steven n fettig's Jitterin' Thoughts

It's quiet all through the house, not a creature is stirring, not even a mouse... I had to take a picture of a Sirah I'm enjoying on so many levels. I have about 20 minutes worth of homework left for the evening and I'm hoping tonight will be one of those nights where I actually sleep when my head hits the pillow.
Today has been one of those days where I had meant to accomplish so much, yet achieved so little. I spend far more time on understanding MovableType 4.x and fastcgi than I wish to admit. (I do feel better about the server configurations we have in place, but there is still much to learn.)
I also still owe this little weblog of mine an update on my philosophical battles with thoughts on Walworth County funding private operations like WCEDA. I noticed a piece in the Janesville Gazette Xtra from Mr. Burkhardt about the necessity of WCEDA in providing the County with planning guidance so that we can enjoy the benefits of bringing more tax revenue our way. Tomorrow, I'll tackle that issue with some more direct comments, but for now, I am still stunned that people believe in economic planning. There are plenty of fancy arguments for government creating zones for economic development, etc. None, however, are more powerful than an easy to read legal guide to a given municipality and low taxes. Only big business seems to be interested in games and tax dodge schemes. The small guys - i.e. those like us or to be more specific, between $50,000-$200mil per year in revenues (perhaps that top number should be higher) - prefer rules they can know and that they will generally be left to go about doing their business as they see fit. If we provide to the market we intend to serve in an efficient and responsible manner, business will come and our revenues will grow (positive revenues, not just money for the sake of making more, but more profits, etc.). There is no honest person out there who would argue otherwise.
Planning means that a person expects to forecast the future. No bureaucratic body has ever succeeded in doing so for any amount of time. History appears to be ignored again. By the way, ad hoc development is what an efficient market is about. Ad hoc means to concentrate on a specific mission and good businesses typically find ways of doing just that.
Back to work so I can go off to bed.

Yes, two exclamation marks to begin a weblog entry. Today I learned something important about myself:

I'm exceptionally good at compounding errors with thoughtlessness.

No one had to tell me that. I learned it all on my own. I realized that I was capable of this feat when I had to create journal entry corrections for an error three times over. What does that mean? Well, when balancing the end of month books for work, I made a simple error. To correct this accounting error, I tried to fix the error with an entry to the general ledger. This led to another error. When I fixed that error, I realized I inadvertently made another. I followed this up with a mistake... not an error, but a mistake. After much irritation, I sat down, took a few breaths, wrote another journal entry and corrected the error and the mistake. What is the difference between an error and a mistake, you ask? It's my secret. Plus, I couldn't have possibly made four errors in a row!
After double checking what I did, I thought about it and gave myself a small lecture as to why I should slow down and pay attention to what I'm doing. Then a little voice went off in my head shining a positive light on what I did. I was exceptionally good at making those errors (and the lone mistake). That's when I realized that I have a talent I would wager few others have. I'm good at compounding... errors. (Oh, and wasting an hour with the snap of a finger.)

I've had a good number of thoughts on two businesses I'm involved in and what we can do to overcome a struggle that each is individually facing. Both businesses are in dissimilar industries and their problems are not even remotely similar. One business is struggling hard with failure and the other is not; it is struggling how to grow its business after a period of significant change.

The key to each business's success will be innovation. There is nothing that says this innovation needs to be life-changing. In fact, the concept I have is that the innovation will be decidedly non-life-changing - i.e. we will remain who we are but modify what we actually do and say. It will be simple steps in the direction of improving how we conduct ourselves and communicate with our customers. A few of the change we need to make are not without much work and dedication towards modifying how we do certain things.

At some later point, I hope to delve into one of the details and to talk about what my thoughts are, but to keep this short, I wanted to add only this: The idea that innovation in simple steps will be necessary and bring about positive results came to me when I was looking at a website of a competitor. In reality, we wouldn't dare compete against them because they really do a much better job than us in being good at a large number of items that we don't have the staffing or equipment to handle. Plus, they have the resources to take on much larger projects than we could hope for. We are comparable to them in terms of pricing and personalized service. While we win in pricing, we fail miserably in personalized service/support. We also fail horribly at collecting on payments owed to us. Both of these items are 100% our fault. We have continually over-promised and under-delivered. We have not taken the necessary steps to guarantee payment (as much as anything can be guaranteed) either. Both of these items should be easily resolved. We need to ask customers whose service we cannot hope to manage to find another vendor and we need to make sure that those we keep and those we add are within our sphere of capabilities. When this requires growth, then we have to bite the bullet and grow.

