Why we should hope CEOs quit - Tom Peters and more

Tom Peters is an establishment management guru. He's not on the scale of the true greats like Machiavelli or Sun Tzu[1], but he's at least in the middle tier.

So his take on executive compensation is noteworthy ...

Op-Ed Columnist - Escaping the Bust Bowl - Kristof - NYTimes.com

... Tom Peters, a management expert, suggests capping the pay of C.E.O.’s receiving bailouts at that of a four-star general. As for the concern that the executives would quit, who cares? Mr. Peters writes that if all the top executives of the Fortune 500 companies were exiled to Elba, “performance of their companies would not on average deteriorate.”...

CEO compensation is the inverse of the zero-bound problem that confounds fiscal policy and produces perverse (high institutional risk) but logical (highest expected return) behaviors in financial managers and bank traders (Paul Wilmot, NYT). CEO compensation has reached the upper-bound limit of what used to be called "f-you money" -- the $30 million plus personal wealth that makes employment optional.

So CEOs don't need their jobs. They work extremely long hours because they adore their work - for reasons that are good and not so good. If you reduce their compensation, so they're now falling down the power curve, many of them will quit.

Then what happens?

I'm betting Peters is right, in part because I don't think CEOs are "selected" on the basis of excellence in leadership or judgment. I suspect that if a large majority of CEOs of publicly traded companies were to take early retirement that corporate performance would be unchanged or improved.

That may be what we have to do to eliminate the upper bound problem.

[1] Update: Ok, confession time. I added Sun Tzu because I was influenced by the opinion of others. My bad. I've since read it; Machiavelli stands alone. In modern times I still like 'Reengineering the Corporation' even though it got quite a bad rep later, and I like 'The Innovator's Dilemma' (but not later, much weaker, "Innovator's Solutions" book). and 'Getting to Yes'.

On books, history and the Kindle

"If humans could learn from history, there wouldn't be so much of it."

me

“Our vision is every book, ever printed, in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds.”

Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com

History is to the past as Moby Dick is to "Fought whale. Lost.". Even if it's true as stated, it's necessarily a radical reduction. Anyone who's read a book of another era, or visited the NYT archives,  feels the wonder of untold stories. Jim Stogdill has written an excellent essay, inspired by the Bezos quote, on history and books ...

The Kindle and the End of the End of History - Jim Stogdill O'Reilly Radar

... I had been doing some research this morning and was reading a book published in 1915. It's long out of print, and may have only had one printing, but I know from contemporary news clippings found tucked in its pages that the author had been well known and somewhat controversial back in his day. Yet, Google had barely a hint that he ever existed. I fared even worse looking for other people referenced in the text. Frustrated, I grabbed a 3x5 card and scribbled:

"Google and the end of history... History is no longer a continuum. The pre-digital past doesn't exist, at least not unless I walk away from this computer, get all old school, and find an actual library."

My house is filled with books, it's ridiculous really. They are piled up everywhere. I buy a lot of old used books because I like to see how people lived and how they thought in other eras, and I guess I figure someday I'll find time to read them all. For me, it's often less about the facts they contain and more about peeking into alternative world views. Which is how I originally came upon the book I mentioned a moment ago.

The problem is that old books reference people and other stuff that a contemporary reader would have known immediately, but that are a mystery to me today - a mystery that needs solving if I want to understand what the author is trying to say, and to get that sense of how they saw the world...

It's not the pre-digital past that seems increasingly blurred and lost, it's the pre-Google past. Much of the early computer era, even the early Internet era, is think on the net.

Lovely essay. I wish both Amazon and Google, with similar missions to bring knowledge the world, great success.

Google's ActiveSync license - interesting

Google, I am your servant. Google has saved my iPhone from a heel grinding. As of today I have Push connection to five of our family calendars (Contacts are up next), and I didn't even need Microsoft to pervert the platform.

Pound sand, MobileMe.

