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How many olympic gold medalist swimmers do you remember?

Unless you are in swimming, I would say the answer would be “Not many”

Anthony Ervin (olympic gold medalist for swimming in 2004) is about to
change that and is carving out a name for himself in a very unique
fashion. Ervin is auctioning of his gold medal in eBay and the proceeds are going to go to Tsunami relief.

Is this an attempt to get into the limelight? Ervin says “No” and in his own words -

“Selling my gold medal isn’t an attempt at the limelight,” he said.
“Rather, it’s the least I can do to help give back a little of the good
fortune I’ve experienced through swimming.”

While Ervin may be speaking from his heart and I think he is
doing this for a great cause, I am sure he is in the limelight and that
is just a bonus.

I had not heard of anyone else doing this before and for me, it was a very innovative way of leveraging his accomplishments.

All the best, Ervin! Hope you win another gold medal in the 2008 olympics.

My friend from India was staying at Homestead Hotels. Last night, I wanted to reach him by phone. I thought it should be easy. I was wrong!

I knew his room number and it was easy to get the hotel number from the website.
However, when I called the main number, I got a message stating that
there was no one in the front lobby.  There were instructions to
reach a hotel guest something like “please dial the guest’s 4 digit
extension.” That was a curve ball there. The room number had only three
digits. I thought I will use my intelligence and tried prefixing the
room number with “9″, “8″, “7″ etc. I thought something has to work.
Long story short - I was able to call someone else and got the
extension for the room number.

Interestingly, each room has a different four digit extension that is
unrelated to the room number. For example, if the room number is 234,
the extension is 1442.

Unless you are a magician, or a psychic you may not be able to guess the connection ;(

We have talked about this multiple times - if you want to have a
competitive advantage, you need to innovate. What if we have no
resources to invest in R&D and innovation. No problem. The whole
world can be your R&D unit

There are several examples where companies have used outside help
(paying in the range of $0 to hundreds of thousands of dollars)

Lego Mindstorms:
I think it was in 1999 that Lego introduced the Robotics Invention
System. In simple terms, they opened up the SDK for programmers to
create their own games. And they did. There were almost hundreds of
games and variations of existing games that programmers created out of
this system. Lego would put up a catalog showcasing the outside
inventions.

Innocentive: Innocentive
connects the world’s top scientists with the toughest R&D
challenges out there. One of the solutions will win the money but as a
bonus company gets to see all other entries and approaches to solve the
problem.

Technorati: Last november Technorati launched their first developer’s contest.
They were looking for innovative uses of Technorati API. The Grand
prize winner got $2,500 and the runners up got an iPod. Once again, the
company got to see the hundreds of other cool entries (I think)

Top Coder: When I last saw it, there were more than 54,000 members in this community. Top Coder posts design challenges
and the members can participate and win. Once again, one person wins
and the company gets to see the designs of several other folks.

Isn’t this cool? I love the model as long as there is a win-win approach.

My friend Karthik Sundaram of PurplePatch Services referred me to this interesting service on the web called SendThisFile.  Their offer as stated on their website is:

If everyone in a company learns the basics of “systems thinking” life
would be very simple. Here is a definition of a system from the late
Austrian Biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy

A system is an entity which maintains its existence through the mutual interaction of its parts.

Systems thinking, in essence, is an understanding of the system as a
whole and the mutual interaction of the underlying parts of the system.
The effect of changing on part on the other part(s) of the system needs
to be understood.

You will find systems everywhere. An organization is a system, the
project that you are working on is a system.  Imagine a scenario
where everyone on your project has a solid understanding of the goals
of the project, players involved, inter-relationships between the
components of the project and understanding of the overall impact of
the success (or failure) of the project across the organization.
Automatically, team members would become more accountable as they have
insight into how the piece they are working on affects every other
piece of the project. They exactly know where their piece fits in the
overall puzzle.

For starters, please read The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge. This book provides an excellent introduction to systems thinking.

If you are not in sales, this might surprise you. Many of you may be
thinking “I don’t ever intend to be in sales. This does not apply to
me!”

Believe me, it DOES! Everyone of us are selling something almost on a
daily basis. We may be selling our abilities to perform a job, our
ideas or our point of view.

Unfortunately, the sales profession does not get a lot of respect from
many quarters. Many of us won’t accept that everyone is a salesperson
in some way or the other.

