BrainFuel

Awhile back Jason at Signal vs Noise recommended a book called Maverick which I immediately ordered. It sat on my shelf unread until just prior to my trip to Brasil. I figured it would make a good book for the flight down and as a bonus it was about a Brasilian company.

The book was fabulous.

It’s the story of turning a company inside out and removing management and giving that control to the workers. The book is a narrative story and it is so fast paced you’ll be able to read it in a few days. It will inspire you to overcome obstacles and think about situations completely differently. Semco enables the employees themselves to hire their supervisors, their managers, and even select warehouse locations and make decisions ranging from vendors to uniform colors. They don’t have a layer of management to do this anymore. Since employees as a team can also fire the supervisors they have the incentive to find someone good. They even have open books and everybody sets their own salary (and bonus).

• The Wikipedia Article on Ricardo Semler.
• Read the first 5 pages on Amazon
• Lessons from Semco on Structure, Growth and Change
• Semco web site

What do you think is more effective? Having a business completely run by a set of well defined processes or having the right people on the bus and no process?

If you’re going to read E-Myth then you also have to read Good to Great. On Principal, I completely disagree with some of the ideas E-Myth presents. While it’s handy and you can learn a lot, the basic premise of E-Myth is that people don’t matter and process is the thing that does matter. I disagree with that 100%.

I agree with E-Myth in its description of the typical business (managers, technicians, entrepreneurs). It’s the solution to the problem I disagree with. And that solution is process, process, process. Not just some process, all process and the extensive documentation of process. With E-Myth everything is documented down to the detail and the idea is that once something is documented you can hire anybody to do that job. E-Myth rides on the premise that people are robots and lack creativity to do their jobs.

Good to Great is the exact opposite and is guiding readers in the right direction. It says you should think about who is on the bus first, before you even figure out what you’re going to do in your business. It argues that a good team can do almost anything and we’ve seen that over and over again with businesses that succeed wildly. They just go out there and do awesome stuff again and again.

I see very little process at most of these companies. I can even think of a number of web startups that appear to have no process from the outside, and have eschewed process.

Now let me sidetrack just a moment and say I’ve spent more time with E-Myth than I care to admit. I spent months working with an E-Myth consultant working through their course a few years ago. I found it disgusting how focused it was on process. Everything was packaged up really nicely and the gist was that I could become a success if I just stuck with the multi-year program.

In all reality I think the most you can learn from E-Myth is this simple fact. There are three types of people and you shouldn’t try to do all of them yourself.

1. Entrepreneurs (who are the dreamers, focused on the future)
2. Managers (who are the organizers, focused on how to do things efficiently)
3. Technicians (who are the “do-ers” focused on what’s to be done)

I invite the authors of these books to defend their positions.

Continue reading:

• Jim Collins — Good To Great
• First Who, Then What
• E-Myth Worldwide
• Review of E-Myth

I just read Blog Design Solutions which is a book that quickly walks you through creating a blog. The book covers the popular blog engines and goes in depth about customizing each. This book will help you save time if you plan to create a blog. It starts out quite simply and that’s ok because as you delve deeper and read the chapters that interest you you’ll find an amazing wealth of information.

Big lineup of authors
This book was a combination effort by a number of bloggers. They are: Phil Sherry, Andy Budd, Simon Collison, Michael Heilemann, Richard Rutter, David Powers, Chris J. Davis, and John Oxton. The extent of talent wrapped up in this book is stunning. Imagine if one person tried to cover all of the blog engines out there. It would be impossible. This approach works.

Table of Contents

1. The “Web Log”
2. Creating a Local Test Environment for Your Blog
3. Movable Type
4. ExpressionEngine
5. WordPress
6. Textpattern
7. Write Your Own Blog Engine

Who is this book for?
It’s for anybody that hasn’t mastered their particular blog engine and wants to learn more. It includes all of the basics like installing a blog and setting up your testing environment to design and coding ideas. It even touches on some CSS basics. Rather than learning by trial and error, I think if you read this you just might save some time.

I primarily work with WordPress and I found that chapter particularily interesting. I learned a new trick reading this book. Did you know that you can create vastly different layouts in your category archives by simply saving off separate category pages? For example, for the Best category I could create a file named category-18.php into my WordPress theme folder and immediately without any further customization that category could have a different layout. The number that you enter refers to the category id number (found in the WordPress Edit Categories page). That’s pretty cool. Here’s some info on the WordPress Codex about Category Templates if you want to read more.

I’ve heard people say that ExpressionEngine is very nice and so I found it interesting to read about the process of setting it up. I would really love to use it for a project. A similar process was outlined for Movable Type and Textpattern. A couple of times I thought the book got off track however in the end I noticed it was each author putting his own spin and sharing his process for building a great blog.

To conclude
If you haven’t delved into customizing a blog before and you want to save some time — even if you have — get this book. I could have saved hours had I read this book a year or two ago. If only for the great material about WordPress. It does have some portions that are more basic yet really shines when educating about customizing and designing a great blog.