Cough. Ok, so I did need a bit of Microsoft. Specifically, their ActiveSync monopoly (PalmPre). I figured this cost Google a fortune ...

Google licensed ActiveSync from Microsoft for this. I assumed they'd cloned it. I wonder what a ten million user license of ActiveSync costs? I don't imagine Microsoft gave Google much of a discount. It's an amazing testimony to the power of Microsoft's Exchange monopoly, and a marker for how serious Google is about making this work.

Ahh, but not so fast. Betanews has a different angle (emphases mine) ...

Google Sync made possible through patent license with Microsoft | Betanews

...[Google] licensed Exchange Server patents from Microsoft, in a deal that company is describing today as an "open" license.

This morning, Google launched its initial beta for a contacts synchronization service that enables individuals to share information for up to five mobile calendars and three e-mail addresses between devices, including iPhone, S60, BlackBerry, Sony Ericsson, and Windows Mobile phones. If that list sounded familiar, it's because their manufacturers are all on the patent licensing agreement list announced by Microsoft last December 18

Today, Google officially joined that list, though obviously because its beta has already been launched, its agreement with Microsoft must already have extended back at least several months.

Whether due to the evolving state of the market, the increasing demands by consumers for interoperability, the increasing threats from the European Commission, or a combination of these factors, Microsoft has steadily been increasing the availability of its technology, including to competitors. One of the most crucial of the protocols being opened up is Exchange ActiveSync, which Microsoft's own Exchange Server 2007 uses to maintain contact information, e-mail distribution, and point-of-presence between networked PCs and mobile devices.

It's easily the most effective synchronization protocol going, and has become the de facto standard. So Microsoft is under increased pressure to avoid being characterized as non-competitive or unfair with regard to one more standard upon which the world's businesses rely, which is also under its complete control.

Under Microsoft's current policy, the use of APIs to communicate with a system using one of its protocols, does not require a patent license. But serving up the protocol for yourself under your own brand name does require one, and that's what Google Sync does...

I wonder what's in the patent. I suspect it might include things like the definition of a "Contact" -- such as the data model.

It's also clear that Google isn't running a humungous version of Exchange Server -- they licensed the patents, they didn't buy Microsoft's software. Maybe this didn't cost them as much as I'd imagined.

I think we all owe the European Union a big "thank you" for forcing Microsoft to relinquish effective control of Exchange Server. This also suggests that BlackBerry is not as vulnerable to Microsoft's direct action as I'd imagined.

Now, on to sorting out my Contacts so I can, for the first time ever, have a unified contact set. More on that later ...

Update 3/4/09: In comments Leaskovski refers to the interesting example of "Z-Push", an open source project:

... Z-push is an implementation of the ActiveSync protocol which is used 'over-the-air' for multi platform ActiveSync devices, including Windows Mobile, iPhone, Sony Ericsson and Nokia mobile devices. With Z-push any groupware can be connected and synced with these devices...

... Open source Z-Push enables any PHP-based groupware package to become fully syncable with any ActiveSync-compliant device.

Being an opensource project under the GPL, it allows developers to add their own backend so that Z-Push can communicate with their groupware solution.

Currently, Z-Push is available with four backends: the IMAP and the maildir backend for e-mail synchronisation, the vCard backend for contact synchronisation and one for the Zarafa package which allows full synchronization of E-mail, Calendar, Contacts and Tasks. We expect that other backends arise in the near future as the opensource community gets the grips with the new possibilities....

Great project. I sure hope they succeed and I'll keep my eye open for z-Push news. Unfortunately Source Forge hasn't heard about feeds :-). Maybe one day.

It's interesting to watch the emergence of de facto standard data models driven by the need to support synchronization (a very demanding master). There are lessons aplenty for health care standards (HL-7 RIM, etc).

The case that Obama has been naive (via Krugman)

I'd assumed that Obama, a Chicago pol, was cynical smart, and all this "bipartisan" stuff was just chaff to distract the enemy.

