Brian Grey Blog

Finally, after having the book sit on my shelf for years I got around to reading “First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently” over the holiday break.  For anyone who is either a manager, or being managed by a manager, I’d highly recommend reading the book.

In the event, however, that you don’t heed my advice, here are a couple key points worth thinking about as a manager.

First, take the time to really get to know your people — starting with your direct reports, but also take the time to get to know as many people on your team as possible. And by “get to know”, this means taking the time to understand the true talents of the individuals on your team. As the book points out, and I firmly believe, everyone is wired with distinct and different talents (which are different from their skills and knowledge).

This is a truism I learn a little more each year I manage. In the past, as much as I would have liked to “change” somebody or get them “trained” to improve in a certain area, the reality is that people through both nature and nurture come to the party prepared to excel in certain areas and struggle in others.

Understanding that talent is somewhat hard-wired in people leads to the second key take away.  That is focus on enriching key talents inherent in the people you manage and make sure they are put in roles that are the best fit for those talents. Don’t waste your time trying to “round out” your people trying to make everyone the same type of player across the board. That’s just not realistic. Instead, embrace the different talents and spend your time putting your “players” in the right positions on the field (to steal a bit of sports metaphor).

And finally, the glue that connects all of this for managers is making sure to be clear on defining the right outcomes for your people. Again, these outcomes or goals may be different for each person on your team — based on their role, function and talents — but ultimately all of the individual outcomes point toward a single set of goals for the business.

At this point it’s important to note here that once you’ve laid out the goals for your team members, your job as a manager is to do everything you can to clear a path that allows them to utilize their unique talents to achieve these goals.  This last piece is typically most challenging for managers who feel that they need to control the methods or process by which their people achieve the defined outcomes.

My advice here is simple. If you aren’t comfortable with the notion that you pick the team, put the players in the right positions, layout the goals for the team and each player, and then let your players “play” to the best of their abilities, then you will find managing an almost impossible endeavor.

If “Milk” – Gus Van Sant’s portrayal of the life of Harvey Milk starring Sean Penn – is playing in your town…go see it! (For those unfortunate to live in a town that likely won’t screen it, rent it when it’s available on Netflix).

My wife and I got a “date night” last evening and saw the movie here in SF. The fact that we live in Duboce Triangle across from the Castro added a bit of personal connection to the movie’s message.

Penn does a phenomenal job as Milk – and the story of Milk’s ascent from an insurance company employee hiding from the NYC police to become the “Mayor of the Castro” in essentially eight years is very moving.

Perhaps the most striking moments are the parallels between then and now. Essentially 30 years ago California battled a Proposition 6 that at it’s core was exceedingly discriminatory against gays.

Today, we have progressed not far – adding a couple digits to a new Prop 8 that is equally as affronting to civil rights as the measure Milk helped oppose in the late 70′s.

The movie is well done – and the story is worth everyone learning regardless of where you live on the political and religious spectrums.

My buddy Paco Chierici’s documentary “Speed and Angels” is being promoted on Hulu. This is very exciting because I know how much time, effort and passion Paco put in to the project. I also know that Mike Homer was a major influence in helping get this movie produced.

The reviews seem to be phenomenal — Amazon’s ratings are near a perfect 5.

Here’s the IMDB page for the movie.

Now that the movie is on Hulu, I am looking forward to getting a chance to watch it myself. Seeing Paco’s movie show up on Hulu is another example of the changing landscape of producing and distributing high-end content. A lot of attention is being paid to how examples like this portend bad things for the media business. How, they say, can all this effort and cost put in to creating a movie experience like this ever generate an acceptable ROI when the revenue streams are limited to DVD sales and Hulu ad sales?

Well, good question. First, the ease with which the film can be distributed through these channels creates opportunities for content producers that didn’t exist a couple of years ago. I would expect that at the top of the food chain, the returns for true “hits” will still be there. It’s the market for the next few layers of content that is opening up, enabling more content producers the opportunity to get in to the game, make a little money and stay in the hunt for delivering a “hit”.

