Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Author: Paul Wallbank

  • In it to win it – does overcompetitiveness hurt entrepreneurs?

    In it to win it – does overcompetitiveness hurt entrepreneurs?

    I’ve written before about entrepreneur and venture capital investor Mark Suster and his writings about business are always worth reading.

    His recent post pulling together writings on the DNA of an entrepreneur is interesting reading however one point jars – competitiveness.

    In Steve’s view competitiveness is about winning at all costs and crushing the opposition.

    That’s fine when competing for a customer, fighting over market share or pitching to the same VC investor, but business usually isn’t a zero-sum “if I win, you lose” equation.

    Sometimes its about complimentary strengths. In the early days of PC Rescue I tried to partner with an old colleague who had set up a competing business.

    Mark was actually a better computer tech than I was, my strengths lay more in sales and administration, had we teamed up we’d have been a good combination.

    Unfortunately Mark took Suster’s view of ‘winning at all costs’ and when I foolishly referred customers to him because I was either busy or thought he could do a better job, I found he was stealing those customers.

    Eventually I had to cut ties with him, and it cost him money and the chance to be part of something bigger. Mark was greedy but I’m sure he thinks he ‘won’ against me when there really wasn’t a contest.

    Geeks are particularly poor at admitting they have weaknesses, in fact their lack of self understanding could be their greatest weakness of all. So drumming a ‘win at all costs’ message into their heads is almost certainly counter productive.

    It may well be that this win at all costs view is damaging the mental health of many entrepreneurs, by viewing what others are doing through a prism of “I have to win” almost guarantees depression as often the life of an entrepreneur is more steps backwards than forwards.

    As most reporting of startup and entrepreneurs is distorted by survivor bias, we often gloss over this latter point – in reality starting your own business, particularly one that’s under-capitalised, is hard and tough work with a high chance of failure.

    That chance of failure means a ‘win at all costs’ mentality could result in a generation of mentally damaged former entrepreneurs.

    Mark Suster’s views are really good on what drives the Silicon Valley model of business. We need to take care though we don’t take the wrong lessons which end up hurting our businesses, families and our own mental well-being.

    Jackpot image from Henriette via SXC.HU.

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  • Do kids really need laptops in school?

    Do kids really need laptops in school?

    Are laptop computers really essential to educating our kids? Fairfax media reports this weekend that the Australian Federal government’s laptops in education scheme is near collapse.

    What stands out from the story are the quotes from educators;

    Chatswood High School principal Sue Low said her school was providing laptops to students in year 9 but the uncertainty over future plans was unsettling.

    “Laptops are now just as much of the culture of education as are pens and paper,” she said. “To not have certainty over how we will administer laptops to our students is very disruptive, and we need that certainty as soon as possible.”

    Some schools have come up with their own solution to the problem. One NSW school has made arrangements with a private provider under which parents can buy a laptop for $1341 or rent-to-buy for $90 with monthly payments of about $50.

    That computers are important is not a debate, but are we putting to much emphasis on the tools and not enough on what education is trying to achieve?

    One educator said a decade ago that they could teach an 80 year old to use a computer in a few hours, but an illiterate 15 year old may be lost for life. This is truer today than it was then.

    Computers are flooding our lives with information and the tools to gather that information are intuitive and don’t need 12 years of school to master.

    What we are all need are the critical and mathematical skills to filter out the dross and misinformation that floods onto our screens.

    Old and young have the belief that if something is on the web, then it must be true. The biggest challenge for parents and teachers with the web is convincing kids that cutting and pasting huge slabs of Wikipedia into an assignment isn’t research.

    Not that this is just a problem in the classroom – plenty of politicians, business leaders and time poor journalists have been caught out plagiarising Wikipedia and other websites.

    In recent times I’ve been to a lot of ‘future of media’ events where the importance of ‘data journalism’ has been raised. What really sticks out listening to these is how poorly equipped both young and old journalists are to evaluate the data they’ve gathered.

    This isn’t just a problem in journalism – almost every occupation needs these skills. We could argue those skills are essential for citizens who want to participate in a modern democracy.

    Computers, and coding skills, are important but we risk giving students the skills of today rather than giving them the foundations to adopt the skills of tomorrow.

    We also risk making technological choices that risk education departments, schools and kids being locked into one vendor or system.

    Giving every child a laptop is not a replacement for them having the critical, literacy and numeracy skills to participate in 21st Century society.