Krugman says otherwise, and he claims evidence (emphases mine) ...

Paul Krugman - The Destructive Center - NYTimes.com

... how did this happen? I blame President Obama’s belief that he can transcend the partisan divide — a belief that warped his economic strategy.

After all, many people expected Mr. Obama to come out with a really strong stimulus plan, reflecting both the economy’s dire straits and his own electoral mandate.

Instead, however, he offered a plan that was clearly both too small and too heavily reliant on tax cuts. Why? Because he wanted the plan to have broad bipartisan support, and believed that it would. Not long ago administration strategists were talking about getting 80 or more votes in the Senate.

Mr. Obama’s postpartisan yearnings may also explain why he didn’t do something crucially important: speak forcefully about how government spending can help support the economy. Instead, he let conservatives define the debate, waiting until late last week before finally saying what needed to be said — that increasing spending is the whole point of the plan...

Wow. The administration really expected support from the Party of Limbaugh?! They weren't just putting up a smokescreen?!

How the heck did such a naive group win the election?!

I assume they're better informed now.

Update: Emily doesn't buy it. She thinks the "80 seat" leak was another layer of deception, intended to make the GOP think that Obama's team were a bunch of naive rubes. She's convinced they're deeply steeped in darkest devilish evil. I certainly hope so!

Google is the net

When Google is having technical problems (as in this morning) the net feels slow.

That's because, for me, Google is a lot of the net I use - search, Reader, Gmail, Apps, etc.

I'm not the only one (emphases mine):

Coding Horror: The Elephant in the Room: Google Monoculture

... Now that Stack Overflow has been chugging right along for almost six months, allow me to share the last month of our own data. Currently, 83% of our total traffic is from search engines, or rather, one particular search engine:

Search Engine
Visits

Google
3,417,919

Yahoo
9,779

Live
5,638

...

AltaVista
202

...

Those 6x and 8x numbers that Rich quoted two years ago seem awfully quaint now. Google delivers 350x the traffic to Stack Overflow that the next best so-called "search engine" does. Three hundred and fifty times!..

The shocking thing is that AltaVista still exists! They were the first truly useful search engine, and their fate should forever crush talk of "first mover advantage". I was an early adopter of AV, and I remember the day I gave them up for Google.

Consider this. For the the elite Geeks that visit CH ...

• Google/Live = 600
• Live/AltaVista = 30

I like Google. In terms of doing things that help me, the rank of software companies in my life is basically Google >>> Apple/Microsoft (tied, and Windows 7 might push Microsoft ahead). Still, a wee bit of competition would be good for everyone.

Why we may buy Kindle 2

Not for us, for my mother who has macular degeneration and limited vision ...

Amazon.com: Kindle 2: Amazon's New Wireless Reading Device (Latest Generation): Kindle Store...

... Kindle's high-resolution screen now boasts 16 shades of gray...

... Kindle has six adjustable font sizes to suit your reading preference. Now every book in your library can be large print.

... Kindle can read to you. With the new Text-to-Speech feature, Kindle can read every book, blog, magazine, and newspaper out loud to you. You can switch back and forth between reading and listening, and your spot is automatically saved. Pages automatically turn while the content is being read, so you can listen hands-free. You can choose from both male and female voices which can be sped up or slowed down to suit your preference...

They only have six adjustable font sizes, so I don't think that's different from Kindle 1. I was hoping they'd go to seven or eight sizes, but really I need to test with my mother.

Imagine: How and why Microsoft should pervert the iPhone

Imagine we lived in an alternate reality where Apple didn't forbid applications that competed with its iPhone suite. Yes, I know it's hard. History was very different in that universe. Maybe Jobs achieved true spiritual enlightenment a few years back, and the alternative-Apple's board wasn't able to fire him.

In that reality, like here, former Palm geeks were fed up with Apple's PIM/PDA services and current BlackBerry users snorted their coffee when contemplating the iPhone ...

