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Book Review (Freedom to Explore)

Michael’s book has 26 two-page chapters with each one covering a different letter. Each letter has a well-crafted story with a provocative point to make.

Some of the chapter titles are ‘C is for Crap’, ‘E is for Erotic’ , ‘L is for Lager’ and ‘Y is for Yahoodotcom’.

A cool quote, there are heaps, is from ‘X is fro Xenophilia’

Jewish theologian Martin Buber once said, “Life is meeting.” By this me meant that we are fully and authentically alive when we meet others. To meet, in his thinking, is to so engage another human being so as to see in them at least as much complexity and beauty as you would like others to see in you.

Book Summary

Freedom to Explore
Michael Frost

Genres             Christian Spirituality, Post Modern Church
Pages              63
Readability       3 (1 = Easy, 5 = Hard)
Enjoyment        5 (1 = Never Read, 5 = Remarkable)

If you are are in any way involved in Christian things, BUY IT and READ IT. It will challenge your thinking no end!

NB: Xenophilla means 'an attraction to foreign peoples, cultures, or customs'

Natures artwork

The sun was persistently making its way towards setting, casting long shadows that ducked and dived over lush green rolling hills that were intermingled with native bush. No artwork or picture can capture such beauty.

Just 30 minutes later, the sun had set and its intensity was made known by illuminating some high streaky strata cloud with beautiful reddish orangey bands of light. The cloud twisted and turned just a little to create an incredible image that only a few privileged people would enjoy that day. In minutes they would be gone and never reappear.

These images made me thankful for my life.

They were an incredible birthday present!

In other news 200 people die in Iraq...

Imagine living in Iraq at the moment. Imagine going to the markets and always having to scan the people around you, always wondering if that guy is the next suicide bomber.

Think for a moment about the shock and outrage as news filters around the city of another 200 people being killed in your city that day.

500 people in your country this week!

Over 62000 people since America arrived!

You have already had more than a few of your friends and family die or been injured.

‘We are ‘fighting terrorism’ in Iraq, that is why we are there, said Tony Blair this week. This story has changed so many times: first we were removing the WMD threat, then we were removing a dictator, then we were bringing democracy and free elections, and now we are fighting terrorism. ‘It is a worthy cause,’ echoed Dick Cheney.’ ^

How would you feel about Tony Blair “fighting terrorism’ for you?

How would you feel if you found out that the media in a small country in New Zealand found the ruthless, unnecessary and sad death of 33 Americans 4 days ago more important that 200 people in your city today? The 200 people dieing was the third news story in and only made it to that slot because it was one of the bloodiest days in months.

What the media reports is in direct response to what we want to see. We want to know about the US shootings, just as people would if it happened here. ‘The shootings happened in a free country’ we resonate, ‘What happens in Iraq is sad, but that’s what happens in the Middle East.’

How would you feel if you lived in Iraq?

Did you choose to get born in Iraq?

Did you choose to have America invade?

Did you choose to have an ill-equipped police force and poor intelligence that cant stop the bombings?

Wouldn’t you long for the freedom and the life you once knew?

How would you feel?

Implication: It blows my mind how insensitive we have become to real issues in the world. It appals me. But I don’t know what I can do about it.

Linfox buys Provincials

Linfox as purchased Provincial Freightlines Ltd effective today. It hasn’t hit the general media as such.

While the sale of privately held companies to Aussie companies is inevitable I must admit I think it is a loss to New Zealand. It is further evidence that the Transport market is maturing in NZ, as the medium size companies either grow or are acquired.

Provincials had some really rocky years back in the 80’s and I remember well their merger with Heatons. In the last 10 years however they have developed a really strong brand.

Their silver trucks with simply the word “Provincial” on the curtains is a crisp, clean and very well recognised brand.  They have developed a strong customer focused niche business.

What will become of “Provincial”? Time will tell. They were the first customer of agóge and I appreciate their loyalty and continued support. I wish them all well in this transition.

The Google Story

Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google as a research project while studying at Standford University. From there they have grow Google into a worldwide household name and one of the largest companies (by market value, not revenue or employees) in the world.

