Why this blog?

This blog is dedicated to references of insightful, thought-provoking Internet material, relevant to the technology manager.  

A well known saying in management theory states that “You cannot manage what you do not measure”.  I have always believed that, in technology management, this is a very naive focus. “You cannot manage what you don’t understand”, sounds much more like a winning plan.  This does not mean that you have to be the lead techie in your company (although more technical knowledge always helps), it means that you have to have some understanding of what you do.  

Now, what do you do? In this blog I focus on six areas:
(1) Business Strategy - How to best make money from what your company does
(2) Innovation - How to keep being better than the competition
(3) Managing Techies - Getting the most from your team
(4) Cool Technology - Having an awareness of game changing technologies
(5) Consumer behaviour - Getting a better understanding of the people you sell to
(6) Interesting times - Events and trends shaping our world

A good understanding of the above goes some way to improving the quality of a technology manager’s decisions.  The topics are not meant to be exhaustive and is rather presented as “thought for the day” tidbits to keep your grey matter engaged. Nobody has time to spend hours on a website, so I have limited each post so that it should not take more than 15 minutes of your time.

Feel free to comment on any of the posts.  They were chosen to be thought provoking!

Synthesized happiness?

How can we make customers happy when they choose a product that they did not know they needed? Perhaps have them synthesize their own happyness?

Dan Gilbert does a great TED video where he discusses the concepts of Natural and Synthesized happiness (worth a look).  Dan defines natural happiness as the happiness that you experience when you get what you dreamt of.  Synthesized happiness is the happiness you “make” after you either did not get what you dreamt of, or you did not really have any dream to start off with.  Modern society seems to frown upon synthesized happiness, but it is no less real.

So, if people buy your breakthrough product, they will naturally tend to grow more fond of the product over time.  Increasingly favouring what they own against what they decided not to buy.  

Dan then goes further to show how “freedom“ is the enemy of synthesized happiness in that it creates uncertainty at the instant when the person is most ill equipped to handle it (he does not understand the product yet). This means you should only put forward product options and information which you know your target customer already has an opinion on.  In a fast changing world where vendors have to educate customers on the valuethey should extract from their products, one should be careful to limit the options.  

Interesting how Apple’s product portfolio strategy differs from the rest of the consumer electronics market.

What motivates people to better performance?

If you have not done so already, do yourself the favour and watch the video on motivation by Daniel Pink. I cannot agree more with his conclusions...  

According to Dan, the three factors which lead to better team performance (and satisfaction). These are:
(1) Autonomy - Ability to make decisions and act upon them
(2) Mastery - The opportunity to get better at stuff
(3) Purpose - Contributing to the big picture

How much of the above are you affording your team?

Where will Europe’s tax come from in future?

Through all the very interesting news coming from the European financial crisis I found this gem which I feel gives concerning insight into Europe’s future. Not sure where the data comes from, but one can understand the various governments’ inclination to fund budget deficits with loans if you look at this declining ratio of workers to retirees.  While social responsibility is increasing, less people are productively contributing to the economy and paying tax.  

Can governments survive in such and environment?