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  • High cost politics – how the Australian election will fail business

    High cost politics – how the Australian election will fail business

    “Running costs have gone crazy” complains Sydney restauranteur Jared Ingersoll at the same time the Australian events industry warns it’s being crushed by a higher dollar.

    While the closure of an inner city cafe doesn’t mean that much, a bigger warning about Australian costs comes from Royal Dutch Shell who have put their gas investments on hold due to project blowouts.

    Natural gas investments are the core of Australia’s economic policies with the country’s Asian Century report identifying energy exports as being the country’s main revenue earner over the next quarter century.

    Costs of doing business in Australia have been steadily on the increase since the Howard government introduced the GST which triggered Australia’s transition to a high cost country.

    It didn’t have to be that way but Howard’s addiction to middle class welfare meant what should have been a opportunity to reform the economy during the mid 2000s was squandered with gifts handed out by one of the highest spending governments in Australian history.

    While Whitlam at least spent money on bringing sewers to the suburbs, Howard spent his on subsidies to rich schools and parking permits to self-funded retirees.

    It would take a brave government to undo Howard’s work which isn’t something we can expect from the populist and cowardly Australian Labor Party that lacks any of the honesty or strength required to confront the whining middle classes about their unsustainable entitlements.

    Which makes the election announced last week interesting. In her election announcement the Prime Minister made a mention of dealing with the high Australian dollar, which at least shows the Labor Party sees there’s a problem – although they certainly don’t have the stomach to make the tough decisions required.

    On the other side of politics though it’s all unicorns and magic puddings. Tony Abbot and his friends are partying like it’s 1999.

    The Liberal Party policy paper released last week is notable for not acknowledging the global financial crisis and maintaining that taxes can be cut while Howard’s middle class welfare state can be expanded.

    The best example of the Liberal’s addiction to middle class welfare is their promise to introduce a parental leave scheme. As their Strong Australia policy document explains;

    Paid parental leave ought to be paid at a person’s wage rate, like holiday pay and like sick pay, because it is a workplace entitlement, not a government benefit.

    Not only does the Liberal Party believe that high paid workers should get subsidies for their nannies, but that employers should pick up the bill, just like holiday and sick pay.

    Middle class welfare and a massive business cost increase to boot.

    In a Smart Company poll last week, the small business readers overwhelming endorsed the Liberal Party.

    They should be careful what they wish for.

    For those worried about getting Australia’s high cost base down there are serious debates to be had about our tax and welfare systems along with tackling issues like high property prices, over-regulation, aging population and workforce skills.

    Most importantly, we have to define what Australia wants to be in the 21st Century.

    Little, if anything about these issues will be discussed before September and in the meantime the Dutch disease will slowly strangle Australian business. We need better.

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  • Sharks patrol these waters

    Sharks patrol these waters

    The announcement that the New York Times was attacked by Chinese hackers after exposing the financial details of the nation’s Premier doesn’t come as much of a surprise to anybody following either China or computer security issues.

    One of the realities of modern computing is that systems are constantly being compromised, the complexity of IT networks is so great that even the best security experts can be caught off guard.

    Securing our networks

    In such an environment the normal business and home computer user has little chance against sophisticated criminal or government sponsored attacks, by the Chinese or any other spy agency.

    One example of how badly wrong things can go for an organisation is the hacking of security advisory firm Stratfor in 2011, this illustrated how small business practices of having relatively open networks and poor password security can have serious consequences.

    The issue is not how we fortify our systems against intruders, but how we manage the risk. A useful analogy is how supermarkets deal with shoplifters – they can’t eliminate the problem, but they can manage it in ways that control losses.

    Businesses, governments and home users have a range of things they can do to make it harder for hackers to get into a system and limit what they can access if determined one gets in.

    The limits of anti-virus

    Another aspect in the story that doesn’t surprise is the poor performance of the New York Times’ anti-virus software. According to Forbes, Symantec only caught one malware program out of the 45 installed by the hackers.

    I have an entirely rational hatred of Symantec. While running an IT support business, their products were the bane of our lives and we encouraged users to choose alternative security software because of the unreliability of many of Symantec products, particularly the once proud Norton brand that was aimed at home and small business users.

    At the time of the great malware epidemic in the early 2000s, Norton Anti-Virus had a huge market share and it proved to be worse than useless against the various forms of drive by downloads and infected sites that were exploiting weaknesses in Microsoft Windows 98 and XP systems.

