Entries Tagged 'Commentary' ↓

Mum and Neil are visiting right now from Australia and we had a great time over the last week watching The Long Way Round. It was one of those communal experiences where we’d all gather around the TV and sit watch, and talk with each other about the fascinating events as they unfolded. Who said TV couldn’t be interactive!  I guess it depends on how good the content is and what you put into it.  It was the second time watching the series for Shannon and I but it was no less interesting. It was great to watch and see the reactions of Max and Charlie and Mum and Neil.  Max was very keen on it and he said that it was hard to wait for each evening when we would gather around the tube. He wanted to skip ahead when we were all asleep and watch the whole thing, being the nocturnal teenager (15) that he is, but he knew it would be better if he waited and watched it with everyone else. It’s just one of those nice memories that I know I’ll look back on fondly from this visit.  Our time together is growing shorter now and I can feel that unfortunately the visit will come to an end soon. There is never enough time with these long distance visits to pack in enough ‘visiting’ and this one is particularly short since we’re so busy getting ready to move.

In Dad’s recent correspondence he has mentioned being glued to the Tellie watching the Cricket tests from Australia. Today, when I picked up the Palm Beach Post there was a feature on local Cricket clubs here in South Florida – which are apparently very popular and numerous. The best one happens to be right here in West Palm Beach, called the Atlantic Cricket Club (note that their site seems to be down at present). The Florida League page is here. They have a former pro bowler from Jamaica, Glen Anglin, who is my age.

Reading the article made me want to get out and play. Sounds like they value commitment to the game, over skills, so you never know, I might be able to make the team if I tried out. On the other hand when you have a former pro playing on your team and you’re also the #1 team in South Florida it would seem my chances would be slimmer. Cricket is as much a social and strategic game as it is athletic and it’s a game that really tests your nerves and focus since it is played over a long time period. I was never a good bowler when I played as a kid in Australia (though no worse than most of the neighborhood drongos I played with). I was a decent batter however, and a good wicket keeper and slip. Defense is a critical and very large part of cricket so being good at those positions, rather than a more visible bowler, is a good thing.

Lately, I’ve been feeling pretty damn happy. You know how when you work and work and nothing seems to go right and then, seemingly, all of a sudden, things break for you? Then, not only have you broken through a plateau but you’re accelerating beyond the reaches of your imagination? Yeah, that’s how life has been going for the last couple of months and especially in 2006. Did I tell you that 2006 is my break through year? No, well it is.

Much has been fueled by following a discipline in all things from working out, eating good food, focusing on important things (like my kids) and really starting our business. I got a real shot in the arm with all the traffic our business blog is garnering after only a couple of weeks. I’m starting to really appreciate the term organic and not look down on it for it’s buzzworthy overuse. Having been the recipient of real organic growth of our company blog traffic it’s real to me now.

Part of this really hit home when Shannon and I were looking at our blog referrer stats tonight. There was a bunch of traffic coming from the guy’s site who made TiddlyWiki’s. He had actually read my post and was featuring an excerpt of it on his home page! Given that I love his TiddlyWiki tool this was a real honor (and yes, it stroked my ego) but it was more shock than anything else. I took a screen shot to celebrate the occasion.

It really pains me to see our old company, Knight Ridder Digital, up for sale (Shannon and I are both KRD alumni, and it’s actually where we met). Everyone knows that current Knight Ridder shareholders are looking for bigger profits and valuation from the looming sale. They’ll get some of that but only if they recognize what they have and invest in it. I’ve been surprised that none of the press has talked about other companies that could stand to benefit from buying Knight Ridder other than the suitors that have been written about, which are primarily newspaper companies and money managers (I’ll expand on this point later in this post). Yes, print is going down hill – no kidding – but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t value in the product, it is great local content after all, and it still requires investment and the best management to make it work. You keep managing a mature product as a dead product and you create a self-fulfilling prophecy, and all your best people leave.

