In case you didn’t notice from the change of tone in my tweets, I have been on vacation with the family for the past week.  Enjoying the scenic grandeur (and at times solitude) of the Pacific Northwest and taking a ton of photos with my new camera (1388 photos to be exact…and 5 movies…).

Today, I had the joy of the first day back on the job and dealing with the flood of emails, followups, and catching ups that is the price we pay for taking some time off and not reading emails.  Like that wasn’t enough, today VMware (my employer) had to go an announce that we were acquiring SpringSource (and add a few more items to my list to completely dissolve that post-vacation glow! ).

After a day dealing with my inbox and urgent items, I had to take some time out of the evening photo processing to read the Steve Herrod and Rod Johnson blog posts on the acquisition.  And provide a bit of a different viewpoint on this acquisition…fresh from vacation and not knowing anything more about this acquisition than what has been publicly stated by others (so safe from saying anything other than my opinion – see disclosures in the About latoga labs in the sidebar).

I’ve Been Through This Before

I’m not talking about my employer acquiring a company.  I’m talking about a closed source Company acquiring essentially an Open Source company.  Before joining VMware I used to work for IONA Technologies (sound familiar….think CORBA…Yes!  That IONA!).  I was there when IONA bought LogicBlaze.  What made this acquisition interesting (especially for me…being part of the enterprise sales team at IONA) was that we went from having 1 closed source product (ESB) to three products (all ESBs) which competed with each other.  And I was only allowed to sell one of them.

Executing a successful merger is not easy even when the companies are very well matched.  But it becomes even more difficult when they have conflicting core values (and revenue models) like closed source code development and open source code development.  In my most recent experience, the Iona/LogicBlaze merger didn’t work as well as it could have because the two sides of the house competed against each other and management turned a blind eye to it while they tried to figure out a revenue strategy post merger.  Funniest thing is that a lot of the core value propositions we were discussing with clients at IONA in that Enterprise sales team that I was part of, still hold true today.  Back then virtualization was a huge hidden value savings that I couldn’t tap into.  Not any more…

Regardless of the synergies that two companies can provide each other technology wise, there is not as much focus traditionally placed on the social aspect of merging two companies.  It is that social aspect (like the social aspect of introducing any new technology in a company) that will drive the speed and revenue value of the acquisition.  Having been through this before in a rather painful way, it is important to mention this fact.

Why VMware + SpringSource Makes Sense

The good news is that this conflicting personality issue shouldn’t be a problem with the VMware/SpringSource merger.  First, there is no competing technologies between the two vendors.  SpringSource allows VMware to access the higher level parts of IT (Applications and App Developers) while also working together to enable the Cloud Vision of vSphere.

Second, based upon what Rod Johnson indicated in his blog post, he will be heading up SpringSource as a separate unit within VMware following the VMware BU organization.  This should mean that SpringSource will get to work as they have been to support their existing community and customers in that classic open source way while working together with the other VMware BUs to add bigger picture value through the combination of SpringSource technologies with VMware’s.

Paul Maritz has indicated in the past the need to move up the value stack of IT and has used the term framework more than once during the vSphere launch.  The ability to leverage the virtualization foundation of vSphere with vApp and abstract away the applications from the operating systems with SpringSource’s various build-run-manage products not only provides a much more open application development environment to compete with Google and Amazon, but also provides an solid migration path for Enterprises to move to the Private Cloud with all their web based Java applications.  Image a world where Java App developers have the ability to integrate via the spring framework right into the virtualization based cloud where their apps will be tested/QA’d/run.  Regardless of weather…er…I mean whether…that cloud is an internal cloud or an external cloud.

I see some very clear and interesting developments on the horizon from this acquisition which I’ll try to disclose my opinion on in the future.  And, as is can be the case when you put a lot of very smart people together with solid management, I’m sure we’ll see some surprises as well.  From the looks of my LinkedIn network, I’ll also be re-united with some old colleagues as well!

Tomorrow will be an interesting day of conversations with my global clients to hear their take on things!

At the end of last week I was directed to Matt Mullenweg’s post The Way I Work, Annotated, which he wrote after his The Way I Work article was published in Fortune.  It was a great insight into how Matt uses technology and structures his day to achieve the things he wants to achieve.  (also check out the other The Way I Work articles from Fortune).