The Google story follows the incredible rise of the company, its culture of innovation and its “Don’t be evil” philosophy. The growth in the Google business is mind blowing, for me at least. Founded in 1998 here is their revenue growth

Google’s Revenue History

Year	Revenue (US$ in millions)
1999	$.2
2000	$19.1
2001	$86.4
2002	$440
2003	$1,466
2004	$3,189
2005	$6,139
2006	$10,604

Google is an only in America story. You simply couldn’t have build a company like this in New Zealand for 3 very clear reasons:

1. Our IT network simply wouldn’t be able to handle the volume and you would have to move off shore in your 1st or 2nd year.
2. We simply would have enough IT people available to be employed to build the system.
3. In the 2nd year they raised $25million (about NZ$48million at the time) in Venture Capital. You would not raise that sort of money in NZ.

All that said, it is a remarkable story and has some key lessons:

1. Keep your project teams to 3 – 5 people. Anything more slows down innovation.
2. They have a 20% rule to drive innovation. Their engineers spend 1 day a week working on any project or idea they like. If it is good enough it may get funded and launched as a product.
3. An awesome employee culture meant they employed people for less and stole people from other huge companies in their formative years. Without it they probably wouldn't have made it.

Book Summary

The Google Story
David A Vise

Genres             Google, Business
Pages               325
Readability       4 (1 = Easy, 5 = Hard)
Enjoyment        4 (1 = Never Read, 5 = Remarkable)

Finally, now that I have read the Google Story it makes me think it would be almost impossible to take on Google in their core brand (not that I was thinking about it). I still think some of the lessons of my previous post apply, but it fails to acknowledge just how intelligent the founders of Google are.

Book Review (The Google Story)

The thing that blows me away the most about The Google Story is the intelligence of it's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

If you are a closest IT geek and entrepreneur like me you will probably enjoy the read.

Be warned the numbers are mind blowing. Last year was their seventh year of busiess and they had revenues of $10 billion US dollars.

You can read the full review at www.viewpoint.net.nz

Some Easter heresy?

Since its Easter I thought I would share two notions that have spun around in my mind over the last week.

Awe...

I love going for a ralk (part run, mostly walk) by the river. I love the fresh air, the smell from the wet autumn leaves and the sunshine that breaks through the natural canopy. I’m amused at the way the ducks quack, in a way that it sounds like Donald Duck laughing, particularly when I start running.

I enjoy solitary ralks and ralks with friends. At some point, I am almost always filled with awe for the creation I am witnessing. I am reminded that it is too big and beautiful to be an accident. I contemplate how God made the beauty and the smells and the sights. It prompts me to remember that the earth doesn’t revolve around me, It doesn’t exist for me. 

I got an email the other day that simply said “thanks for ….”. The awesome thing about the email is that it was from a person I didn’t expect thanks from. It made me smile because I know this person has had a tough life and I see the person changing and growing. Its awesome.

Very awesome!

You know I think awe is a form of worship. Maybe it is worship in its purest sense. Not the stand up and sing songs kind of worship that my friend posted about. You know, where you stand and sing words because that’s what everyone is doing, even though nothing is happening in your heart.

No, awe is a feeling of being alive, of understanding that Gods grace isn’t just shown to the people in the church, but to everyone.

Through many things.

Everyday.

I would rather be filled with awe through seeing a person learning or through creation any day, compared to orchestrating awe or worship at a church service.

His Grace is shown to us everyday.

I think the problem is we are just to busy, mostly with dumb stuff, to notice!

Jesus as a kid…

Now, if you had grown up with Jesus, as a boy that is, wouldn’t you have noticed something different about him? Wouldn’t you have seen something different in his life for 30 odd years and thought, wow, this guy is the Messiah!

Well his friends and family and fellow villagers didn’t. He came into his hometown and started preaching one day and they said “what is he talking about, isn’t this Mary’s son, the brother of James, a carpenter”. Their attack was relentless.

How does that work? Why didn’t they see him for who he was? I guess it is because Jesus was real. The gospels show Jesus to be a man who was often annoyed and frustrated, sometimes scared, sad on occasion, and even angry.

Why is it then that Christians think they need to be perfect and ‘holier than thou’. Why do so many Christians lack authenticity? Why of all people do they have to pretend like everything is OK? If Jesus friends and family struggled to see the real him because they knew him, why do Christians pretend to be other than the real them?

Two thoughts. Evocative; hopefully. Heresy; maybe!

Load Images from Other Sites

OK, so now the closet IT geek side of me comes out. The image below is a link to a tool I created that builds HTML code for images that you may want to load off other websites. I use it quite often at www.viewpoint.net.nz for images relating to news articles. It saves having to upload the image myself.