Gordon's Notes: The straw that broke my iPhone love

... What makes this straw a back breaker is not simply that iPhone calendaring is pathetic, it's that Apple forbids alternatives. Even on OS X there are a few alternatives to Apple products, but on the iPhone only Apple can use the USB cable, and vendors are explicitly forbidden to distribute alternatives to Apple's core applications. On the iPhone it's Apple's Calendar.app, or it's nothing.

It's a bad story, and, short of a revolution in Apple's attitude, it's not going to get better. Astonishingly, the Apple iPhone and MobileMe have made me miss the old Microsoft.

So I've stopped recommending the iPhone to others anyone who needs at least PalmPilot 1994 functionality, and I won't be replacing my wife's (miserable) BlackBerry Pearl with an iPhone...

In this alternate reality, Dr Doom Microsoft can be a dark hero.

Microsoft Outlook is an ugly mongrel of ancient code, but it spanks iCal and Address Book. So imagine if Microsoft were to create an iPhone calendaring, task, contact and memo suite tied to Outlook, Entourage, Exchange Server and their newest incarnation of Windows Live.

Consider the advantages for Microsoft

• They'd have a great weapon against RIM (BlackBerry)
• They could charge $50 an iPhone app and make a bit of change
• They'd bind more customers to Windows Live, which they could leverage to provide streaming music and video services (remember, in this alternate reality the iPhone is open to Apple's competitors). Maybe they start charging for a bundled streaming media and data store service and generate revenue there.
  
• Microsoft's iPhone address book could be used to tie customers to their messaging solutions, from email to instant messaging
• They'd make it very easy for customers to switch to Microsoft's phones since they'd have a simple data migration solution
• They'd have several tools to pry people from Google's calendaring, email, contacts, identity, pending telephony/video (GrandCentral) and, eventually, search solutions
• An iPhone/iTouch platform could be a part of Microsoft's Netbook response strategy.
  

In that bizarre reality, I'd be singing the praises of Lex Luthor Steve Ballmer.

Wow. Rescued by Microsoft. That's weird. I'm almost grateful it can't happen here.

American corruption and Obama's challenge

I usually discount predictions of American outrage. As near as I can tell, America has been seriously stoned for at least 8 years.

On the other hand, I feared Obama was another lost cause and that he would need to adopt the GOP's deceits to contend.

So maybe Rich has something here. He gets credit for smacking the media meme that Daschle's problem was taxes (emphases mine) ...

Frank Rich - Slumdogs Unite! - NYTimes.com

... In reality, Daschle’s tax shortfall, an apparently honest mistake, was only a red flag for the larger syndrome that much of Washington still doesn’t get. It was the source, not the amount, of his unreported income that did him in. The car and driver advertised his post-Senate immersion in the greedy bipartisan culture of entitlement and crony capitalism that both helped create our economic meltdown (on Wall Street) and failed to police it (in Washington). Daschle might well have been the best choice to lead health-care reform. But his honorable public record was instantly vaporized by tales of his cozy, lucrative relationships with the very companies he’d have to adjudicate as health czar.

Few articulate this ethical morass better than Obama, who has repeatedly vowed to “close the revolving door” between business and government and end our “two sets of standards, one for powerful people and one for ordinary folks.” But his tough new restrictions on lobbyists (already compromised by inexplicable exceptions) and porous plan for salary caps on bailed-out bankers are only a down payment on this promise, even if they are strictly enforced.

The new president who vowed to change Washington’s culture will have to fight much harder to keep from being co-opted by it instead. There are simply too many major players in the Obama team who are either alumni of the financial bubble’s insiders’ club or of the somnambulant governmental establishment that presided over the catastrophe...

Rich's reminds us that Geithner and Rubin are deeply embedded in the history of Citigroup and Goldman Sachs; and that the banking connections run deep in Obama's organization. On the other hand, American history has many examples of insiders turning against tribe - with the the advantage of knowing where the skeletons are.