Then, this past weekend, I heard a radio interview with Jim Lehrer on KQED’s City Arts and Lectures where Lehrer talked a bit about his working style and how it changed in recent years (after his heart attack).  The key thing that Lehrer mentioned was creating a list of what he wants to do and then comparing that to what he did do on a daily basis.

Both of these were a great reminder to me about the things that you want to accomplish.  I have a note card sitting on my desk with three aphorisms printed on it.  The first one is “Your Focus Determines Your Reality”.  Every now and then you need to step back and analyze your focus and look at your reality so you can do a gut check.  Coming across the aforementioned items recently reminded me to do that…

One of my clients made an interesting comment this week about a new way they are thinking of measuring their data centers.  Anyone dealing with virtualization knows that measuring a data center on square feet or number of physical servers alone is rather meaningless.  We mostly talk about ratios:  VMs per Socket (CPU) or VMs per Core.  But as green initiatives push on I had one client mention the new metric of VMs per Kilowatt hour.

This is interesting because it not only takes into consideration the efficiency of your virtualization solution, but also the power efficiency of your servers, storage, and network.  What is the efficiency at which one can run a data center?  When you get into a cloud computing environment where users pay for what they use, don’t the providers also want to only be paying for what is required?  If companies are now placing notes in their annual reports on their corporate carbon foot print, shouldn’t they also be thinking about defining, measuring and tracking their data center carbon foot print?

This takes one down an interesting thought process that I think I’ve only scratched the surface of.

(Thanks goes out ot Mike P. for pointing me to the above Dilbert strip!)

While catching up on some email today, I came across an confluence in my inbox. First, I catch the following Computerworld headline in a technology industry email newsletter:

As rumors swirl, Twitter says no rush for business model

A few email later, I run across a humor email (that I’m sure everyone has seen by now) that discusses derivative market explained for laymen. It starts off:

Heidi is the proprietor of a bar in Detroit. In order to increase sales, she decides to allow her loyal customers – most of whom are unemployed alcoholics – to drink now but pay later.

My first raction to Heidi’s business plan is ‘how acinine, she’ll never see any money by loaning drinks to alcholics.’ By now we all know the rest of the story about the derivative markets, banks kept giving Heidi loans based on her debt assets only to never see their money come back.

And now we switch over to the alcholic users of the web 2.0, where everyone can get drunk for free off of their favorite services. So, will Twitter’s VCs and Investors ever see their investement dollars turn into the lucrative cash flow that Heidi’s bankers thought they had? Or will Twitter end up with some risk manager calling in the marker and cause the fall of the micro-blogging derivative markets?

Guess Twitter needs to determine which definition of business they want applied to them:

3. a person, partnership, or corporation engaged in commerce, manufacturing, or a service; profit-seeking enterprise or concern.

or will they keep focused on features and building more mass market appeal adding more noise to the signal until they reach

11. excrement: used as a euphemism.

Round and round we go…last call, drink up!

Today I had yet another of my customers indicate that they are trying to figure out how to get rid of the corporate owned laptop.  Last fall I had a similar discussion with a customer about employee owned laptops.  At that time it was a conversation with an IT knowledge worker who would have rather been given the choice of which laptop he could use versus be forced upon a single brand.  This time it was from an IT executive who would rather reduce his corporate desktop support costs by getting ride of the physical computers all together.

By providing a yearly or bi-yearly stipend and a set of minimum system requirements, let the employee buy the laptop of their choice.  The company provides the business desktop as a virtual desktop that runs back in the data center and the employee accesses it from their own computer.  Lower or no hardware support costs, data is secure in the corporate data center, easier centralized backups, and longer refresh cycles as the virtual desktop’s computing power can be dynamically expanded when needed and the servers can run for 4-5 years versus the company paying the expense of the refreshing laptop hardware every 2-3 years.

I think this company could get there eventually.  Though it won’t be for all laptops in the organization, but a larger enough number of them to make the savings turn into real dollars.

I have noticed an interest change in behavior lately, and it’s been mostly from my customers.  A number of them have started to place the toll conference line number in their meeting invites (some even first with the title of Preferred).  Could it be that they read the post I made back in December advocating just this type of behavior as an easy way to help save corporate money on conference calls?

I’m more than happy to take the credit. How about a small 1% of the savings commission fee?

