Category Archives: Business

Companies forget that they pay wages; don’t understand complexity of economy

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Apparently 68 out of the top 100 retailers are concerned about flat or falling wages. Huffington Post did some poking around their 10-K forms and aggregated the top risks for the top 100 retailers. Huffpo found that low spending, unemployment, and falling or flat wages were the top 3 items. To me this is really interesting. Apple was recently identified as part of a wage fixing scheme that looks like it could have cost employees something on the order of $3.2 Billion, Wal-Mart has cut hours of their employees as to prevent themselves from paying for ObamaCare for those employees, which means that those employees have to pay for their insurance out of pocket, as they have to insurance now.

All of these things together impact the web of our economy. What we’re seeing is local optimization which leads to sub-optimization of the entire system. Companies that are cutting wages or benefits to maximize their profits are likely taking a cut out of their own revenue stream. It’s likely that many Wal-Mart employees shop there because it’s the lowest priced place in most areas for most goods. The fact that WinCo is Wal-Mart’s largest threat now, is pretty indicative that wages are falling.

When Henry Ford raised the wages of his employees to a real living wage, it wasn’t out of kindness or some perceived social good. It was so that his employees could buy his car. If a large mass of people are unable to buy a good you produce because of your own wage policies you’re creating a problem for yourself. Furthermore, economies are networks, they interact with each other. Each and everyone of those employees would then become representatives for the Ford brand and be able to show off the good they were manufacturing. With every new employee hired, Ford knew that there would eventually be one more sale.

Companies today have clearly forgotten this. Retail is one of the largest segment of our economy, with a huge number of employees. If this entire swath of our population cannot afford to buy consumer goods, then it’s likely that we’re going to be continually be at risk for another recession. People buying stuff is what keeps our economy going. If the companies that staff the most people do not pay them well enough to keep buying stuff beyond food, then we’re at a great risk.

Wages are a very difficult thing. There’s a Socialist party in Seattle that’s trying to get minimum wage up to $15, but offered a job starting at $13/hour. Employees have gone on strike to get higher wages. I’ve written about it several times, however, whenever companies are indicating that low wages are a risk to their business, it’s time for them to start looking in the mirror. There are large retail industry groups, these groups should start to investigate the root cause of these risks and propose recommendations to address these concerns.

Should the Fed look to take action to protect the companies from themselves in order to protect the economy? Should the minimum wage be increased to address the problem? Should the government take action at all, it’s the businesses fault if they fail because they didn’t pay their employees enough. What do you think?

Retail and payment intermediaries

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In recent months there have been multiple instances where a major retailer has had their data infrastructure breached. This has resulted in millions of customer’s credit card information being compromised and stolen by some variety of criminal organization. It’s likely that the organization used skilled computer experts to hack into the system in some fashion. I also would not be surprised if some type of social engineering was used to ease their access to the data systems. Furthermore, if their Point of Sales devices were not fully secure that information could be gathered using a credit card that could also read information from the system.

This is the problem that applications like Google Wallet and Paypal are trying to solve. They are trying to position themselves as an intermediary between the customer and the retailer to protect the consumer and provide a common transaction method for many platforms including in person point of sales. I think the fact that I’m just now thinking about this has really shown that companies like Google and Starbucks have failed at showing where the true value in their product is.

I didn’t come to this conclusion without help though. Truthfully, it’s because of PalPal ads that I’ve been seeing on Huluplus. This ad walks through how unsafe we are using our credit cards with online retailers and that they protect your creditcard and bank account information from ever being seen by the retailer. Which, is a really powerful argument to use their services. Of course, that’s if you trust PayPal as an organization.

Personally, I’m concerned about using PayPal as they’ve had their own networks hacked with some account information stolen. They aren’t perfect, and honestly it’s likely going to be impossible to maintain and prevent any data breaches, but a company like PayPal should have that as their goal.

With that in mind, it’s kind of helped me think of the true value of both cash and a BitCoin like solution. At this point, it’s pretty clear that BitCoin has been compromised at least on some level. It’s not truly anonymous any more. Cash is still though. It’s the best way to buy anything from a store. It also reduces the rate that you spend your money compared to buying everything with a card. As you actually see the money disappear. Although, some times it doesn’t feel that way, especially when you’re out drinking at a bar.

