CEO Unplugged

Noel Tichy and Entrepreneur's Foundation

I'm involved with an organization called Entrepreneur's Foundation, which is a consortium of 100-odd private and public companies in Silicon Valley that have made community involvement a tenet of their corporate values.  Homestead has been a member for a long time, and for the past few years I've been involved as an advocate, fundraiser and member of their steering committee.  At Stanford recently, EF lead a roundtable discussion on Corporate Citizenship, and the keynote speaker was a professor named Noel Tichy, from the University of Michigan biz school.  He gave an interesting, and for-the-most-part engaging talk on what it means for corporations to go good citizens.

If you ask me, Dr. Tichy doesn't go far enough.  He's basically saying that the largest corporations in America that have created hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth (mostly for their key employees, themselves, and their early shareholders) are obligated to be concerned wtih the global issues of poverty, education, human rights, etc. because it is the right thing to do, but it also is good leadership and contributes to the bottom line. 

I say that that corporations of all sizes have a social obligation to give back to the community, because corporations are our society's major source of both wealth creation and social change.  I'll write more on this later, but if you want to learn more about an organization that believes companies of all sizes have the power (and responsibility) to make a difference, check out the website for Entrepreneur's Foundation (full disclosure, I'm on their Steering Committee).

 

A thought on innovation: industry vs. academia

When I was a graduate student in Computer Science at Stanford, I spent a lot of time struggling over whether I wanted to pursue a career in academia or the software industry.  I was torn because academia seemed like a place where you could pursue great ideas and research without concern for market acceptance or financial viability.  That, of course, was also precisely academia's problem.  The things you did in academia often never saw the light of day in the "real world" and were relegated to a library shelf (or, these days, a server) somewhere.  On the flip side, the software industry never seemed to tackle the "big" technical problems of society because the market wasn't there, or at least not readily apparent.

I was reminded of this conflict a few months ago when I attended Stanford's 4th Annual Media X Conference, which is a conference that brings together researchers and professors from across the University with representatives from industry.  The idea is to promote discussion and collaboration, with the hope that corporations adopt and/or collaborate on research projects underway at the university.  Conceivably, industry could even "charter" research projects that the faculty would carry out on their behalf.

This is an interesting idea, and I'm certainly rooting for its success, especially because a friend of mine, Ellen Levy, runs the Media X program.  But, as I sat through the rapid-fire presentations of the professors, and talked with them during the breakout sessions, I couldn't help but think this idea is destined to fail.  Unless the university (and all universities) change one fatal flaw in their approach to solving big problems: collaboration.   Where people inside corporations--at least well-run ones--tend to have one common goal (the short and long-term success of the corporation), people inside of research universities all have individual goals: the success of their individual research so that they can get funding to do more research, get their books published, and build up their personal academic "brand."  Please don't get me wrong--I'm not suggesting in any way that the motivation of academic researchers is disingenuine or selfish.  Almost universally, academics have chosen their craft because they are trying to contribute to the great body of social knowledge in a pure form. However, they mostly seem to be living on individual islands, and are at pains to point out why what they are doing is different from what all of their colleagues are doing.  This simply is not a good way to make great progress.  If there are two smart people working on a problem, I believe they will always solve it better if they work together.  Three is even better than two.  Now there may be some limit (five or ten?) but these people need to be peers, able to challenge each others' ideas

My mother and my twin brother (and several close friends) are research professors at major universities, so you'd think I'd be headed for an earful from them all after this post.  However, I think they all agree with my aha moment, as they have all expressed simimlar frustrations with academia.  Now, there are plenty of problems with the way the private sector solves big problems--namely, that they define "big" by the market size instead of the severity to society (think global warming, poverty, illiteracy, etc.).  That's why we need academia to be effective at solving these big problems.  Programs like MediaX do a service to the private sector by teaching us what's happening in the research labs  of America's finest universities.   But they could learn something from the private sector as well, namely that it's hard to turn a theory into a world-changing technology or product without an environment that better rewards team thinking and behavior.   More focus on the problem, less on the problem solver.

Office Live is Live but not Office

Walt Mossberg, of the Wall Street Journal, wrote unenthusiastically recently about the new Microsoft Office Live service, which is aimed at very entry level small businesses trying to create a basic web presence (full disclosure: he compared Homestead favorably to the new service, which is competitive to Homestead).  While their web site solution seems too rudimentary for even the most basic full time business, their integration of simple CRM solutions is really cool.  I’d be curious to hear from the Homestead customers (or potential customers) out there if you’d be interested in basic CRM and database functionality built into your Homestead service.

Unfortunately, the name Office Live leads one to believe that it includes web-based versions of Microsoft’s flagship Office Suite (i.e. Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.), which it doesn’t.  At least not yet.  Now that would be a killer app for small businesses, and Homestead would become an ASP/reseller of that in an Internet minute if it every happened.  Of course, they would probably screw up the pricing somehow, and/or make the licensing agreement ridiculously draconian, or pull some other myopic Microsoft move.  But if you’re reading this Bill, take it from a former employee: I think there’s a really big opportunity here.