Nailing jelly to the wall: managing change in the 21st Century

How do you manage change? No matter what you do, change happens to all of us – probably more than we think.

There are the kinds of personal changes everyone experiences as kids and parents get older, our own hair gets a little greyer (and sometimes thinner) and people, animals and places come and go from our day to day lives. And then there are day-to-day external changes that we typically have no control over – such as traffic and weather.

I would hazard a guess that most of us manage these kinds of changes pretty well, as they are well-understood. Even when these changes are unpleasant - such as when there’s a big hailstorm or a traffic jam that makes you two hours late – you can use your life experience to handle that change.

And, as people, we all have resources that we employ when we’re experiencing difficult change. Friends, family, psychologists, doctors and people of faith are all typical go-to sources of support, ideas and comfort during those times.

So hold that thought – that vision of how people manage change. And now start thinking about companies and how they deal with change. And I suspect there’s something to be learned from one about the other.

MANAGING THE DEATH OF A PRODUCT

Bringing a new product to market is a tough business that involves a lot of blood, sweat and tears. But pretty much every product - no matter how smart, cool and amazing it is on the day it’s launched – has a lifespan.

For some products, that lifespan can be measured in decades. If you look at the flagship product of a company such as Coca Cola – which, despite many changes in marketing and formulation, still sells vast quantities of sugared water every year.

For technology companies, however, the life of a product can be measured in months. Some products barely make it off the drawing board and into manufacturing before the company that sells them pulls the plug. This is particularly true in highly-competitive, mass market technology products such as smartphones – where competitive advantage can disappear quickly and manufacturers are tracking data daily on the success or failure of their product.

Photo courtesy of Dell Inc.

 

I remember some years ago talking to Michael Dell, the CEO and founder of computer maker Dell. In a piece I originally wrote for The Financial Times, he talked about how his manufacturing model helped him gain insight more quickly about what products were succeeding or failing – but it did not make him immune to failure. Here’s an excerpt:

Mr Dell also said that the direct manufacturing model gave his company an unparalleled insight into the kinds of product areas that his company should move into – as well as those from which it should retreat.

‘One of the magic abilities of any great product company is to understand technologies and customer requirements and come up with the perfect combination to solve a problem’, said Mr Dell, although he admits that customers sometimes do not realise that they have a problem that technology can solve. ‘The customer is not likely to come and say they need a new metallic compound used in the construction of their notebook computer, but they may tell us they need a computer that is really light and rugged. Where some companies fall down is that they get enamoured with the idea of inventing things – and sometimes what they invent is not what people need.’

He said that by using the Dell model, he knows very quickly when a product isn’t going to sell. ‘When we launch a new product, we know within 48 hours whether or not it’s going to work’, he says. ‘We had a Web PC that didn’t turn out so well. But if you have no experiments, then you have no success. Occasionally, you just miss.’

PUTTING CUSTOMERS AT THE CORE

On another occasion, Michael Dell talked about his approach to managing companies in tough times. To set the scene, these comments were made in a speech 2003, when the economy was still very much recovering from the economic downturn between 2000 and 2002 (and the aftermath of 9/11).

Here’s some of what I wrote about it in IT World Canada (the full article is here: http://www.itworldcanada.com/article/simple-management-advice-for-tough-times/19971#ixzz44bP5nMOz )

“Dell said that while he recognized that we were in tough economic times, the fact that times are tough didn’t really change what he had to do: listen to customers and deliver products that offer great value. It sounds like a hokey and simplistic solution to a complex situation. But it seems to be working for Dell ...

Dell is making good money and growing its business at a time that all is supposed to be doom and gloom. In his speech, Dell talked about having built his original business on the simple proposition that both consumers and businesses shouldn’t have to pay thousands of dollars each for computers that really consisted of about $600 worth of parts per system.

He figured, correctly as it turned out, that if you cut out the overhead of a delivery channel and a number of other costs along the way, that you could still make a decent margin and deliver systems that people would be happy with. Dell also later figured out that if you did this directly via the Web and supported it with fast delivery times and good service, you would have much closer links with your customers and could count on repeat business.”

CHANGE IS CONSTANT

So, as with people in their own personal lives, the one constant in business is change. Things WILL change – to a greater or lesser degree – in most businesses from one year to the next.

One of the best things you can do to prepare your company to deal with such changes is to be really, really clear about what your assumptions are – and then have a laser focus on continually re-validating those assumptions. If any of your key assumptions prove false (and wildly optimistic), you’ll need to adjust your plans accordingly.

And most assumptions are never 100 per cent accurate – positively or negatively. That’s why many companies can end up with a huge glut of product they can’t sell OR end up having customers sign onto waiting lists because they can’t keep up with demand.

Remembering Andy Grove - Third and Final Part of the Series

So my final thoughts on Andy Grove came from something he said at an Intel conference I attended at the height of the “dot com” boom. I believe it was in February or March of 2000.

To set the scene, Intel had invited a number of journalists (including myself) to its head offices in Santa Clara to hear the latest on the company’s upcoming product releases. I won’t bother going into the detail of that here, but suffice it to say that – in the course of this briefing – Andy Grove came into the room to talk with us.

In the course of that talk, someone asked about Intel’s approach to making investments in early stage companies. To provide context, Intel had – at that time – made announcements about how it was investing in promising start-ups that it said could enhance the use of Intel’s chip technologies (and the ecosystem in which they were used).

The discussion came around to Intel’s criteria for selecting companies in which they would invest – and the words “exit strategy” came into the conversation. At that point, Andy Grove became very animated and made it abundantly clear that he would not look kindly on any company that approached Intel with an “exit strategy” already planned – so that early stage investors (and founders) could cash out early with a tidy windfall for relatively little work.

Sadly, I was not able to lay my hands on my own notes of that event – but it was not the only time that he clearly articulated this view. In a really excellent 2012 interview on NPR, Andy Grove and Intel co-founder Gordon Moore (yes, the guy after whom “Moore’s Law” is named) looked back on their career together and reflected on exit strategies and many other things.

 

"I really don't have much respect for the people who live their lives motivated by an exit strategy existing, being performed," Grove says in the NPR interview. "There was no option that we were trained in that says, 'If it gets too hard, get up and leave.' "

I would strongly suggest that if you’re curious about how Intel came about – or what made Andy Grove tick professionally – that you not only read the review, but also listen to the audio clips in the interview. It’s really good.