By now it should be no surprise to anyone that every business is looking to cut costs.  In an economic recession like the one we are in, even those business that are still doing well are cutting costs as the future is so unknown.  There is one area of cost cutting that is so simple and so close to everyone in a company…and yet most companies don’t really focus on it.

The Conference Call.

With so many remote employees, the conference call line is necessity of modern business.  As a career member of sales teams, I have always had my own personal conference line.  This conference line consists of both a toll free and a toll dial in number.  Most of the time when I get a conference call invite in my inbox, the location is the toll free conference line number.  And most of the time this is costing the company more money that it should.

At a previous company, an analysis was done of our telecom usage.  It was concluded that we were wasting over $100,000 a year on duplicate phone charges from our conference calls alone (and this was a company of less than 500 people).  Every time we would dial the toll free conference call number, we were paying substantially more than if we were to use the toll number.  Add on to that the fact that we were usually dialing that toll free number from a company phone, and we were getting double billed: once for the local phone change and once for the toll free conference line.

By raising the awareness of this situation to the entire company and by adapting user’s behaviors — we all started to include both the toll and toll free conference line number in meeting invites and always dialed the toll number when using a company paid for phone line — the company was able to save a substantial portion of this $100,000 per year phone waste.

Extrapolate this estimated wastefulness up (or down) to the size of your company and see how much money you might be wasting yearly.  Changing your corporate and personal behavior is an easy way to reduce this waste.

A helpful tip for companies of all sizes during these economic times.

Update:  A client of mine brought up an interesting point during a recent discussion on this topic.  His company uses IP Phones internally. With the phones leveraging the exising data network, calls within any location for the company world wide are free.  But, when someone dials a toll-free conference call number, they are routed outside the network and start to incure a phone charge.  This client happens to produce their own conferencing solution, so the costs really start to add up when the toll-free confernce numbers are called since the entire conference system is “free per use” as long as they don’t leave their IP network.

Tonight I attended an interesting panel discussion that featured three Bay Area venture capitalists discussing the impact that today’s recession based economic conditions are having for startups and their fund raising processes. Two things from this discussion jumped out at me.

The first being that all three of the VCs agreed that if you can bootstrap your company and or drive to profitability with taking very little money, then do it! This isn’t what you would expect to hear from a VC, but when you consider that most VCs are “businesses” that are structured to do large deals, this makes sense. Smaller business opportunities exist all around us that could be grown to a $10M-$50M exit. Most VC’s can’t invest the time into those opportunities when these entrepreneurs are looking for under $500k of investment. Those are the deals that a few dedicated entrepreneurs could bootstrap and grow by staying focused and end up with a very nice payout with the majority going to the entrepreneurs.

The other topic that jumped out at me (but by no means surprised me, I agree with it) is that fact that most entrepreneurs or managers in startups and small companies don’t dream of taking their company public anymore. There is so much overhead and pain involved with being a public company today with regulations, requirements, and value being driven by those who don’t focus on long term fundamentals of a company that it isn’t really worth it unless you are large enough or have a unique and defensible enough value proposition. Add on top of this the increased public distrust and angst toward senior executives of public companies that the reasons for being an executive in a public company are far out weighed by the headaches involved.

On that same thread, I find it amazing how some very large companies who are sitting on Billions of dollars of cash are completely abusing their employees right now in order to increase their stock price. I have heard some scary stories as of late that take cost cutting to new highs and lows, and employees are having to take some of these cost cutting measures directly to their bottom line. It’s one thing when the company is fighting for it’s survival, but another when the company is sitting on Billions in cash and has growing revenues. The reason for this in my opinion is that stock prices currently are not being valued based upon the fundamentals of the company. Yet the senior executives of a public company can’t follow their best business sense to do what’s right toward their employees and customers because they have to cow tow to wall street analysis and fund managers who are are influencing their stock priced based on the macro economic situation.

Who wants to be a public company CEO in this climate?

(Though with the right company, right now is the time to invest with these artificially deflated stock values…)

Tonight on my drive home, I heard an interesting radio program on my local NPR station (KQED).  They were airing part of the Asia Society’s U.S.-China Green Energy Conference, a segment about Fueling a Clean Energy Future.  The introduction was from one of the partners (I think he was a partner) from NEA.  Most of the discussion that I heard (recording wasn’t posted at the time I am writing this) was about the energy needs of the world and the possible energy generation alternatives.

