Rapid growth is a drug
I recently had the privilege to hear Joe Rogers, Jr (CEO of Waffle House) speak at a luncheon. He had a number of interesting things to say about growing a company. First, a couple of interesting facts about Waffle House. It is the second largest 24 hour (McD is #1) fast food chain in America with over 1,500 restaurants mostly in the Southern United States. Joe Rogers, Sr started Waffle House in 1955. In 1957 they made their one and only acquisition and they’ve grow organically since then. In the 1960’s they started to franchise the brand. In 1973 Joe, Jr took over from his farther when they had 400 restaurants. They have over 1,000 shareholders and is still privately held. He believes that Waffle House will still be privately held 20-30 years from now.
- Rapid growth is a drug: Mr Rogers gave a number of examples of fast-food chains that had astronomical growth and then flamed out. He believes that rapid growth is a drug and not necessary to be successful in the long run. After rapid growth in the 70’s they’ve slowed down. Since the 80’s they’ve only maintained 5-6% growth — slow according to industry standards.
- Grow slow to became the biggest: He believes in growing at a measured pace to become the largest. 5-6% is slow, however after 50+ years Waffle House is now the second largest in it’s category. Most other fast-food restaurants in this category are declining.
- Pace your growth based on careers: He believes very strongly in growing management and not hiring from the outside (see below). A company should measure and pace it’s growth based on the careers of managers. This is not easy, however definitely possible.
- Don’t hire outside senior executives: Finally he believes that you cannot hire a senior executive from the outside. Outsiders don’t have the passion, and cultural background as Waffle House livers. Someone asked him if he isn’t worried about group think and stagnating if you don’t bring new blood onboard for new ideas. He said it is easy and inexpensive to hire a consultant (or read a book) to get new ideas. Interesting…
It was very interesting to hear another viewpoint regarding company growth. I usually only hear about rapid growth and also hiring the best and the brightest from outside an organization.For more info on Waffle House see wikipedia.org and wafflehouse.com.Do you think this model is also applies to technology companies? Can you think of specific examples?
Art of the Start, Part 1
I am studying The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki instead of just reading it and it is taking me much longer than usual to finish this book. I can HIGHLY recommend this book.
Let me give you a couple of teasers to get you interested. If you plan on starting anything you should think about creating meaning. Meaning is:
- Make the world a better place,
- Increase the quality of life,
- Right a terrible wrong, and
- Prevent the end of something good…
You should also create an internal mantra for your organization. A mantra is for your employees; it’s a guideline for what they do in their jobs. A tag line is for customers; it’s a promise of the service they can expect from you.For example: Starbucks’ mantra is: “Rewarding everyday moments”.I enjoyed the following quote from Oscar Wilde: “Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.”I say: Let’s gain some experience starting something and creating meaning!Additional info: This is also a good overview of Guy’s work @ About.com. How to change the world is Guy’s blog and his new company is Truemors.[amtap book:isbn=1591840562]
Ruby on Rails – Build a blogging engine in 15 minutes!
With Ruby on Rails (RoR) it is possible to develop a blogging engine in 15 minutes. Watch this 15 minute video demo-ing RoR. The Ruby language was developed by Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz) in 1994. According to Matz:
“Ruby is the interpreted scripting language for quick and easy object-oriented programming. It has many features to process text files and to do system management tasks (as in Perl). It is simple, straight-forward, extensible, and portable.”
