http://www.dawnstar.id.au/geek/lego-and-the-australia-tax/
Changes to the LEGO online store are slugging Australian consumers
LEGO And The Australia Tax
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Creating free time for what you want
For a little while this morning, as every week, I helped in the class of one of my stepdaughters, at a local school. Last year I did a talk in my daughter’s class. If there is an excursion, I can volunteer to go along and help.
I can drop of kids to school rather than before school care, I can pick up kids from school rather than using after school care, and have time to help with homework and do other things most afternoons.
Other people working for me have the same freedoms.
We have time for all this because I’ve designed my company to enable it. Of course people need to be present and do stuff a certain amount of time every week – but the processes in the company don’t rely on me (or someone else) being there at set times, and that’s the key difference.
It’s one aspect of how one can practically address Upstarta Principle #9: “Focus on people (internal and external), prevent stress.”
That may seem easy, but if you look about various processes in companies that generally require multiple people doing sub-tasks, such as doing payments including payroll, you tend to find interesting dependencies on people and very specific times. Often people don’t realise this any more, as they’ve become used to being in the “right” place at those times. Changing a process is not easy, but it is possible with proper understanding of how these things work – just deciding to change is not good enough and generally results in a lot of pain (and no change).
See if you can come up with another example of such person/time dependent processes within your organisation, and post a comment here! If you want help with changing, it’s best to contact me directly as there’ll be quite a bit of communication (and real time on your end) required to make such things happen.
Reviewing the Upstarta Principles
After three successful years, it’s time to take a peek at the Upstarta Principles and see if any changes can be made that would improve them further. They’ve worked really well, but perhaps we can make a sentence clearer with fewer words, remove things that don’t belong, and so on.
One idea I have is to add a Principle #0:
“All choices have consequences; inaction is also a choice.”
This appears to be a recurring theme in Upstarta blog posts as well as in talks and mentoring activity, and it’s somewhat fundamental to everything else hence the idea to make it the first item.
This, and a few other suggested changes, are on the Upstarta Principles page. You can comment/discuss on this post, or discuss via email. Looking forward to your input!
Is Crowd-Funding Upstarta-Compatible?
At one of my recent talks, I got a question about whether crowdfunding (such as Kickstarter) breaks Upstarta Principle #1 (“neither a borrower nor a lender be”). Luckily, it was something I had already thought about quite a bit. Lucky because while it’s perfectly valid to not have an immediate answer to something (you can always follow-up with an individual later), actually having some form of answer – even just one that leads to a useful discussion – is more interesting and beneficial for the crowd present.
But back to the question… it’s not an entirely straightforward as there appears to be a case of borrowing: a group of people interest in what you’re doing give you money in the hope that you’ll succeed. Basics of investment, right? Not quite. The difference is quite interesting and actually goes to the heart of the difference between Upstarta companies and others.
An investor puts money into a company with the objective to get more money back later (either in bulk or over time). While it is certainly also the company’s intent to make money, it may not normally do so at the rate the investor requires, and also it actually has to deliver products or services which are what it makes money with. So this results in a triangular yet in-equal business arrangement where the company needs customers, but it actually operates primarily for the investor. This is in some ways similar to a commercial TV network that needs viewers but actually makes its money by advertising thus its clients are the advertisers not the viewers!
Contrarily, crowd-sourcing is money from future clients. An early crowd-sourcing example I know of about is UK-based Demon Internet (an Internet Service Provider). While the Wikipedia story differs somewhat from the version I heard from an early co-worker of the founder of the company, it went roughly like this: around 1992 people in the UK were asked for interest in a new ISP and they would a cheque to a PO Box; if 100+ people were to do this, the ISP would be sufficiently funded and start its business. This worked exceedingly well and the company’s GBP 10/month became a benchmark for others as in those days Internet was generally time-charged (still is in some places!) rather than flat rate. Revolutionary.
As can be clearly seen from the Demon Internet example, the people who put the money in were also the direct beneficiaries: the company delivered a service they wanted. They simply paid their internet service subscription one year ahead. Apart from company overheads, the funding didn’t go anywhere else.
Kickstarter and other crowd-sourcing “facilitation companies” operate with the same mechanism. They act as an escrow-service, holding on to the money until the project is fully funded. Provided the facilitating company is trusted, this is of course much more reliable than the receiving company just using a PO Box 😉
All that said, that doesn’t mean that all crowd-sourced ventures are Upstarta companies. Funding is not the only thing we look at to see if a business idea makes sense. Some ideas are very interesting but just not viable as a business concept – either outright or in that particular form. When they are put up on a crowd-sourcing site, those ideas in particular might either not achieve their funding goal, or not (be able to) deliver. The latter is of course worse as then the money has been received and spent, but no service or product is delivered to the early investors.
There has been some analysis of Kickstarter outcomes (Behind Kickstarter Crowdfunding Stats) and it shows some of this problem. Exact tracking is apparently difficult because Kickstarters essentially makes projects that don’t reach their finance target disappear. But more than that, I believe the “unable to deliver” fails are a very important and serious aspect that deserve much more scrutiny, and I see no reason to not have all that fully public.
I think that if you have a sane business idea, getting your first 10 or 100 customers through a crowd-sourcing approach is perfectly valid. And it could also be a valid idea as a one-off rather than as an ongoing business.
About a screw: not everything read on the Internet is true
Swedish media production company Day4 recently conducted an experiment on Internet media and the Apple community. They drew a screw with a special-patterned head and posted it anonymously via Reddit. It spread like wildfire.
Just some odd sites, you reckon? No. Try a search on “apple screw” and see for yourself which big names picked this up like almost everybody else. Since no further information existed, all of the commentary in the articles is extrapolated from thin air, with presumptions based on Apple’s actual past actions.
A phrase like “Apple May Be Working On A Top Secret Asymmetric Screw To Lock You Out Of Your Devices Forever” doesn’t even hold up to very basic scrutiny. Disregarding the simplified misuse of the word asymmetrical, it’s not that hard to make/copy a tool for almost any screw head design, from scratch (either from plastic or a metal). Even if the whole thing were true, tools would have been produced very swiftly – regardless of any legalities (which would be a valid topic, considering the US DMCA legislation).
The group at Day4 created the following chart plotting the distance from the source versus the perceived level of truth. Nothing new there either from a psychological perspective, but it’s good to have these things pointed out every once in a while:
- don’t just believe everything you read/see (don’t just disbelieve either, that’s almost as invalid);
- journalists, and people pretending to be journalists, can be (and often are) very lazy;
- if you are a proper journalist, always do your job thoroughly (as others may not);
- and last but not least, building an image (as Apple has) of being seen to be capable of initiating this kind of idea is not super. Choices have consequences, always (often delayed) and the people making such decisions may not consider the long term.