    Windows weaknesses

    The common culprit was Windows ActiveX scripting language that Microsoft had introduced to standardise its web features. While a good idea, Microsoft made ActiveX a fundamental part of Windows and gave the features full access into the inner workings of the system.

    Sadly Symantec made the decision to run all their security software on ActiveX as well.

    As ActiveX was the main target for malware writers it meant that Norton AntiVirus or their Security suite would crash in a heap once a computer became infected and the Symantec software would actively interfere with attempts to cleanup a compromised system.

    Making matters worse was Symantec’s subscription policies which cut customers off from vital updates and their bizarre policy of not including important upgrades in their automated updating function.

    The failures of tech journalism

    All of these factors made Symantec a loathed product in our office. It wasn’t helped by a generation of tech journalists who wrote gushing stories about Symantec, gave their products favourable reviews despite the company’s lousy reputation and consulted their employees for expert comment.

    It wasn’t tech journalism’s finest hour. What really grates is the number of these folk still peddling nonsense about IT security and anti-virus software.

    That distrust of Symantec continues to this day and those of us who struggled with their products a decade ago are not surprised at their poor performance on the New York Times’ network.

    State sponsored risks

    In defense of Symantec, the Chinese hackers are very good and its unlikely any security software would stand up to a sustained and determined attack from them or their counterparts in the US and Israeli governments.

    We should also note that government agencies trying to get into systems is not just something done by the Chinese, US and Israelis; every government in the world is engaging in these activities against foreign businesses and their own citizens.

    So we have to accept that these breaches and attacks are a real threat to any computer and any organisation. It may well be should build our security strategies around the assumption the bad guys are already in the system rather than believe we can build a giant electronic fort to keep the bad guys out.

    One thing is for sure, you can’t rely solely on anti-virus software to secure your IT systems.

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  • Building Africa’s multinationals

    Building Africa’s multinationals

    African business site CP-Africa has a profile on the continent’s youngest billionaire, 31 year old Ashish Thakkar, based on a recent interview with the Wharton Business School.

    Ashish’s story is fascinating one, his family have been refugees twice – once from Uganda when Idi Amin expelled the Indian population and later in Rwanda – and each time his father rebuilt the family’s fortunes from scratch.

    In setting up his own business at 15 with a $6,000 loan, Ashish surprised Dubai authorities who thought his age was a misprint. 16 years later Mara Group operates in real estate, tourism, manufacturing and IT services across 24 countries, the bulk of them in Africa.

    The interview is an insight into how African economies are evolving and how the continent is just as diverse as the others – it’s as foolish to lump all African nations together as it is to consider all Asian or European countries as being the same.

    An important point that jumps out of Ashish’s interview are his thoughts on attracting foreign investment;

    We have a huge issue in Africa with unemployment. Unfortunately, a lot of our governments think the answer is foreign direct investment. It’s not.

    This is one of the mistakes governments around the world make – it’s understandable as those big foreign corporations are impressive and rich, there’s also the kudos a politician or public servant gets from being seen as a great statesman consorting with global captains of industry, this is one of the attractions in the annual World Economic Forum meetings in Davos.

    As Ashish points out, attracting big corporations is not the answer to building a thriving, modern economy. It requires the locals to take action, not just in the business sector but right across the community.

    Waiting for a big corporation to come along to kick start your business community is just a cargo-cult mentality which rarely works.

    That cargo cult mentality is alive and well in western nations, a good recent example was the campaign to get Twitter to open an Australian office in Melbourne.

    Like Facebook, Twitter’s representation down under would be a government liaison staffer who would be best located in Canberra.

    Campaigning for this only made Melbourne look like a bunch of provincial hicks, the city and state is capable of much better.

    The sad thing is all our governments do this when squandering money subsidising multinationals to set up offices that were going to be set up anyway. Business books are full of betrayed cities like New London, Connecticut who gave away tens of millions only to see their great corporate saviour walk away a few years later.

    It’s far better for government to spend those millions reforming business regulations and taxes to make it easy for local businesses to compete with multinationals and become the global leaders of tomorrow.

    As one of the few parts of the world that isn’t facing the challenges of an aging population, Africa economies are in a good position to spawn a whole generation of entrepreneurs and corporations. It will be interesting to see if Ashish Thakkar is leading that generation.

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