Reading: "Who CEO's Succeed (and why they fail)"

An interesting article to read indeed. This is another angle to discuss organizational structure and the role of leaders. Summary highlights below:

1. Human brain ability limits the number of people human can possibly directly communicate at the same time. Academic studies show that "decision-making performance ... falls of rapidly as the group size grows beyond six", "human brain... cannot simultaneously retain and process more than about seven information chunks at once". Hence the optimal working group size is six or seven.
2. Skills from experience of working one size of group does not necessarily working with a different size of group.
3. A mid size group (10-30) is most naturally organized by consensus among all memebers, but also with a leader who facilitates the decision making process.
4. Large size group is dictatorship with clear leadership. However, the election of the leader is the channel of the voice for all group members.
5. A successful department manager does not necessarily make a good entrepreneur. Different skill set is needed. A good entrepreneur of small-mid size company not only do the real job, but also facilitates the decision-making of his/her board. He/she must be good at leading the board in the decision-making process.
6. In a large organization setting, manager's job is to make decision with his/her authorized power level and receive decision from upper level. He/she has less or no need to work with a board in the decision making process.

Hehe, this is also part of my ESD.34 homework.

An Interesting Customer Interview

I just finished a customer interview with Bijay Khadka, the manager of THE au Bon Pain right around the corner of Hayward and Main St.

It went unexpected;). I was researching for the telephony thing for the SMB sector. It turned out that it wasn't quite applicable to them. (They are not in the catering business and they only take a very small amount of order (<2%) through direct calls made to the phone of their store. Most phone orders for abp go to a call center which is managed by the upper company and then dispatched to the closest abp store which does catering). The interview ended up entrepreneurial and how to manage people.

A few key points to summarize:
1. If you want other people to do something, make sure you also do or follow it.
2. treat employee with respect. be friends.
3. treat the customer with respect and demand the employee to do the same.
4. hospitality is the key in running this competitive business.
5. manage people is most difficult problem.

Also interesting is that abp also has a sales/order projection system. It computes the projection of the stuff they will sell and reduce the waste of throwing them away.

Mr. Khadka is doing his MBA from some other b-school and he's being promoted to the business of another abp tomorrow. Congrats.

A new computer for the (SDM) cluster

I finally went out and bought a powerful computer for the speech training cluster. It's a 3.2Ghz/4GB RAM with a whopping 6MB L2 Cache. It sure will speed up the speech training process.

Beer, speech input and typing...

Forgot to mention the bet wtih Sergey during the beer last week. We had a bet what is faster for human to communicate information out: speak or type on the keyboard. I voted absolutely for speak. Sergey thought otherwise.

We had a test. For a roughly 120-words paragraph from the beloved "Innovator's Solution" book, it took 35 seconds for Sergey to read it all out. The typing? It was only half-way thru after 1 minute and 5 seconds.

Ok, this further proved my theory. It's much easier for human to use speech to communicate out. Well, this is well-known. Child starts to speak when they are 2 or 3 years old. They started to read/write around age of 5?

Customer Interviews Yesterday

I phone-interviewed three customers yesterday. It was fun. I totally botched on the first interview;), oops. It seems to be not a very good idea to just read the questionnaire. Everyone is different;). Changed strategy after first interview and I let the interviewee go anywhere they'd like to explore and I only slightly guide to them to where it's more relevant to our product.

It turned out to be really helpful. They not only welcomed our service but also suggested things to look for, ideal use cases (oops, is this too techie?) and potential other market segments. And, also the important features they think.

Such a fun learning process. 3 down, 20 more to go;). Hopefully, my marketing team can take on a few next week.

the SDM Networking session

The SDM networking session turned out to be really good. Met a whole bunch of interesting people. As usual and as a great host, Yoav was there. It's always good to see Sam. Too bad that he's moving to Shanghai. I probably should set him up with all my friends in shanghai.

Finally, I met Ilana, who was one of the first SDM blogger (at least I think). Really fun, intelligent women. Oh, and really... beautiful. Ok, enough compliments. Ilana, this is my blog.

Liked the nerd-test and couldn't believe Ilana scored 94. Sam must have made it up. To run this in SDM08, I definitely vote for Jeremy, heck, who else.

Met a few SDM09 people too. Thomas, Mario, Dan. Welcome aboard.

Too bad I can't make it tomorrow.

Last thing, Helen actually did something useful today: She gave everyone the name tag, which turned out to be really useful.

Beer with Sergey and business idea

I had a quick beer with Sergey at muddy today and some really interesting talk. We actually worked out a really good business case for big firms for the start-up thing I am trying to pull here. Let's see if I can put it into reality.

Thanks, Sergey, you are the man!