Tag Archives: Stanford

The Problem With Crowd Sourcing is Crowds

Rants, Social media, Weblogs, Writing, , , , ,

Crowd sourcing sounds good to me, but then I remember, we humans are a difficult bunch. We like complaining more than praising. We post nasty, negative, and aggressively personal comments on blogs. We’re easily swayed by a few bad apples. Anonymity makes us really mean. Revenge makes us happy.

And we behave particularly badly in crowds. Don’t we?

For example, think of reviews. Remember when we were able to depend on popular reviews to figure out which books to read, movies to see, and products to buy? I say “not so much,” at least not any more. Coming off of a tough marathon of business travel, no more than a week at home since late March, I’m disappointed with how poorly review sites are working for me. I’ve been using Trip Advisor to help me book hotels and, with the gracious help of Trip Advisor reviews, ended up in a particularly unpleasant hotel with particularly pleasant reviews. Somebody’s been gaming the system.

Take a good look at reviews these days. On Yelp, TripAdvisor, Amazon.com, Google, or whatever. Weed out the ones that are obvious plants by self-interested people, like the owners or friends of owners. Weed out the disgruntled people pushing grudges, like one I saw recently who hated the restaurant that kicked her out because she was drunk (and she says so in her review). What’s left?

And then there’s the problem of nasty or meaningless comments on blog posts. Another problem of crowds. Not on this blog, of course – and thank you all for that – but I just read Website Editors Strive to Rein in Nasty Comments from NPR’s All Things Considered. Should comments be moderated? Does it cut into the interest level or authenticity of a site? Here’s a quote:

Clifford Nass, a communications professor at Stanford University, says when you have an environment where thousands of people are vying for attention, people know intuitively that it’s the nasty stuff that jumps out.

“Ironically and tragically, if you want people to respond to what you say, say something outrageously negative,” says Nass.

The Web, while it’s obviously a powerful possibility for crowd sourcing, brings out the worst in us. This is also from that NPR story:

It’s easy to lose your temper on the Internet. Anyone who reads — or writes — comments on blogs and news sites knows that the conversation can quickly stray from civil discourse to scathing personal attacks. For years, many websites just let users go at it, and free speech reigned. But now editors are rethinking just how open their sites should be.

The story goes on to suggest some ways to moderate comments and manage the conversation better. While controversy can build traffic and content, scathing attacks are just ugly; not really interesting to anybody, but quite common. And when it does turn personal, kind of creepy too. Anonymity seems to increase the nastiness level, for obvious reasons; but signing and adding an email address doesn’t make much difference.

And then there’s this new rash of annoyingly automated blog comments. If you moderate a blog you know what I mean. Lately there’s been a flood of inane generic comments placed by Web robots for some obscure SEO gains. Things like “nice post, food for thought, I’ve bookmarked this” that can be applied indiscriminately to thousands of posts.

Question: is this dark side of crowds part of the reason that celebrity gossip is so overvalued in news and media these days? We’d rather read silly celebrity stories than darkly disturbing stories of political chaos and environmental disasters. Or so it seems.

Because we humans are difficult. We like to be negative. And we often behave badly in a crowd.

(Image: by Philippe Leroyer via Flickr CC)

Dwarfed by Metrics

Entrepreneurship, , ,

Interesting insight in this short (less than a minute) snippet of Tom Conrad’s talk for Stanford’s Entrepreneurship Corner. He looks for the bigger, more humbling number to keep his team sharp. Specifically, Pandora may be the giant of Internet radio but it’s a very small piece of total radio. Nice approach.

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/swf/player-ec.swf

(The video should be embedded here on the page. If it isn’t, you can click this link to go to the source page.)

Tom Conrad, the speaker, is CTO of Pandora, and also has history with Apple Computer, Documentum, and Pets.com. The same site has a full one-hour talk he gave last month. My second favorite snippet there is success is not about you. It’s very refreshing.

Is Education Missing its Target or Just Aiming at the Wrong Target?

Business Education, MBA, Weblogs, , ,

I’d like to think that business education should be about education more than business. It should be about leadership, perspective, and vision, more than about analysis, buzzwords, jobs, and salaries. But is it? Or is that just the kind of high-sounding stuff we write when looking back, years later?