I hope Reich is write about a populist anger at America's high tide corruption though. We can't eliminate corruption in human government, but we can push it back to the lower range of history. To do that we'll need Senators like Al Franken rather than Norm Coleman, and we'll need an angry public to stay loud.

Krugman on the GOP's latest blow

The deal with the GOP "centrists", per Krugman:

What the centrists have wrought - Paul Krugman

...The real question now is whether Obama will be able to come back for more once it’s clear that the plan is way inadequate. My guess is no. This is really, really bad...

The Party of Limbaugh strikes.

Oh, and the GOP's DeMint (South Carolina) wants to block any stimulus money going to walking and bicycle paths.

The POL is just bad to the bone.

Dyer - 5 new articles

Five more from Dyer (apologies for formatting):

The Cuban Revolution at Fifty

Thieves' Quarrel

Israeli Tail, American Dog (2)

SWISH, Obama and the Terrorists

Multi-racial Britain

AT&T sends more SMS Spam, locusts infest exec underwear

The phone chirped notice of an incoming text message. We don't have an SMS plan, so that's unusual. Was it an urgent message from my wife?

I struggled to pull the phone from my pocket. Oops, drifting in my lane a bit. A sharp correction ... too sharp on black ice. The van spins into the path of the oncoming oil tanker.

It's all so fast. The crunch and shattering glass, the crushing pain, then the searing fireball. The last thing I see is the message ...

"AT&T FREE MSG: Share your love ... Add a Line for your Valentine! Visit an AT&T Store .."

Lungs searing, I gasp out my Death Wish.

A plague of locusts infests the underwear of the AT&T executive team -- and that's just the beginning ...

Apparently, AT&T was not discouraged by the reaction to their American Idol spam ...

Gordon's Notes: Annals of idiocy - AT&T spams customers about a TV show

... lunacy like AT&T's recent bonehead move deserves at least a whimper or two (emphases mine) ...

AT and T Sends Customers ‘Idol’ Ads - NYTimes.com

Some AT&T Wireless customers have voted an emphatic no on a promotion for “American Idol” that popped up on their phones this week.

AT&T, a sponsor of the show, said it sent text messages to a “significant number” of its 75 million customers, urging them to tune in to the season premiere on Tuesday night...

... Mark Siegel, a spokesman for AT&T Wireless, said the message was meant as a friendly reminder. “We want people to watch the show and participate,” Mr. Siegel said. He added, “It makes perfect sense to use texting to tell people about a show built on texting.”

... Mr. Siegel said the message went to subscribers who had voted for “Idol” singers in the past, and other “heavy texters.” He said the message could not be classified as spam because it was free and because it allowed people to decline future missives...

... Richard Cox, the chief information officer for Spamhaus, a nonprofit antispam organization based in Britain, countered: “It’s absolutely spam. It’s an unsolicited text message. People who received it didn’t ask for it. That’s the universal definition of spam.”..

So now they're back, advertising AT&T services.

I replied "STOP" to the message. I suspect I'll be dinged 20 cents for that one. There will be more.

I wonder how they know not to send these things to, say US Senators? They must have some way to avoid infuriating people who might hurt them with something more material than imaginary locusts.

Maybe AT&T has forgotten that it's not the Bush era any more. Betty McCollum is our US Senator, and soon, if we're lucky, Al Franken will join her. He's not there yet, so let's see if Betty is interested in sending AT&T some Minnesota love ...

See also: AT&T's rebate scam. I wonder if they've had any serious accounting audits lately; corporations who play these sorts of games tend to play other games too ...

The straw that broke my iPhone love

It is a small thing, by itself.

Unfortunately, it is just one more bit of nasty among so many more, and it's such a quintessential bit of Apple nasty.

The maximal interval for an iPhone Calendar alert is 2 days.

This is a problem. I need to be alerted of upcoming birthdays and certain other events at least 2 weeks ahead of time. That has been possible with all the calendaring software I've used over the past fifteen years -- except for the iPhone Calendar.app.