NEA is a venture capital firm.  So the types of investments that they are looking at are the ones that will score huge payback.  If the opportunity won’t turn into at least a $100M+ business, they usually aren’t interested.  So it makes sense that they would be investing huge in the power generation side of the planetary energy coin.

However, on the drive home, it struck me…what about the flip side of that coin?  If the estimated future power consumption for the planet is measured in the 10′s of Terawatts of power and if the power needs are increasing as developing nations raise their standard of living to match the developed nations standards, why isn’t there as much attention given to saving power?

Are we focused to much on addressing the symptoms and not enough on the cuase?

I remember years ago hearing about a company that was working on a power transformer that would allow devices to go into standby mode and consume fractions of a watt of power instead of 10′s of watts of power that is the norm now (see my previous post about Results from Monitoring the Meter).  About a year ago I tried to find that company, doesn’t exist any more.  Transmeta was another company that was focused on the power savings, but dropped off the radar and is a IP management shell employing more lawyers than engineers right now. The only company that I can think of immediately that is both above the radar and impacting huge power savings directly from their technology is VMware.

There are huge areas of waste that we can still address. Image how much of a dent we could put in the future consumption if our focus on how not to use as much electricity expanded beyond CFLs?  I hope there are more companies out there than I know of working on conservation technologies, but I guess I find myself a bit annoyed by the lack of focus that seems to be applied to them.

(Disclosure:  as of this writing I am employed at VMware as a Solutions Consultant.)

Earlier this week I got together with a group of entrepreneurs I know and I was surprised to learn that one of them is starting to instrument his online application to provide Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) capabilities. Granted, he didn’t realize that what he was doing was BAM, but that just shows that as a business person he intuitively knew he needed to instrument and monitor his business.

This is a very smart move on his part. Early on in a startup’s life cycle all the focus can be on the business of the end users and forget about the business of running the business. With limited engineering resources, where do you invest them? Most startups will invest all of those resources into their product offering. Only later, when the product complexity has grown and they are out talking to investors do they realize the mistake they made.

This particular entrepreneur is the founder of Amahi, which offers a linux home server. You sign up for the Amahi service, which is currently free, and then download the Linux based software needed to run your home server. Amahi has highly automated the process of getting everything installed and up and running, in the end you have your old PC re-provisioned as a home server for your “family intranet”. You can then monitor your home server from the Amahi website.

With their new instrumentation, Amahi can now monitor how many people have signed up and where each one is in the installation process. If a customer stalls out somewhere in the installation, Amahi now knows about it and can proactively reach out to provide assistance. Beyond that, as the person running the Amahi business, the Founder now knows what his conversion rates and time frames are for customers for each stage of their installation. If Amahi ever needs to go talk to investors for funding, this information is invaluable as it shows how their business works and provides the investors a sense of comfort that the business is being professionally managed.

As a long time statistics hound, I worked in the early day of the web providing application instrumentation for running explosive web businesses. We were always focused on the technical instrumentation of the servers, but I also got interested in the business possibilities instrumentation provided. BAM has been a decade long initiative to move that instrumentation up to the business level, an initiative which was highly successful. However, BAM typically focuses on larger companies. The principals of BAM can just as easily be applied to Startups with just as much value. The startups just need to invest the time to build it into their system from the start.

One of my personal pet peeves is bad presentation skill. Considering the technology industry is so focused on information and knowledge, it’s amazing how bad we are at communicating it. I see this almost on a daily basis in Sales. It’s either an over loaded presentation on technology from marketing, a badly organized presentation from Sales people, or — worst of all — a presentation that is just a printed record of what the presenter said. Blah!

So I was giddy with excitement (honestly, just ask my wife…she was there) when I came across a wonderful book by Garr Reynolds called presentation zen. I have relying on this book lately as I develop a couple of presentations, specifically funding presentations where it is most important to be able to tell a story about what your working on and why it’s the most important thing since sliced bread (at least to your potential customers). That is one of the key points that presentation zen makes: your presentation should be telling a story, and it shouldn’t be a novel…think more picture story book.  (for a great example, see Larry Lessig’s TED presentation on How creativity is being strangled by the law.)

