Recipe for American success: One part self sufficiency, one part team work. And mix?

A colleague/friend of mine asked me a very interesting question via email today...and it really struck a cord. 

"Which attribute is more important or favorable in American culture – being self sufficient or promoting team work?"

Full disclosure. My friend is not American by birth, but has lived here for quite awhile. So his/her perception and perspective is potentially different from someone born in the US.


My first inclination was to write, "team work, of course".  But then as I considered the depth of the question he/she was asking, I started to lean to the ideal that being self-sufficient is more important. Though it might depend on the day, the week or even the job/type of work I was currently employed doing. Assuming, I'm somewhat representative of a typical American, I was struck by the fact, that honestly I could go either way on this question. And that a survey of people on the street (or even Facebook) might yield a similar result. 

Realistically, I guess you could point to the fact that everything is set up for us to want to be self-sufficient and driven for personal reasons in the US. Capitalism, democracy, professional Darwinism, etc. are all set up around the individual. But if you investigate the way that many companies run their HR review processes, they're keyed to both individual and company wide goals. My personal experience is that the companies that consistently hire and keep the best talent, tend to focus their performance compensation on the individual piece. Because that's the tangible portion that we as Americans care about...we want to be the self sufficient super stars who our superiors can count on to complete the most difficult of tasks. The group goals are often seen as out of our control, and  something that even the best teamwork can't truly impact.

Yet, we as Americans also pride ourselves as being a melting pot and working through our differences to conquer things as a "team". Team America, if you will. Any NFL or NBA fans can look to Tebow-mania and Lin-sanity as examples of talented people, who demote their own self sufficiency to become a true team player, improving the outcomes of the overall team. Simply trying to play a part of a bigger whole appears to be their ultimate goal. Not fattening their own statistics. 

What do you think?  What really is more favorable in American culture: A great individual, self sufficient talent. Or a person whose success is that he/she contributes to a winning team? Or is their a comfortable blend? And is that mixture the real recipe to succeeding in American culture in whatever way you personally define success...

Paradox of being cool

Quite an interesting article about the iPhone and its effect on cell phone providers. Not only have the big cell phone carriers been required to spend billions to support smart phone data hogs, particularly the iPhone (I admit, I'm probably one of those hogs), carriers typically take a back seat as Apple gets the positive product afterglow and the negative stuff (dropped calls, etc.) ends up in their lap. Now they're basically being forced to incur negative financial results just for the privilege of providing the iPhone as an option to consumers.

Apple wants the relationship to be that way for the most part.  A decision for the carriers to make: JOIN US OR BE UNCOOL.  And their white hot stock price shows to some extent, they are winning that critical decision. In most businesses, such an arrangement might be simply a form of investment for the future, sacrificing something in the short term. But, in typical situations, businesses have more control over that future opportunity. In this situation, Apple controls a large part of the potential long term benefits and in turn profitability.  They dictate the product refresh timeline, the advertising concepts and style, the highly sought after media content the iPhone delivers, and of course, the coolness factor.

If this doesn't remind people of high school, I don't know what does...to stay relevant or "cool", each carrier has made a critical strategic decision to trade financial performance today for the potential years away. In high school for example, that would be the equivalent of taking a short cut on tonight's Calculus prep for your exam on Friday, to spend more time hanging out with the cool kids, tonight.

If you play the analogy forward, what did high school and especially the last 50 years of technology invention show us? Those same cool kids who cut corners don't often finish first.  Being cool simply today does not guarantee success in the long term.  Actually, it's at least as likely that the Calculus nerds that could care less about being cool today, dominate longer term.  See Gates, Page, Brin, Zuckerberg, and Allen as possible examples.

You can't cut corners on your "homework" and expect to end up on top.  Any finance person would tell you that $1 today is far more valuable than a "dollar" in 2015 as the date the article references as Sprint's target to make money on their Apple iPhone deal. The carriers may have a fun time hanging with their friends tonight, but it appears far more likely that only the nerds in Cupertino will be the cool ones in the future.

"Pardon me, but do you like that Steve Jobs iBook?"

Prior to the holiday season, my work travel schedule took me to quite a few airports. And in every Hudson news or other airport newsstand, I notice the Steve Jobs biography. I heard some great things about it, but every time I considered it, all I could think of was "darn, that book will be a pain to travel with."  It's not a coffee table book big, but at 600 pages or so, it's definitely not a thin 200 pager which fits easily within a normal laptop bag.  Of course, my wife would tell you that I carry a massive bag, and that it shouldn't be a problem. But, already carrying at least two laptops (one for my company, one for a client), my portfolio, power cables, flash drivers, even I didn't want to pick up the extra weight of that book.  Then the holidays happened and I was lucky enough to get the book as a gift from my family.