From the sounds of it you’d think I was an old company stalwart. Actually, I love technology and new companies but I’ve worked for old line, mature product companies for much of my career. I worked for Pacific Bell Directory (SMART Yellow Pages) in the Bay Area for 10 years in the 90′s and played a role in the “Merger integration” work for the entire sales division for Pacific Bell Directory when SBC purchased Pacific Telesis. I was one of two representatives from sales leadership who flew out to the St. Louis headquarters of SBC’s Yellow Pages and got a front row seat to the efficiencies planning, ‘best practices’ work and new management structures that would become the new company. It wasn’t pretty.

Tony Ridder understood the impact of the Internet back in the mid-90′s much better than most as the Chicago Tribune points out quite accurately, and he backed his vision with real investment dollars until the ‘Dot Com Bomb’ of late 2000 started to detonate. From then on until about a 18 months ago I would say that Knight Ridder has managed their growth Internet properties like a mature product with very little investment and an almost unseen amount of innovation. Why? Investors and Wall Street. Could Wall Street, Tony Ridder, the board and senior management have done better? Yes.

I used to delight in telling my new employees that Knight Ridder was the first company in the world to publish a newspaper online (MercuryCenter on AOL) but it was a hollow statement in more recent years as I took part in laying off staff that we desperately needed in an industry with a REAL hockey stick growth rate! Stop and think about that. Why would a company with major assets in one of the hottest industries be cutting staff? As far as management practices go this one is a non-starter. It’s not like people thought during the time of the dot com bomb that the Internet was going to go away or stop producing results!!

From the company legacy and employee perspective there is very little good that comes from being acquired. On the flip side the purchasing company will have many upsides, including a plethora of new job opportunities in middle and senior management and a very real power boost from owning new brands, expertise and products. But, I think the truth of the matter is that it’s not that much fun for anyone but the stockholders. Even then there is certainly no guaranty. Knight Ridder is a good company, no doubt under performing on Wall street but I believe it is just our investor Attention Deficit Disorder and management vision that make it so.

About a year after SBC purchased Pacific Bell, they purchased a VERY small independent telephone company called SNET, Souther New England Telephone with primary operations in Connecticut. They were like a gnat on the ass of an elephant in comparison to the might of the afore purchased Pacific Bell. A funny thing happened. SNET’s board and senior management made sure that their deal language protected their people, company and legacy in a way that was shocking to the street, and even more so to PacBell people. When SBC purchased PacBell there was almost a wholesale change of management and business practices despite the fact that there were many really bright people at PacBell and some great ways of doing business. SBC threw the baby out with the bath water. To the credit of SNET’s leadership they at least saved some vestiges of management respect when they went down. I hope that Tony Ridder has the guts to do just that. He’s representing generations of Ridder’s, Knight’s and countless thousands of people who have brought great news and advertising to the U.S. and even the world. I hope that the resulting company will respect what they have and invest in it – that it won’t just be an efficiencies race like we all know is the likely outcome. I’ll be rooting for Mr. Ridder, his board and his senior managers like Hilary Schneider, and all the great friends I have there to pull off the all-but-impossible.

The Yahoo! and Google equation that no one is writing about

Maybe that’s because my following hypothesis is all wet but hear me out. I say that Google or Yahoo! should buy Knight Ridder and would greatly benefit from the purchase. New world companies like Google and Yahoo! have more need for KR’s content and more respect for their success in journalism and advertising than any of the other newspaper companies said to be looking at KR. Never mind the news content, what about the hugely successful world of online recruitment where Knight Ridder is 1/3 owner of CareerBuilder.com? Knight Ridder’s online recruitment revenue’s are about 40% of their total online revenue and it only keeps growing. If Yahoo!, currently third in the online recruitment space to CareerBuilder’s second, purchased Knight Ridder they would become a Monster.com squashing powerhouse. Yeah, Tribune and Gannett, the other owners of CareerBuilder would have to agree to the sale but I think they could find it in their hearts to get in bed with Yahoo!, especially if Yahoo! extended some of their other offerings to them. I don’t think it hurts that the CEO of HotJobs, Dan Finnigan, used to run Knight Ridder Digital and was a chief architect of the CareerBuilder acquisition. After working for Dan at both Knight Ridder Digital and before that SBC’s SMARTpages.com I saw first hand what a great biz dev talent he is and I can’t believe Dan’s not thinking about these things and talking them over with Terry Semel, CEO of Yahoo!. Yahoo! could also combine efforts with Knight Ridder in the hot local search space, a huge oil well waiting to gush the online equivalent of black gold by using the local advertiser relationships that Knight Ridder has. Did I mention that Dan brought over Knight Ridder Digital’s VP of Sales, Tim Lambert to run biz dev at HotJobs? I know Tim well from working for him for years and he’s now moved on to head up Yahoo!’s local sales effort (local search) and is using the experience he gained at Pacific Bell Yellow Pages and Knight Ridder Digital to make Yahoo!’s local search effort a real success. The only thing I’d say against this hypothesis is that Yahoo! has a lot of broadcast depth and focus in their senior management and their content clearly leans that way so I could understand if they’re not as excited about print content, as they would be to acquire say, CNN broadcast content but it could still play.