At any rate, what all this boils down to is Andy Grove’s advice: Build something that lasts and that matters. And that sounds like great advice for both life and business.

Remembering Andy Grove - Part 2

One of my most fun memories of talking to Intel pioneer Andy Grove took place in London - and I'm pretty sure it was a the Savoy Hotel - in 1991. He was fun, talkative and willing to participate on whatever creative ideas our photographer had for how he should pose.

I was interviewing him for a popular monthly UK computer magazine called Personal Computer World (the interview was later reprinted in a great book from Wendy M. Grossman called "Remembering the Future: Interviews from Personal Computer World").

Here are a few highlights:

Andrew Grove is not your typical computer industry mogul. Although he
is a co-founder of the largest and most successful microprocessor
company in the world - Intel - and has led the personal computer
industry by the nose for most of the industry's 15-year life, you wouldn't know
it to talk to him.

He greets you with a winning smile, a twinkle in his eye and a manner
which suggests that being president of Intel is just what he does for
a living - and that he really can't wait to get home, slip his shoes
off and relax. Unlike most CEOs of large US computer companies, Grove
does not appear a zealot for PC technology - or even for Intel
itself.

During our interview, he was as comfortable getting into the fairly
outlandish poses suggested by our entrepreneurial photographer as he
was in discussing his then-upcoming keynote speech at Comdex '91 in
Las Vegas.

But behind the easy manner and laid-back style is a self-made man in
the best traditions of American business. Grove was born in Budapest,
Hungary in 1936 and after making his way to the United States
graduated in 1960 from City College of New York with a Bachelor of
Science degree in chemical engineering. He took his Ph.D. at Berkeley
(near San Francisco) and landed his first job at Fairchild
Semiconductor.

And there Grove stayed until he was invited to help found Intel with
Robert M. Noyce and Gordon E. Moore in 1968 - with the goal of
develop a process to allow several thousands of transistors to be
integrated on a single chip of silicon with relatively high
production yields. Shortly after, the first Intel microprocessor was
born.

Since then, Intel has come to dominate the microprocessor industry
with PCs from every major manufacturer (except Apple) basing their
systems around Intel-architecture chips. Over the past two years,
however, Grove is facing increasing challenges to its position."

After that intro, I talked quite a bit about the technology and competitive landscape issues of the day (which were very top-of-mind then - as much as the Xeon processor show below is today).



Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 v4 CPU front view - photo courtesy of Intel

 

 

But the answers that really stand the test of time (and are actually fun to look back on) relate to his take on the future. Here's what he said about the way he thought networks would be used in the future (and remember, this conversation is taking place in late 1991).

The current ratio (of network staff to equipment) is one network
administrator per network. Although this is 'do-able' today, what if
you want to wire up 100 computers? Current average network sizes are
ten computers per network and at that rate it would mean 10 million
network administrators would be needed. It's like when someone in the
in 1940s extrapolated the size of the telephone network would
eventually require everyone who used a telephone to become a long
distance operator (and in the sense that most long distance calls are
now done by direct dialing, they are right).  So we will try to make
network management functions so transparent that administration will
just be one more function in any network application.  

One other interesting insight from Grove came in a question about Microsoft and its role in the PC industry - and his answer reflected the Microsoft's youth at the time.

It (Microsoft) is and has been the most productive developer of system software.
For most of this decade it has been a small company trying to do a
big job. It is not a criticism of Microsoft, but the amount of
resource and development that went into processor development was
not matched by that in systems software - and they are now catching
up.



One observation about this interview - it was one the only interview I ever did with a major technology company CEO that was followed up by a hand-signed note afterwards. When the interview appeared, Andy Grove wrote to me to tell me how much he had enjoyed it. He was a gentleman and a scholar.

More Andy Grove memories soon....

Remembering Andy Grove - Part 1

Former Intel Corporation CEO Andrew S. Grove (known to many simply as Andy Grove) passed away last month at the age of 79. I had the good luck to interview him on a number of occasions - and always found him to be thoughtful, articulate and personable. I'm going to post a few pieces about the Andy Grove I remember - and will do it in a couple of parts.



This first one reprints a story I wrote for Canada's National Post newspaper back in 1999 when Intel has launched it's new "Pentium III" chip - and he reflected on some of the company's earlier mistakes (including a calculation bug in the original Pentium processor that Intel initially brushed off as something which wouldn't impact most people - and then had to urgently fix after a consumer and press backlash).

Here's the 1999 story:

Andy Grove doesn't admit easily his mistakes. Intel Corp.'s chairman took the company from near extinction in the mid-1980s to semiconductor super-star status today by knowing right from wrong decision.

But on the occasion of Intel's Pentium III launch, Grove is in a reflective mood. Perhaps it is because he has pulled back from day-to-day involvement in the company, ceding the CEO and president's job to Craig Barrett. Perhaps it is because he recently fought and won a very public battle with prostate cancer.

Mr. Grove now looks back on the famous "Pentium bug" fiasco in late 1994 and early 1995 with a self-critical eye and admits that he has learned from his mistakes.

Back then, the newly-introduced Intel Pentium processor was being heavily promoted to consumers as the chip that would really take their computers into the multimedia world - allowing them to use graphics, sound and video as never before. At the height of the 1994 Christmas sales season, a "bug" was discovered in the chip - a bug that would cause it to inaccurately complete a certain complex series of calculations.

For the majority of users, this bug would never intrude on the use of enjoyment of computers with Intel Pentium processors inside them. Intel said so - and offered only to help out those few consumers that it felt really needed help.

Consumer groups in the United States, however, took a different view and were shocked that Intel should presume to tell them which bugs were and were not a problem. "The customer is always right!," they told the company. Chastened, Intel eventually did move to widely distribute bug-fixes to the problem and Intel Pentium processors have enjoyed strong popularity ever since.

At the time, however, it was no sure bet that the Pentium would succeed. Intel competitors such as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) had successfully produced “clones” of Intel’s earlier generations of microprocessors including the 80386 and 80486 and stood to gain if consumers backed away from the Pentium (which, at that point, had not been copied by anyone). Any perception that Intel’s future technology path was flawed in some way could have had a strong impact on the company’s market share and sent consumers looking for PCs with other manufacturer’s processors.