A key point to note is that “selling” does not always refer to the
actual selling of a product or a service. However, the same principles
of sales apply even if you want to “sell an idea” to your co-worker,
boss or your client. If you can master some of the basic principles of
sales, your daily life will be simpler.

As a starter, take a look at Mahan Khalsa’s book Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play. One of the best books on sales I have ever read.
Whether you are a salesperson or not, you will enjoy this book.

Have fun!

Meetup, as most of you know is a
hosted service for organizing, well, meet ups. Until recently, Meetup
was a free service. A few days ago, Meetup announced
that it will no longer be a “free” service. I have observed (sitting on
the sidelines, of course) a lot of discussions and opinions about
whether charging consumers was “right”

My friend Dave Taylor wrote a cool piece on this topic. Dave’s point was that if these changes were not carried out right, you could kill the service.

Here are my $.02

First and foremost, I truly believe that there is “nothing” of value
that is “free” It may be provided free but there is a cost associated
with it and someone has to underwrite it. Meetup is no exception. The
company was underwriting the cost and until now, did not consider
subscription was one of the revenue models. Also, the model might have
been to wait until they get the critical mass and then start charging.
Or, it might have been that the service is very successful and there
are a ton of users and providing the same kind of service to a larger
number of users requires more resources which costs more and hence they
have no option but to start charging the consumers.

In other words, Meetup has reasons and justifications to start charging
for the service. But here are the problems with asking people to pay:
a) Most people hate change. Especially one that will ask them to move from “free” to “pay”
b) Perception issue: Meetup is
perceived as a free service and that’s the kind of value associated
with it. Now people have to think what is the right price to pay. It’s
hard to set a price that will satisfy everyone.

Here are some proposed models to consider (for Meetup or any service moving from “free” to “paid”)

1. Charge for Premium: Continue to keep the service free and  create a premium version for which people have to pay.

2. Up-sell: Keep the service free. Up-sell additional services. Revenue sharing through partners’ services


3. Create an enterprise version and sell: In case of Meetup, may be create “Meetup Enterprise” and sell to large corporations and keep the public service free

4. Push Professional Services: Keep the software free. Offer professional services related to the service and charge for those professional services.

5. Open Source completely or partially:
If development costs are a big concern, open source the software so the
community will take over the development and future enhancements.
Company can remain as a thought leader and steward for the software

6. Donations and Sponsorships: Allow users to contribute voluntarily and large corporations to sponsor the service.

7. Sell digital content: Allow
meeting organizers to put content from their members and sell the
content with revenue share. From the meta data associated with service
like Meetup, the digital content can be highly targeted (like Google
ads) and may turn out to be a significant revenue stream.

8. Tiered pricing: One example:
Groups less than 50 continue to be free and groups higher than 50 are
charged based on the number of members say 50-100 $x, 100-300 $2x etc.

9. Charge for support and training

We can get creative and come up with many more and you can mix and match the above.

Last, but not the least -
a) never make the change abrupt. Nobody likes it.
b) get your customers involved in the change process.
c) never insult your customers.

All of us know that if you we want to make sweeping changes, we need to
innovate. Incrementalism (small improvements) won’t attract much
attention. Fedex became a success
story as they changed the expectations (absolutely, positively
overnight) of people, delivered on their promise and charged a premium
for it.

However, Innovation projects are never “complete” Fedex, since then has
embarked on continuous improvement of their “absolutely, positively
overnight” service. One such improvement is the transparency. Every
shipper or the receiver (or anyone with the tracking #) can find out
where exactly the shipment is at a particular point in time. Fedex
customers may not need all the information that they provide but making
the information available will only enhance the credibility of the
company.

One more point to note is that radical innovations are risky too. Not
all of them succeed. So, you should ensure that there is a “tolerance”
for failure at your workplace. Second, you should be willing to
emotionally detach from this failure and embark on the next innovation
project. Whenever an innovation project succeeds, the next immediate
step would be to put that project on a “continuous improvement”
roadmap. Because no project is really “complete”

So, in summary a good framework can be

Innovation -> Continuous Improvement -> Innovation

Take a look at all the projects that are taking place in your own life
and it’s easy to categorize each one of them under “Innovation” or
“Continuous Improvement” If there are no innovation projects, there is
a serious problem. If there are past innovation projects that are not
under a “Continuous improvement” plan, there is an issue too.

The beauty is in balancing the Innovation and Continuous Improvement initiatives.

This short quote reminds us that there are no short cuts to success.

This little quote reminds us of the need to have a noble purpose in our lives