Management

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4 Jan 2015

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The Downside of Meeting Requests

“Expectation is the mother of all frustration.” – Antonio Banderas

Meeting requests are an amazing invention. Pioneered, and standardized, almost 20 years ago by companies like Microsoft (as part of Outlook/Exchange), Novell (Groupwise) and Lotus (now part of IBM Lotus Notes) this innovation had great promise to automate an essential, yet completely routine, aspect of modern life.

The ascendency of meeting request usage, also rides several trends:

  • In the 1990s, I had an Executive Assistant who scheduled my time, acted as a “gatekeeper” and also worked on many projects. She was a master tactician who managed to keep 3 or more Type A executives productively multi-tasking. In many ways, sadly, such personal assistance is being subsumed by..
  • Increasing computational power means that automation of routine tasks, personalized to the needs of individuals is much more of a reality,
  • The mobile revolution has made meetings much more multi-modal and virtual, but also means that most executives must be productive even while being mobile nomads, and
  • Calendars have migrated from paper – I switched about 20 years ago – to desktop computers using Outlook and the like, and now to the ubiquitous smartphone and tablet devices. Such mobile devices are both convenient for calendars, but also frustratingly fiddly places to enter complex meeting details.

Thus, enter the humble Meeting Request which has swelled in popularity. I received my first such request from an Outlook/Exchange user around 2000 and they remained rare until perhaps the last 5-10 years. Now they seem to be everywhere.

In homage to my friend and colleague, Jim Estill, the quintessential time management guru, I ought to be cheering this time saving invention.

And, yet my enthusiasm is sorely tinged by a frustrating implementation resulting in suboptimal user experience …

Top 10 Meeting Request FAILs:

  1. Trojan Horse: It has always seemed odd to me that a thiFrustrating Meeting Requestrd party inviting me to a meeting could embed their own meeting information in my calendar, and yet I am unable to edit this “foreign” request that has invaded my calendar.
  2. Split Personality: If Jennifer invites me, Randall,  to a meeting, then why does my meeting title say “Meeting with Randall” instead of “Meeting with Jennifer”? Computers are designed to automate routine tasks so there is absolutely no excuse for this one.
  3. No Annotation: I write comments in the notes fields of my calendar all the time. Why can’t I say, for example, “Joe is a bit dodgy” or “First met back in 2001”?
  4. Duplication: Many times I receive a meeting request for a meeting that I have already carefully crafted an entry in my own calendar. Again, computers are supposed to be smart enough to figure these things out and merge them in an intelligent way.
  5. Bad Versioning: Many times when meeting information is changed, such as time or venue, the update isn’t seamless. For example, it is common to have both the original and the updated version lingering in my calendar.
  6. No Scheduling: Meeting requests are often used as trial balloons in trying to schedule busy people into meetings. The endless rounds of “Accept”, “Maybe” or “Decline” responses can end up being quite frustrating, especially for many person meetings. These, often fruitless, interchanges underscore the fact that meeting requests don’t automate routine scheduling. Instead, people have to resort to tools like Doodle to vote on alternatives, and then manually schedule the winning result.
  7. Verbosity by having superfluous words in the limited real estate of the meeting subject line. E.g. pre-pending “Invitation:” or “Updated Invitation:” onto the front of a subject, effectively burying the important words. Many times they are put there to increase the impact and readability of the email subject line to ensure opening, but distract in the actual Calendar entry.
  8. Invitations from Google Enterprise Apps or GMail tend to be the most arcane and ugly. Originally, I chalked this up to Google Calendar‘s relative immaturity compared to Outlook, but the brutally long notes and long subject lines continue to stand out as worst in class, almost to the point that I dread getting invited by Google users.
  9. Lack of Anticipatory Computing: in an age where mobile devices know location, existing meetings and other personal habits, the trend to predictive intelligence could be incorporated into smarter meeting requests. For example, combining meeting requests with shared “Free/Busy” data could remove many manual scheduling steps.
  10. No Personalization: Like my contact list, I put a fair bit of thought into crafting a calendar that is both useful now, but also provides a detailed audit trail of my business interactions. To do this, I use conventions, categories and other techniques that, sadly, cannot be injected into these un-editable meeting requests that instead reflect the third party initiator’s preferences.