This was a very real fear – and one that Intel knew well. Back in the mid-1980s, after Intel enjoyed its first flush of success when its 8086 family of processors were used in the original IBM PC, the company came very close to going under.

Arch-competitor Motorola was enjoying huge popularity in Apple’s Macintosh, the Atari ST home computer, the Commodore Amiga and the Sinclair QL. And the notion of having desktop computers with the same company’s processor in them – generation after generation – had not yet taken hold.

Intel also had no guarantee that IBM would stick with its processor family and faced heavily competition from much larger Japanese manufacturers. The release of the 80386 in 1985 was really the turning point, after which Intel knew that it – not IBM – was in the driver’s seat. This was because the 80386 was a huge success and Compaq, not IBM, was the first manufacturer to ship systems based on the 80386 processor. And it enjoyed huge success as a result. IBM thereafter felt compelled to follow.

But we digress. The lesson from the Pentium bug experience came home to Mr. Grove in January when reports started to appear that Intel would be featuring a processor serial number (or PSN) on its new Pentium III computer processor. This electronic serial number would allow computer companies, corporate users of computers and operators of Web sites to use software to call up the serial number of the processor and keep track of which computers were doing what.

This time the outcry came from privacy and civil liberties groups concerned that processor serial numbers made it easier Web site operators to more easily track the buying patterns and interests of consumers.

This time, Intel reacted differently - working with both interest groups and the rest of the computer industry to come up with a solution to the problem even before the Pentium III came to market. So when Pentium III systems were ready to ship at the end of February, Intel was able to announce that it had developed a utility that would allow users to switch the processor serial number feature "off" if consumers did not want to have their systems automatically identified.

 "We are a lot less righteous about things than we were four years ago," says Grove, admitting that Intel redoubled its quality control efforts after the original Pentium bug problem and has become much more responsive to consumer-level concerns. "Having said that, no-one will ever built a perfect microprocessor," he adds. "In retrospect, the problem in 1994 was not the problem (with the chip) but the way we handled it and reacted to it."

 He is even philosophical about the company's current legal battle with the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC), although he strongly denies that there is any merit to the notion that Intel has engaged in any unfair trade practices. The FTC has charged that by withholding products and products plans from Intergraph, Digital Equipment Corporation and Compaq Computer, Intel illegally used its "monopoly power" to force those companies to cease pursuing intellectual property claims they were then making against Intel. Intel denies any wrongdoing and says it was only taking appropriate steps to protect its intellectual property.

Chasing the future

Everyone has their own vision of the future – and yet few of those visions actually align very closely with what reality eventually looks like.

Take the flying car as an example. It’s been a popular idea for most of the past 100 years – making appearances in every era. Not only did comic books and science fiction stories of the 1930s and 1940s often feature a flying car, but they were a staple mode of fictional transportation thereafter in everything from The Jetsons to Star Wars to Harry Potter.

And yet, it’s not something that we as a species have seen fit to put a lot of energy into. While there are lots of examples of real life flying cars (see this YouTube video and all the associated ones on this page), none has ever provided a compelling reason for consumers to go buy them in massive numbers.

There are lots of other reasons for this – including the additional skills required to “drive” in three dimensions and the often questionable safety and durability of the many prototype flying cars that have been produced throughout the last 100 years. And, of course, none of them have been particularly cheap or manufactured by mainstream car makers.

But you get the idea. The same could be said of the “videophone” – once a ubiquitous part of any writer’s vision of the future, but now merely an add-on to what the average consumer can do with their smartphone, laptop, desktop computer or even videogame console. But it’s not a replacement for the ‘phone in the way that futurologists of 30 or 40 years ago had once envisioned.

Thirty years ago, it was – and certainly formed a major part of how telecommunications companies saw their future. I remember attending a major industry conference in Geneva in 1988 where there was much excitement about the idea that the videophone was just around the corner.

Only the corner was a lot further down the track than those companies (many of whom were full or quasi-monopolies that have long since been broken up by legislation or as the result of poor management). And the eventual form by which the functions of a videophone became popular were free applications such as Skype and FaceTime that merely enhanced the attractiveness of the platforms on which they were offered.

So while video calling is now a popular part of our culture, it didn’t become so out of a massive demand by customers for a dedicated video calling device – but rather as a result of cheap, easy-to-use software that provided a “nice to have” option for consumers.

None of that is to discount the huge importance of advances such as videoconferencing for learning, medical and business applications, but rather to just underscore that predicting the form and application within which an “obvious” future technology might become successful is a hard thing.

To my mind, that’s one of the struggles facing the 3-D printing business right now. While 3-D printing is doubtless a ground-breaking and rule-changing technology that can fill in a vast number of niches, it is not yet clear what its dominant application will eventually be.

 

So I was intrigued to see the recent release of a new cars for which many of the parts have been 3-D printed - this one from the “microfactory” of Phoenix-based Local Motors. Local Motors is clearly trying something pretty bold and ambitious with its car (including a price tag of $53,000), but as a project to dip an inventive toe into the churning waters of the future, it's hard not to be impressed.

It seems unlikely that this company will give Tesla anything to worry about, but it does provide hope that there are still keen entrepreneurs and inventors out there willing to take a chance on their vision of the future in the hope that others will share it.

 

Being Digital is becoming real - Part 1

Every once in a while, you read something that is really quite prescient. And with the best of such things, the power of the prognostication only grows with time. So it is that writers such as Jules Verne and H.G. Wells have long been credited for predicting scientific advances such as manned space flight, the development of submarines, air travel and even some asks of what we know today at the Web.

But I want to turn to a more recent author - Nicholas Negroponte (the founder of MIT's Media Lab) - which grew out of a series of mid-1990s articles he had written for Wired magazine. In the book Being Digital, Negroponte posited that anything that could be delivered digitally eventually would. And, in doing so, it would dramatically change the nature of the underlying business behind the existing delivery vehicles for that product or service.

Again and again over the last two decades, it's easy to see how Negroponte's prediction has come true. In music, the sale of physical CDs is vastly outstripped by online music sales. At-home movies are no longer primarily consumed by buying or renting physical videotapes or DVDs - they are increasingly being streamed by services such as YouTube, Xbox video, Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime.

The sale of digital books has skyrocketed in the wake of Amazon's release of the Kindle and its online bookstore. And when was the last time you went into a travel agent to buy a physical plane ticket? Any one of dozens of leading online travel booking sites have played a huge role in supplanting travel agents for many customers. None of this is new - and I have talked about it before.

