Visualizing The Globally Exploding Internet
There’s a great piece in New Scientist depicting the explosion in the internet and bandwidth deployment. Update: a new infographic from the perennially GOOD blog, focuses on the growth in undersea cable and the relative speed and cost. When you look at the amount of sub-oceanic bandwidth installed and the relative growth rates in content production and consumption by geography, it raises a few interesting questions:
- Which oceanic links could cause the most damaging globally cascading issues through the global mesh (Think what happened last week in PRC due to earthquake off Taiwan). Could a massive earthquake or bomb strike shut down the global economy?
- Which links are nearing capacity today / What about in the future?
- What will the web traffic look like in 10 years when Mandarin is the number 1 language and Hindi the number 2 language, with English a distant 3rd? How do Google and other web crawling services need to adapt to that new reality?
- What rapid shifts in bandwidth demand can be caused when the worlds largest bandwidth consumer can have “Permitted Content” shifts rapidly due to changes in Governmental Censorship, such as the access tightenings in Iran or the recent Chinese Great Firewall clamp-downs?
GOOD Infographic
US Job Market Competition Spectrum
indeed.com
I came across an interesting infographic today on the Indeed job site comparing the relative level of competition for job postings by major metro market in the US. The graphic basically compares the number of postings (as empty blue chairs) to the number of unemployed person (as orange stick figures), with a ratio. The graphic is clean and simple, and clearly displays the spread in relative job hunter competition across the nation. They’ve also hot-linked each city entry to Indeed’s job postings for that city. What does it say about the United States that there are 6 open postings for every unemployed person in Washington DC, but 18 unemployed people for ever posting in a prior industrial base like Detroit?
Dolphin Strand Feeding: The Ultimate Display Of Frictionless Teamwork
 IN A NUTSHELL: Every day at low tide, South Carolina bottlenose dolphins exhibit amazingly effective teamwork to catch their dinner. We can learn from their amazing display. |
I had the pleasure of spending last weekend on Seabrook Island, South Carolina, a very relaxed locale for enjoying the beach and natural surroundings. This is a very tidal region, and the daily marsh to ocean to marsh flow is a key element of the rhythm of life. While I was there, low tide was late afternoon, and it was a great time to chill on a cruiser bike, riding the beach on the hardpacked sand.
My normal routine was to ride from Privateer Creek on the southern tip of Seabrook up to Captain Sam”s Inlet which separates Seabrook from Kiawah Isle to the northeast. Although I grew up on the beach and have been a lifelong “ocean guy”, I witnessed something amazing there that I had never seen before in my life, a pod of bottlenose dolphins “Strand Feeding” in the cut. You, like I, may have seen something similar with killer whales on Discovery Channel or National Geographic, but I had never witnessed this in person, and it totally blew me away.
A pod of 5 dolphins cruised through the tidal creek until they found a school of finger mullet or other suitable bait, and then began to circle the school in ever tighter circles, effectively trapping and compressing the school into a tight and tasty mass. Then they created a powerful bow wave that would rush the prey literally onto the bank of the creek, and 3 to 5 of the dolphins would actually come all the way out of the water onto the bank and devour as many fish as they could into their waiting mouths! They would then wriggle back into the water, cruise around until they found another school of fish, and repeat the process. Lather, rinse, repeat. I went back on two subsequent afternoons on a low-to-incoming tide and they were going after it again. I watched them feed and they would beach themselves about every 10 minutes. A really memorable and amazing show.
Upon returning, I did a little research and learned a few facts about this behaviour:
- It is apparently a learned behaviour, not instinctual, and young calves pick it up by observing their mother.
- Bottlenose dolphin in Mexico and Portgual have also been observed to strand feed, but only the dolphin in a 100 mile stretch of South Carolina and Georgia strand feed daily.
- No one knows why, but the dolphin ALWAYS land on their right sides when they come up on the bank. It actually looks like a synchronized trick from Sea World. Due to the abrasiveness of the mud banks, their teeth on the right sides of their jaws get worn down from the repeated beachings.
- Dolphins have excellent out of water vision and have no problem catching the fish as they flop around on the bank.
We captured a few cell phone photos, and I’ve also included some other shots and a video from around the web to help you visualize this amazing behavior. As a leader I was struck by several factors of their teamwork:
- There was no obvious leader, and they appeared to operate effortlessly as a cohesive unit.
- They moved from one school of fish to the next quickly, and were able to instantly gain consensus about what opportunity to work on.
- I’m sure they communicated somehow, but there was definitely a whole lot of action and not much talk.
- They appeared to rotate through and let every pod member take a turn at grabbing some of the glory.
- Each team member was an impressive thing of beauty of pure muscle and brains and was a master at what they did.
If you ever have a chance to make it to the South Carolina Low Country coast, make sure you make it out the the beach for the 90 minutes around low tide. Take your camera!! If you don’t get the chance to witness this in person, see how effectively you can model the dolphins’ frictionlessly productive teamwork in your endeavors.
Photo: Howard Costa
Photo: Cari Zourdos
Photo: sailing@kiawahsailing.com
Technorati Tags: leadership, science, nature
What Happens When Your Social Media Factory Runs Out Of Raw Material?