Do let me know in comments if I missed any major points.

Given the power of networked computing to automate, why is there such a lack of excellence and progress in this particular area?

In fairness, I believe that part of the problem lies in the interplay between competition and the vagaries of formal industry standards. That said, this should be no excuse.

It is admirable that, unlike word processing formats, the various pioneers started to develop standards call iCalendar (and later vCalendar) around 1997 to standardize file formats (like .ical and .ics) and email server interactions. I do know the Microsoft attempted to extend the functionality with some very useful things around that time. But, for some reason, a great idea got off to a good start, but seems frozen at an almost Beta level of functionality.

To conclude, please read this post, not as a gripe, but instead as a call to action to developers to help take the humble meeting request to the next level of user experience. Any takers?

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By-4pu7IQAEaKKJ

3 Oct 2014

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Canadian Angel of the Year Award

Angel of the Year Award: Yuri Navarro, Jérôme Nycz, Randall Howard, Michelle Scarborough

At the NACO Summit in Québec City, it was truly humbling to receive the Canadian Angel of the Year Award. I see this partly as a calling to be an ambassador to continue to help raise the Angel bar in Canada in the coming years. I wish to thank all those kind colleagues who, unbeknownst to me, wrote letters of nomination. Also, this is all based on the remarkable people at GTAN and in the Waterloo and Canadian ecosystem generally.

In response to the award, and recognizing the opportunity to build on current success, I shared the following observations and future challenges at the closing Keynote on Friday 3 October, 2014.

“TODAY’S CRITICAL MASS CAN POWER A QUANTUM LEAP”

Closing Keynote NACO Summit, Québec City Friday 2 October, 2014

Bonjours, mesdames et messieurs. Good morning, ladies and Gentlemen.

I hope that Yuri was aware of what he was unleashing by inviting me to share perspectives and future challenges of Angel investing in Canada! Not unlike a startup running on “fumes”, Canada’s angel sector reminds me of the quip from cartoonist Bill Hoest: “I just need enough money to tide me over until I need more”. I’ll start by looking back to help us paint a future directional context.

As Angel investors, we’ve watched a powerful people-driven engine, coming from nowhere, to become a key enabler of Canada’s future prosperity. As Angels, we fuel innovation companies with our capital and mentorship, ultimately creating some of the highest value jobs for 21st century Canada. What’s not to like about that?

Let’s turn the clock back about 5 years. In 2009, the global economy endured the infamous credit crunch, perhaps the worst economic correction since the Great Depression. I observed this to be the final nail in the coffin for a large number of Canadian venture capital firms, for years struggling to generate viable returns. The seeming extinction of venture capital A-rounds and the bleak landscape for young, emerging companies, compelled me, as a seasoned tech investor, to get involved with the founders at Golden Triangle AngelNet (GTAN) in Waterloo-Guelph-Wellington-Stratford area. In a pattern surely repeated across Canada, Angel Groups from a slow start quietly and persistently worked to fill the funding gap through a labour-intensive “syndication” of Angel capital, with other groups and with government co-investment. In Ontario, this meant repurposing MaRS IAF from its origins as a VC on-ramp to co-investment in Angel rounds, lobbying that ultimately led to the Feddev “Investing in Business Innovation” (IBI) program, and BDC convertible notes.

A typical syndication for a top tier investee company might entail half a million dollars of Angel money being spun into $1.5 million or more. I used to describe this approach as providing “half the money of a VC A round for 10 times the effort”. At the time, I imagined this to be a strategy for a short term “bridge” of Canada’s innovation ecosystem to a more sustainable future. How did this market correction turn out for Canadian Angels?

NACO stats show a remarkable growth in total Angel investment. Between 2012 and 2013 alone, Canadian Angel group direct investments grew a stellar 120% from $40 million to $89 million. Of course, this doesn’t capture the aforementioned co-investment leverage that Angel investors attract nor does it cover investments outside of NACO members. All of us rightfully deserve to be proud of such collective impact.

