Atomic Razor

Learning from Circuit City’s Mistakes - CE Pro Article from CE Pro

Learning from Circuit City’s Mistakes - CE Pro Article from CE Pro

This is a mistake that companies make over and over again.  People see how much their best sales people are being paid, often more than senior managers, and get annoyed and immediately demand that something is done about it.

So, when they don't do something as plain daft as Circuit City did, they will still muck with Comp Plans, put caps on commission payments and engage in other activities which throttle back on payments to the sales team.

The rest, as they say, is usually history.

As a person who has worked in commission paid roles for several years now (ok, more than 15), this pattern of behviour is both extremely familiar and also incredibly depressing.  I hope that when I come to run my own business again, I'll remember that a well paid, well incentivised salesforce is the key to success in any business.

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Holding Dollars

Item on Today this morning about rumours that one of the rating agencies is going to downgrade UK government debt. Given the amount that the UK is currently borrowing to prop up the banking system, this is not a good thing. Apparently, unlike the Germans and the Japanese, but like the Americans, the British don't save, but unlike with the Americans, no-one wants to hold debt in a dodgy minor currency - they prefer to hold euros or dollars. There are also rumours that the UK government might default on its debt. I think this unlikely, but the mere existence of the rumours will do us no good.

Clearly at the moment it would be better for the UK to be in the eurozone. Whether it would be better for the eurozone is another matter. There is the argument that the euro is a dodgy major currency, but that argument is generally made by the usual suspects. The problem for Gordon Brown is that even if he wanted to join the euro and even if the Germans would have us, it would probably be practically impossible to join by next May, certainly in terms of having notes circulating. It would also be a political controversial decision. We can though expect the debate to dominate the political discourse over the next year and a quarter. Brown isn't going to want to say that he will take Britain into the euro, but he has to keep the option open. Cameron and Osbourne's problem is that if Britain is the first country transitioning to a post-post-industrial society (we need a catchier term for the processing of turning from a first world to a, well, not quite a third world country, but certainly something profoundly different from what we have been over the last decades and, arguably, centuries) then sterling is worthless and the only alternative to the euro is US dollarisation. And that worked so well for Argentina. But it might be an easier sell to the readers of The Sun.

The UK government owns 70% of RBS, St Vincent Cable is openly calling for the nationalisation of the entire banking sector (unclear to me how he intends to pay to do that - perhaps he thinks the government should just sequester the assets of the banks) and the Bank of England's prime interest rate is, for what it's worth (in economic terms probably not very much as the economy today bears precious little resemblance to the economy thirty years, much less three hundred - and people say nothing ever changes), at its lowest level ever in 315 years.

And today, the United States gets a new president - young, vigorous and intelligent - at the time that the world's faces its gravest economic crisis since the early 1930s. We live in interesting times.

Getting what you voted for, good and hard | Samizdata.net

Getting what you voted for, good and hard | Samizdata.net

This is an interesting piece from Perry de Havilland, one of the UKs leading libertarians, seriously it's interesting, read it. 

Of course, the reasons I find it interesting, and many readers will is somewhat different to the reasons Perry thinks it is interesting.

He makes an interesting thesis, that markets work because the actors in the market are flawed and acting only from Self Interest.  His point, and I've heard this argued somewhat by David Friedman, is that the real problem is that politicians are flawed and therefore Statist solutions don't work either.  Only the market will magically punish the irrational.

One of the vast problems I have with this line of logic is that the only rational course of action is to punish the stupid or gullible, no matter what the cost to society is.  I may, perhaps, be too empathic for my own good.

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How the Mighty are Fallen

Technology Review: Long-struggling Nortel files for bankruptcy

I'm surprised I hadn't seen mention of this elsewhere. One might well ask what took them so long - I recall Nortel in the early 2000s posting the largest ever (quarterly?) loss by a company, something like $17 billion. That was, of course, writedowns of goodwill, but Nortel shares were fully convertible for hard cash when it was valued at $297 billion. Now it is now worth $155 million, which means that 99.95% of the company has been destroyed. That does take some doing. Those famous vanity adverts weren't, in hindsight, perhaps such a good idea. Unless you cashed out in 1999. I wonder if Amanda Holt did? Given that The Reg claims she had a £90,000 a year job in 1999 (was there a Nortel ofice in Manchester?), she would presumably have had plenty of stock and stock options (Teli at Siemens certainly did) - The Reg says that her £15,000 of share options were withdrawn by Nortel after she was sacked, but she may already have had owned shares in her own right.