The really interesting thing - or at least what is catching my interest - is the growth in physical goods that can be "delivered digitally" through the use of 3D printing technologies. Innovative new 3D printers make it possible to use digital information about how to custom-manufacture something to recreate that thing. As discussed in this piece from a recent NPR broadcast on the subject, it could be something as simple as a toothbrush. Or it could be that hard-to-find part for a classic car you've been restoring - but can't find anywhere.

But 3D printers are, of course, relatively expensive at the moment. Prices are falling quickly, but I think there's a good chance that they will follow the model of the quick printing industry. In the late 1980s, the advent of what was then called "desktop publishing" software allowed even the smallest of publications to create publications on-screen, deliver them in a disc to be read by linotype printers - and then have print-ready pages spat out of large expensive machines. And a big business grew out of that need from - and the founders of companies such as Kinko's (which was acquired by FedEx in 2003 for $2.4 billion) did very well out of it.

In my next post, I'll look at how the growth of the 3D printing business could play out. In the meantime, here's something I'd love to see come out of a 3D printer some day!

A classic Austin Mini.

Happy summer.

High School Never Ends

I’m been thinking a lot lately about people who “lose touch” with one another. In the past year, I’ve been fortunate enough to reconnect with people I’ve known in many different stages of my life – people I have known in high school, university and a variety of different jobs throughout the last several decades.

And, not surprisingly, technology has played a big role in many of those reconnections. Not all have been through Facebook – some have been via LinkedIn, email or people just picking up the ‘phone. But all (at least the ones I know about) have been successful. People who wanted to get hold of me – no matter how long ago it was that I fell out of regular communication with them – have been able to find me. For the most part, the same is true of those that I wanted to find.

The real insight for me in all of this is fairly simple: it’s really hard to lose touch with people anymore, unless they really want to lose touch with you. I honestly believe that’s a really good thing. It means that all of us have the chance to stay connected with people we meet and befriend at many different stages in our lives – and have a better and richer understanding of both ourselves and our friends in the process.

Think about the people you knew at school, in college – in that first summer job. Every one of them saw you growing, learning and becoming the person that you are now. And many of them will remember things about you that you may have either forgotten (or, at least, that you don’t think about too often). For me, all of that came to light last year when I attended a high school re-union. I connected with many people that I hadn’t seen in person in decades. And yet, partially because I had been in touch with many of them through Facebook in the past few years, there wasn’t so much of the awkwardness (at least for me) that might have otherwise permeated the event.

For three days, we talked, laughed, caught up, and reminded one another of our high school selves. And we had a lot of fun. And one of those friends (Glen Schaefer, whom I had actually never lost touch with) reminded me of something about myself – that I had enjoyed acting in high school and college. That reminder re-ignited an acting bug for me that led me, a few weeks later, to start auditioning for local theater productions and eventually performing in back-to-back productions throughout the fall and early winter.

On stage in Audition For Murder, Feb. 25, 2012

I guess the point here is that everyone who knows and cares about you has their own memories and ideas about you – and sometimes those may be things that you’ve forgotten about yourself. The really good news is that it’s now easier than ever to reconnect with people you used to know as either friends of business colleagues. A quick request on LinkedIn or Facebook can do in seconds what it may have otherwise taken you hours, days or weeks to do.

So don’t be shy about reaching out to connect with the people who’ve shaped your life! It’s way less weird and awkward than it ever has been – and I can assure you that the rewards are there for the asking.

Just talk

For years, I made a living trying to predict what might come next in the technology world. I got to play with lots of different gadgets that could be controlled in many different ways - with keyboards of all shapes and sizes, mice, touch pads, touch screens, tracker balls, joysticks and even a strange gimmick that claimed to allow you to control a computer with your "brain waves".

But I always found myself most fascinated by the idea of being able to talk to a computer. You see, my favorite way of communicating is talk - face to face - to another person. I like not only to be able to use words, but also wave my hands around, vary the speed, tone and inflection of my voice - and generally make delivery of the spoken word as rich an experience as I can.

I've also been given opportunities, once in a while, to do a little acting - and, when you're on stage, you've only got your voice and body to do the communication for you. The writer, the director and the other actors can all help, but when the spotlight (literally or figuratively) is on your character - you are on the hook for communicating whatever needs to be communicated. And whether that is a line, a shrug of the shoulders, a meaningful glance - or an intense glare - the audience will understand what you mean if you delivery it properly.

I bet you're wondering where I'm going with all of this. It all started with a recent experience with the Kinect for the Microsoft Xbox 360. Kinect includes a camera and a microphone that allow you to control the Xbox 360 by waving your arms, moving your body and speaking into the microphone from anywhere in the room.

In the interests of full disclosure, I do work at Microsoft, but it doesn't have a whole lot to do with what I want to say right now. The point is that I've been using the Kinect as the only method of controlling my Xbox 360 for the last few weeks (since one of my college-age sons mistakenly walked off with all the conventional controllers when he was home for winter break). I use it to play games, to watch TV shows and movies - and even to get some exercise with one of the sports games.

And when I'm watching a TV show and want to pause it. I just say "Xbox, pause" and the show pauses. If I get a little hoarse from yelling at the Xbox, I can move my hands around so that an on-screen hand points and lingers on an on-screen "play" button. It really is pretty darn cool.

What struck me about all this is that my traditional concept of how voice could and should be used in computing was around "speech to text recognition" - which was focused on allowing people to "dictate" into their computers using voice recognition technology.

Although the technology for that works pretty well now, I don't use it - nor do I know many people who do. I don't know whether it's because people feel stupid dictating things into their computers - or simply because they don't speak the way they write. For me, the latter has always been the stumbling block.

At my best, I like to write the way I talk. But doing things that other way around is not something I've ever been easily able to master. In my world, I suppose I don't really want to talk to my computer, I just want to tell it what to do.

Computer... Off.

Sometimes disintermediation isn't - it's just new middle-men

In my last blog, I wrote about how the concept of disintermediation (where the "middle man" is removed from a transaction) has changed industries throughout the world as consumers are increasingly enable to buy digital goods and services directly. In thinking about it more, however, I have realized that there's probably a whole lot less disintermediation than I may have realized.