Couple this with the ever declining cost of content production and you get a market that will be big and a market that for the high end — and maybe even mid-tier — will be profitable. The somewhat painful transition may be for the studios and other “middlemen” in the food chain. These are the guys who may lose out in the long run.

If somebody can create a piece of content as compelling as “Speed and Angels” on a low 5-figure budget, and can then directly pursue a grassroots distribution strategy to get it distributed and marketed digitally, why do you need agents and studio infrastructure?

Maybe you don’t.

Finally got around to the upgrade last night (ok, early this morning). The install went pretty smoothly (at least so far). I had hoped to use the WP auto upgrade plugin or the one-click scripts upgrade tool that my web host offers, but realized both of those options would be sub optimal to doing a manual upgrade.

Nice thing now is that future installs come with one-click upgrade built in to 2.7.

I am just getting going on the new UI, but I like it already! The QuickPress module is pretty handy. I am sure the more I bang around on the dashboard I’ll come up with some feedback for the WP crew.

One of the plugins I do want to play around with is Buddy Press that just came out with the 2.7 release. As WP expands beyond a blog publishing platform, I can really see them evolving to become the “dashboard” that I have been looking for to corral all of my personal communications and publishing activities — across my social graph.

The other feature I will be looking for is a way to auto publish a status update with a Tiny URL of each of my latest blog posts through my Twitter account so those that follow me on Twitter can be prompted when I have an updated post.

Speaking of cool features, how great would it be to have a single place where I can drive all of this versus having to bounce across 10 browser tabs in FireFox?

I’m not convinced closed end solutions being offered up by Microsoft Windows Live at home.live.com or AOL via Bebo will be complete enough to make it worth my time because they will always feel limited in terms of the services that I can plug in?

Every 6 months or so a press release or story comes out that ESPN.com is redesigning their site, all in an effort to simplify user interface and improve user experience.  The latest push — according to Silicon Alley Insider is driven by a desire to boost traffic — Comscore has ESPN down year-over-year in uniques.

First off, when was the last time you heard a big publisher (heck, any publisher) really place credence in the Comscore numbers?  My guess is that like most of the bigger guys, they are still seeing YOY growth in ad impressions and specifically “premium” ad impressions.

But I digress.  Let’s be real clear, a redesign isn’t the magic elixir for radically boosting traffic.  The sports category is one of the most mature and crowded verticals online and there is a basic formula that works for the big media site:  basic news & analysis, scores and photos.   Those three content categories account for typically > 80% of a sports site’s impressions (not counting fantasy page consumption which for some sites rolls up to a sizeable chunk of page views).  The only way a redesign moves the needle in traffic is if:

1) the new experience makes it much easier for users to get from page one to the stuff that they are really interested in and looking for in the first place, and therefore they stick around longer, or

2) the new look also comes with a new product offering or robust feature set that gives users a reason to dig deeper in to the site

Beyond the maturing of the category, the other dynamic is the emergence of other outlets for sports content — blogs or niche sports sites — continue to lure audiences away from the core branded offerings from big media guys.  The social networking rise hasn’t made a huge impact, but when lumped in with niche site growth probably contributes to pulling some audience away as well.

Monetization is still heavily consolidated at the big guys, but consumption is spreading out and there may be an opportunity for a few of these smaller guys (Citizen Sports, Bleacher Report, YardBarker, FanIQ, etc.) to aggregate a different sports consumption experience that the big guys will eventually find is more valuable to own outright than to simply bolt on as a traffic roll up.

Now, back to ESPN’s traffic issues.  One of the mysteries has always been the desire to keep as much of their premium voice and content behind a pay wall within “Insider”.  Let it free – let it be shared, sent around by users and used to really spark discussion amongst the community under the ESPN brand across all users, not just a few hundred thousand willing to pay for it.

On the redesign front, de-cluttering is always a good thing.  I’ve always been a believer that fewer, highly targeted and compelling choices at the front door is what gets users making their way in to your property and spending real time with your content experience.  I don’t think auto play videos, and cramming as much stuff “on to the shelf” is the way to achieve this goal.

