Tag Archives: advice

April 7, 2015 · 10:58 am

You Could But You Shouldn’t

You might have missed an item last week although you might very well have been the subject of the report.  Do you know about ad injectors?  I’ve written about them before, most recently when some genius at Lenovo thought purchasers of their laptops would want to have Superfish bundled with their machines.  Besides being a massive security risk it was annoying as hell, as a plethora of ads cluttered up users’ screens.  Well, it turns out that Lenovo doesn’t have a patent on either stupidity (at best) or maliciousness (more likely).  To wit:

More than 5% of Google site visitors have at least one ad injector installed. Of those, half have at least two injectors installed, and nearly one-third have at least four installed, per a study Google conducted with researchers at University of California Berkeley.

In other words, millions of people have code installed that will insert new ads, or replace existing ones, into the pages those people read.  You may be one of them.  How did this happen?  Generally, some miscreant bundled the ad injector with some other desirable piece of software which the user installed.  Tool bars (don’t install them!) and certain software download sites (download.com, for one) do this routinely.  As the Google Security Blog put it:

Unwanted ad injectors aren’t part of a healthy ads ecosystem. They’re part of an environment where bad practices hurt users, advertisers, and publishers alike. People don’t like ad injectors for several reasons: not only are they intrusive, but people are often tricked into installing ad injectors in the first place, via deceptive advertising, or software “bundles.”…Ad injectors are problematic for advertisers and publishers as well. Advertisers often don’t know their ads are being injected, which means they don’t have any idea where their ads are running. Publishers, meanwhile, aren’t being compensated for these ads, and more importantly, they unknowingly may be putting their visitors in harm’s way, via spam or malware in the injected ads.
So why does this happen?  Because it can and because some executive doesn’t have the moral courage to say “no” to an easy buck.  Any of us in business make choices like this all the time.  We could do things that are evil but profitable but most of us choose not to.  We should not be afraid to point out and shun those who do.
Business is hard.  Making the right decisions is part of what makes it so.  We don’t do some things just because we can.  Besides being immoral it’s myopic and as Lenovo found out the backlash can be worse than the original problem.  Make sense?

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March 27, 2015 · 10:41 am

Easy Recipes

This Foodie Friday will involve a trip to the store for me. I like to avoid the markets over the weekend so Friday mornings are sometimes spent reviewing and searching for recipes. A little menu planning in advance means just today’s trip to the stores.

Pulled pork in BBQ sauce sandwich with slaw

Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As I was going through a few food sites looking for ideas it struck me how many recipes involved the word “easy.” I suspect part of that is an appeal to the time crunch all of us seem to be under and part of it is to make cooking less intimidating for those whose kitchen skills involve a microwave and opening a can.  The recipes are indeed easy – dump some stuff in the slow cooker, walk away for 6 hours, voilà! Supper!  While I love my slow cooker and have made, say, pulled pork in it, I’m not going to tell you that the end product is anything like, or near as good, as what I produce from my smoker.  The smoker is a tricky beast to use and requires a lot of attention. Which is, of course, the business point.

I’m not going to tell you that we need to make things as difficult for ourselves as we can.  In fact, I think quite the opposite.  What I won’t do or ask my clients to do as part of making things easier is to denigrate the quality of their offerings.  That’s where “easy” tends to become hard.  Maintaining the greatness of your brand, your products, your services isn’t easy nor will it ever be.  It requires constant vigilance and a proactive mindset.  You can’t just set the cooker and walk away.

So here is the easy recipe for this Friday.  This is the one that gets us to great while being relatively easy. As a person, learn the basic skills you need and practice them.  That’s true in the kitchen and the office.  Possessing those skills – critical thinking and communicating first and foremost – and getting them right makes using them easy.  As a manager, hire and train only those people because when every member of the team gets the basics right every day the end product will be easy AND great.

You in?

 

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March 20, 2015 · 10:35 am

Let Me In

This Foodie Friday I’d like us to have a think about accessibility and food.  No, I don’t mean wheelchair ramps into restaurants or menus for the blind.  Maybe a better word might be “pretense.”  Let me say what I’m thinking about and you can fill in the blanks.  Either way, it relates to business as well (what a shock!).

I watch a lot of cooking and food shows.  Some of them feature chefs who give off an air of superiority – they know a lot more than you do.  That may be true about the methods but it’s not true about the taste.  Any of us knows what we like and dislike and I, for one, am not going to let some dolt with a few years for cooking school under his belt tell me what tastes good.  Let’s face it – many of us probably know as much about cooking techniques as they do.  What really good chefs have that we might not are moments of inspiration through which they transform food into something etherial.

I don’t want to paint with too wide a brush.  As this piece pointed out:

Plenty of big name chefs are popular in large part because of how accessible they want food culture to be (Anthony Bourdain has made an entire career of sharing his love and understanding of food), or how they want to share their knowledge rather than lording it over us simple peons (Wiley Dufresne is as much an enthusiastic Culinary Biophysicist as he is a Chef). Chefs who want to join in the conversation rather than control it are myriad, and they’re a vital part of the discussion.

All of this is applicable to you no matter what business you’re in.  We need to spend time making what we do accessible – to our consumers, to our partners, to our team.  What I mean is that we need to demystify it – take the very complex and help others to understand it so they in turn can engage in the conversation.  It may mean a meeting to explain the types of data you’re gathering.  It could be a video inside your factory to explain how a product is made.  It’s all really a recognition that the benefits of letting others in and engaging in conversation far outweigh the downsides.  No chef is going to tell me what I like.  No brand is going to either.  Be accessible – ask me the question and I’ll answer and hopefully you’ll respond.

That’s my take.  Yours?

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