Whether you are buying eBooks from Amazon, songs from iTunes or renting movies from Netflix, you are actually not buying directly. You are just dealing with a new middle-man. The same goes for buying online travel from Expedia or Travelocity - you aren't buying that travel directly from the provider, you're just dealing with a new middle man.

That doesn't mean there there aren't lots of successful examples of real disintermediation. They range from the smallest (such as independent recording artists who have their own Web sites and sell songs, t-shirts and CDs directly to their fans) to the largest (such as airlines and rental car companies that let customers buy airline tickets and reserve car rentals directly).

But the most popular online and successful examples of online commerce aren't real disintermediators - they're just new middle men. And what that tells me is that people who make things often aren't the people best suited to market and distribute them - even when the product is digital. So even though anyone can easily set up their own Web site to market and sell their own products, that is probably not going to be their best task to success.

I'm betting there are also good examples of "re-intermediation" where middle men have re-entered the buying process because they add value that those who have tried selling directly find that they (and their customers) need what the middle men can provide. More on that in the next blog.

Disintermediation and customer experience

The growth of disintermediation - when a "middle man" is removed from a transaction - has transformed global business over the last 20 years. And its has been painful for the many businesses that were either slow to recognize the impact of this trend - or simply refused to do much about it.

Witness the movement of video rental from established players like Blockbuster to a broad range of online players (such as Netflix) and cable companies (including Comcast and DirectTV). Similar changes happened in the landscape of the retail book business (where Amazon's success hastened the demise of "bricks and mortar" bookshops large and small) and in the gradual decline of the local record store (replaced by customers getting their songs online).

Further examples are all over the place - and most of them aren't really very new. And there have been times when certain sectors bucked the trend. Back in 2002, for example, I wrote in the Financial Times about how travel agents were fighting back against online travel sites by providing the kind of in-person, in-depth knowledge that customers appreciate and are willing to pay a little more for.

On the whole, however, disintermediation has generally won the day because many of the companies and industries that were being "disintermediated" didn't really understand the value of what they provided.

That's why - although Borders and Blockbuster were hit very hard - the exceptions prove the rule. There are lots of examples of small, well-established local bookshops and video stores who have survived. They survived, I think, because those small businesses understood that their real value was the experience. The experience, for example, of going to a book shop and talking to the owner or informed employee about books that you won't easily find elsewhere - and where the owner knows and understands a little about you - does have real value.  

The same - in terms of understanding the value to customers of the experience being offered - is true at movie theaters. If movies theaters were all about just providing people with great and engaging ways to watch movies, they would be largely out of business. Really good high-definition televisions with big, bright screens are now available at excellent prices - and many movies make the jump from theater release to DVD or online viewing very quickly. But movie-going is all about the experience.

It's about being in a big hall with a lot of people having a shared experience, eating over-priced popcorn and watery cola. It can also be about 3D technology and IMAX, although I do think those are just things that theaters need to do to keep evolving.

It's about what the theater itself has to offer - and all the fun things that are part of going to a movie. It also takes a bit of effort - you have to work with the theater's show times, plan for parking, sit through trailers - and figure out where and how to meet friends. There's a lot to the experience.

The movie industry is, of course, an interesting example since its demise has been predicated since the early days of television. Pundits have long asked why anyone would both going to a movie theater when they could get "the same thing" in their homes. And those pundits have generally misunderstood what that same thing is, which is why there are still lots of movie houses around.

None of this is to say that the movie business isn't deeply affected by the many changes that technology-led disintermediation has brought about. But movie producers have somewhat protected themselves from it - as they make money whether their movie is rented at a video store, shown on TV, Netflix, the local theater or your phone. And maybe that's the other lesson of disintermediation. It can "grow the pie" for everyone when consumers can get what you produce in the form that they want it.

More on that next time....

Privacy is on its way out - I wonder if anyone will miss it

Much has been written about "the death of privacy" - and I think a lot of it has been over-stated. But I do think it's true that the world is a much less private place than it used to be. Whether you're looking at the information that people choose to share on social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Myspace- or previously-hidden (or, at least, hard to reach) information that's now in the public domain (such as estimated home values on Zillow), there are a lot of things that were previously private that are no longer so.

And that's largely OK with me. On the whole, I'm not really too fussed what people know about me or my life. I've always felt there's a fine line between privacy and secrecy - with the former being generally a good thing that helps people have and maintain appropriate inter-personal boundaries and the latter being an unhelpful, controlling and ultimately destructive impulse that is as unhealthy in personal relationships as it is in governments.

The real question that I think technology has brought to us is this: who gets to decide what's private and what's not? Hopefully, each of us gets to make our own decisions on that, but it doesn't always seem to work out that way.

There are some things that clearly fall within the existing legal framework - such as the big "cellphone hacking" scandal in the UK where a major tabloid newspaper is accused of sanctioning the hacking of cellphone messages and texts between the rich, royal and famous. And then there are a lot of gray areas.

Suppose, for example, that I didn't want Zillow to publish an estimated value for my house? Or that I didn't want Google to offer a "street view" of that house? Or maybe that I didn't want every search engine on the planet to pull up links to my older, published work (the good, the bad and the ugly).

For the most part, I'd be out of luck. I have a reasonable expectation of privacy around what I say in-person to someone else (and I can judge for myself whether that person is likely to pass on information that I have told them is private). I should also have a similar expectation for cellphone messages and texts - although it's clear that they can be hacked. But published work on the Web - whether it's newspaper, magazine articles or video - that's all fair game.

The long and short of all this, I think, is that we're all just going to have to get used to a lot less privacy and be OK with that. I don't see any way to turn back the tide - nor a huge amount of value in doing so. Sure, there are a lot of things that ideally should go with that (like a greater sense of tolerance and acceptance throughout society for people's backgrounds, political views and other things they might have otherwise wanted to keep private), but changes to expected levels of privacy will happen regardless of those broader societal changes. And there do have to be some hard lines drawn.

While I don't mind - on the whole - much of my life being open, I think kids, for example, should be protected from having their young lives impacted by this lack of privacy before they're learned how to manage it. And some of that will come from education (so that they know how to use privacy settings on Facebook and Myspace) and some of it may have to come from legislation.

In general, my hope is that reduced levels of privacy will cause more of us - with our human frailties and foibles - to be regarded by our fellow citizens as "just regular folks" who deserve our consideration and acceptance. I honestly believe that the more we look at others as people - first and foremost - the less we'll suffer from the impact of less privacy.

