The Hindu Business Line : A dash of Zen for more profits

WHAT do Barbie dolls, Nokia phones, and American Express cards have in common? What secret of success does Intel share with Stephen King? What business models were embraced by both Swatch and Microsoft?

These are the teasers on the back cover of The Art of Profitability by Adrian Slywotzky, from Warner Books. Each of its chapters presents a `different, powerful business model' that reveals the `invisible but significant governing principles that allow businesses to survive and prosper in any economic climate', with a dash of Zen. A sampler:

Becoming digital allows you to literally reverse your business processes, from push to pull and from guess to know. Give the customers half a chance and they'll shift their behaviour from passive to active mode. They'll look up product info, prices, order status, and the answers to technical service questions. They'll schedule their own maintenance, download software, and so on. In fact, there are more than 20 different tasks like this that suppliers used to do that a digital business enables customers to do for themselves.

The low-cost business design doesn't need huge market share to be hugely profitable. It is hugely profitable as long as it continues to be dramatically lower-cost. If you are too focussed microscopically, what happens at the edge of the radar screen? Two things can happen. The more traumatic one is when someone makes you irrelevant. The other, less traumatic instance, the one that leads to a slow and painful demise, is the invention of a completely new model that delivers the same thing at a 20 or 30 per cent lower cost.

New product profit is all about psychology. People get so caught up in the new product gold rush that they refuse to think forward three years, refuse to think clearly about what will happen on the other side of the parabola. To manage the parabola strategically, overinvest, by a factor of three, on the left-hand side of the parabola, and underinvest, again by a factor of three, on the right-hand side.

It is one of the enduring paradoxes of business that big-ticket hardware folks invest the capital, take all the risks and then let somebody else capture the service-contract business that has predictability, lower price sensitivity, higher margins, recurring revenue, and the opportunity to create an ongoing customer relationship.

Many people see only one way of making a profit - the one they grew up with, usually, or the one that's been written up in the most recent issue of a business magazine. Just as they can imagine only one kind of time. Reality is much more complicated and promising than our limited imaginations often let us recognise.

Read it on a long haul because it has enough inputs to contemplate upon.

Book courtesy: Landmark

Code etiquette

HABITS die hard, even if you are dying to change them because they are causing problems.

A greater malaise is to keep doing the same thing over and over and yet expect a different result. That is a form of insanity, writes John Crupi in his foreword to J2EE AntiPatterns, by Bill Dudney et al, a book from Wiley Dreamtech (www.wileydreamtech.com) . "This may also apply to software development. Unfortunately, we have repeated some of our major problems so often that we don't realise they can be a source of some of our major problems."

And AntiPatterns are `bad habits of code and design', explains the back cover of the book. "The authors explore the common mistakes that are made while developing J2EE applications and clearly show how to refactor your way out of them."

For starters, J2EE is Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition and it defines the standard for developing component-based multi-tier enterprise applications. More:

An AntiPattern is a repeated application of code or design that leads to a bad outcome.

The outcome can be poor performance or hard-to-maintain code or even a complete failure of the project. And refactoring is a disciplined means of transforming the implementation of code to make the design better without changing the externally visible behaviour.

The best summary of the common misconceptions of distributed computing, and therefore J2EE programming, is the eight fallacies, attributed to Peter Deutsch. These are: The network is reliable; latency is zero; bandwidth is infinite; the network is secure; topology doesn't change; there is one administrator; transport cost is zero; and the network is homogeneous.

Risk and failure are issues we have to deal with all the time. Enterprise architects and J2EE developers need to keep a bit of paranoia around to help them plan for potential failures and risks. Many of the projects J2EE is used for put millions of dollars at stake, both during development and while they are running. You can't deploy these applications and not be ready for the consequences of failure. Some great examples of paranoia in action are Netscape's multiple network links, RAID (redundant array of independent disk) arrays, and UPSs.

To navigate your way out of the Too Much Code AntiPattern, there is a set of related refactorings to consider. Beanify to help get model code into the right place, introduce Delegate Controller to help get controller code into the right place, and introduce Traffic Cop to get the page flow code into the correct place.

J2EE applications that fall victim to the Web = HTML AntiPattern will have a browser-based interface that uses HTML. But this interface is likely to require extensive use of dynamic HTML, Flash, applets, or ActiveX controls. As a whole, the interface will probably be hard to use for some tasks and rough around the edges in general. The reason for these difficulties is that the designer will have pushed the tools beyond what they are designed to support.

Not a bad idea to read a book of bad habits.

Century management

WHERE to find out how "Janusian vision, creative destruction, dualism, and collective genius inform the 21C leadership"? What do "customised workplace, the creative Web and kaleidoscope thinking mean for the 21C organisation"? Subir Chowdhury compiles the answers for these and other such questions in Management 21C, from Pearson Education. We are not talking about a bus-route number but the current century, and the book "brings together visions for the new millennium". It is for "those who believe in creative war." Subir adds in his preface: "Someday we'll all manage this way." Read on:

For decades, organisations have utilised key metrics like ROI (return on investment) and ROA (return on assets). 21st century organisations will utilise a measurement called ROT (return on talent), that is, knowledge generated divided by investment in talents. ROT measures the payback from investment in people.

Bill Gates admits that if 20 people were to leave Microsoft, the company would risk bankruptcy. Nathan Myhrwold, Chief Technology Officer there, claims that in the new economy, the difference between the average and the good is no longer a factor of 1:2; it is a factor of 1:100 or 1:1,000! At Nintendo, the computer games company, management argues that an ordinary person cannot design a really good game no matter how much he or she tries.

Tomorrow's managers will create roles and structures that will ensure their people are always looking around for new opportunities. These roles will include: Converters - those taking today's technology and converting it to tomorrow's needs; scanners - people charged with finding new niches and customers; expediters - those who can help others to bypass red tape and bureaucratic regulations; browsers - employees who scan related industries, technologies and professions for ideas their organisations can use; linkers - those who persuade individuals and related companies to join short-term partnerships; energy conservers - people who look to plug drains in emotional, physical or intellectual energy brought about by ineffective managers or poor work environments; and talent scouts - those who look for people with the potential to become masters.

Information technology now includes biotechnology; seeds given particular genes (a kind of `software' implanted in the seed) can result in insect-resistant crops with higher yields, replacing pesticides and the physical labour to spray them.

Technology does not replace the need for human interaction and we believe that many companies in the future will miss this point to their detriment.

Quite often, information comes from those people to whom managers have easy access and with whom they get on. Decision-makers may use sources that provide lower quality information but are readily accessible.

A book that can offer a good ROT, that is, return on thoughts.

Please e-mail us on the latest IT books you have read at Books2Byte@hotmail.com

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A dash of Zen for more profits

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