It’s a truism, at least in VC circles, that “services busineses don’t scale”.  In the very basic sense that services are provided by a human (I’m talking about real services businesses here and not XaaS businesses) and that more services requires more humans, this is, of course, true.

But there’s motion in the ocean in services, and it’s worth paying some attention.

What’s new?

• Crowdsourcing.  By chopping up a services function into minimal parts and farming the minimal parts out to a large crowd of temporary workers, one can do hefty projects cost-effectively, use “time slices” of otherwise-expensive experts, or even achieve novel insights (as with prediction markets).  Crowdsourcing is an extremely interesting area for Valhalla.

(Crowdsourcing actually reminds me of RISC (“reduced instruction set computing”), where a processor is designed to use a small instruction set at high speed and efficiency instead of a CISC (“complex instruction set computing”) architecture where each instruction is specialized but requires variable cycles to execute, hurting predictability.  Crowdsourcing = RISC, “conventional” services = CISC.  Well, CISC did win out more or less (although RISC is making a comeback in GPUs.  But we digress).)

• DoGooders.  A significant number of youths want to do good, and are actually doing good.  Teach For America is sort of the paradigm for this kind of thing.  I don’t know if it’s significant compared to my youth, but as these new service workers come into NoGooder jobs later on they’re going to want those jobs to have some kind of significance beyond the paycheck.

• Death of the professions.  I know the most about medicine here, which is transforming from a profession/craft business into an industry.  Since the drivers are the same, I expect we are seeing the same thing in accounting, law, science, engineering, and teaching.  What does it mean to have “professionals” without a professional esprit de corps or, more appropriately, a professional code of ethics?  I don’t know, but we’re going to find out.

Enough for one day.  Your thoughts?

I had occasion a year ago to blog about my experiences as a customer of the hospital system.  With a relative this week undergoing elective surgery, I am reminded forcefully of how antiquated, creaky, and dysfunctional the healthcare business is, as a business.

My relative’s surgeon, his PA, the nurses on the ward that he oversaw, and all of the staff, were individually superb.  It would be hard to find a group more knowledgeable, capable, and caring.

As an organization, however, the hospital was really really creaky.  When we showed up for admission, we were directed to a waiting room for “same-day surgery”, where the three staffers promptly disappeared for something on the order of an hour, turning out the lights in their office and leaving us with no clue where we stood or when things would change.  The hour of our surgery approached, when our surgeon happened by in the corridor.

“Why are you still in street clothes?” he said to us.  “I’ll fix that.” And he went backstage for a few minutes and produced one of the missing nurses.

With the surgery in progress, we were told to go downstairs to another waiting room where we could get a paging device that would let us know when we could visit in the recovery room.

Downstairs, the same thing: nobody in charge, a bunch of patients sitting around.  The staffer in charge had gone away some time ago.  No idea when she would be back.  Maybe 20 minutes later she sauntered back in.  Gave us a pager.

After two hourse had passed (the length of time we had been told the surgery would last) another staffer came around and collected our pagers.  They were done with them for the day.  No problem: security would tell us when the surgery was over.

Security, it turned out, was the lynchpin of this hospital’s operation.  Security knew everything; for the first time that stressful day, we felt someone was in charge.  Someone was acting as if a regular process might help patients and their families.

All’s well that ends well.  The surgery went well and we are recovering.  And, once again, most of the individuals we dealt with in the hospital were superb professionals.  But somehow the hospital doesn’t work as an overall organization.

Why not?  Thoughts?

I got a Fitbit a few weeks ago, and I’m really fond of it.

Not in any perverse way.  It’s what Apple product fanboys and -girls say about Apple products: it just works.

What’s going on?

1. Elegant hardware design.  It’s a nifty little hi-tech clothes pin, with two-tone colors and the fabled One Button interface  (In all honesty, I have mixed feeling about One Button interfaces: there are invariably secret button pressing combinations that you have to remember; might be easier to just have another button).  But I’m carping.  The design is satisfying and elegant.
2. Does one thing well.  I think the old debate between having one device to do everything or multiple devices has been settled in favor of multiple devices.  Most people I know have more than one mobile or portable device, and have use cases for each.  In FitBit’s case, the one thing is measuring footsteps and altitude changes (well, OK, maybe that’s two things, but the idea is to measure your level of activity during the day.)  (And then again, The FitBit Ultra also tries to measure your sleep quality; I think the job it does here is suboptimal; maybe should be left to another device.)
3. The one thing it does well is a big plus for me.  I could see myself becoming one of those Quantified Self people; I love having the seamless feed of my activity into my diet software; I sort of have a vision where other stuff feeds in as well.  I don’t know if I’ll start wearing one of those headbands for sleep EEG waves, but I am toying with a FitBit Aria wireless scale.  If only the scale is accurate enough (I’ve had bad experiences with previous digital scales).

What’s not to like? 

A lot of our companies have a hard time with competitive positioning.

Maybe I’m a nerd, but it seems pretty straight ahead to me.

I take my playbook from Hammacher Schlemmer.  When they have something in their catalog, it’s either “best” or “only”.  Maybe, once in a blue moon, it’s “first” as well.  But “first” has all too brief a moment in the sun before it has to become “best” or “only” or die.