What do you think? Don't feel that you need to keep your thoughts private!

My Memory is Online

I feel fortunate that the digitization of my life seems to be happening at a point when my own brain is straining to retain (and retrieve) all the information I think it is supposed to hold. Having lived my professional life as a writer - and much of my work having appeared online for the last 15 years - I'm finding that the Web is actually doing a pretty good job of remembering things for me that I had almost forgotten.

I like to think of memories as being kind of like that big warehouse at the end of the "Raiders of the Lost Ark" movie, where there's a seemingly endless array of boxes containing historical artifacts - most of them gathering dust and all difficult to identify and unpack in any rational way.

What is surprising to me now is just how many pieces of my "pre-Web" life are appearing on the Web (and spark retrieval of those things I haven't thought about in a long time). I would not have expected, for example, that the writing that I did in my university student newspaper days would ever make it to the Web. And yet, through the magic of archived PDFs, my writing (and that of many of my friends) appears on the University of British Columbia's library archive site. In this example, on Page 5, I see a piece that my old friend Tom Hawthorn wrote about exploitation of students working at a certain large burger chain, On Page 6, there's a piece by Bill Tieleman on the efforts by the New Democratic Party to rebuild itself (shades of today) and, on Page 9, I am reminded that I actually did write an extensive feature about the perils of being a parent and living in student housing. And all of this took place in this week 31 years ago!  

Meanwhile, the Web also holds the text of long-forgotten technology articles. This piece unearths work that I did in writing about how the early Apple Macintosh was used to help Fleetwood Mac's road manager handle the band's 1988 European tour. If you had asked me to remember anything about writing that article, I would have been hard-pressed to do so. In fact, I had completely forgotten having written it until I saw that piece while doing a search for this post.

Come the 1990s and things get a little easier. But many old Web sites have been taken down or radically altered. So as an aid to my memory, I sometimes use the "Wayback Machine", which provides archives of some pages of old Web sites - even if the sites themselves are long gone. You just stick in the URL of the old site and it will bring back a list of pages it has archived from now defunct sites - organized by day.

Of course, none of this is really a substitute for actually remembering things. And I'll try to remember that.

Why I Don't Want To Be My Own Editer

It's an odd feeling to know that you're becoming irrelevant. But that was indeed how I felt after giving a talk at a local university about my life as a writer - and trying to give tips to young, aspiring writers.

The core of this irrelevance was simply that the kinds of challenges and aspirations facing young writers has changed. For centuries - virtually since the invention of the printing press - one of the biggest obstacles for any writer was to get published. Sure, there were a few hardy souls who wrote for the love of writing. But the most prolific (think Charles Dickens or Arthur Conan Doyle or, more latterly, Stephen King) were all about getting their work published and in front of large numbers of readers. And, of course, they wanted to get paid so they could make a living doing what they loved.

Now, anyone with Internet access and a free account on Blogger, can be a published online writer. And if you want to write a book, Amazon makes it pretty easy and economic to self-publish - and sell - Kindle versions of your work (at a minimal cost and, of course, agreeing to share revenue with Amazon). The part about getting paid, however, is a little more tricky in this new world. You need to handle that yourself - by getting advertising on your blog, selling eBooks directly - or be one of those rare bloggers whose work makes it from the blog to the big screen (hello, Julie and Julia).

But the real point is that writers no longer have to live and die professionally by the whims of editors and publishers - even if they are willing to be 'starving artists'. And I'm not totally convinced that's a good thing. Editors and publishers (good ones, anyway) can add a great deal to the quality and value of any written work - from magazine article to grand historical novel. Left to handle everything on their own, today's new writers have to be their own editors and publishers.

The smart ones will, I think, seek out others to fulfill that role for them. It's very hard to edit your own work - and even harder to be a judge of its appeal to readers. Being your own publisher means having to set your own quality bar. I, for example, have to tell myself (not always successfully) that readers may not enjoy having sentences constantly broken up by dashes, parentheses and odd asides within the narrative. But I'm my own publisher and editor, so who's going to stop me?

The answer seems to be that I'm going to have to stop myself. And that's hard. But maybe it's a better challenge than having to pester editors and publishers with my ideas until I find one that appeals to them. I personally don't think so.

What do you think?

Job-hunting 2.0

Job-hunting used to be a pretty personal endeavor. And it was all about you - the job applicant. The application process was designed to help you market yourself. Your cover letter and resume were your chance (if you didn't already know someone at the company) to start building a relationship between yourself and your hoped-for new workplace.

The advice from friends, career counselors and loved ones was also pretty consistent - keep your resume short, consistent and to the point. Ensure that your cover letter shows you to be engaging, confident and strong in your desire for the new job. And all of those things made sense.

But something pretty dramatic has happened over the last 10 years. Not only has the economic downturn changed the landscape of job-hunting (so that there are a whole lot more people looking for jobs and far fewer actually finding them), but the technology that powers many recruiting departments has transformed both how you submit your job application and what happens to it after it's been submitted.

The sad fact is that the first person to see your resume or cover letter these days won't commonly be a person at all. It will likely be a resume filtering application. It works like this:

• You submit your resume online (either by attaching a document or cutting and pasting the resume into an online form)
• The resume filter application scans your resume for the existence of certain "keywords" (like those used in Web search) and, if the right keywords - or enough of them - are found, then your resume may actually make it into the hands of a human being
• Presuming that your resume contains the keywords that the company is looking for, then the recruiter may actually start to read the fine words you've carefully composed in order to get their attention and explain how you are different and why the company NEEDS you

And all of that is very, very different advice than the traditional "keep it short, simple and to the point". I won't go into a lot of detail on job-hunting tips, as other blogs have already done a good job of that - such as last year's Underblog post that asked "Would You Pass The Resume-Filter Test?" and the excellent set of tips to which it linked at Iagora - which explains, in considerable detail - how best to create CVs for the New Reality.

This is an area I've been long interested in. A few years back, I interviewed a hiring industry luminary - Dr. David P. Jones - and he provided a great perspective on what were then looming trends in hiring. You can read that article here: http://www.verificationsinc.com/newsletter/01152007/million.html and, I think it's a great illustration of how things that were - not long ago - just 10 minutes into the future can have an impact on your present day life.

I'd welcome any tales and feedback from anyone who's currently job-hunting and how this new Resume Reality is impacting them.