Now here's what makes this so perfectly Apple. The iPhone development team had dozens of examples to draw from, not least the original PalmPilot. They must have consciously decided to omit this feature. I imagine the team was proud of dropping a feature few people would use, proud of their minimalist aesthetic.

Ok, bad enough, but I'm used to that. I'm way off in the extreme tail of software users. There's very little I'm really happy with (Windows Live Writer, Gmail, and Google Reader come to mind). Apple's desktop iCal software reaks about as much as their iPhone app.

What makes this straw a back breaker is not simply that iPhone calendaring is pathetic, it's that Apple forbids alternatives. Even on OS X there are a few alternatives to Apple products, but on the iPhone only Apple can use the USB cable, and vendors are explicitly forbidden to distribute alternatives to Apple's core applications. On the iPhone it's Apple's Calendar.app, or it's nothing.

It's a bad story, and, short of a revolution in Apple's attitude, it's not going to get better. Astonishingly, the Apple iPhone and MobileMe have made me miss the old Microsoft.

So I've stopped recommending the iPhone to others anyone who needs at least PalmPilot 1994 functionality, and I won't be replacing my wife's BlackBerry Pearl with an iPhone.

Which brings me to the obvious next question. If the iPhone is a dead end, is their anything better?

Not yet, but I'm going to be watching the Android even more closely, and, I've got my fingers crossed that the Palm Pre will beat very long odds, and I'm watching for the jailbreak team to add a Calendar replacement that runs against Google Calendar.

Update 2/9/09: Google to the rescue? I feel for Nuevasync. The iPhone calendar app still sucks, but I can use the WebKit interface to Google Calendar to make changes.

Update 2/14/09: Saved by Google.

White house blog blows a rabbit ears post

Geez. This stuff really isn't so hard.

The headline on the White House Blog post today is: "A few more months of rabbit ears".

Problem is, they're talking about the analog to digital broadcast conversion. That's not a problem for those rabbit ear antennae. My 40 yo (design) rabbit ears work great with my digital to analog converter.

No wonder the American public is confused. Even the White House gets it wrong.

Long live the rabbit ears!

A shameful secret shared

A shameful secret ...

Was Kevin Costner's Waterworld an ahead-of-its-time eco-parable? - By David Zax - Slate Magazine

...  I might as well come out and say it: I liked Waterworld in 1995, and I like it now...

I liked it too.

Now you know.

Natural selection and executive compensation

Imagine a world of sterile herbivores.

No predators, no reproduction.

Some are better at running, some are better at calculus, and some are better at gathering food.

Now imagine we rank the herbivores by food gathering capacity and call the top herbivore the CEO.

In the curious ecosystem of modern capitalism, do we select for executives who's primary skill is the ability to gather money to themselves?

Ok, it sounds silly, but wait a minute.

We usually define the CEO by their alleged job function -- that is, to lead, etc. They need to get the most money because ... well, they're the ... you know ... the alpha.

What if we have it backwards?

What if the primary skill of the modern CEO is "money gathering" -- the ability to, by various means, gather the most money to themselves? Since we organize corporate income distribution by corporate hierarchy, what if it's primarily the money gathering skill of an individual that determines their corporate stature?

In this case, the best "money gatherer" would, almost be definition, become the CEO.

Trust me, there's something here.

Of course it's not that simple. "Money gathering" is a complex skill, and it's associated with other skills that are relevant to the role of "leadership". On the other hand, it's also associated with traits that are perhaps not so good for leadership, judgment and direction.

Natural selection, remember, isn't about being handsome, smart, or fast. It's the statistical process of finding a local minima. In the peculiar world of modern capitalism, and given the rule that the CEO makes the most money, it may also be true that the person who makes the most money is the CEO.

So maybe we do "select", above all, for money gathering capacity -- much to the detriment of other skills.

That would explain quite a bit, wouldn't it?

Update 2/11/09: A similar post of mine from 2004.