Shamefull.

Probably not. Currently this site has about three readers (including my mum, thanks mum) and to be perfectly blunt, doesn’t truly merit any more readers, until I remove my thumb from the orifice in which it is inserted, and actually create meaningful content.

December flew by, as Decembers have a tendency do.  I hope that you had a great Christmas and New Year time? Mine was a bit of a shaky start on a personal level, one of the reasons I kind of laid off blogging for a while. It steadily improved though, with some nice quality time spent with my family, my little sister flew in from the UK for two weeks, and I even got a couple of days away (from everything; home, work, sanity) on the ski slopes.

I then had a pretty hefty project, for my day job, of moving our office into a new location. You all know the pain that comes from jobs like that; packing and sorting, followed by lifting and lugging. Then followed by trying to find a new home for everything and plugging in-numerous things into each other, hoping desperately that they will all talk to one another as they did before.

Then there were the conversations. Late at night, face to face over a beer or via Skype, meaningful conversations with people who I respect hugely (people who mean something to me) about concepts and ideas that have been fermenting for long enough now. 2009 is the year to start making some of these projects happen.

Micro National, both the site and the concept (as I see it anyway) is intrinsic to those projects. There seems to be zero doubt in anybody’s mind that we are entering a new era. The concept of teams of like-minded individuals coming together in order to make projects work,  seems to be gathering its own unique inertia. Commercially focused but not built upon the same business foundations as the business entities that have come before.

2009, the year of the Micro National.

The team behind 37 are obviously darn clever guys, and a while ago they wrote a book called Getting Real, which is all about their philosophy behind creating simple, useable web applications (like BaseCamp). Although aimed at a different audience than my line of work there were several pertinent chapters that apply to anybody running a business or developing products, be that code or bicycles.

Being the Web 2.0 savvy guys that they are, they have three distribution models; analogue (a real book), digital (a downloadable PDF of said book) and also a somewhat scrappy, but free, preview on their website. I have to admit to being too tight to pay them for either the book or the PDF (though I do give them in excess of $100 a month in licence fees…) and I’ve read through the entire book, and back again, for inspiration and sage words.

A few days ago I spotted a twitter posting from Jason Fried, one of the 37 founders and somewhat of a internet guru, about a new book in the pipeline. Going by the working title of “Unconform“, it gives an indication already of the direction they are heading in. If it does for simplified business thinking, with a sharp commercial edge, for what their previous tome did for coding, then it will be an essential read when it appears in airport bookshops somewhere towards the end of 2009.

BTW: You can follow Jason on Twitter, he’s a very interesting guy: @jasonfried

If you were to browse through my music collection (now fully contained on iTunes, almost 9000 songs totaling 26th solid days of back-to-back memories) you could follow my journey.

From my teenage years in Oxford, where my tastes were alternative rock from local legends & coffee shop regulars Radiohead.
Through my bike shop years in Bristol, in which I was submerged to the hip and trip hop scene defined by Massive Attack, (who I once sold a bike to).
My first taste of the corporate life in London led to exploring Ska, House & hip hop from Phi Life Cypher, Nick Warren.

With the change in life pace that marked my move to the Alps, I became partial to something more acoustic, with more value contained in the vocals, and obviously a fairly substantial French influence, through Abd al Malik or Cyril Paulus.

More recently I’ve felt a shift back towards guitar led music, although often still with a tribal baseline, the funky new mix of live music and sampling such as Matisyahu, the Killers, or U.N.K.L.E

At each one of these musical interludes, I have, in turn, been influenced by other sounds, flavours or beats. Our friends share their discoveries with us

Despite the fact that we demand they still play the old classics when we see them live in concert (Radiohead’s Creep is the perfect example), we ask our musicians to constantly push their own creative boundaries and explore new soundscapes.

And as they discover, we do too, with each new twist inside a turn leading to personal self-discovery; by confronting what we thought they liked, you are required to question your own musical hunger.

In comparison, business tends to be a pretty dry affair: workflows, business functions, objectives and SOP’s dominate the agenda.

Defined boundaries, and over-regulated strategies never felt right to me. Certainly there’s always a need to fit into the predefined corporate culture, it’s perhaps even Hippocratic. So while I have been reasonably successful in my professional career, I’ve always had this sensation of being a round peg trying to fit into a square hole. Too often I’ve seen colleagues or customers lose sight of their real identity and their personal morals the moment that they slipped into work mode.

But what’s happening in the world right now fills me with some inspiration and hope to the future, as there definite air of change floating through marketplaces, business strategy and perhaps governance as well?

When we work, it should be a time when we’re required to question ourselves constantly, and drive ourselves to discover or explore. Therefore, by definition, we cannot remain in a safety zone, we cannot grow our businesses without sampling and mixing and scratching, and occasionally juggling the wrong beats.

In the first stages of my working life, I was not the person I am today. Now I have new horizons, 30 years under my belt, a child. I don’t dream of the same things, and although the dreams I had have changed, the aspirations of where I want to be creatively have not.