Now turning to the future - Part 1 of many

This blog is called "Ten Minutes into the Future" for a reason. I created it to not only chronicle a life of living with - and using - new technology a little ahead of the pack (and talking about the many interesting people I've had a chance to meet along the way), but also to take a look into the future.

So for the next while (the immediate future), I'm going to focus on where I think various aspects of technology may take us - and how that will impact our lives. I'm going to start my focus by looking at an odd trend that simultaneously increases and decreases the importance of the devices that you use to enjoy or use the information you work with.

Take the basic word-processed document, for example. With online products such as Microsoft's Office Live - which you can access at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/web-apps/ you can work with your spreadsheets, word-processed documents and PowerPoint presentations from any popular browser. You don't need to be using your specific computer pulling information from its hard drive in order to be able to work with your information. It's all stored out in "the cloud" so that you can get it from wherever you happen to be - using whatever computer you have to hand at the time.

I admit there is really nothing radical in this idea. In many fundamental ways, it harkens back to the old days of the 'dumb terminal' when users would log into mainframes and minicomputers to work with their information - and it's certainly in line with the experience than is common to anyone who uses Facebook, Twitter or just about any one Web site that does anything more than provide textual information.

Former Sun Microsystems' former vice-president John Burdette Gage is largely credited with coining the phrase 'the network is the computer' and it really seems to have become true. Any reasonably-powered device (from a phone to a Web-enabled TV or gaming console to a high-powered desktop computer) can do most things on the Web that you would have typically expected that only a 'personal computer' could do 10 years ago.

And that trend is only likely to accelerate over the next 10 years - with huge implications for the entire technology industry and some important impacts for us as consumers. Over the next few posts, we'll look at those implications and impacts - starting with the impact of the cloud and online applications in the delivery of many of the services we use in our day-to-day lives - from how we apply for jobs, how we shop, how we use government services, where we live and how we get there.

Stay tuned!

Videophone: The Bathrobe Effect

For as long as I can remember, the videophone - in one form or another - has been a component of the science fiction of the near future. Whether it was Star Trek, Dick Tracey or The Jetsons, the idea of the videophone has been hugely popular. The desire to be able to look at the person you're talking to is very natural and human.

And the technology to do it is here - and has been for quite a while. And there are a lot of ways now to approximate making a video phone call - including Skype and a myriad of other video calling solutions. In addition, lots of big companies provide video conferencing facilities in their conference rooms - so that people can both see and here what's happening in a meeting that they are 'virtually' attending.

Despite all of this, the videophone as an artifact has really not yet arrived. And I have a theory as to why that is: there's a lot of value in not being seen. Having a telephone conversation without video ensures that the person on the other end - if they're engaged in the dialog at all - has to listen to the words you're saying (and how you're saying them) and doesn't get any of the visual cues about your body language.

You don't have to dress up to make a phone call. Anyone who's ever worked from home knows the value of being able to be professional and businesslike on a conference call, yet still be wearing that ratty old bathrobe that you got for Christmas 10 years ago and haven't been able to part with.

There are, of course, circumstances where you do want to be seen on a call - and there are now lots of options to do that. Those options are growing. When I purchased my latest cellphone last month, I noticed that it had front and back camera lenses for the express purpose of allowing video calls. Apple, of course, has made much of this feature in its latest iPhone.

But no matter how many lenses you put into a phone, I can't think of any circumstance under which I'd want to inflict the sight of me in a bathrobe - first thing in the morning - on the rest of the world. Only those who've built up the tolerance for such a sight should bear the responsibility for witnessing it.

And that, I predict, is why the videophone has been slow to become popular - despite the ability of technology to deliver it.

Ode to the Busy Signal

My favorite blogger recently pointed me to a New York Times Magazine piece on the disappearance of the analog phone (and the land line to which it was attached). It lamented the loss of reliability in telephone communication - and how we collectively seem to be willing to live with dropped calls, conversations in which words cut out and endless beeps and buzzes when texts and "incoming email" beeps cut into a phone conversation.

I must confess that the piece got me to thinking about some of things I miss about land lines. I miss the busy signal. It's something that is so rare now, that when I hear it, I don't hang up right away. I hang on the line for a while, savoring the fast-paced beep that sings the song of my teenage years.

It went like this: there's a girl want to call, but I haven't had the nerve. I finally get the courage to call her. I dial the number with apprehension. I sweat a little. And then..... I get a busy signal.

But it was OK. The busy signal didn't connote rejection. It didn't tell me that I personally was not the one she wanted to talk to. A busy signal might also be the very thing that helped me get the courage to ask her in person if she would go to the dance with me.

If I were a teenager today, I wouldn't get that second chance. She'd either see my number come up on Caller ID and ignore it. Or she might come on the line and say - "I'm on the other line - can I call you back?" Either way, I'd be crushed and rejected. Right then and there, without a moment for cool reflection, a chance for a great comeback - or a thought that perhaps fate was intervening.

The busy signal was also my friend in business. As a reporter, one of my jobs was often to get hold of people who didn't really want to talk to me - or, at the very least, were hard to get hold of. A busy signal told me that they could be gotten. They were not only near the phone. They were on it. So all I had to do was make their phone ring while they were still near the phone. And few people could resist a ringing phone. You never knew who it was going to be - and what message of joy or sadness might be delivered. The call might be Important.

And without Caller ID, the person I wanted to talk to would have no idea I was a reporter. If I heard a busy signal, I knew that there was a pretty good chance that if I keep dialing their number they would eventually finish their call and answer mine.

It strikes me that the beep-beep-beep of the busy signal was very democratic and egalitarian. Making a call was a "first come, first served" kind of thing. So if I called someone first, anyone and everyone else who called that person - no matter who they were - would get a busy signal until my conversation with that person was over.

So I guess I just wanted to say it: I miss the busy signal.

Hanging up now......

Old Tech: When does it stop being useful?

I have a curious technological dinosaur in my living room (and no, I'm not talking about myself). I'm talking about an old reel-to-reel tape deck that my Dad used for many years to record music - as well as the various musings of family members. I have it because I want to move the various bits of old audio he created into a digital form (probably WAV or MP3 files) so that they can be shared with the rest of the family.

But it's also kind of a cool thing to look at - with it's glowing VU meters, slowing rotating tape spindles and giant buttons. It has a real, tactile quality to it that I just don't feel from the digital recording software on my PC or smartphone.