I’m not sure I truly trust any of the large companies that offer these intermediary services. PayPal, Google, Apple, Samsung, Starbucks, and etc… all have their own version and all of these companies make money by locking you into their services. Google, Apple, and Samsung have the most incentive and potentially access, as they are selling you the only other thing you’ll have with you besides your cards, your phone. Locking you into not just their device but payment methodology is powerful. Not because it keeps you on their network, but also because it provides them with a huge amount of information about the rest of your life. Google likely will already have a lot of it based on your search history, but they don’t know what you’re actually buying. At this point they don’t have the full data to connect search results to purchases. Using Google Wallet closed that gap and provides a really valuable set of data for their customers.

Intermediaries are going to be really important moving forward because they will help reduce customer risk. It’s going to be important to figure out how to balance the risk of not using an intermediary with using one and providing them with massive amounts of data as well as extremely personal data that if all your eggs in one basket could be devastating.

Grants to build out networks rules change

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Recently there have been a serious debate between the FCC and major telecoms about the minimum rate for broadband. It’s pretty obvious that there’s a strong disagreement between most customers and their ISPs. For the most part rural ISPs are pretty terrible. If you live outside of a major city it’s unlikely that you’ll have a very fast internet service. For a country of our size and population, we have an extremely large portion of our population that does have access to the internet, however we don’t have the deepest penetration of the internet in the world. Which for a country of our wealth that is something of a shame. We’ve been investing, through governmental grants since the middle of the 90’s and we haven’t seen the expected return on investment that we’d expected as investors. We paid for companies like Verizon and Comcast to invest in our network, and I mean we, as in the tax payers. We’re paying for them to get rich off of grants.

Internet Population and Penetration

Smaller countries like the Netherlands and the UK have significantly greater penetration. Sure they have smaller populations than we do, but they also have significantly faster internet speeds than we do across the board including rural areas. Korea has speeds an order of magnitude higher than we do, despite the fact that we’re a significantly richer country than South Korea.

One of the first moves in a long time that the FCC has done that is a positive move in a really long time. As of today, the FCC has decided that the minimum speed for broadband must be 10mbps which is a huge step in the right direction. This will change the minimum threshold for any investment by a company to earn a grant to increase from 4mbps to 10mbps. This is the right direction for our country and I’m really excited about the possibilities. It means that the FCC is starting to really understand that the telecoms don’t fully have our best interests in mind when they make their arguments. We’ll see what happens in the upcoming months.

Methodology, managers, and projects

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When working on a project there are a few different ways to manage those projects. One is the traditional waterfall approach, which is your top down project where you have to use Gantt charts to figure out how long you think it’s going to take up front, where you’re given a set date that can’t change without a lot of effort to do a certain amount of poorly defined requirements, and a set amount of money to do the project. This approach has been how Windows and many video games have been produced in the past. It’s not really extremely effective and really no one really likes working a project conducted using Waterfall methodologies. There are risks, projects get cancelled and the project management can seem to be capricious and opaque. This leads to lack of trust and belief that management has the best interest in mind for both the project and the employees on the project.

To address these concerns a group of people created the Agile project management methodology. The goal was to value working software over documentation. Which means that each bit of software is broken down into the minimum viable feature, or the smallest piece of working software that could be packaged and used by a customer. The goal is to manage the project through adjusting how many of these features are going to be finished by the go live date. Effectively you build small bits of work instead of finishing one giant massive piece of software.

This approach is effective for other types of technology that have a modular architecture. There’s some minimum viable product, where you need a minimum set of features for the product to actually work. For example a cell phone needs to have a combination of features to function properly. Things like bendable screens would not be in the minimum viable product, but an excellent touch screen would be. These minimum viable features can be modulated based on the Kano model – which is useful for determining if a specific feature is basic, a pleaser, or a delighter. If the feature falls into basic, you must include that feature if you’d like it to be a success. However, those minimum features don’t guarantee a successful product, you’ll need to include pleasers as well as delighters. Those are the pieces of scope that you will be able to eliminate to make sure you actually launch the product on time.