I decided to give it a try and take it with me on a few trips.  I would actually carry the book outside of my bag and put it through the security process in a bin.  And the funniest thing happened...I received several comments a day from passerby's, from other passengers on my flights and even from TSA's finest. The comments either gave the book praise or asked me my opinion. Both of which encouraged short conversations between me and someone who probably never would have talked to me except for this larger than normal book I was carrying.  A book that carried that story of one of the most remarkable inventors and CEO's of the last century.

As I was flying back from my last trip and I finally finished the book, I realized something else.  As Steve Jobs predicted, his iPad invention which plays that intersection of technology and the humanities, would change the book industry. Numerous articles on top news sites will give credence to that daily as publishers, state and federal education committee and schools/universities struggle to re define how to play in the new digital publishing world.  But the piece that I'm not sure Steve predicted (or any of the e-Book device manufacturers), was how having all of your books loaded on to a digital device would change the interactions and questions you get when carrying a traditional book.  No longer will people be able to quickly notice a book and either ask you about it, or make a judgement about what you do, or who you are.  To the passerby's, you're merely reading an "iBook" or other digital content.  I'm not saying this is always a good thing, but even if I was to carry a medical journal or law school book, or even a copy of BusinessWeek, people can form some opinion of me and potentially ask me a question about that item.

Physical books and other reading materials seem to provide a personal connection, that I'm not sure an iPad does at this point.  The passenger in 20D would be hard pressed to know if I was reading the Bible or reviewing the WSJ.  I guess that's an unforseen tradeoff the iPad causes. Users have access to a wealth of reading sources at their finger tips in a super convenient and portable package in exchange for some level of personal anonymity.  I for one enjoyed reading a physical book like the Jobs biography but I can see where the prevalence of digital reading options will affect even the most normal of human interactions. "Excuse me, do you like that iBook?" just doesn't seem to have the same ring.

4 Cores and 7 Gigs ago...

Whereas the title of the this blog is a little misleading, it's both a nod to my Junior High history class and having to learn the Gettysburg address, and a "celebration" of sorts because I'm finally running a virtual machine on an Intel based Mac the way it apparently it should be run. For those of you who read my blog when I first went on this bi-polar journey, thinking Mac, working Windows, you know I went this direction because I needed some specific workplace tools that are not available purely on the Mac OS.  So, I simply went to the nearest Apple store and selected an off the shelf 15" MacBook Pro, discussed my options for running Windows on it with one of the Geniuses (VM, Parallels, or the easiest, Boot Camp), and then decided that VM Ware would do the trick. I installed both the virtual machine, and Windows Vista with all of the "fun" Microsoft Office applications I use on a weekly basis. Exciting titles like Outlook, PowerPoint, Visio...well, you get the idea.

At first, the laptop seemed to handle MicrosoftVista without issues. I was able to do my work in the Windows world and running the virtual machine in unity mode, switch over to the Mac side of the laptop and use it for Safari, Mail, ichat, Skype, etc. But, about two months into running it this way, I started to encounter significant issues in the way the laptop responded. It would take up to a minute to start a Microsoft application, emails with attachments would crash Outlook, and in some cases, the laptop would just freeze.  Needless to say, after losing work countless times and feeling like I was booting up my old Commodore 128 in terms of processing speed (I'm using a Mac right!?), I needed to make some changes. It wasn't apparent at the time which OS (Snow Leopard or Vista) was causing the majority of the pain, but I decided to do a little research.

Amongst the myriad of blogs and tech journals I reviewed, I stumbled upon a few that provided details on what the virtual machine settings should be to perform best with the combination I was using.  Things like suggested Memory allocations, how you partition the hard drive, how you tweak the core processor, etc.  And of course, this other nugget "without a minimum of 4GB of RAM available for memory, just for the virtual machine, we suggest turning off the thumbnail view feature and other graphics intensive Vista features". Aka, my poor little Mac with the 4GB of RAM total, allocated across both environments wasn't going to cut it. So I could either decrease the capabilities of Vista (oxymoron, I know), or go get some more memory installed.  Which in my mind, at the time, was too much of a hassle.