For the purposes of this blog, however, the real question is when it - and other devices like it - stop being useful and make their way from being living room curiosities to items that need to get dropped off at Goodwill? Aside from the aesthetic quality of the device (and the same could be true of an old record player, VCR, cassette deck, 8-track tape player, slide projector or 8 mm movie projector), the real answer may be the use of the media with it is associated.

If I have old tapes, slides and movies, there's an obvious usefulness in keeping the old machines around. It also saves me the trouble of actually doing that "rainy day project" of moving all the pictures, audio tapes and video tapes from their current form to a digital one.

But I'm beginning to think there's more to it than that. There is actually something to the experience of watching slides on a classic projector, hearing the 'thunk' of a VHS tape as it stops in exactly the right place to begin playing an old movie or dropping the record player needle in exactly the right place on an old LP.

So I guess old technology really stops becoming useful when you stop having any feeling for it. Don Draper said it all in the classic Mad Men episode "The Wheel" - when he extols the virtues of Kodak's then new slide carousel with the following words:

"This device isn't a spaceship, it's a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards... it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called the wheel, it's called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels - around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know are loved."

As long as we want to keep going back to those places where we know we are loved, old technology will always be with us.

Voicemail now on the endandered technologies list

Voicemail has lived a long and useful life. But from everything I can see, it's on the verge of extinction- along with old friends such as telephone land lines and those big cordless phones with long silver aerials (like the one favored by Jerry Seinfeld in his apartment).

The interesting thing about this phase of technological evolution is that it appears to be as much a social shift as a technological one. From where I sit, voicemail isn't dying out because it stopped doing its job well - or some other technology came along that did it better. In fact, voicemail has changed a whole lot in terms of how it's delivered - from the classic "answering machine" to today's digital voice recording. But the way in which you interact with voicemail - and it's core purpose - has remained the same.

Voicemail is dying because no-one wants to leave voicemails anymore - and even fewer people want to listen to them.

Based on a completely non-scientific study of friends and family, the only people who seem to leave voicemails are above a certain age threshold - and that threshold seems to be rising. A few years ago, I started to notice that my own teenage kids would never leave me a voicemail. First of all, they would never call a landline. And if they called my cellphone and I didn't answer right away, they would either keep trying - or send me a text. The other thing I noticed was that if I left a voicemail, it often was either disdained (why did you leave me a voicemail? That is SO lame) or completely ignored.

Now don't get me wrong. I love my kids - and they're really great people. But they have been conditioned to expect that almost all technologically-delivered conversation is instant - or completely irrelevant. I then started to notice this same trend at work - where younger people in the office (I'll call them twentysomethings) started to operate the same way. Either they would send me an email or engage me in a conversation on IM (Instant Messenger) - but almost never would anyone of that age leave me a voicemail.

Over the past two years, the age bar has continued to rise to the people where the only people who really ever leave me voicemail now are my parents (who are 78 and 85). Everyone else has bought into the "instant engagement" mode of communication.

I predict that email will be the next on the endangered technology list - at least for social interactions. Already I'm seeing a huge trend towards friends leaving me Facebook messages - or texting me - if they want to get in touch. And, a few years ago, those same friends would have sent me an email (or left me a voicemail).

This evolution is ripe for many things - including comedy. So I'll leave you with one of a recent sketch about Facebook (and generational mismatches) from Saturday Night Live!

Leave your message after the beep........

PC pioneers: Sir Clive Sinclair

Over the 30 years or so that I've written about technology (and God, does that make me sound old), I've met, heard from and talked with a lot of visionaries and pioneers - including Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Alan Sugar, Michael Dell , Andy Grove and Carly Fiorina.

But none have had the technological insight, quirky charisma or entrepreneurial flourish as British computing pioneer Sir Clive Sinclair. I first became aware of Clive Sinclair when I was a boy in Canada - and was intrigued by his radio kits (such as the Sinclair Micromatic) in the late 1960s. I did eventually buy a crystal radio kit (and I can't honestly say that it was one of his, but I can say that his name stuck with me) - and it fueled an interest in technology and gadgets that have stayed with me throughout my entire life.

Even then, it was clear that Sir Clive was pretty unique:

• He had a flair for marketing
• He liked to release new products quickly
• He liked to sell products by mail order (and, as I found out later, would sometimes use the proceeds from the mail order money to pay for manufacturing of the products that customers had ordered)

Another theme that continued throughout what I've seen of Sir Clive's career - and it was as much in evidence in his early career as his later endeavors - was the willingness to take chances. As a result, his career enjoyed a 'boom and bust' quality - throughout which he has never stopped being inventive. That's why his inventions included:

• One of the first portable CRT televisions (which sadly came at a time when LCD technology was able to make it irrelevant)
• One of the earliest mass-produced electric vehicles (a 'trike' called the Sinclair C5, the launch of which I attended at London's Alexandra Palace in 1985)
• The hugely popular Sinclair Spectrum colour computer (a must-have for any self-respecting British computer user throughout much of the mid-1980s)
• The pioneering, but much-troubled Sinclair QL (which included subscription to a 'user's club' newsletter I edited for Sir Clive in the 1980s)
• A lightweight folding bicycle (which remains a passion of Sir Clive's even today)
• A pioneering, lightweight laptop computer called the Z88

So even though his most commercially successful enterprise - his computer business - was sold off in the late 1980s amidst financial troubles to British electronics entrepreneur Alan Sugar (whom is also a marketing genius of a different sort), Sir Clive's passion for inventing has never waned. And I have to admire that.

In my interviews with him, he was always quiet, thoughtful and yet full of enthusiasm. He was also largely without the brashness and self-promotion that I've sometimes seen from his American counterparts. It could be argued, for example, that Michael Dell probably learned a lot from Sir Clive's experience in building and selling computers via mail-order (which was the original business model for Dell - although admittedly it probably owed as much to the Sears Catalog model as to Sir Clive).

Anyway, in recognition of the 25th anniversary of the launch of the Sinclair C5 electric vehicle (which was launched on January 10, 1985 - so I've only got a couple of months before we're out of the 25th anniversary year), I'm going to make this the first of several posts about one of the more intriguing people I've ever interviewed - and I'll dig out some of my old interviews and notes to make the next post a little more lively. Consider this the scene-setter. And I'll be inviting friends with their own experiences of Sir Clive to post their thoughts about him.