I’ve seen two important pieces on higher education and business education in the last week, one questioning the idea of the MBA, the other questioning higher education in general. While the Harvard Business School writes about a glass half full in The Future of MBA Education, Seth Godin writes about what he calls The coming melt-down in higher education on his blog.

The Harvard post summarizes a new book called Rethinking the MBA, by David Garvin,  Srikant Datar, and Partick Cullen. It’s about six cases of well-known business schools (including Stanford, my personal favorite) revising their programs to deal with a changing world. In the interview, Garvin says:

Yet rebalancing from the current focus on “knowing” or analytical knowledge to more of what we call “doing” (skills) and “being” (a sense of purpose and identity) must occur. Business schools need to think innovatively about how best to use the resources available to them. For example, there are many exciting opportunities to engage alumni in the learning process.

Seth Godin calls his bleak picture “as seen by a marketer.” He predicts “meltdown” in higher education for five reasons:

  1. Most colleges are organized to give an average education to average students.
  2. College has gotten expensive far faster than wages have gone up.
  3. The definition of ‘best’ is under siege.
  4. The correlation between a typical college degree and success is suspect.
  5. Accreditation isn’t the solution, it’s the problem.

He makes several very good points. This observation seems all too true:

College wasn’t originally designed to merely be a continuation of high school (but with more binge drinking). In many places, though, that’s what it has become. The data I’m seeing shows that a degree (from one of those famous schools, with or without a football team) doesn’t translate into significantly better career opportunities, a better job or more happiness than a degree from a cheaper institution.

In both cases, to me, it’s about confusing education with job training and job placement. If you measure success by average salaries and job placements, then as a society you substitute job training for education. The target is growth of the person, not growth of the income.

I have to admit that I started thinking about getting an MBA degree when my dad showed me a newspaper story about MBAs getting high-paying jobs. So now years later, I write about education first; but for me it was about changing careers, from journalist to business.

That worked for me. I did change jobs. However the real value, as I look back, was in the classroom, what I learned, much more than the step up to the next job. Years later, what I expect from somebody with an MBA degree is a better view of the whole business, from finance to marketing to operations, human resources, and so forth. You might work in one functional area, but you have basic understanding of the whole, not just your specific part. And you have a sense of what business analysis is like, how and when it’s useful.

Or at least, that’s what I hope. I’ve also posted on this blog my thoughts on what business schools can teach, what they don’t teach, and questions to ask before getting an MBA.

Business Plans, Plan A vs Plan B. Real or Fiction

Business Planning, Management, Planning Fundamentals, , ,

Very interesting talk from earlier this month on Stanford’s Ecorner. This is Randy Komisar, of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, as part of a one-hour talk built around his book Getting to Plan B.

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/swf/player-ec.swf

That’s a two-minute piece. Interestingly enough, it was followed immediately by an additional one-minute piece, called the Benefits of Mapping Plan A. That’s also important.

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/swf/player-ec.swf

Read This Before Getting an MBA Degree

Advice, Business Education, MBA, , , , , ,

Here I am, father of five grown-up children, 37 to 22 years old, all of them working in small high-tech companies, all of them college grads, two of them with graduate degrees. And, while my MBA studies were exactly what I wanted, and worked great for me, not one of my five kids has a business degree, much less an MBA. Yesterday somebody asked me why that is. This post is my response.

1. Don’t do it for the money

Search Google for Is an MBA degree worth it? and you’ll find lots of people showing that the average incremental income linked to an MBA degree doesn’t compensate for the expense plus the lost income for two years. They’ll use buzzwords like opportunity cost. Ironically, I’m sure my MBA degree paid for itself in money terms many times over, but the analysis seems to indicate I’m the exception, not the rule.

So why do it (and if you have to ask, that’s a bad sign)?  You do it because you want to learn about business: entrepreneurship, marketing, finance, operations, strategy, management, planning, and so forth.

2. Don’t do it when you’re on the way up

Don’t ever quit an exciting new job to go get an MBA degree. Do quit a boring job or one you’ve mastered so much you’re not learning any more. Do use an MBA effort as a catalyst to change locations, the life you’re living, your business interests. Don’t do it when times are good.

3. Don’t do it if you hate school

If getting your undergrad degree was a long hard haul; if you don’t like school or classes or homework or teachers; then you’re going to hate the MBA program. You know who you are: some people like school, and some don’t. If you don’t like school, even if you successfully dragged yourself through it because you’ve got good discipline and you’re highly motivated, then you’re going to hate the MBA classes. And that’s hell. That wasn’t my case. I’d grown up (finally) when I went back to school.