I have to admit that I’ve not heard of Ruby until recently. I programmed a lot of Smalltalk and C++ in my former life as a programmer and Ruby seems to be a great OO language with great reflective capabilities. Matz also mentions that Ruby was inspired by Eiffel and Ada — languages that I studied as a student in the late 80’s and then forgot about. Reflective features and MVC are now commonplace. These features were very esoteric in the 80’s.Well back to Ruby on Rails. This framework was developed by David Heinemeier Hansson and released in July 2004. David is from Denmark and a partner in the 37signals.com company. I really appreciate the simply, yet powerful design of the 37signals web applications. Do yourself a favor and learn a few things from these guys.RoR is a framework to quickly develop and deploy enterprise web applications based on Web2.0 principles. It uses Ruby as a scripting language and quickly and easily generates a web application framework. You can quickly link this application to a database back-end. The beauty of RoR is the interaction with the application while developing and the rapid deployment when you are done. Rapid prototyping is back! Rapid prototyping or agile programming involving the user is a great way to quickly develop an application that is highly usable and valuable. I really enjoyed Hasso Plattner’s (SAP co-founder) recent keynote at SAPPHIRE 2006 in Orlando called (re) design (scroll to the bottom of the page for Hasso’s keynote).At some point I would like to compare RoR with SAP’s Webdynpro technology. You can find an interesting discussion on this topic and AJAX on SAP’s SDN website. This is your first hint that my plan is to relate some of the new Web2.0 technologies back to enterprise software, specifically SAP. Watch this space…More links: Attend a RoR conference in a city close to you. You can also find a number of books on Ruby and RoR on Amazon, e.g., Ruby and Ruby on Rails.Oct 26, 2007 update: Ruby and Rails are now standard in Apple’s OSX LeopardPlease give me your personal experience using Ruby or Ruby on Rails.[amtap book:isbn=0974514055][amtap book:isbn=0977616606][amtap amazon:asin=B000FK88JK]
Using Google Spreadsheets
In an earlier post I mentioned Google Spreadsheets. I decided to use this web app for a fairly detailed spreadsheet recently. My initial comments are:The good…
- The web-app is fairly responsive and you can easily and quickly update a spreadsheet. Navigation within a spreadsheet is fairly snappy.
- Smaller spreadsheets load quickly from the Google site. Smaller spreadsheets also load quickly from your local machine.
- To format a cell, change the font, and create a function is very initiative and easy.
- Spreadsheet navigation is quick, easy, and initiative.
- It’s very easy to share a file to collaborate on a spreadsheet.
The bad…
- Maybe this is a Mac problem, however I couldn’t see a cursor when editing a cell. This makes it very difficult to edit a function, especially very complicated functions.
- Uploading a file of any significance size takes loooooooooonnnnng. I have a 6Mbps connection. It’s still very slow. It’s not really practical to work like this.
- Ok, so you developed an elaborate spreadsheet and now you want to print it. Well, the printing functions are VERY limited in this version. The only way to print a spreadsheet is to render it in HTML and then to print the web page. Not the most powerful way to print. The rendering is also very bad.
Current assessment: Don’t delete your Microsoft Excel application just yet!I would like to hear about your experiences with Google Spreadsheets.
Online web-based applications
I received my writely.com login today. Writely is an online word processor. You can also collaborate online and export to MS-Word, pdf, OpenOffice, etc. It is still in beta and doesn’t support Safari. Not a problem I also use Firefox. Have a look — it is almost viable. I also mentioned Google Spreadsheets previously. These days you have many choices to create, and edit MS-Word documents online:
- WebOffice from Webex. Use to share applications. Online database.
- KDCalc. Generate enterprise application (Java or .NET) from Excel spreadsheets.
- JotSpot. Quickly develop wiki-based applications including web-based spreadsheets.
- Thinkfree. Thinkfree lets you create, access, and edit Microsoft Word, Excel or Powerpoint documents within a Browser. Cool!
Let me know if I missed one!I will test drive some of these over the next couple of months and then report back.
What a website!
I live in Atlanta and every October Atlanta hosts the Catalyst Conference for young leaders. The conference was birthed by John Maxwell the Leadership Guru and this is it’s sixth year. The keynote speakers include: Andy Stanley, Marcus Buckingham (First, Break all the rules fame) and Donald Miller (author of Blue Like Jazz). Very worth attending. The Catalyst website is stunning and very different from what’s out there today.The company that produces it is called: FiveStone. Have a look at their website and some of their clients — very cool stuff.[amtap book:isbn=0785288376][amtap book:isbn=0785263705][amtap book:isbn=1416502661][amtap book:isbn=1590523296]
What color is your personality?