The best part of presentation zen is that it can be used as a quick reference guide as your working on a presentation. It helps to reinforce the lessons you know. Such as start planning your presentation without your computer. You need to know your story line and flow, and having the computer in front of you when you do this only distracts you into things that don’t matter (like large bullet lists). I forgot this lesson when I started working on my latest presentation and the book, along with some peers with whom I reviewed an early draft, reminded me of my errors.

If you do presentations, do your audience (and yourself) a favor and buy a copy of this book!

I would also check out a Guy Kawasaki’s The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint, he brings up a great set of points on creating a presentation as well as a wonderful template to start with if your building a funding presentation (and he happens to have written the forward to presentation zen). A huge thanks goes out to Val for pointing me to this posting!

Since I’m on the topic of funding, if you interested in the world venture capital, I recently came across an interesting opinion piece on the Software VC Outlook for 2008.

“I’m happy about the fact that I’ve retired more people than I’ve fired.”

That quote is from a friend of mine and wins my Business Philosophy of the Year award.  In a period of time when you hear stories in the news about how the rich keep getting richer, you see wall street firms imploding under their own house of cards that they built, and you hear stories from friend after friend of how mis-managed the companies that they work for are that hearing someone who is building a business make a statement like that is down right impressive.  (Even more so when you know them well enough that it comes from the person’s heart and they mean it.)

I guess it’s the fact that true sentiment like that is so hard to find when you work in the get rich quick world of high technology and vulture capitalists that I felt it was worth sharing…

I recently become aware of two great coup happening in Starbuck’s land. Both of which will have a ripple effect through the business community…but probably not how you think.

The first one being some inside information from my local Starbucks manager I heard this week. Starbucks will be discontinuing their breakfast sandwiches starting this fall. I think this is a huge mistake on their part and I bet is being made by some recently hired corporate executive from the fast food chain industry. Sit in a Starbucks on any morning and see how many people order those sandwiches. How many of them are business people or regulars who probably double their spending at Starbucks because of that sandwich? A lot (I have done this field research).

I only go to Starbucks now because of those sandwiches (personally, I lost the taste for Starbucks coffee after an extended trip to Italy two years ago). The reason is rooted in the fact that now that McDonalds is serving premium coffee they don’t want to be seen as competing with them. I find this thinking ridiculous; unless those sandwiches are adding less to their bottom line than my back of the napkin field calculations have come up with, this decision will hurt Starbucks more than it will help them.

The second one I read about this morning, Starbucks Switches to Free AT&T Wifi , or will be starting this spring. As all road warriors will know, Starbucks is the go to location for getting on line while on the road. There have been times that I have spent more time at starbucks in a day that I did at my hotel. As they break away form their 6 year relationship with T-Mobile, this changes will have multiple economic ripple effects:

1. T-Mobile will be taking a huge hit to their bottom line. The majority of their 8900 wifi locations in the US were at Starbucks’ 6800 company operated stored (from Starbucks PDF Fact Sheet). T-Mobile’s wifi business will just about starve if they don’t strike a deal with some other retail outlet. Not to mention that most T-Mobile customers I know that have a T-Mobile phone have it primarily for the discount on the wifi access, which they use mostly at Starbucks.
2. AT&T will gets a huge boost to their Wifi business (their bottom line is so large, I’m not sure how much of an immediate impact this will have.). With costs much lower for the service than T-Mobile, and Starbucks debit card holders getting 2 hours of free access per day, and with all 100,000 US Starbucks employees getting free wifi access, and with the service eventually being expanded to AT&T wireless customers, let’s hope that the AT&T infrastructure is able to handle this better than it has been handeling their Uverse roll out (which isn’t going smoothly, I hear).
3. Starbucks should see a boost to their debit card transactions since holders of those cards get free wifi. This has trickle through to the credit card companies as they process the transactions for these cards, and of course take a percentage fee. (I believe Visa is the processor behind these cards, so this boost in revenue will help with their upcoming IPO).

It’s amazing how interconnected the business decisions at this scale can become.  One just has to be able to look past the headline and connect the dots.

The topic of hiring of people and leading of people are intrinsically linked. For some reason, both of these topics have been re-occurring themes for me rather recently. I have been having numerous conversations on both of these topics with friends and colleagues. Based on some of their comments, I thought it would be valuable to share some of my observations with everyone.