Creative, I’ve recently felt the need to collar that aspect of my personality too, as I’d never really considered myself as creative. I don’t paint or play music.
I don’t build beautiful mountain bike trails, nor shake my thing as Macbeth in the amateur drama club.

But I have come to appreciate my strengths as a corporate DJ. I don’t know where it comes from, but I’ve nurtured an ability to hear a sales pitch or strategy, and lock it away somewhere in my mind as a sample.

Then look at the crowd from the DJ booth, and try to read the room in order to pre-anticipate the next tune that can get all those hands back up in the air.

Grab two analogue copies of Business Practices, Volume 1, a classic from years gone by, Volume II a bootleg Black label of the future present, then cut, scratch, fade and innovate. Creative Commercialism.

DJ POne of Birdy Nam Nam says it best; Le truc, c’est qu’on travaille et se remet en question sans cesse, donc on ne peut pas appliqiquer la meme formule, faire un 2e album comme le premier, 5 ans apres.

From my point of view, one of the clearest, cleanest and most appealing concepts that tie in all the key areas of new-wave business, and that I have seen appear recently, is the really rather fabulous MyFab concept.

However, before you click on the link and whizz over to their site, there is one rather substantial issue, which I see very regularly, but which is very disappointing to see from a group of people who are obviously otherwise very switched on.

Frenchness. As in the unbelievable ability that the French have, to consider themselves an island apart from the rest of the world. This is one of my personal pet hates, and probably something that I’ll revisit elsewhere, and in more depth. For now just be aware that what you are going to do is go to a .com address that is (as far as I’m aware, there could be some clever geo-localisation going on that I am not fully unaware of) a site entirely in French.

Rant over. Let’s talk about the concept itself, as it really is rather superb.

The thinking behind this company is well explained on the site (in French…) and is built around the concept of customers voting for and then ordering products that MyFab then manufacture. Visitors to the site are asked to vote for the products they want to see made, and once a certain number of products have been pre-ordered, production itself gets under way in the Asian factories, and the goods are shipped to Europe.

Obviously the most visible, and the most attractive, part of this deal from the consumer’s point of view, is that the prices become incredibly competitive. By stripping out every unneeded a layer of margin from their pricing calculations, they end up offering the consumer anything up to 70% discount from what would otherwise be that products MSRP.

What especially intriguing at me about this entire concept, is that surrounding it there is this sense of community that has been created. Though I should point out it’s probably not the doing of the site owners themselves. Instead I’ve been seeing customers talking about MyFab on Facebook (where they advertise pretty heavily) and sending e.mails “have you seen this? I’m going to order, are you?”

It appears that community doesn’t really seem to have been maximised on the site in its current incarnation, but is I would imagine something that is bound to happen in a future update. In the meantime they have customers advertising their products, which are all pre-sold upon docking, potentially no sales drop-out and some innovative products your’e unlikely to ever find on the high street.

Me? I “ummed” just a little too long and missed out my personal favourite.

As I have said before (and I’m going to say it again, and again) it’s important to remember that, above all else, we are running businesses. As such they must/shall be business entities, and ultimately make a profit.

But this sense of community, of being an intrinsic part of the “whole” is what distinguishes Micro National companies, from mere companies.

I was reminded of this in a rather nice post over on copyblogger. Well said.

1. install RSS widget

2. go to your twitter account, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the RSS icon.

3. copy and paste that somewhere. Mine looks like this: http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/16311281.rss

4. copy and paste this:http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/########.rss

5. copy and patient your identification number from the you have been given, and replace the ## from the user_timeline code.

6. you now have: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/16311281.rss (obviously with your ID, not mine)

7. now drop this into your RSS feed on WP, I would suggest not checking the top two choices, as it will just duplicate your twitter messages.

Done! As I said… wasy when you know how! Thanks to the WP forum for the pointer!
So, that’s the site done (as fellow WP’ers will know it took all of two shakes of a whotsit to do… but looks like $467,000 if not a Million bucks..) now all that’s left is trying to make sense of my previous blog ramblings.

One of the recent buzzwords in the software industry is the idea of scrumming teams together in order to build software using this new mindset. While I’d find it hard to directly apply these techniques to most of the work I do, as always there are nuggets of information there that seem logical and applicable in almost any company.

It’s such a simple concept, but so many systems and processes that surround us in our daily lives seem to go against the agility ethos. For example where I’d like my work to be more agile would be in the order processing and purchasing areas, but thinking of the challenges we face in those areas means tackling work itself would have to be done in a radically different manner.

On the one hand we have internal processes, which by their very nature are things we can control and therefore, however hard it might appear, we can overcome those obstacles pretty readily.

More of a challenge however, is in the external processes that by their very nature mean we rely on other companies, service providers, or government organisations, which obviously make from getting from point A to point B much more challenging.

There’s a number of site you can check out to read more about this, one of the best articles I’ve found so far is here.