But is it enough? Both from my own international investing and available statistics, it would appear that Canada’s Angel ecosystem is ahead of Europe on the maturity curve. I would estimate Canada has a 3-5 year head start on Europe. On the other hand, our American friends are definitely well ahead in maturity, deal dollars and information gathering. Angel Capital Association (ACA) data shows almost $25 billion of total US angel investment in 2013. To be at this level, on a per capita GDP basis, Canada would need about $2.8 billion of annual Angel investment. Even counting all the leverage, Canadian angel investment needs to grow 5 to 10 times over the coming years just to achieve parity with the US.

In Waterloo, home of Perimeter Institute, we tend to love Quantum Mechanics metaphors. Thus, propelling today’s critical mass through a quantum leap is a mission all of us need to work on collectively and individually, whether as angels, angel groups, NACO, governments, venture capitalists, sponsors, in fact, each and every ecosystem participant.

So, I will conclude by identifying just five of the gaps that we collectively need to fill:

  1. Scaling: Recently, my friend Steve Currie, VP Strategy at Communitech, observed “Canada is great at starting companies, but not so good at growing them beyond the 5 year horizon.” This means less job creation but also smaller exits. In a study of 183 recent high tech exits versus 2300 comparable US exits, the average US valuation was US$384 million versus US$100 million for the Canadian companies. I don’t know about you, but I find it simply tragic to leave so much value on the table. Angels have a huge role both in mentoring management skills around scaling, but also pivotal to financing that scaling. And, bigger exits, will in a virtuous circle, drive more Angel investment.
  2. Giving Back: We need more of our successful serial entrepreneurs to become (super) angels and continue to start new ventures. In the Silicon Valley, Paypal alone had 14 serial entrepreneurs like Peter Thiel and Max Levchin whose experience and wealth helped build legends like LinkedIn, YouTube, Tesla, Kiva and Yelp. While we do have a few super angels, we have yet to spawn someone like Ron Conway whose 600 investments include Google, Facebook and Twitter. Canada needs more titans like Mike Volker and Jim Estill.
  3. Deal Discipline: Great companies grow and scale partly because of external motivations. In the 1990’s the hottest companies all wanted to do an IPO and that involved a playbook of enhanced management, systems and processes that also helped the companies scale into better organizations. VCs also played a part, but today, this role often falls onto Angel investors, hence requiring a more “institutional” approach versus becoming just another retail asset class.
  4. Co-investment: Government funding has been critical to our success and it is key that funding increasingly backs Angel choices rather than governments having to choose winners. That said, there is plenty of room for more. For example, our Feddev IBI program in Ontario provides a 50% match while the almost identical “Double Equity” program in Austria does a 100% match to angels. And, the Angel Tax Credit, so common internationally, in parts of the US and in BC, would provide a much-needed boost to overall Angel resources.
  5. Operational Innovation: Currently, most angel groups run as nonprofits using largely committed volunteer deal structuring and with little automation of the process. A big reason for this is Securities Regulations, especially in Ontario, that put a chill on innovations that might trigger an expensive regulatory burden. While there is some hope that the proposed Equity Crowd Funding rules might provide the clarity for such innovations, there is also the risk that this is a force that further pushes deals into a retail mode when what we need instead is more institutional discipline.

With these key points in mind, and assuming the right environment, I have no doubt that greater innovation in business models will fuel growth of a larger and more sustainable Canadian angel landscape. All of us can play our part. To dial up our game, will be an aggressive, yet I believe achievable challenge. And, we need even better measurement so we can regularly monitor, and report back to ecosystem participants, our progress.

The road forward isn’t just about traditional business. Because Angel investors’ motivations uniquely straddle the ever-blurring boundary between “passion capital” and Wall Street-style finance, Angel investing will increasingly be a great exemplar of Social Innovation. To me, the culture of collegiality and sharing resembles my experiences in nation-building around charitable foundations.