4. Do it at the best school you can get into

Listen carefully for a while and you’ll start to hear people saying so-and-so is “Harvard MBA” or “Stanford MBA” or “Wharton MBA” and so on, in a way that changes the title to incorporate the school name. Northwestern also works for that, Duke, Babson, and for sure a few others (and I apologize for leaving them out). I have to recognize that this is easier said than done, because they are tough with admissions and expensive, but there is a difference between an MBA from one of these name schools and the MBA from one of the others. Even that return-on-investment analysis that I brought up in point 1 above looks much better when it’s an MBA from a name school.

5. Don’t do it if you can’t afford it

My wife and I worked my way through. I didn’t have scholarship or family money. I worked a lot at consulting while studying full time. We ended up with a lot of debt. But in the end, we were able to afford it. It was a lot cheaper back in 1979. If you can’t make the money side of it work, if it’s going to be two years of financial hell, don’t do it.

6. Don’t sacrifice a lifelong relationship for it

There’s a catch 22 problem here: first you have to say, if it’s a matter of either your marriage (or a lifetime couple relationship) or your MBA degree, forget the MBA. Lifetime relationships are way more important. But the catch is: in a healthy relationship each person makes the other one better. When I quit a job to get an MBA my wife encouraged me. “Let’s take the risk,” she said, “if we fail we fail together.” We’re still married. If you’re married or in a real long-term relationship, and your spouse, partner, or significant other doesn’t like the idea, it could easily destroy your relationship. That’s too big a sacrifice.

And be honest with yourself on this point too: if you really want it and the boyfriend or girlfriend doesn’t care enough about what you want, realize it’s a bad relationship anyhow, one person pulling the other down, then go get the MBA anyhow. Meet somebody new.

Yeah, I know, that last bit has too much paradox.

Robert Sapolsky: the Uniqueness of Humans

Reflections, , ,

I’m so happy to see that the TED site, by far my favorite collection of online talks (I’ve posted several of them on this blog before), picked up this Robert Sapolsky talk. If you don’t see it here, or if you want to watch it in a higher quality HD mode, you can click here for the link to the YouTube source.  The TED talk user ratings call this “informative inspiring fascinating.”

This talk is fascinating. Dr. Sapolsky, the author of Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, makes a set of amazing “contrast and compare” points about how we are remarkably similar to a lot of other animals in much of our behavior, but — and believe me, this part is going to make you think — different. His talk is fun, entertaining, and important.

By a stroke of good fortune, I was there at Stanford Univeristy to see this talk when he delivered it (actually last June, although the site says September). I wanted to share it then, and was reminded of it today, when I saw it among the new talks on the TED site.

Us vs. Apes, and Why we Care

Reflections, , , ,

How are we different from apes? Apes also pass culture on to groups, apes can be violent, apes can be empathetic, but no other species has the power for the abstract.

And why does this matter? How does it affect our lives?

Robert Zapolsky, author of Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, and a favorite professor at Stanford, gave this talk last Saturday as part of Stanford graduation. He starts at 4:51.

If you can’t see the video here, you can click here for the source on YouTube.

Solving the Job Crisis One Job at a Time

Family Business, Marketing, Self Promotion, , , ,

Blogs are supposed to be personal, right? So allow me to personalize. Let’s consider the plight of one Megan Berry, 22 years old today, graduating from Stanford in two months with close to straight As.

Megan wants a job. More specifically, she wants a job related to social media and Internet marketing in the Silicon Valley.

In any normal year, this would have been no problem. Google would have snapped her up. Yahoo would have. So would a couple of dozen other companies. She’s an opportunity. A “fuzzy” political science major who won Web awards for programming Cold Fusion databases before she reached puberty, and did serious Web programming work for darfurgenocide.org while still in high school; she’s kind of a bridge, a writer and marketing type who understands the depths of programming. She has her own blog, and blogs at Brazen Careerist and Huffington Post. She’s been on Facebook for four years. She’s on Twitter. She’s on LinkedIn.

But then came the downturn. And the worst year for graduating seniors since sometime in the 1930s. And Megan’s got some possibilities, some things might still work out — one of which came directly from Twitter, by the way — but we’re passing mid April now, and she’s still available.