So I followed the helpful suggestions and VOILA! I had resolved most of the performance, albeit creating a watered down version of Vista along the way. Imagine running Windows 2000 on your home computer and remember what limitations in terms of "graphics" I'm talking about. Mind you, I was now trying to work this way in 2010. And then came Windows 7 about six months later. In my mind, and from what I read, this was the panacea. All of my issues were Vista related (obviously) and with the improvements that both Microsoft and VM Ware had made to their respective software, I would be able to run a more modern implementation of a Windows OS. Wrong. Same issues, same problems. Fast forward to the end of 2011, it's time for me to replace my Mac and I decided to ask people who know about these things; the same Geniuses at the Apple store.  They laughed when I told the story and told me to beef up to 8GB of memory and that would do the trick.  Not to mention the 4 cores in the new model could be allocated as I wished.  The new Mac Book core wasn't available the first time, but I'm not sure why they RAM discussion wasn't made more clear in 2009.

From the moment I started up this new machine, I've been astonished. It's like I stepped into 2012 or something. Remarkably faster on both the Lion OS and Windows 7, except for a few items caused by the transfer of data from the old to the new, this thing flies! I know, does it really matter how fast I can switch between Visio and PowerPoint...well, maybe not. But I'm still elated at the fact that 4 cores and 4 more GB of RAM did the trick. Again, maybe it's not 4 additional cores and 7 more gig than before, but a person can dream big, right?

Keep your friends close and your emoticons closer <:->

I was reading an article about brewing tensions between two tech titans in the LA times last weekend , and I was captivated as I tried to determine what the heck Samsung thought they would get out of suing Apple over emoticons. Then I read an additional Reuters article about how Samsung reportedly makes the advanced A5 chip that keeps the iPhone/iPad money train running. These two current articles display the devilish land grabs that are going on within the wireless, mobile and smartphone industries.  And I realized, this is just the beginning of contrary behaviors likely to be displayed by Apple and Samsung. As well as their tech peers, Sony, Google, Microsoft.

Though seemingly irrational to sue a business partner while your short term interests, e.g., continuing to push products that end consumers clamor for, both sides are pushing to establish their own beachheads. Areas of the tech space they can own, either through software, hardware or more likely the integration of the two. On one hand, you can see how both companies discussed in the article are advancing their own agenda and protecting their strategic opportunities. On the other, they both are strategically partnering with a direct competitor in one or more of those key business markets. I guess Michael Corleone was right...keep your friends close, and your "enemies" closer.

Streaming Apathy

A few months ago, I would have been truly excited about this news about the new Netflix iPad app.  But now I'm apathetic to the news about a new iPad "toy" that my wife sent me via email. And this from a person who went on and on about how great Netflix was as a service. And who spent the better part of 8 blogs in the last two years, writing about the service.

The simple fact is that since we switched to be Netflix streaming only customers (for $7.99), our use of Netflix has plummeted. Cyndey and I are using Redbox far more frequently as a substitute for what used to be a weekly red envelope surprise from Netflix. We discussed recently how the fact that we're not actually seeing an envelope arrive and that dictates to some extent our viewing habits. I'm sure Netflix did a ton of analysis about this phenomena before making the change. Or maybe they didn't.  The simple fact is that without the red envelope, I'm much less likely to access the service and in the long run, Netflix has probably lost me as a streaming customer. Maybe as a customer in general.

Routing Irony

There's been quite a few articles recently about Huawei, the Chinese maker of networking and infrastructure hardware (think Cisco of the East), and its efforts to improve its image with US companies. In fact, one of their recent hires, a US based executive who previously served in high ranking capacities at large telecoms like British Telecom, is basically a full time lobbyist and part time executive tasked with bringing AT&T, Verizon and other US based carriers into the fold. To date, the biggest telecom carriers have resisted adding Huawei to their preferred vendor status because of security concerns. And US government reservations as well...the same company tried to buy Sprint a few years back and the acquisition was blocked by the FTC and other government agencies. Now comes the announcement that Huawei is actually pulling back on sales of network equipment to Iran because of concerns that its products might be used to ferret out insurgents.

When I read this article my first thought was that this was done completely for sales and image reasons in the US, but then reflecting back to the other articles I had read, I realized there is some irony that Huawei which itself is closely aligned to the Chinese government, made this decision. There's something to be said for a company like Huawei who most likely helps support the Chinese "Great Firewall" and probably helps with similar insurgent activities in the mainland, pulling back from similar activities in other countries. Maybe they looked in the mirror and realized that there's definitely a conflict of interest. And/or maybe they really are trying to get rid of any global stigma about selling into Iran. Regardless, there are numerous reasons to watch and see if Huawei continues to distance itself from other deals with government entities in the future.