The above is just a short version of what we need to change about what we are doing. To top it off, if we look at reality and ask the question about whether or not we are even capable of providing the services we promise, we can't. Not with how we are currently conducting the business. We will need to innovate what and how we do things to meet these needs and fulfill our obligations. The innovation I have in mind is not revolutionary, it is evolutionary, and without burden of not having to create a new paradigm, we can take the slow, measured steps needed to be inventive and improve. And, we will improve and we will succeed.

So, the key to our success is innovation. The reason for our disappointments has been failure to do so.

I really like my Apple products. I like their computers, I like their software, and I like their gadgets (e.g. iPod, iPhone, AppleTV). I loathe their support. Apple, and many companies like Apple (in the tech industry), simply don't know how to let their tech support personnel make sensible decisions. Here is my example for the day:

I purchased the Leopard Family Pack installation DVD about a week after Leopard came out. I really had no intention of using it on my main machine (right now a 17" MacBook Pro - still running 10.4/Tiger), but I wanted a chance to try out some of the "improvements" on one of my workstations that I use as a backup to the MBP. A few weeks later, I got around to installing it on a Mac Pro and it worked like a charm. (I'm not overly enthused with the performance of Leopard on any of the machines I have had a chance to install it on, but I like certain software features, like Time Machine and the improvements in Apple Mail, that it has made sense to install it on a few coworker's machines. I have had nothing but problems, however, installing it on PowerPC based machines. We have three identical 17" iMac G5's that were purchased at the same time. The installer crashed every single time in every imaginable way on all three machines. The only way I eventually got Leopard installed on the machines is by installing using Target Disk Mode on a PowerMac that we use as a backup and test server. I read somewhere in the Apple Support Discussions that others had experienced similar problems with Leopard 10.5.0 install media and that they had been able to get Apple to swap their install discs. In my case, I didn't want to waste the time dealing with AppleCare on the phone, so I put up with the problem. That was until this weekend, when I tried to do a fresh install on a PowerBook G4 (1 GHz), the installer crashed (again) in every single imaginable fashion - i.e. I tried a dozen times in a dozen different ways to get it to work, and it didn't. Write me if you want the details. It would take far too much time to explain it here. Suffice it to say, I really did try everything - except installing via Target Disk Mode.

Yesterday, I bit the bullet and called AppleCare/Apple Support and went through the process with a tech. An hour later, we ended the conversation with, "Steve... please take the PowerBook and install media to the Apple Store and get them to replace the media..." Nice. 60 miles (one way) and over $20 in gas and 3 hours of my time (which on the low end, equates to a total trip cost of $160 plus the waste of me driving a vehicle because somehow my problem - which we all agree is with the media - cannot be solved by them sending me another copy of the software). What a friggin' waste. Today, however, I had the chance to make it to the Apple Store in Milwaukee (Mayfair) because I had to go to Milwaukee for business anyway and the 20 min. extra drive would be worth it. I made an appointment and went through the motions with the Apple Genius dude - who was extremely helpful and pleasant, by the way - to get the media replaced. After explaining my experiences, showing anyone who would listen an example of said experiences, everyone we have talked to agreed that the install media was the problem and it needed to be replaced.

Read that last sentence again.

Instead of shipping me a package in a very efficient manner - via UPS/FedEx/DHL - I drove 120 mi. and wasted 3 hours to replace a 8 oz. package that has a DVD that was defective. 120 miles... round-trip. for a dvd.

This is the type of waste that companies promote because people don't use their brains - or aren't allowed to. Now... I don't think I had one tiny minute impact on the environment, etc. Sorry, I don't play that game or buy into that religion. But, I do believe that the over-all impact to me and society was negative. It was a waste of time and energy; time and energy that could have been applied to something productive. Shame on Apple and shame on businesses that promote waste and laziness because their policies and systems don't let people make decisions that simply make sense.