Of course, the bigger challenge will be explaining to the corners of ESPN Inc. who get cut from the homepage, why they are no longer on the homepage.  I have always suspected that appeasing all the internal constituents has tended to pull sites like ESPN.com back to jamming as many pixels above the fold as they can fit.  Sound familiar?

There’s another important election in process – the one at RailsRumble.com.  Thanks to the crew at TechCrunch, I came across the ‘Rumble, a 2-day (exactly 48 hours to be exact) Rails developer competition.

Go to RailsRumble.com, sign up to get access to the contestants and vote.  You need to carve out a bit of time to really get a feel for the applications, but it’s pretty impressive to see the innovation that can be pulled together in such short order.

I am particularly fond of Where’s the Milk at?.

Remember the days when you looked forward to a SFO or LAX to JFK trip simply for the 5 hours of solitude?

Well the folks at GoGo are on a mission to make sure that peaceful time is turned in to just another 5 hours of being tethered to the office via email!

(Note: I haven’t signed up for the service, so this isn’t a real product review – just a bit of a rant)

As I boarded my flight tonight in NY the smiling young man in a green GoGo shirt and black slacks geeted me warmly – expecting I presume that signing up for his Internet access service was going to be nirvana for me.

No thanks!

I mean, c’mon. When do I get to read a magazine anymore (in the bathroom doesn’t really count)? When do I get to watch an edited version of a movie I wouldn’t even rent from Blockbuster (Kit Kittredge: An American Girl, are they serious?)? When do I get to chat up the stranger next to me and learn about the latest Botox techniques (“wow, it looks so…natural”).

No, I am going to pass on GoGo for now – no offense, of course, to the kid in the green shirt and his unbridled enthusiasm for wi-fi at 30,000 feet.

Finally got around to taking the burden of managing the family’s day-to-day finances off my wife’s plate. My inclination was to download Quicken’s software to my Mac and power ahead. But I took a stab at Quicken Online, and I have to say it was one of the more impressive web software experiences I have ever had.

(Here is an older CNET review and another review from blogger GetRichSlowly.org).

The set up was simple, the integration of my bank accounts (where I already have online bill pay wired in) and my credit card account (which covers the rest of the family’s transaction history) was also simple, and then the simple feature set made it easy to actually get caught up on our bill pay and current cash flow picture.

Sure, it’s a simple solution – it isn’t really set up to wire in to Quicken Software (yet!) and I don’t get sense it’s really set up to wire in my investment portfolio to become my ultimate financial web hub…but that’s clearly where the roadmap is headed. It is just super compelling to know you can access your info via Web wherever you are and via any device.

Checked out Dipity – start up founded by Yahoo! alum Derek Dukes. Like the visual design, it gives a good representation of a story or topic over period of time.

I’m sure over time the service will feel increasingly robust in terms of sources that are sucked in to the feed (right now reliance on Digg and GoogTube is pretty obvious). Also, would like to see the community conversation tools more discoverable. If there’s a Palin thread, where’s the chatter from the community about good ‘ol Sarah?

Here’s a sample embed from my Dipity (below) – also check out TechCrunch’s review.

No, I’m not pissed at Apple because their stock chart over the last 30 days looks like a Swiss Alps ski slope. I pissed because my holy grail of being able to finally make the full switchover from PC to Mac has been blocked.

You see, I spent the better part of this evening trying to get the synchronization going between iCal, Entourage and my iPhone for my contacts and calendar. Oh, it was going to be glorious. A single laptop, a single mobile device, all tied together seamlessly by the eloquence of Steve’s hardware and software wonders.

But no. Much to my chagrin, iCal and Entourage don’t talk to each other. And not just in my OS X 10.4.11 version. This seems to be a problem that a lot of people are encountering. I guess you could blame some of it on Microsoft. It is afterall their Entourage software that is in the chain here.

No dice. I expect more from Apple. I expect perfection — a perfection that would enable them to work around whatever Entourage “issues” might be at play here. So now what do I do? I guess I have to dial back my aspirations for a single, super PIM (e.g. Entourage) and live on my laptop witch the more basic Mac address book and iCal?

Wait until I get up the nerve to try Mobile Me!