The last five years have witnessed an unprecedented expansion of Canadian Angel investing and we are poised for even more remarkable growth in the next five. In the words of the incomparable Alan Turing,

“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done”.

Now, let’s get to work …

 

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3 Aug 2012

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[Book Review]: The Idea Factory

The idea factory by Jon Gernter

Published by Penguin Press
WorldCat • LibraryThing • Google Books • BookFinder

A marvellous exploration of a research and innovation powerhouse that, even viewed from this age of innovation, surprisingly anticipated many approaches we think of as modern breakthroughs.
I’ve long admired Bell Labs and feel that many of its researchers and innovations interacted with an impacting my own career. While in University, the notion of working with or at Bell Labs was the highest aspiration for top thinkers in many fields. The Idea Factory is an engaging read and showed me how limited my understanding of that institution really was.

First of all, from the 1920s to the 1980s, it was way ahead of its time as an agent of innovation. The approaches were brilliant and could be applied today, including the notion of building architecture and organization structures to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration. Breaking down “knowledge silos” was definitely countercultural in a century known for specialization.

Secondly, the sheer number of transformational inventions, including the laser, transistor, fibre optics, satellite communications, the cellular mobile network, integrated circuits and the notion of information as digital that came from a single institution is both surprising and would be impossible in today’s world. Sadly, in the modern competitive marketplace, there is likely no room for a monolithic regulated monopoly, as was AT&T, to support such a single engine of innovation and basic research.

My primary connection with Bell Labs was through computer science with innovations such as UNIX and C Programming Language. The historical context this book outlines shows how surprising this is because AT&T was, by regulatory decree, precluded from entering the computer industry. That said, it is ironic that most of the inventions of Bell Labs, collectively contrived to make telecommunications as a separate industry obsolete. Instead, as predicted as early as 1948 by the remarkable information age seer, Claude Shannon, much of the modern economy has by transformed by our current digital age of networked and pervasive computing.

Lastly, Gertner explores the culture of those who drove innovation. Often eccentric, and to outsiders perhaps impossible or unemployable individuals, had the sheer force of will and brainpower to achieve breakthroughs that others either hadn’t even considered or thought impossible. Given my own small town origins, the deliberate strategy of finding these small town prodigies to populate the largest research-oriented brain trust in the world resonated.

All too often, societies believe that they are the first to master innovation. Sometimes we should stop and consider successful strategies from the past. Far from being solely a modern preoccupation, innovation has always been a hallmark of human advancement. Yet, with no clear place for a lucrative and regulated monopoly to fund pure research, where will the fundamental research of the future originate?

The book cites John Mayo, a former Bell Labs chief,

“Bell Labs substantial innovations, account for a large fraction of the jobs in this country and around the world”

In a world driven by global markets and the quarterly thinking of Wall Street, we really do need to consider how our next leap of fundamental research will be unleashed. John Pierce, another Bell Labs chief summarized the “Bell Labs formula” in four main points:

“A technically competent management all the way to the top.
Researchers who didn’t have to raise funds.
Research on a topic or system could be, and was, supported for years.
Research could be terminated without damning the researcher.”

Beyond learning from the wisdom of the leading research institution, where will we find the vision and resources to enable innovation on such a transformational scale? Beyond the Venture Capital and now Angel funded technology startup ecosystem, perhaps exemplars like Mike Lazaridis‘s pioneering Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics will chart a course for the 21st century.

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downonthefarm

3 Aug 2010

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How You Gonna Keep ‘Em Down On The Farm?

“How You Gonna Keep ‘Em Down On The Farm” (excerpt) by Andrew Bird

Oh, how ya gonna keep ’em down? Oh no, oh no
Oh, how ya gonna keep ’em down?
How ya gonna keep ’em away from Broadway?
Jazzin’ around and painting the town?
How ya gonna keep ’em away from harm?
That’s the mystery

______________________

This week, my 18 month old Blackberry finally bit the dust. Out of this came a realization that led me to the challenge I issue at the end of this post.

