Business Insight Zone

I’ve said something similar before, and now Joshua-Michéle Ross of O’Reilly Radar says it well in this post:

The fact is that there are already tons of other outside distractions at work ranging from instant message, email, workplace socializing and the never ending cigarette break — so this is not a new problem — but an old concern applied to a new technology.

Better, he gets at the real problem that underlies companies’ complaints about productivity lost to social media:

Companies that think they may have a productivity problem because of social networks and the like actually have a measurement problem — that is — they don’t know how to objectively measure whether an employee is meeting standards of productivity.

You can read his whole post here.

It’s funny that I should come across Josh’s post just now, for two reasons:

1. This was a day of interruptions. Partly this was my own fault, partly it was beyond my control, but the result was that I worked plenty, edged ahead on several things . . . but didn’t have any great victories to show for it. What I hear from friends and colleagues suggests to me that a lot of us have this same experience all too often.
2. One of the good interruptions in my day came in the form of a talk with a colleague about the mechanics of an internal communications project we’re pondering. One of the key issues: how to harvest the benefits of social media tools without creating ever more inboxes or sources of pings to interrupt our days. As far as I can tell, the jury is still out on that one — not just in our office, but everywhere.

What do you think? Do social media tools hamper productivity more than e-mail, meetings, and other, older types of interruptions?

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Related posts:

• Managers beware: Facebook isn’t the problem — e-mail is.
• Your brain hates Twitter.
• Monkeys love bananas, humans love e-mails.

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1. This month’s haul of IPO filings, which we talked about a couple of weeks ago, keeps getting bigger. Combine the proposed offer amounts of all ten filings this month, and you get a total of $4.57 billion, which makes this easily the biggest month of 2009 in terms of both the number of filings and their dollar value.

2. By contrast, July has been pretty quiet for actual IPO debuts. There was one on July 1 (LogMeIn, Inc.), there’s one today (PennyMac Mortgage Investment Trust) . . . and that’s it. This is something of a letdown after months of three, three, and seven IPOs, but maybe it’s just the summer doldrums.

UPDATE: Turns out we got another IPO on the 30th — Globe Specialty Metals.

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Photo by Tambako the Jaguar, used under a CC No Derivative Works license.

Are you getting enough feedback? How detailed is it?

One of the key premises of “deliberate practice” is that its practitioners — think Tiger Woods or Yitzhak Perlman — thrive on continuous, fine-grained feedback. It’s not enough for Woods to think that he hit a bad shot, or for Perlman to think that a phrase of Bach he played wasn’t fluid enough. They want to know exactly what went amiss so that they can improve it.

(If you’re new to the topic of “deliberate practice,” you might want to start here.)

Hard as it is for anyone to perform at the level of Woods or Perlman, in a sense those two men have it easier than many businesspeople, who often don’t know ahead of time what their feedback is going to look or feel or sound like. For many people in business, feedback isn’t nearly as easy to discern as a sliced 3-iron or a flatted quarter-note.

Sure, sometimes you can tell when you blow a sales call. You can tell when the prototype of your new product doesn’t work. And you can certainly tell if you miss a revenue number. But do you know why?

We’re often left to guess. We pick up all the messy pieces and try to figure out what went wrong, even though we often don’t know — can’t know — all the factors in play.

Given these realities, we may never be able to enjoy feedback as instant or granular as musicians and athletes get. So what do we do? What feedback can we get? And how can we put that feedback to use?

I have some ideas of my own that I’ll lay out in a separate post. But right now I’d like to round out my thinking about this by hearing from you:

What do YOU do to collect and use relevant feedback in YOUR work?

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Photo by Marcin Wichary, used under a Creative Commons license.

Today I was joking with my boss that I could give this blog over entirely to:

1. Updates about doings at Hoover’s, e.g. new product offerings or celebrating successes of Hooverites;
2. Talking about Twitter; and
3. Ranting about the state of financial journalism in this country.

I’m kidding. Mostly.

Here’s my teeth-grinder du jour, from Bloomberg:

U.S. Durable Goods Orders Rise Excluding Cars, Planes

Orders for U.S. durable goods, excluding automobiles and aircraft, unexpectedly rose in June, signaling manufacturing may expand in the second half of the year.

Excluding transportation equipment, demand for goods meant to last several years climbed 1.1 percent, the most in four months, the Commerce Department said today in Washington. Total orders fell 2.5 percent, the first decrease in three months. . . .

Emphasis on that last sentence because it’s the actual headline. Durable-goods orders fell 2.5% in June, as was pointed out in the very first sentence of the Census Bureau’s summary release that accompanied the data. So the Bloomberg headline might be something akin to one spouse saying to another: “I’ve been over our fixed expenses, honey, and we’re doing fine . . . excluding food.”

Now, the people at Bloomberg are smart, which makes me think two things:

1. “We know that automobiles and aircraft have been getting hammered, but is that obscuring trends in the rest of the manufacturing economy? Look, this story tells us! . . . Interesting angle from Bloomberg. My mind is growing!”
2. “This story, from the headline on down, overplays recovery and underplays trouble, directly contradicting the tenor of the Census Bureau’s release.”

Now, my question to you: which one of these reactions is more reasonable?

Please bear with a placeholder entry: This morning when I was standing in line for coffee, I saw a great news graphic — one that correctly contextualized U.S. housing numbers — on the front page of the paper version of the New York Times.