Yip. I'm a geek, but I'm still in the closet!

VC: The ones that got away!

Bessemer Venture Partners is perhaps one of America's oldest venture capital firm, carrying on an unbroken practice of venture capital investing that stretches back to 1911.

They have a "Anti-Portfolio" section on their website discussing some of the names they have passed on in the Venture Capital stage. Just small names like Apple, eBay, Fedex, Google to name a few.

Check it out here, its mind blowing to think about how much money they missed out on.

[Hat tip: Idealog]

Transport companies get a 3% increase in costs

Some significant cost increases to the Trucking Industry in the last few days.

Firstly the long awaited increase in the Holidays Act from 3 weeks to 4 weeks. I was thinking about the implication of this to the industry. We currently have around 25,000 ‘Heavy’ Truck drivers. Each of them is now entitled to an additional 1 weeks leave. For an industry that it already short of drivers, it now needs around another 500 drivers just to cover the additional 125,000 days annual leave to be taken this year.

Don’t worry about finding an additional 500 drivers, it will be easy – Yeah Right

The second issue is the increase in Road User Charges with 48 hours notice. It is estimated that the 11% increase in RUC will increase operators costs by 1%. This is a significant amount of money that can not be recouped from customers instantly.

A 3% increase to transport companies costs from 1 April. Welcome to the new financial year guys. Sorry I don’t have any solutions apart from getting a new government.

Free Prize Below

Come to the edge. We might fall.
Come to the edge. It's too high!
Come to the edge! And they came,
and he pushed ...... and they flew.  - Christopher Logue

I have just finished my sixth book for the year, Seth Godins "Free Prize Inside" (and it actually has one). It is a book that challenges business to go to the edges and beyond.

The key implication for me: Ideas are worthless if no one owns them and makes them happen.

To read the full review and get your free prize click here. If you post a comment on viewpoint.net.nz, I'll email you a free prize.

Get your FREE PRIZE here

Free Prize Inside follows on the back of  'Purple Cow' and 'Unleashing the Ideavirus'. Seth Godin again does a great job of provoking a review of how we conduct our marketing and challenges us to create remarkable businesses. He introduces two new terms 'a Free Prize' and 'Egdecraft'

A free prize is an idea, an innovation or an add-on to your existing service that makes your product more remarkable. It is ideas that are so simple that they make people talk about your service, and this leads to an ideavirus.

Edgecraft is the craft of finding ideas that are innovative enough to take you to the edge and beyond. It acknowledges that to be noticed you need to be different, and to be different you need to be edgy in your industry.

Here are some quotes:

'If people aren't blown away, they won't talk about it. If they don' talk about it, it doesn't spread fast enough to help you grow.'

'Edgecraft is an iterative process that is much easier for an organization to embrace than brainstorming.

There are hundreds of available edges, things you can add to, subtract from or do to your product or service. Find an edge and go all the way to it. Going partway is time-consuming and expensive-and it doesn't work very well. Going all the way to the edge is the only way to jolt the user into noticing what you've done. If they notice you, they're one step closer to talking about you.

It's all marketing now. The organizations that win will be the ones that realize that all they do is create things worth talking about.'

Book Summary

Free Prize Inside
Seth Godin

Genres          Marketing, Management, Ideas
Pages            235
Readability    3 (1 = Easy, 5 = Hard)
Enjoyment    4 (1 = Never Read, 5 = Remarkable)

You can download "Unleashing the ideavirus' for free here. Or you can check out Free Prize Inside here. Oh and there is a Free Prize in Seth's Book as well. If you enjoy ideas and stretching your thinking, READ IT.

Free Prize Below

Come to the edge. We might fall.
Come to the edge. It's too high!
Come to the edge! And they came,
and he pushed ...... and they flew.  - Christopher Logue

I have just finished my sixth book for the year, Seth Godins "Free Prize Inside" (and it actually has one). It is a book that challenges business to go to the edges and beyond.

The key implication for me: Ideas are worthless if no one owns them and makes them happen.

To read the full review and get your free prize click here. If you post a comment on viewpoint.net.nz, I'll email you a free prize.

When Google or TradeMe dies.

