Scott Barstow

Would You Like Some Bland With That?

I spent the week between Christmas and New Years in Tulsa, OK visiting family.  On one of the days my wife and I decided to go get some coffee (or tea in my case).  There were, of course, sixteen Starbucks within a five mile radius of where we were, but I wanted something different.  

We stumbled upon a cool little, locally owned, coffee shop called Agora with the help of Google Maps.  What I loved about this place was that they took the time to help us find a coffee and tea that were really perfect for the day and our mood.  I actually ordered something, changed my mind, and got something different without the guy rolling his eyes and treating me like an idiot (or charging me for the first drink).

Later on that same day we went to Pepper’s Grill for dinner.  If you are ever in Tulsa, this is really the only place I would characterize as a must-visit.  They have some of the best tex-mex food on the planet.  Not coincidentally, they are also locally owned.

I am getting to where I will drive a good bit out of the way to have an experience that I can’t get on every corner in every city in the US.  I know people love Panera and Starbucks, but they are all so bland.  Who wants bland?  

How about you?  Do you prefer convenience and consistency over quality and excellence?  Do you look for local and unique over national and same?

The Number Two

A man with two clocks never knows the time.

A man cannot serve two masters.

These independent thoughts have in common the distraction of having two of something.  In the case of business, this might be having two competing objectives, or to be more to the point not having one clear objective.  

I think there is also something to the idea that trying to be something you are not (personally or professionally) creates two of you.  The real you and the other you.

Lots of people think of the new year as a time to add to their lives those things that they think are missing.  There is more value, I would submit, in ruthlessly getting rid of things that don’t belong.  

Getting down to one is where I am headed each day.  It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be.

How about you?

You Never Know Who’s in the Room

A few years back I went to see a Switchfoot concert at a college nearby.  At the time I knew who they were, but would not have considered myself a fan.  At the urging of my brother, I went to see them. 

The concert venue was lousy, and there was almost no one there.  Probably less than 500 people showed up.  The warm up bands were awful.  I was skeptical.

Next thing I knew Switchfoot was up on stage and giving it everything they had.  They had an insane amount of energy and put on an amazing show.  I became a fan that night.  Fast forward three or four years to two weeks ago when I took my entire family up to Charlottesville, VA to see them perform again.  It’s a four-hour drive from where we live, but I knew it would be worth it.

Sure enough, they killed it again.  It was one of the best live shows I have seen.  

The moral of the story for me has nothing to do with Switchfoot, but rather their commitment to giving it all every night they perform.  They could have easily mailed it in the night I first saw them, or even given 75% of their usual effort.  Instead, they made us feel like there was nowhere else they would rather be.  As a result, they gained a whole family as devoted fans.

Something to think about when you don’t feel like doing your best work.  

Backupify - A Service To Back Up Your Gmail and Social Accounts

I have been a customer of Gmail since 2004.  Since that time, nearly all of my email has been stored with Google.  It’s something I fret about from time to time when I think about the cost of losing my mail to either an error at Google, a hack of my account, or human error.

This week I came across a great service called Backupify.  It does a nightly backup of your mail, calendar, and Google Docs.  In addition, the service will back up your Twitter and Facebook accounts, as well as any Facebook Fan Pages that you administer.  There are a number of other services such as Flickr, Picasa and Zoho that are also included.

The service has three levels:  Personal, MyCloud 100 and MyCloud 500.  The prices are Free, $4.99/mo and $19.99/mo respectively.  The details on what is included with each plan can be found here.

I also use Apple Mail to back up my mail periodically to my local machine, but Backupify gives me an additional measure of peace of mind.  

Check it out!

Why You Should Record Meeting Audio

If you are like most people, you have inevitably come out of a meeting with less than perfect notes and had to try to recall important items from the discussion.  Missing important details inevitably leads to wasted time and effort, either by taking the wrong action or by having to circle back with the other attendees to recapture the information.

I started a practice a couple of years ago of bringing an audio recorder with me to all meetings, whether attending via phone or in person.  It has proven to be invaluable, and has saved my backside on more than one occasion.

Here are some great reasons to start recording your meetings:

• It allows you to engage more actively in the meeting, knowing that you can revisit the recording later to take notes and get important details
• You can share meeting audio with other participants who were not able to attend the meeting
• You can have the meeting transcribed by 3rd party transcription services if there are legal (or other) reasons to do so
• By being able to play back the audio, you often get the nuances of the discussion that you never heard or had forgotten
• Settling disputes over what was actually said becomes as easy as playing back the audio

I have two recording devices that I use.  I have an Olympus Digital Voice Recorder that is very small, maybe 1.5”x3”.  I use this when I am only bringing a paper notebook to the meeting.  What I don’t like about this device is that it’s a pain to get the audio off.  Although it’s a USB connection the audio is not easily accessible.  When I have my Macbook Pro with me, I use Evernote’s audio recorder.  It’s fantastic in that the audio is automatically backed up for me.  This is my preferred method.

Everyone dislikes meetings.  Everyone dislikes taking notes during meetings even more.  Having audio is a good way to make meetings more productive and have a record of what actually happened.

Question:  Do you ever record meetings, and if so, what is your methodology?