I’ll start with the hiring aspect. Everyone who has been in management has dealt with this issue. One of the new tools that I have found very valuable in this process has been LinkedIn. After screening a resume, if the candidate looks interesting, I will jump on LinkedIn (LI) and search for them. So far, my hit rate has been upwards of 75-80%. This number is dependant upon how big your LI network is. There are a number of different philosophies on how to build your LI network (which I’ll leave for another post), but my network is just over 300 direct connections with a total network size of two million.

First, I’ll compare their LI resume to the one that I received, discrepancies become red flags. Next I’ll look for recent jobs of the candidate and see if I have anyone in my network that was at the same company during the same time, this is one of the built in features of LI. I focus on connections that are closest to me. If there are any that are directly connected to me, I’ll drop that person a quick email to get some feedback on the candidate. Once the candidate list is narrowed down to the final few, I’ll do a more in depth blind background check on candidates. Even if the candidate doesn’t have a LI profile, chances are that there are multiple of his previous co-workers who do, so searching by the company name and pinging key individuals based upon their roles and geographic area are easy. (Note: this is where having the business or higher level subscription to LI is valuable as you have the ability to search the network wider and send more LI messages.

All of this is not new. The concept of hiring from your network or doing blind reference checks from your network is what savy business people have done for decades. LI just gives you a tool to speed the process and access to a wider network.

What surprises me from my conversations with others is how many managers don’t do very thorough blind reference checks. Most company’s HR departments will do a background check of an individual as part of the hiring process, but actually talking to people who used to work with or for an individual is invaluable! Like so many things in life, you have to take the comments with a grain of salt, but the comments are usually more accurate and real than the recommendations that appear on LI. Through the blind reference check and doing a little digging, I was able to determine that a top candidate I was considering hiring had worked at three different companies at the same time in the recent past! Obviously, he was off our list—I did tell the recruiter who brought us the candidate and he was shocked (I was as shocked that the recruiter didn’t do a more thorough investigation himself to earn his commission…I haven’t used that recruiter since.).

In another incident, I realized that a leading candidate was interviewing at a company where a good friend of mine worked. It ended up he had been interviewed by my good friend. Since our companies were not looking for the same type of candidate, we compared notes in an open discussion. This helped us both by confirming things we both had observed about the candidate and find out items that each other didn’t know. In the end, my friend’s company wasn’t the best fit for what the candidate wanted (and both my friend and the candidate realized that) but my company was.

People are the most important asset of any company. Yet, at least in the technology business world, why do so many managers not take the hiring process seriously and invest the time needed in the process? I have heard so many horror stories of bad hires. The majority of these bad hires could have been prevented through the simple act of a blind reference check. Yes, it takes more time but it’s time well spent.

Another aspect of the hiring process, which is usually outside of the hiring manager’s control, is the “signature experience” of the company. What are the company’s unique cultural traits? How are new employees indoctrinated into this culture? I have had more and more candidates ask me this over the past 3 years. I think this is a side effect of the rocket and crash startup culture of the technology industry. So many people have been through it that they want the opportunities and challenges of that environment but under the umbrella of a more structure corporate environment. The article “What it Means to Work Here” in the March 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review (HBR) discusses this very topic.

The topic of corporate culture is one that I always try to understand myself in new opportunities. It’s been my experience that most companies pay lip service to this concept but don’t actually embrace it. They may have a formal document that describes the corporate values, but that is as far as they take it. Nordstrom is one company that I have had direct experience with regarding their “signature experience” of customer satisfaction, they do take it serious and it is part of the Nordstrom culture. (if you know a long term Nordstrom employee, ask them about the story of a customer who returned a tire to the store…).

The flip side of the corporate culture coin is the employee type. No company can be a fit for all types of employees. Likewise, if you know your culture screen out the people that don’t fit. The six types of employees the article lists are:

1. Expressive Legacy
2. Secure Progress
3. Individual Expertise and Team Success
4. Risk and Reward
5. Flexible Support
6. Low Obligation and Easy Income

Check out the article for the rest of the details.

This leads me to the leadership aspect. That same issue of HBR has an excellent article entitled “Leading Cleaver People”. The one truism in business is that you want to hire people that are smarter than you. The ultimate example of this is what the authors refer to as “Clever People”, the individuals inside a company that are the ones that provide true competitive difference for the company. They also provide a whole new set of challenges for managers. As the authors state “clever people have one defining characteristic, it is that they do no want to be led.”