In 2003, I had to cacel mu Arvon course at Moniack Mhor with Gordon Legge and Bernadine Evaristo at in order to work on the Vodafone UTRAN second vendor bid. I even read two Gordon Legge books - not bad. We eventually lost to Nortel - the CTO of Vodafone was ex-Nortel - I recall his gurning fizzog from an advert that appeared in The Economist shortly before he left Vodafone, but it should I have been a no-brainer. Although we needed to do was show a slide of Siemens's credit rating v. Nortel's credit rating. I am pretty sure that Mike did indeed show such a slide. It's always more complicated than that, although, in this case, it shouldn't have been. Of course, Siemens Mobile Networks no longer exists either, so worrying about the relative share prices and credit ratings today of Siemens and Nortel is moot. I wonder what Nokia Siemens Networks  credit rating is though. And who will end up with the various parts of Nortel (Alcatel Lucent might be the best cultural fit).

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The CES Roundup...

Despite getting to bed at what passes around here for a reasonable hour, and that I didn't drink after about 11, I'll admit that I feel rough.  That would probably be the 3 nights of post 3am finishes and the early calls for meetings.

One of the problems is they pump extra Oxygen into the casinos and bars - this does two things; it keeps you feeling awake and alert and it stops you feeling so drunk.

Of course, the moment you go elsewhere, for example, to bed.  Things go down hill fast.

Never mind.  Tis but once a year... except I have Mobile World Congress in 4 weeks and that's pretty much a rerun.

Back to the show.

Well back to the show.

I did actually get to see it this year, which is more than last year. 

Nice stuff - a lot of very impressive 3D stuff on TVs.  The 3D prototype monitors without glasses were interesting but the images unclear.  I finally tried out a Myvu (www.myvu.com) which was interesting but not good enough to fork over $300 for.  Give them a little longer and I expect that a pair will be appearing in my standard travel kit.  But they need to get lighter and up a notch from VGA.

I liked the PS3 stuff I saw, and I am tempted sorely.  The Sony Vaio TT was also pretty spectacular.

Just plain weird: building a complete house of the future inside the event but putting it at the far end of the least accessable hall.

Work related: all good meetings.  The Nvidia demo of their new chipset for mobile devices looked good, but I'm naturally skeptical about canned demo's.

It was a hard show.  Lots of excellent networking, some extremely good customer contacts. 

Next stop Barcelona - rinse, repeat...

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The New New Thing

What is the New New Thing in 2009? Or the New New Person or the New New Book? I mean in the way that Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine was the New New Thing in the late 1940s or feminism and the works of Buckminster Fuller in the late 1960s or Gregory Bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind in the early 1970s or post-structuralism and deconstruction in the early 1980s or K. Eric Drexler's The Engines of Creation in the mid-1980s or complexity theory or artificial life were in the late 1980s or the web in the mid-1990s. I am getting jade and am ready for something new. Everything can't have been invented. Can it? I suppose with the crisis in late capitalism, the New New Thing ought to be something in the sociopoliticial sphere, but it is not clear that there is any underlying philosophy behind Obama that can revolutionise the world - or at least the way in which we see some of it.

Suggestions on a postcard please.

A Razor New Year

So, welcome to 2009.  Looking back on the last year, Paul and I managed a more reasonable chunk of postings than previous years and even had a few "lively" mini-threads.

2008 wasn't an easy year for the world.  Strangely, business wise, I had an excellent year and 2009 is shaping up well.  Part of the reason for that is that I currently work in the world of outsourcing - so we're at the cutting edge of cost reduction for a lot of companies.  The second reason is that, so far, Seattle seems isolated from the worst that the world economy has thrown at the US.

Anyway, a busy quarter looms large.  Next week I'm off to the circus that is CES.  There's a chance I'll be stuck in Vegas until Sunday, which will be challenging.  Then after a few weeks home, I'll be back on the road to Barcelona.

There will also be some travel to China and Russia (potentially).  We'll see.

Anyway, here's to a happy new year!

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