Please don’t view my device failure to be a reflection on the reliability, or lack thereof, of Blackberry handsets. Rather, as a heavy user, I’ve found that the half life of my handsets is typically 18 to 24 months before things start to degrade – indeed, mobile devices do take a beating.

The obsolescence of one device is, however, a great opportunity to reflect on the age-old question: What do I acquire next? That is the subject of this posting, which focuses on the quantum changes in the mobile and smartphone market over the last couple of years.

I’ll start with a description of my smartphone usage patterns. Note that, in a later post, I plan to discuss how all this fits into a personal, multi-year odyssey toward greater mobile productivity across a range of converged devices and leveraging the cloud. Clearly, my smartphone use is just a part of that.

I’ve had Blackberry devices since the first RIM 957, and typically upgrade every year or so. I’ve watched the progression from simple push email, to pushing calendars and contacts, improved attachment support and viewing, even adding the “phone feature”. For years, the Blackberry has really focused on the core Enterprise functions of secure email, contacts and calendar and, quite frankly, delivered a seamless solution that just works, is secure and fast. It is for that reason that, up to the present day, my core, mission critical device has been a Blackberry. Over the last few years, I’ve added to that various other smartphone devices that have particular strengths, including the Nokia N95 (powered by Symbian OS), various Android devices and, my current other device, the ubiquitous Apple iPhone.

My current device usage pattern sees a Blackberry as my core device for traditional functions such as email,  contacts and phone and my iPhone for for the newer, media-centric use cases of web browsing, social media, testing and using applications, and so on. Far from being rare, such carrying of two mobile devices seems to be the norm amongst many early adopters. Some even call it their “guilty secret.”

Over the recent past, I’ve seen my expectations of the mobile experience dramatically escalate. In reality, the term smartphone is a bit of a misnomer as the phone function is becoming just one application among many in a complex, highly functional, personal, mobile computing device. The state of the art in converged mobile devices (smartphones and, increasingly, tablets) has indeed crossed the Rubicon. I believe that this new mobile universe is as big a break with the past for the mobile industry as was the rise of the internet (particularly the web) to the older desktop computing industry. Indeed, in several markets, 2010 is the year when smartphones outsell laptops and desktops (combined).

To summarize this new palette of capabilities of this new mobile computing generation, they fall into several areas:

  • rich web browsing experience, typically powered by WebKit technology, which ironically was pioneered by ReqWireless (acquired by Google) right here in Waterloo. With the advent of HMTL5, many such as Google, view the browser as the new applications platform for consumer and business applications,
  • robust applications ecosystem, with simple AppStore function to buy, install and update. iPhone and Android are pretty solid in this regard. Blackberry’s ill fated AppWorld is an entirely different matter. For me, it was hard to find, not being on my Home Screen, application availability seemed to be (counterintuitively) dependent on the Blackberry model I was using, and also the OS memory security didn’t seem up to the applications actually working reliability. (Translation, I found that loading applications onto my Blackberry made the device slower and less reliable, so ended up removing most applications). Whatever the reasons, the iPhone AppStore has 250,000 applications with 5 billion downloads. Android Market has over 80,000 applications and Blackberry AppWorld lags signfiicantly behind this.
  • user friendly multi-media interface, including viewing of web, media, and images, drop & drop and stretch & pinch capabilities. So far, touch screen technologies used in both iPhone and Android seem to have won the race against competing keyboard-only or stylus-based alternatives. Personally, I believe there are still huge opportunities to innovate  interfaces optimized for small screens and mobile usage, so I will remain open to the emergence of alternative and competing technologies. I’m convinced that one use case scenario doesn’t fit all.
  • a secure, modern & scalable operating system on which to build all of the above and to drive the future path of mobile computing. Given my heritage in the UNIX world starting in the 1970’s, it is interesting to me that all modern smartphones seem to be built around a UNIX/LINUX variant (iOS is derived from BSD UNIX and Android from Linux) which provides a proven, scalable and efficient platform for secure computing from mobiles to desktops to servers. Blackberry OS, by contrast, appears to be a victim of its long heritage, starting life less as a real operating system, but more a TCP/IP stack bundled with a Java framwork that morphed over time (it sounds reminiscient of the DOS to Windows migration, doesn’t it?). To be fair, Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS also suffers from its slavish attempt to emulate Windows metaphors on smaller, lower power devices and the translation doesn’t work well.

