Business Archive

Worth or value criteria

Posted April 1, 2013 By Landis V

I was reading an article on ComputerWorld today that considered changes to the way technical employees are evaluated. The thought that crossed my mind was, perhaps we should also be thinking about similar changes in the way we compensate employees – and not just technical employees, but across the board. The hourly and salary based models are as broken as paying by lines of code produced or shortest development time to test. They have been gamed and gamified to the point where their viability as metrics of worth and utility are questionable at best, and quite possibly contributory to our inflationary spiral at worst. Just an interesting thought that came to mind and I wanted to make a quick note of in case I have time to come back and ponder it in the future.

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WikiStart – Tiny Tiny RSS

Posted March 26, 2013 By Landis V

http://tt-rss.org/redmine/projects/tt-rss/wiki

I was reminded this morning, while reading some of James Altucher‘s very interesting posts and wanting to add to my subscription list, that I’m eventually going to need to do something to replace Google Reader as my feed reader.  This might be an interesting way to do so.  The Android client is a plus.  I’ll have to add it to my project list.

Edit 6/18/13: Also ran across https://www.commafeed.com/welcome today, which does not look bad, but I still have some inclination towards tt-rss at this time.

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Get Your Business Online Today

Posted February 20, 2013 By Landis V

http://www.gybo.com

Of course Google has a motive to get people online, but they’re right. It’s very simple to get a presence online, and it doesn’t cost all that much – less than $7/month for a package I use for my -personal- Internet presence, and there are even lower cost and “free” offerings. I still believe the immediate benefit for absolutely anyone who does it is the @yourdomain.com e-mail, but you might have something even bigger.

I don’t particularly like the Intuit “website in a package” they tie in with this, but there are a lot of other ways to do it. But having the ability to build your Internet presence – and NOT just through Facebook or Google+ – and just keeping it in mind, thinking about how you might be able to parallel or change your brick-and-mortar with an online presence has huge potential.

If you’ve thought about it but not known how to approach it, or if you’ve never thought about it and just have questions and don’t know who to ask, ask me.

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http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2012/06/secret-state-golem-xiv.html

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.

For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

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Seriously, Cisco…

Posted February 3, 2012 By Landis V

As a whole you’re really becoming a giant frustration. Your secure transfer protocols still aren’t VRF aware (client applications – i.e., scp) after how many years and incantations of IOS. The sole benefit I get from maintaining SmartNet contracts on equipment (software updates… TAC would be a joke, but it’s not funny) is becoming pointless, as the updates are just as broken as the software the boxes shipped with, they’ve just shuffled the bugs to new locations in the code. You finally get a system to the point where it’s just about stable, and you end-of-life it. Your supply chain is among the worst I’ve ever seen, to put it nicely. And with the last couple of generations of ISR’s, I’ve even had some doubts about the quality of the hardware. I’ve dealt with a few really sharp individuals in your organization over the years, and I hate to take anything away from them, but this slide on the whole makes me wonder if it’s just rime to find something… anything… else.

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What shareholders want

Posted May 29, 2011 By Landis V

Of course one can’t speak for all things desired by all shareholders in most cases, as that is generally a very large and often diverse group.  It’s a little like describing “what women want” – you can’t speak for all of them, and you’re pretty much guaranteed to offend at least some of them.  I have a problem, though, with shareholders always driving corporations to increase profits. Yes, this is the goal of an investment, but at some point (for most products) your market will become saturated. You can realize continued sales through attrition or product upgrades and improvements, but are not often likely to see the rapid expansion and growth experienced early in the lifecycle. It would seem to me that, to provide the best product and experience, and to maintain both the brand and a (hopefully loyal) customer base, the organization would at this point focus on optimization, cost reduction, increased efficiency, and improvement, as well as possibly alternative use cases for the product. However, it seems instead that the shareholder pushes for diversification in the product line – pushing the business to grow by expanding to areas and products with which it does not have an intimate, innate familiarity. To be fair, I can appreciate some of their reasoning for this; one need look no further than the disease resistance and outbreak survival mechanisms in genetics to see that diversity has a tendency to promote longevity. This brings to mind an interesting point in its own right – it’s perhaps not so much “survival of the fittest” in genetics, but rather a convergence towards entropy.

All this said, I can’t completely refute the idea that “if you’re not growing, you’re dying” which also seems to be a popular and accurate mantra in business. I only wish I could put a business in a controlled bottle with no inflation and see if it still held.

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Quick links to a couple of blog posts by Jeff Doyle

Posted April 29, 2011 By Landis V

Jeff is someone whose contributions and expertise in IP networking I acknowledge and respect.  He shares some good insights regarding risk in these posts (chronologically).

Close Enough

Measuring the Immeasurable

Confidence Levels and Calibration

and finally The Value of Information.

The purpose of the articles is to help build a better business case through the reduction of uncertainty, and I think the collection does a good job providing basics on how to do that.   I find considerable truth in one of Jeff’s key tenets from these articles:  If it truly cannot be measured, it holds no value.

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