For the record, the Lacie Porsche 250 GB hard drive is something I do not recommend. My unit failed within a year. Even after reformatting it failed again. I know hard drives fail, that’s not why I am upset. I’m upset because Lacie requires that the drive have a mechanical failure before they’ll replace it. Apparently the drive corrupting data and becoming inaccessible doesn’t qualify.

Lacie will not look at it, and somehow diagnosed that mine is operational over the phone (how brilliant) and pointed to a one-year warranty which has just passed. I won’t be buying Lacie again.

A few weeks ago I installed phpAdsNew to experiment with the idea of running my own banner ad publishing system.

I hope to have advertisers for my coffee blog within the month and wanted to be able to serve ads, track statistics, and generally wreak havoc.

I’m doing a good job with that so far.

Overall impression: phpAdsNew is very powerful yet comes with a learning curve. They need a “Wizard” or something fo helping newbies get going. I almost gave up when I couldn’t figure out how to insert banner ads. You can see my results on the sidebar. I threw a picture of a shot of espresso up on the left side on BrainFuel.

One thing: if I were an advertiser I would rather pay to get PageRank juice. That’s what I want and I’m convinced my future banner ad customers will see things the same way.

I wanted to comment that WordPress 2.0 is finally out (came out on December 26 actually) and they’ve posted some comments up on the official WordPress blog.

I have a few thoughts about the introduction of a WYSIWYG editor for WordPress. Firstly, I think it’s great because this brings WordPress more in line with what business users and non-technical bloggers might want. Finally someone can make something bold without having to know any HTML tags. They made a really smart move in that they created an easy way to disable the editor so you can hand code everything. Absolutely cool.

I’ve used this editor on my Superman blog at WordPress.com (a hosted service that you don’t have to upgrade). The cool thing I’ve noticed is that the editor allows for easy insertion of the “More” link in posts. This is something that was often overlooked in WYSIWYG Plugins for WP 1.5. WYSIWYG Plugins have actually been somewhat of hacks if you want my opinion.

As to what I think of the new interface. It’s definately improved. Steve Smith at Ordered List has already gone and updated his Tiger Admin Theme for WP 2.0.

Oh! One more thing: Built in support from the get-go for Akismet spam filtering. That’s awesome!

I’m planning to upgrade Arizona Coffee soon with the latest version of WP and we’ve been talking about upgrading BrainFuel sometime in early 2006.

I saw King Kong on Friday and I absolutely loved it. I’ve heard the critics say this movie was too long. I’ve heard them say that if it had been an hour shorter they would have given it all five stars. Frankly, I don’t care. I paid $9 to see this and Peter Jackson gave me an extra hour of a movie about a giant ape and it was well worth it.

The dinosaur chase scenes put Jurassic Park to shame. Halfway through the movie I commented to my friends that I thought this movie was redefining movies altogether. There are scenes in which dinosaurs are falling off cliffs and dangling from giant vines and King Kong comes in and beats them up as if they were toys.

Well I won’t go into a lengthy review. I’ll just say this one gets 5 stars and I’ll definitely get the extended edition of this just so I can watch the dinosaur chase scene again and again. It will be worth it.

Some interesting notes:

• You might want to check out the review over at The Uber Geeks.
• King Kong IMDb entry.
• Remember that show called Early Edition about a guy who gets tomorrows newspaper today? Well, Kyle Chandler, who played Gary Hobson is in this movie.
• Shades of Grey review.
• 1933 King Kong Movie Stills

Elf (filmed in 2003) is a funny Christmas movie that features Will Ferrell. It’s about a guy who is raised as an elf in the North Pole and because of his size is forced to move to the U.S. where he finds his father. He lives the elf culture treating life as an adventure. He eats everything with sugar on it including spaghetti which he tops with syrup. Lots of syrup in fact.

I give it 4 stars out of 5 just for the wit and comedy and the fact that I’ve watched it perhaps 5 times in the last few years and it is always funny.

It’s filmed in a sort of style where it reminds you of other classics like It’s a Wonderful Life or Miracle on 32nd St. Maybe those films and throw in a little bit of the old animated classics like Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. That was apparently intentional as they hope the film will become a classic. I’m sure it is too soon to tell whether that will be the case however it has the sort of humor that could last a lifetime. I think what is lacking in this story compared to, say the previously mentioned movies, is a significant moral to the story. This movie pokes fun at Santa and provides some witty scenes showing how boring our lives and daily routine can become. It shows a family dealing with an unexpected turn in life and make the decision that family is more important than everything else. Or at least, that’s my best take on it.

Since “Buddy” (Will Ferrell) has never experienced city life he blunders through almost everything with a lovable curiosity even causing problems for others and himself and realizing some of the sad moments in life. Overall it’s a genuinely funny movie that is designed to be family friendly.