I want to stress an important point. This is not solely a criticism of Blackberry being slow to move to the next mobile generation. In fact, some of the original smartphone pioneers are struggling to adapt to this new world order as well. My first smart phone was the Nokia 9000 Communicator, similar to the device pictured on the left, and first launched in 1996. Until recently, Nokia with their Symbian OS Platform was the leader in global smartphone market share. Likewise, Microsoft adapted their Windows CE Pocket PC OS, also first released in 1996, for mobile computing market earlier in this decade, and that effort is now called Windows Phone, shown on the right. Both vendors just seem to have lost the playbook for success, but continue to thrive as businesses because smartphones represent a relatively small fraction of their overall businesses. However, respectively, feature phones and desktop OS and applications, are hardly likely to continue to be the growth drivers they once were.

I need to stress another point mentioned earlier. There will be competing approaches to platform, user interface, and design. While it is possible that Android could commoditize the smartphone device market in the way that Wintel commoditized the mass PC desktop and laptop marketplace, I suspect that being ubiquitous, personal and mobile, these next generation smartphones are likely to evolve into disparate usage patterns and form factors. That said, there will be certainly be signficant OS and platform consolidation as the market matures.

At last I get to my challenge. As an avowed early adopter, I have aggressively worked at productivity in a “mobile nomadic” workstyle which leverages open interfaces, use of the cloud and many different techniques. Even I am surprised by the huge enabling effect of modern hardware, communications and applications infrastructure in the mobile realm. Essentially, very few tasks remain that I am forced back to my desktop or laptop to accomplish. However, the sad fact is that the current Blackberry devices (also Nokia/Symbian and Microsoft) fail to measure up in this new world. Hence the comment about Farms and Paris. The new mobile reality is Paris.

My challenge comes in two parts:

  • What device should replace my current Blackberry?
  • Since the above article doesn’t paint a very pro Blackberry picture, what is RIM doing about this huge problem?

I should point out that I have every reason to want and hope that my next device is a Blackberry. RIM is a great company and a key economic driver for Canada and I happen to live and work in the Waterloo area. Furthermore, I know from personal experience that RIM has some of the smartest and most innovative people in their various product design groups, not to mention having gazillions of dollars that could fund any development. Rather, I would direct my comments at the Boardroom and C-Suite level, as I am baffled why they have taken so long to address the above strategic challenges which have already re-written the smartphone landscape. Remember that iPhone first shipped in Janaury 2007 and the 3G version over 2 years ago, so it’s not new news. Android is a bit slower out of the gate, but has achieved real traction, particularly in the last few quarters. And, to be clear, I’m not alone in this – see “Android Sales Overtake iPhone in the US” – which goes on to show the the majority of Blackberry users plan to upgrade to something other than Blackberry. The lack of strategic response, or the huge delays to do so, remains an astonishing misstep.

Therefore, if anyone senior from RIM is reading this, please help me to come to a different conclusion. I very much would like to continue carrying Blackberry products now and into the foreseeable future.

For other readeers, please comment with your thoughts. What device would you carry, and more importantly, why?

[NOTE: this post was written a week before today’s launch of the Blackberry 9800 Torch with OS 6. There are definitely some promising things in this design, but it remains to be seen if, indeed, this device represents the quantum leap that the new marketplace reality requires]

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money-v-passion

5 Feb 2010

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Ignite Passion before Money

This week I had the pleasure to be the luncheon speaker during the Ignite Entrepreneurship course put on by Guelph Partnership for Innovation,  aimed at University of Guelph graduate students from various technical fields including biology, life sciences, materials, agribusiness, etc.

It’s always a thrill to get into a room with 40 or so energetic and bright grad students who are considering going into business. And, kudos to GPI for hosting this.