There are numerous personality profiling systems in use today, e.g., Myers-Briggs, DISC, etc. How about one that profile your personality based on a color system. Yes, colors. The system is called the Dewey Color System.
From the publisher: In 1981, Sadka began experimenting with color as a means of better understanding people’s personalities. Today, his Dewey Color System has become a patented business of its own, boasting a website, merchandise—such as stuffed animals and home decorating systems—and a number of devotees. Starting with the question “What’s your favorite color?” Sadka leads readers through a series of questions to help them get to the root of their hopes, dreams and fears. His system relies upon various combinations of a person’s favorite and least favorite colors, which the reader selects from four palettes provided with the book. Astrology-like descriptions of the inner workings each color profile (e.g. if yellow is your favorite color “finding common ground is the game you play best”) make up the bulk of this book. The rest of it consists of arguments that support the validity of the test that may or may not sway skeptics. Credulity aside, however, Sadka’s test is lots of fun, and his personality descriptions may surprise even the most cynical of readers.
You can also find more information on their website: www.deweycolorsystem.com. Unfortunately the website only supports IE. No support for Firefox for Safari.[amtap book:isbn=1400050626]
Apple does it again!
This week Apple announced a lot of great products at WWDC in San Francisco during Steve Job’s keynote. The one product that impressed me the most is a feature called “Time Machine”. Time Machine will be part of the upcoming Leopard OSX release. It provides full automatic backups and phenomenal and very intuitive recovery of any data object in OSX. This is a great example of a company taking a very tedious process and reinventing it in a way that makes it accessible and easy to use for everyone. It’s based on some very cool technology called, “Core Animation”.
Disclosure: I love Apple products! I have a PowerBook G4 for work stuff and an iMac at home. In fact I don’t have a Windows machine anymore. I do have one lonely Linux box running a great operating system called, Ubuntu.
After tasting the fruit in 2003 doing video editing on an iMac, I converted all my machines to Apple. Btw, my first computer ever was an Apple II with two 128k floppy drives — really hi-tech stuff!
Why do you still use Windows?
Web v2.0 is here…
I recently started to research what the hype is around Web2.0. Well, I think it is more than just hype. So far I believe that Web2.0 is about web services, better and quicker development tools and the most important aspect, better user interaction via browsers — no more page flashes and slow updates. Another aspect is user generated content (more on this later) — yes, myspace.com and youtube.com. Yes, I know it is also about wiki’s, mashups, blogs and podcasts.
Web Services:
Sites like Google.com, Amazon.com and also ERP vendors like SAP are making it very easy to find and use Web Services.
Have a look at some of these not-so-well-known sites to get a feeling of what Web2.0 is all about: travbuddy.com, thinkfree.com (Microsoft Office on the Web!), and evoca.com from Savannah.
Development tools:
I don’t have too much information on this yet, however you can start by reviewing Ruby on Rails. SAP also provides a strong enterprise grade development environment to develop Webdynpro transactions.
User experience:
In the “old” days we were used to see whole page screen refreshes when we used application via a browser. These days the user experience and interaction is mind blowing — think Google Spreadsheets. It is now possible to update each pixel on a web page without a full page refresh. Technologies like AJAX, Adobe Flex and SAP’s Webdynpro make this possible.
This is just the introduction. I plan to write a lot more about Web2.0, especially how enterprises can use the “web-only” technologies and use it in an ERP world. I have 12 years of experience with SAP and will therefor mostly focus on SAP’s Enterprise Service Architecture (ESA).
Interesting links:
SoonR – Use Skype on your cellphone
OK, another entry for the day. Do you ever have the need to have access to your desktop, but you only have your web-enabled phone with you. Well, now you can. Have a look at: www.soonr.com. They support both Windows and Mac — great!The best part is you can use Skype on your cellphone!!! Have a look at the following Techcrunch review.Let me know what you think of this?
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