the new is part of the fragility.
Break the rules!
If you want to make a significant change in your business, break the Rules. We operate with a bunch of rules in our head that can hold us back. By breaking the rules, we can see how to improve things and get significant results. While we can argue about whether Uber and Lyft can be profitable companies, there is no question that they have been breaking rules right and left. In many cases, Uber moves into a town without any permissions and breaks many laws to get started. However, when breaking rules, make sure that you are following the data.
September 2017
Google's Research on Effective Teams
Over the years, people have wondered what makes the difference between a group of workers selected at random to work together and those special teams that get so much done. Google has researched the issue and reported on their findings. The important point is that rather than having high skills in any one person, people on the most effective teams were psychologically safe.
Cultural Tensions
In the 900's, the Scandinavian economy had three major sections; farming and fishing, raiding, and trade. Of the three, trade gets the least notice, but may have been the most consistent source of wealth. Each produces stress on society and we see the same stresses today in corporate cultures. We know most about the Viking Raiders but economically, they were in the same position as people who win the lottery: The money gets spent quickly and the raiders are soon in need of more cash.
October 2017
Internet of (Vulnerable) Things
In Nature documentaries, we can watch penguin colonies raise their chicks.
We can watch the adults come and go.
All the while, right off shore, the sharks are swimming, waiting for a meal,
knowing that the adults and chicks will swim right into range.
Currently, there is a mad rush into the Internet of Things.
Yes, the opportunities are huge.
But the spread of unsafe devices is putting all of us at risk.
Ignore Stuff
The human body is receiving a huge amount of data every second, most of which we ignore. Our eyes are processing every second and send the data to the brain on a network of about a million nerve cells. We toss away most of this information. In management, often we need to ignore certain things. Much can be safely ignored but there are some that should not be.
November 2017
Antifragility
When software is first written, often it is "fragile"; users can find keystroke combinations or inputs that "crash" the program. Many a web page has been hacked by people who have discovered ways to break the normal behavior. It takes a lot of work to build the software so that it is able to gracefully handle bad input or aggressive attacks. We need systems that are not fragile. The same is true with corporate systems. We need antifragile corporations.
Turn the Problem Around
Many times, when we can get stuck on a problem, it helps to turn the problem around and look at it from another viewpoint. Turning a problem around is a common solution technique in the physical sciences and in sales. We can "solve" a problem from one viewpoint and then, when looking at the problem from the other side, see a totally different solution that is often far better.
December 2017
Trusting Data
We have all heard customer support people tell us "that is what the computer says" even when we knew that the computer was wrong. Computer data is often trusted when it shouldn't be and not trusted when it should be. Computers and data need to cross a "trust boundary" and things go wrong at that boundary. We face liars and out dated information all the time. We need to have a good process for letting data inside that trust boundary.
Costs of Speedups
In the Large Hadron Collider, the second run was designed to run at a rate of one burst every 25 nanoseconds. To put that in perspective, in 25 nanoseconds, light travels only about 8 feet. There was tremendous costs and effort to be able to get some information when things are happening that fast. In business, we are all being pushed to speed up processes.
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