With that as the management challenge, here are “seven things you need to know about clever people” from the authors:

1. They know their worth
2. They are organizationally savvy
3. They ignore corporate hierarchy
4. They expect instant access
5. They are well connected (both inside and outside of the company)
6. They have a low boredom threshold
7. They won’t thank you

As the authors state: “If you try to push your clever people, you will end up driving them away. As many leaders of highly creative people have learned, you need to be a benevolent guardian rather than a traditional boss.” If you’re in a management position or strive to be, I highly recommend reading this article. There are some wonderful suggestions and tactics that are provided for how to manage clever people. By better understanding the traits of clever people, you’ll be able to identify them during the hiring stage, and provide an environment for them to work their magic.

Ever had one of those days where separate conversations from the day collide into a similar theme? Today was one of those days for me.

A co-worker and I were talking about the trials and tribulations of working remotely as part of a larger technology team. We were sharing horror stories of the disconnection from your co-workers because everyone relies on email. Where if you didn’t block off Noon to 1pm on your calendar you were likely to have a co-worker schedule an important call during that time (like I have to block off my lunch hour?). And to boot, they scheduled the meeting at 11:50am via the shared calendar system and then get upset when your ten minutes late (yeah, like I just sit in front of my computer waiting for email all day). If you can’t tell, this is a pet peeve of mine…email is not instantaneous, guaranteed communication method. If it’s urgent, pick up the phone and call me!

My co-worker was describing how his last job had him working from 6am till midnight due to the fact that there were people all over the world and they were all work-a-holics (or the company culture/expectation was that everyone was). Sure, it’s nice to have the flexibility of your work schedule to go to the gym in the middle of the day to blow off some steam or run an errand or two, but not at the cost of not being able to step away from work.

Then, this afternoon, I heard a story on NPR’s All Things Considered that talked about a home recorders dream, playing with pros online. It was a story about a guy who’s passion was playing the guitar and recording his music in the evenings. With a laptop and about $1000 he was able to build a home recording studio. The kicker was that there are numerous services available online where he could send an MP3 of his recording to someone, do a short call with them, and then for a flat rate they would record background tracks for his song (drummer, beat track, background horns, etc.). A few more MP3s would be passed back and forth and in the end the home musician had high quality tracks he would download for his song and mix it himself at home.

To those of us long time technology people, you’re probably yawning saying “so what, that’s not new”. But it is for the music industry. When you look at how music is made, all these musicians are usually in separate rooms, just listening to the other tracks when they record their own. Technology and the internet has enabled the studio musicians and singers to go independent, live geographically where every they want, and work on their own schedule. Everyone is happy, right?

Again, all of this isn’t new to those who have been doing this in high tech, but I look at this in a different way. How many of these people have the self-control and discipline to work in this fashion? More importantly, as we have the next wave of employees coming out of school, how many of them are being prepared for the challenges of balancing your life in an always-on economy?

If you can work in that situation, great for you! But, I have heard rumblings about the always-on economy from many people from all different areas of business. The difficulty of having family time because you work retail and have to be in the story during the holiday sale. The difficulty of taking a vacation and having to check your email or blackberry constantly. The difficulty of getting work done becuase of the constant interruptions from IM, Email, or the phone. Regardless of whether a worker can work in this type of environment, is it efficient and healthy?

My co-worker is expecting to see more of a revolt toward the remote working situations. We might see a new wave of self-help gurus who will help you learn how to work remotely and still have a balanced life.

Here’s my advice from what I try to do regularly to balance out my work/life and deal with the always-on economy…and it won’t cost you a four easy payments of $49.99…

• Take time each day for thinking. No phones, no email, no IM. Those are tools, learn to turn them off. Just take some quite time to review and focus on topics from the day (for me, I follow this with time for writing).
• Set aside focus time to accomplish more detailed or creative work. Turn off the communication tools. Give yourself time to concentrate and work.
• Take a real vacation at least once a year. No cell phones, no email, no connection with work. If you can’t leave your business to let it run on it’s own, then it’s not a real business. (or if your boss won’t let you take a vacation where you can’t be reached, then they’re not a real boss.)

I think there is a frustration level simmering beneath the surface of the working world that we have created. For our own and the greater good, we can’t ignore it.