The Times site has a much fancier interactive graphic — appropriate, given the medium — but I’ll see if I can find a digital image of the graphic in the physical paper, because it did three things in a small space:

1. Conveyed that there’s been a tiny improvement in the nationwide average of housing numbers over the past two months reported.
2. Showed the improvement in context by putting the uptick at the end of a years-long bubble-&-bust cycle of housing prices.
3. Completely blew my mind by taking the extra step of dis-aggregating (or de-averaging) the information a little bit by showing how some of the local markets covered in the survey are doing better than the average — while some are still declining brutally.

For some context on why I value de-averaging, read this post.

For a quick tour of my frustration with the misreporting of economic data in the business press, you might scan this, this, and this.

More anon.

I spelled out this dead-simple method earlier today in a discussion on LinkedIn — thought I’d share it here, too.

1. Go to TweepSearch.

2. Enter a relevant set of keywords in the search bar. Let’s say you’re an expert in fundraising for nonprofits. Your first few searches might run like this:

• philanthropy
• not-for-profit development
• nonprofit development
• not-for-profit fundraising
• nonprofit fundraising
• foundation development
• alumni development
• arts fundraising
• . . .

Note that you could also limit each search to a particular area by including a geographical term. (Be sure, though, to try variations, e.g. try “Portland” and then “Oregon” and then “PDX.”)

Click the image below for a full-sized view of the results page:

3. For each query, scroll through the results that TweepSearch returns. The freshest accounts — the ones updated most recently — appear at the top, and each entry lists the full biography for the account and tells you how many followers and updates the account has. In a minute or two of scanning, you can decide which accounts are interesting enough to look at more closely.

4. Using a tabbed browser, right-click on each Twitter name to open a separate tab for the Twitter page for that account. (As with my lightning-fast Twitter follow-back method, I find that the tabbed approach makes things much quicker to work through.) Once you’re on the Twitter page, you can read some of the person’s recent tweets to get an idea of how frequently they post, what they talk about, and how they come across. If you’re interested, click the “Follow” button to follow them, just as you would normally.

That’s it. I’ve used this method a lot to find relevant people to follow. By using new combinations of keywords, it’s easy to keep finding great new folks to follow day in and day out.

Two more notes:

1. You might do better to repeat this process for a few minutes each day — maybe at the end of the day, or when you’re waiting on hold — rather than trying to follow hundreds of new people at once. At some point, all the biographies start to run together.
2. There are many other good ways to find new people to follow — this is just one more arrow to put in your quiver.

Ah, but the title here promised how to find followERS, not just people for you to follow. Persuading the new people you follow to follow you back is the subject of my next post. Stay tuned . . .

Thesis: A great enterprise always acts like it’s building for the long haul.

It does this . . .

• . . . even when the short haul is painful.
• . . . even when the horizon is obscured.
• . . . even though it implies hard decisions.
• . . . even though people don’t like it.
• . . . even though it would be much easier to focus on the short term.
• . . .

What would you add? And what are you doing to build your company for the long haul?

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Photo by Wolfgang Staudt.

I’ll wrap up my Monday by pointing you to a lovely post about the unlovely subject of online gossip. It’s written by my good friend Meg Fowler — who, besides being a doyenne of Twitter, knows a thing or two about the business world.

it’s not about your brand. it’s about you.

. . . It’s a bit of a battle to hold back sometimes, especially when the gossip is especially juicy, or when everyone else is talking about it,  or when someone we know is frustrated… or when we’d like nothing better than to go find a bat and “adjust some worldviews.”

But it is never a bad idea to think before you  speak, and to consider the impact of your words beyond the next ten seconds or minutes or hours or days.

What Meg writes is aimed at individuals, but I can tell you that it all goes double — triple – for businesses that are engaging online.

By no means should businesses take this as an excuse to duck online engagement. If your audiences — customers, rivals, analysts, hangers-on — are out there talking to you, you’ve got to be able to engage them. But you also have to be savvy about how you engage them.

Meg’s post is full of good advice, not because the world is full of malicious gossips, but because the nature of online communications can so easily make an ordinary person sound like a malicious gossip.

Most of the businesspeople I encounter via Twitter, LinkedIn, or blog comment threads are like most of the businesspeople I encounter over the phone or in person: basically decent, somewhat flawed, trying to make a living. But occasionally I have to gape when someone who’s purportedly using the social media for business violates every common-sense standard that Meg lays out in her post.

Give Meg’s post a read. Show it to all of the people in your outfit who talk about business via social media. Remind them that you’re all good people and that you want to come across as good people online.

And the next time you’re about to say something you’ll regret online, refer back to Meg’s good advice.

Sorry to keep harping on this, but the issue has gotten under my skin:

New homes sales soar unexpectedly

Sales of newly constructed single-family houses spiked 11% in June to an annualized rate of 384,000 homes.

The gain over May was much greater than expected. A consensus of housing industry analysts had forecast seasonally adjusted sales of 352,000 . . .

Yes, I acknowledge that 384,000 is bigger than 352,000. But year-over-year sales — which is what we should be looking at to account for seasonality — are down 28% from June 2008 to June 2009. So while the raw number did beat experts’ projections . . . it’s still really, really bad.

New homes sales down 28% year over year

That’s the real headline.

We can do better than this. Right?

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More in the same vein:

• Innumeracy in financial reporting?
• From the Department of Actually Informative Headlines . . .
• “I want you to have expected it.”
• Beware “unexpected”!

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Just a reminder: I regularly bookmark items of note using the service Delicious. The most recent five bookmarks appear in the “Worth Reading” box in the sidebar, but you can see all of the bookmarks — nearly 900 of them, tagged according to category — via my Delicious page.

Happy browsing!

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Image by poolie.