I was chatting to someone the other day (Jim or Alf or Vivek or all of the above) about how Google or TradeMe or Microsoft will eventually have their day. There is a day coming that they will not be the biggest or best, and there is a day coming when they may not exist. It may not be in the next 5 years but the day will come.

Do you think it is possible to take on tradeMe or Google? SkrentaBlog offers 12 tips to taking on Google. Have a read, some of them are really applicable to taking on any huge company, product or service. Comapnies like TradeMe or Telecom or Manpower. Here are a couple of the highlights.

# 1, A conventional attack against Google's search product will fail. They are unassailable in their core domain. If you merely duplicate Google's search engine, you will have nothing. A copy of their product with your brand has no pull against the original product with their brand.

#2, Duplicating Google's engine is uninteresting anyway. The design and approach were begun a decade ago. You can do better now.

#3, You need both a great product and a strong new brand. Both are hard problems. The lack of either dooms the effort. "Strong new brand" specifically excludes "search.you.com". The branding and positioning are half the battle.

# 9 Your product must look different than Google in some way that is deliberately incompatible with their UI, for two reasons. One, if you look the same as them, consumers can't tell how you're different, and then you won't pull any users over. Two, if your results are shown in the same form as Google's, they will simply copy whatever innovations you introduce. You need to do something they can't copy, not because they're not technically capable of doing so, but because of the constraints of their legacy interface on Google.com.

# 10 Your core team will be 2-3 people, not 20. You cannot build something new and different with a big team. Big teams are only capable of duplicating existing technology. The sum of 20 sets of vision is mud.

Setting up in Australia

Mainfreight today announced that they have conditionally sold Pan Orient Project Logistics business and its 75% interest in LEP (New Zealand and Australia) to global logistics company Agility Group for A$83 million. It is the last of the non core Owens businesses to be sold. The funds released from the sale will be used by Mainfreight to fund its ongoing international expansion.

With Mainfreight, Freightways and others slowly establishing significant off shore businesses I wonder what a successful strategy would be for more NZ companies to do the same?

The road to overseas subsidiaries it would seem is littered with more stories of failure than success. Air NZ and Ansett, Telecom and AAPT (yet to see the end of this movie) are examples of huge companies struggling to make it happen. How then is it possible for a NZ company to stem the tide of Aussie investment and head into their backyard? What are the key points to consider?

#1 It is harder than you think.
Summed up well by Josef Roberts who launched Red Bull in the two countries. "Don't rush overseas. Australia might have five times the population, but it also has five times the competition, and Kiwis aren't used to dealing with Australian bureaucracy. Roberts worked out a worst-case scenario, and then doubled the cost and doubled the time. "We were about right," he says. "It took three times as long and was three times as expensive." [From Idealog "Meet the man who gave Red Bull wings"]

#2 You need to avoid the Valley of Death
Rod Drury wrote about the Valley of Death "From New Zealand, once you have saturated the local market, you then have a massive transformational change to address another market. You may need to introduce capital, add new staff, learn foreign rules - the list goes on. For us to take almost our first step of expansion, to enter only our second market - we bet our businesses. I'm calling this - the Valley of Death."

#3 You need to take your time.
This would be the key lesson I have gleamed from companies like Mainfreight, Freightways or even Michael Hill who have set-up in Australia. They seem to make slow educated decisions about their growth into other countries. They take the time to understand the markets, people, culture and regulations and they take small incremental steps. They have done this well and don't bet the NZ business on it.

I don't have much first hand experience. Hopefully one day I will, but in the meantime I am interested in your thoughts.

Nature, floods and awe!

One of my friend's parents could not get home the other day because of the flooding in the Far North and for some reason I had this urge to fly over the region and see it first hand. I love floods, they amaze me! If only I had my pilots licence and fine weather and spare time I am sure I would have done it - Yeah Right.

It is funny how we are often drawn to want to see natural disasters. I guess floods blow my mind for the same reasons that we are drawn to sit by rivers, stand on a wind blown rocks gazing out into the pacific ocean, look in marvel at the full moon or to sit on mountain tops and soak in the view.

I think in all of us, seeing the disaster or the view or feeling the wind reminds us that there is a force in the universe greater than us. That there are beautiful and awe-inspiring things in our life everyday that we take for granted.

For me it makes me feel human and reminds me, yet again, I don't spend enough time soaking in creation.

Free Hugs Banned

This is an evocative clip where Free Hugs are banned... Though evoking.

[Hat Tip David Farrar]