How to Start Simple

You woke up this morning with a great idea, one that will change both your life and the lives of everyone you know.  It’s the next big thing, for sure.  The next question you inevitably have is, “What do I do first?”

If you are a technologist like I am, the tendency is to start building something right away.  The cooler, the better.  People love cool.  I have taken this path at least three times in the last year, all with little or no success.

Instead, consider boiling the problem down to its essence.  What is the simplest path to take to figure out whether your idea makes any sense to anyone else?  There are two examples that come to mind that demonstrate this path as a viable way to determine if your idea is any good.  Eric Ries talked about two of them in his book, The Lean Startup

When Nate Swinmurn started Zappos, he started by taking pictures of shoes in stores and putting them on a simple e-commerce site.  He promised to buy the shoes from the stores if he got any orders in return for permission to use the pictures.  No inventory to buy, and no big budget.  He used the time to figure out his return policies, how to ship, and all sorts of other operational issues.  Once he had the model figured out, then he used investor money to scale it.

Food on the Table is another great example.  Food on the Table helps families plan meals around what is on sale at the grocery stores around their users.  Instead of building a system to do all of the meal planning and shopping list generation, the founders simply used pen and paper with their first few users.  They worked out the kinks in all of the processes, and used pen and paper until they could not keep up with demand.  Then they automated.

Obviously if the solution requires technology up front, then the path must be different.  However, many ideas that you may think require automation and technology out of the gate really don’t.  What you end up doing is wasting both time and money on something that was never the right approach to begin with.  Instead, figure out ways to test your idea using what is at your disposal today.  It will enforce discipline in your thinking and hopefully avoid the waste bin that I have dumped my ideas into.

Question:  What ideas do you have right now that you could start testing with less than a $500 investment?  Why not start on it today?

The Story of Chapman’s Ice Cream

Chapman’s Ice Cream is legendary in Canada.  They are a family-owned and operated business in northern Ontario.  What makes Chapman’s a great story is not the quality of their ice cream (I have never had it), but rather their response to a disaster in September 2009.

On September 4, 2009, their creamery burned to the ground, essentially stopping production for the entire company.  Because of where the company is located, the ripple effect of this could have been disastrous.  Nearly everyone in Markdale, ON works for Chapman’s.  It was the classic story where a small factory town loses the factory, and the town disappears. 

Except that it didn’t.  Chapman’s, through an insurance policy they had been paying on for nearly 40 years, kept every single employee either on their payroll or helped them to subcontract with the companies that were used to resurrect the operations of the company.  Chapman’s contracted with their competitors at times just to keep production moving and keep their people working.

Chapman’s returned to limited operation just seven weeks after the fire, and were back in full production a few months later.  Not only that, but they actually hired more people when they returned to full production than they had employed prior to the fire.

The lesson in this story, that we should all remember, is that the people who work with you and for you are the most valuable asset your company will ever have.  The Chapman family understood this and acted this way for 40 years before it was ever put to the test. 

Question:  What do you do to keep your employees happy and productive?

Google Finally Starts Appealing to Our Emotions

The latest ad from Google is the most compelling ad I have ever seen them create.  I saw it on Sunday.  If you have not watched it, check it out below.  Is it me, or did you feel like you were watching something from Apple?  Really well done, Google.  It makes me want to use your products.  Which, by the way, I already do.

Answering the Question Prematurely

I was at a client site the other day and they were talking about some exciting new initiatives that were getting ready to kick off.  While there was a good bit of excitement around it, there was also frustration with some of the thinking around how to attack these new opportunities.  It seems that there were those who wanted to overload the new stuff with some of the same burdens of the way things had always been done.

There are lots of ways to solve problems.  Many times our experiences shape how we think about the problem, and we draw conclusions because we think we know how the story needs to end.  In my mind, it goes something like this:  I hear someone say “The problem is that I can’t do x”, and I have solved x twenty times in the past five years, so I already go straight to the conclusion.  ”You need y to solve x.  It works every time.”

It’s a tough thing to learn to take a fresh look at the problem each time.  There is generally enough nuance in each situation to make it unique, so the challenge is to have the patience to let the brain do what it does best.  

Our brains are great at churning away at things, and using inputs that are not top of mind to come to the right conclusion.  The issue, at least for me, is opening my mouth before my brain is done.

Question:  What are some ways that you use to interrupt the rush to conclusion?  I would love to hear about them.

A Different Kind of Performance Review

I was reading an article by Premal Shah of Kiva this past week.  The focus of the article was on how to do reviews for the people that work for you.  I thought he had some really good ideas on how to get away from the traditional annual review.

At Kiva, the staff are required to present their latest work regularly to a group of their peers.  If they are working on a particular project or particular part of the world, they stand up and give a presentation to the staff about why they are doing this particular work, and how it’s going.  This review process factors heavily into a staff member’s performance evaluation.

I really like this idea, and when I get to the point where I have employees at Rocket Hangar, I think having something like this would be a great way to make sure I have the right people working with me.  If they don’t feel passionately enough about something to stand up in front of the rest of us and tell us why, then we shouldn’t probably be spending money or energy on it.

Question: If you had to do this at your job, would you feel strongly enough about your work to stand up and defend it in a room full of your peers?