Issues with these projects come whenever there is a mixture of methodologies. When management believes projects must be managed through waterfall through a central project results office while the development team believes the project is being managed through the agile methodology. This creates serious issues whenever there is miscommunication, lack of information, or lack of understanding the real status of the agile team’s approach. This is exacerbated by the required openness in the agile approach (where you are supposed to continually learn from your mistakes and have a conversation about all the problems you’ve had – to fix them) while in waterfall it is better for people to hide and place blame elsewhere whenever things are not going well. Not because people are bad, but the incentives are in place to behave this way. With a single option of go/no go, it’s better to minimize the known risks as if things are misunderstood as going poorly it will drive management to take action. While in an Agile team, discussing the true status of the project is vital through self policing and partnering with other agile teams to address the problem. The greater the likelihood of success of the projects.

This conflict and a switch from governance in the agile methodology can and will destroy the trust the various agile teams have developed. An organization needs to fully commit to a single project management methodology or it will struggle to complete any project within scope and budget and will demoralize the leaders of projects being worked in agile, as waterfall would likely be the methodology that management selects. Leaders of Agile projects should leave organizations that undercut the agile teams, as it will not stop and will have dramatic impacts on their careers in the long run.

Silicon valley, new tech, and how we use it

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Last night as I was watching Hulu, an interesting comercial came on that was all about jabbing Silicon Valley and its love for the newest of the new. I think it was for a new Toshiba Tablet. This comercial was really self-aware of the environment in which they sell as well as the types of people they are actually trying to sell their devices to. I think that the commercial also does a great job pointing out that the Internet of Things and 3d Printing both might be part of a hype machine that is out of control. All of these technologies could do great things, but they aren’t preordained to do anything amazing. It’s up to the user to really enable that.

I think that the book I’m reading “Enchanted Objects” does a bit of this as well. I’m torn if I should love these ideas or hate them. The Smart scissors mentioned in that ad would definitely fit under the definition of Enchanted Objects because it’s something ordinary that through sensors, haptic feedback or other do-hickeys has some extra-ordinary capabilities. Many of these things seem gimicky and unlikely to catch on. Others, like the author’s Glow Pill – which is a lid for a pill container to remind people to take their pills – would be really helpful to a lot of people out there.

I also agree with the author’s sentiment that the black screens we peer into day in and day out, are somewhat ugly, unweildy and have never lifted up to their hype. Which means that they likely haven’t made our lives significantly better and mostly just incrementally. I think this is born out through the drop in sales in tablets, the saturation of the smart phone market, and the resurgance of sales in PCs. People have found the tablet ecosystem limited in someway and awkward to use and have opted to refresh their capability with a cheap laptop rather than springing for a new tablet (an exception to this trend could be a Surface 3, but we’ll see how that pans out in the long term). Another concern with all these devices is of course security and safety from prying eyes. I’ve been talking about this for a number of years, but I believe that people will actually start listening after seeing the result of the Ferguson MO police action. Your twitter feed and location is on twitter, the police can find that. What other data are you sharing out there without truly understanding it. How can it be used against you by a militarized local government?

I think much of this goes back to my questions of ethics and technology. At what point does a technology become unethical or, rather, the use of a technology become unethical? Is a smart trashcan ethical because it helps you save the environment and support local business, what happens if that impacts your taxes or gets you on an eco-terror watch list? We don’t understand how our data is being used and to me that is scary.

I think this is played out a great deal with the fact that AirBnB, Uber, Lyft, and similar sites are the biggest booming sites in Silicon Valley. These aren’t truly technological innovations, they are business model innovations, which is why they are so devastating. Sure they are leveraging technology in an appealing way, but they aren’t really technology companies. Their innovation is in the way they engage with their customers, the delivery method is the same in many cases, a room or a car, as their competitors. The competitors haven’t been able to figure out how to combine the nimbleness of the app with a dynamic business model. Based on historical evidence, it’s unlikely that they will be able to catch up and compete. Which is fine, because I’m sure their data usages will be as opaque as the new companies. We don’t know how they are collecting our data or what they are doing with it.