So my formula for competitive position is something like: “<Widget> is the <only-or-best> <solution> with <benefit(s)>”

• “VHS is the only videotape format with 3 1/2 hours recording time” (I think that was the number)
• “Baby aspirin is the best medicine for preventing heart attacks” (Maybe that’s true, maybe not, but you get the idea.)
• “Hydrogen is the only fuel with no greenhouse emissions.”

Thoughts?

I flew out to the Bay Area this week, and found, when I went to check in for my outbound flight the day before my departure, that my seat had been changed from the Economy Plus aisle seat I had booked six weeks before to a middle seat.  (If you’re not a Slave of United, Economy Plus is the front of the Economy cabin where there’s actually enough leg room to sit without cramping.)

I called United, and the customer service woman I spoke with told me:

1. She couldn’t get me a better seat than the window seat I could see on the website
2. This was an ongoing and known problem, one more result of IT glitches in the merger of the two companies.
3. There would probably be seating problems for “six months or more” in the future.

I’m not sure all the parts fit together here.  What kind of snafu would re-shuffle the seating map?  Was everyone reshuffled?  Just me?  Why?  How?  And why couldn’t someone go over the mistakes by hand and improve the lot, at least, of the “elite status” flyers?

But assume it’s all true, what does it say about the future of global industry?  If every time there’s a merger it means a churn-o-genic event like this takes place, how can mergers be adaptive?

Coincidentally, I was going out to a “maker movement” conference in Palo Alto, the Make Magazine Hardware Innovation Workshop (a terrific conference with a very hot new tech category), and what these are aiming to do is eat the lunch of large manufacturers.  If a nimble 10-person organization can, say, build cars like Local Motors (one of the presenters at #MakeHIW), why on earth will you need a GM or a Toyota in the future?

Can someone hurry up and disrupt United-Continental?  Or maybe disrupt all mergers?

For reasons historical and accidental, I’ve ended up in charge of most of Valhalla’s marketing and public relations.  For those who follow my posts, it’s not the most natural fit for a reformed geek.  But I’m really enjoying learning about it.

Some of the big lessons so far (and probably obvious to anyone in the field):

• Marketing online is much more like a conversation than a lecture.  The audience is stuck in the lecture.  The online audience can click away in a beat.  People linger online over what engages them, and the main thing still that engages people online is conversation.
• You have know what your audience is thinking.  Putting yourself in the mind of the personae you are talking to online is the best way to come up with engaging content that will get and hold their interest.  At each turn in a blog post or a tweet, I try to have in mind what my ideal reader is thinking at that moment and let that insight guide what I write.
• Measure, test, measure.  Online you can measure almost everything.  Even branding becomes measurable — or, our entrepreneurs assure us, will soon become measurable. And the medium is superb for perpetual testing and improvement.  Doing A/B testing is just a best practice, it’s table stakes for anyone wanting to do online marketing.

Please let me know what I’m missing. 

Great event in Atlanta this morning.  Big crowd, lots of energy, lots of questions, and one of the best panels I’ve been on in a while:

Dan Homrich (@TheRedWave), CEO Smartsoft Mobile solutions

Tiffany Trent, Director of Strategic Solutions at First Data

Tim Cannon, VP of Product Management at Jackson Healthcare

Caroline Van Sickle, CEO Pretty in My Pocket (PrIMP)

Good mix of B2C, B2B, security, payments, beauty, enterprise apps.

Here’s a pdf of my presentation (although it’s more Pinterest-like than textual):

Mobile_Apps_–_Past,_Present,_and.pdf
Download this file

One of my New Year’s resolutions this year was to read more “long-form” material.  After reading Nick Carr’s scary book The Shallows I became aware that my interest and ability to read anything longer than a paragraph or a screen was atrophying, so I resolved to get back in the saddle.

Which led to my reading another great book, Atul Gawande’s Checklist Manifesto.  If you haven’t read it, do so.  He shows that setting up a “checklist”-style process is essential to avoiding mistakes in areas as diverse as the surgical operating room, the cockpit of an airplane, and, yes, a VC firm.

For better or worse, the sponsor of a deal generally gets excited about it (if they don’t, it’s probably not a great deal!) and tends to, ahem, overlook certain shortcomings of the deal.  Having a checklist in place is a way to make sure that all the i’s are dotted and the t’s crossed.

Your thoughts?

I’ve been doing a lot of writing — or at least content generation (I don’t think PowerPoint really counts as writing) — about mobile lately, or about the explosion of “new clients”, or about the consumerization of IT.  I’ll share the stuff here as it comes out.

Unfortunately, none of these terms does any justice to what’s going on.  I think we’re witnessing the end of the PC/client-server/desktop web era and the beginning of a new era.

What marks the new era (in no particular order)?

• Diversity of clients
• Portability of clients
• Mobilization of “real” computing
• Beginnings of ubiquitous computing (a meme where you control all the computing resources available to you by carrying an identity/authorization around with you in a mobile client of some sort)
• Cloud-ification of the back end.
• Rise of the cloud service provider
• End of the mechanical disk drive
• Big Data-fueled applications
• Video as the “new text”

Very interesting.  More later.