Think of this strategically. She’s as young as most college graduates, but in her chosen world of social media and Internet marketing, that whole world started about the same time she got into it. So maybe she has something special in the strengths and weaknesses category, something that might help even in this toughest of all years to get a job.

All her information, links to her various blog posts, and all the rest are (right where they should be for a young social media marketing person) at meganberry.com.

Rethinking Business Schools After the Fall

Business Education, Business Ethics, , , ,

Blame the business schools? As the culprits roll out of the fancy offices in New York and Washington, it’s hard to resist the temptation. There have been several thoughtful pieces on that in the last couple months, particularly the New York Times on blaming the business schools, and Are Business Schools to Blame posted late last month on a Harvard Business School blog. If you care about business education, for whatever reason, read both of these. The first is a bit longer than most blog posts, but thorough, well researched, and significant. The second includes a long string of thoughtful comments.

I care about business education. I think there are serious issues here, and a chance, maybe, to use this crisis to promote some change for the better.

The Times’ piece raises serious issues:

Critics of business education have many complaints. Some say the schools have become too scientific, too detached from real-world issues. Others say students are taught to come up with hasty solutions to complicated problems. Another group contends that schools give students a limited and distorted view of their role — that they graduate with a focus on maximizing shareholder value and only a limited understanding of ethical and social considerations essential to business leadership.

The Harvard follow-up cites three underlying problems (and I’m paraphrasing, here; the words are mine, summarizing):

  1. The traditional business school curriculum separates management from leadership. Management is analytical. Leadership is fuzzy.
  2. Business school lore and legend is about making money. Get an MBA, get rich.
  3. Business schools aren’t owning up to the possibility. The actual phrase is “There has been little contrition on the part of those involved in MBA education after the crisis.” Hard to argue with that. At least Harvard is there.

I see a whole lot of truth in most of this. And I believe in education in general, and I loved the two years I took to get the Stanford MBA, and I wouldn’t change a thing about that time (from 1979 to 1981). I teach one class a year at the University of Oregon business school. So I am involved in all this. And I do think there’s room for a lot more change. And good and bad news.

The Bad News

So much of what they’re saying is, at least from my point of view, mostly true.

Business schools tend to train people to be consultants and middle managers. In my class at Stanford we almost all wanted to be management consultants. Those were the best jobs. From what I can tell, that’s still true, and at all the good schools.

That idea of minding the stockholders interests, blindly, is very deeply rooted. It’s a very powerful rationalization. “Oh well,” they say, as they make the short-sighted, environmentally insensitive, socially insensitive, and even borderline unethical decision, “our job is to mind the share price.”

And the share price, meanwhile, drives very short-term views. The share price doesn’t often reward the strategic decision that sacrifices short term bumps for long-term health.

Business ethics are too often an afterthought. They should be at the core of business strategy, wound in and absorbed in product and market strategy, but they aren’t. They’re separate.

The Good News

The good news is the tremendous boom in teaching about entrepreneurship. It’s the absolute rage in business schools. Entrepreneurship programs are the bright new thing everywhere.

When I was at Stanford, there was only one course on anything related to small business or entrepreneurship. It was called Small Business Management, taught by Steve Brandt. It was a really good review of the startup process, the business plan, and getting investment. It was my favorite course. But it was also the only one offered that had anything to do with entrepreneurship. Today Stanford has a booming center for entrepreneurship and some amazing activities related to entrepreneurship: speaker series, videos, and so on.

And that’s the rule, not the exception.

Furthermore, people inside the schools are waking up to the growth in green business, social entrepreneurship, sustainability, and so on. I was at MERC 2009 the week before last: put on by the George Mason University Entrepreneurship Center, focusing on sustainability. The University of Oregon business school has a program on (a center focusing on) sustainable business. There too, that’s the rule, not the exception.

And a Hope for the Future

Maybe it’s still just a pipe dream, an ex-hippy delusion left over from the 1960s, but it seems to me that changes in the business landscape — increasing visibility, for example, in an explosion of small-scale quasi-journalism in blogs and social media — make it steadily more important than long-term successful business has to respect the fundamental values of fairness to employees and customers, sustainability in resources and the environment, and better citizenship in a very broad sense.

The world is revising the golden rule: do unto others as you would have posted and tweeted everywhere, and lodged in Web searches forever. I think that’s a good thing.

Maybe in the future the businesses will actually do well by doing good.