Today’s Denial Of Service Twitter outage was an annoyance for me, but significantly more serious for others. It was fascinating to watch for me. As a Brick and Mortar guy, I stress out when raw materials to my factories get shut off.
Now I know what happens to people whose business and revenue is built around a social media platform when the platform goes down. You’re out of raw material. No Input, no Output. No Output, No Revenue.
Interesting, and I never really contemplated that it could happen.
Originally posted as a comment by JeffreyJDavis on Yair Olmert using Disqus.
Why Board Meetings Should Be Face To Face
(Following was in response to a post on Fred Wilson’s A VC blog regarding the imperative of keeping board meetings face to face, rather than telephonic.)
Fred -
Chiming in from the other side of the table here. As a portfolio company operator, I also dramatically prefer the face to face board meeting. We have a pretty nice big screen videocon setup at our offices (not a Cisco Telepresence, but pretty high end). We’ve used it a few times, when the weather was really sketchy for travel. It’s nice to be able to have all your notes spread out in front of you as you pitch to your board via videocon. But it’s unnerving if your sponsor goes on mute for 15 seconds and is chatting across the table. Additionally, I get a lot of value out of reading the body language and watching which bullets they circle or pages in the book they fold the corners over. It’s much more educational for me to continue to learn how my equity sponsor thinks about the company and about value creation.
In person is definitely the way to go. It’s why we fly from rural South Carolina up to our sponsor’s office in New York every quarter. Worth the time and $$$ for us.
Originally posted as a comment by JeffreyJDavis on A VC using Disqus.
Six Questions To Ensure Alignment With Your Team
| IN A NUTSHELL: Using this simple quarterly process with your direct reports will ensure that their plans, actions and progress are aligned with yours and the organization’s. |
If you’re like me, you may have participated in a “Goals and Objectives” process with one of your bosses at some point in the past. I never found them very effective, for a few reasons. I tended to spend a lot of time creating a document and forwarding it to my boss, and we never had much real dialog or interplay about it. I was never 100% sure that my goals and the things I was working on were consistent with his direction and the overall company’s direction. Additionally, the standard G&O framework didn’t really give me a process to give feedback or input to my manager.
I’ve been a practitioner of a process called “Six Questions” for several years with all of my direct reports. I didn’t invent this process, I actually learned it from Kevin Wilde, the Chief Learning Officer for General Mills, from one of the original Getting Things Done GTD Connect “In Coversation With” CD’s. Turns out Kevin didn’t invent the process either, it was really developed and honed by Marshall Goldsmith. There was recently a pretty good post about the process on the Huffington Post, which prompted me to share my experience. Here’s how I execute this process (which is a slight tweak on the original questions proposed by Marshall, but which works well for me.)
I set up a series of quarterly one-on-one meetings with each of my direct reports. I usually try to do these in the first few weeks of the quarter, and definitely within the first month of the quarter. I like to do them offiste, and typically schedule them over a long (2 – 2.5 hour) lunch. They choose where, I pay. After the meal is done, we engage in a discussion around the Six Questions:
- What is on my plate right now? I go through the top four to six key initiatives and imperatives that I am working on for the current quarter and try to tie them to the overall business success. Almost inevitably, these are simply re-iterations for my people, but they serve as a grounding point and foundation for the next few questions.
- Looking back at the quarter which just completed, What are the things you feel good about? For each of these areas discussed , often 5 to 10, I try to encourage my people to think about the Critical Success Factors that enabled that initiative to be successful. Wherever possible, this discussion is a good chance to encourage my report and their team and to give them accolades for a good job.
- Looking back at the quarter which just completed, What could have gone better? What disappointed you? Again for each these areas, the focus of the discussion is trying to elicit the root cause as to why we weren’t successful in that area and to try to pull out some learnings for future reference. Based on the rapport you have with your report, you may have to reinforce that this is a non-threatening discussion to get them to open up and really talk about their disappointments. I usually bring my notes from Question 4 from the prior quarter’s discussion to double check versus prior commitments and have a discussion about any misses.
- Thinking about the current/upcoming quarter, What are the things which you want to accomplish? For each of these areas, wherever possible try to cement accountability through agreement on SMART Goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely). Even if it is a multiple quarter initiative which will not be complete by the end of the quarter, try to mutually agree on a measurable milestone to ensure that you are on track.
- What help do you need from me to achieve your goals for this quarter? Usually this discussion revolves around potential barriers or roadblocks which may require some assistance from above to overcome. Occasionally there may be organizational issues or cross-functional influencing where my help can be advantageous.
- How can I be a better boss for you? This is typically an open ended discussion about leadership styles, communication rhythms, mentoring, feedback, etc. Once they know that you will give them this quarterly opportunity to give you candid feedback, eventually you may get some real nuggets during this section.
The discussion itself typically takes about 2 hours. Personally, I just hand-write notes in a journal and then summarize them into a Word Template document later. I use a two column format for the notes in my template, which you are free to use. I find it really critical to try to summarize and distribute the notes within a few days of the original discussion if at all possible.
I encourage you to give this process a try if it sounds interesting. It ensures that your team members stay aligned with your direction and it makes the annual performance review process much easier, as there will be no surprises. If you do adopt it, please let me know how it works for you!!