Google also stands to win in this same scenario where they could gain Knight Ridder’s content but also establish themselves overnight in online recruitment, a space that they are clearly starting to go after while also substantially furthering their local search efforts. In fact I believe that a Yahoo!/Google like solution is the ONLY one that will help KR grow and become even more than they already are. Alas, the newspaper companies that would buy KR would only interject more of the same thinking that put Knight Ridder where they are to begin with and a purchase from money management firms will be the beginning of the end of a great company. Please don’t do it Mr. Ridder – no matter what pressure you come under – let your last at bat be the one you hit out of the park for your brothers and your mom, your dad, your legacy and for all your employees that are counting on you. Believe me, as former employees and as people who have both enjoyed representing your products AND using them please know that we are cheering you on!!

Oh, and if you and your brothers start another news company with all the money you make from the sale and eventually go public, make sure you have two classes of stock.

Good luck

Back around March of this year I set a life goal to reclaim some of my youth, my character, my personality and my physical condition from a time when I was 16, before life had really happened yet. I called it ‘Reclaim 185!’ When I was 16 it was 1985, and 20 long years ago. As I sat down at my new Apple PowerBook to write out my goal the genesis of my inspiration was purely a weight loss and physical conditioning goal. What I found myself writing down crystallized in to a complete overhaul of the mind, body and soul. Reclaim 185 is recognition that I’ve been trying to find my way back to my core self for the last five years. But, things had been going too slowly and 2005 was the year to get focused. So, Reclaim185 became my symbol and goal to reclaim the very best of me from 20 years ago, while NOT throwing out the wisdom that only 20 years of horrible and wonderful experiences bring you.

To really explain Reclaim 185 I need to tell a bit of my life story which I’m going to do in chapters. Why? It’s part of my experience, part of documenting my progress and better understanding what it is I’m doing, and finally for my kids to read about when I’m old and senile and gone all together. Since that could be any day I thought I should get started. Yeah, having kids makes you think this way. Having four kids make you think this way even more!

So, the intro is done. If I start writing I may eventually catch up on those 20 years! For now, I’ll just document that I’ve reached, ON schedule, the easiest and first part of my goal. That was to get from 216 lbs. down to 185 lbs. by the end of this year. Today’s the day. Today I weigh 180.8 lbs. I’ve lost 35 lbs. My running is going great! I now like to run a 5 mile route that I call the ‘Powerline.’ It’s in Wellington, Florida and at least a third of my route is off-road through grass and over a beach-sand like trail that gives me a real workout. Next, I want to really build muscle and strength with weights and various calisthenics. For now, I’m happy to have come so far with my overall conditioning and weight. My eating habits are light years ahead of where I was 20 years ago and my immune system is definitely showing signs of recovery. No more cigars either – I gave them up this summer.

And how am I feeling emotionally? Better than ever and I’m just getting in to the zone. 2006 will be about getting in the zone and staying in the zone in all areas. I am accelerating towards a rich life while recognizing an already rich life in the here and now.

Speaking of which, I’ve got some right now to go take care of. TBD.

My friend Eric and I love to swap stories about Florida drivers and we’ve swapped some tales that seem hard to believe. Just yesterday my appreciation for how bad the drivers are here in Florida was renewed once more. For those of you not familiar with the area let me just clarify that I’m not referring to our infamous ‘cotton tips,’ the old age drivers that go 25 in a 55 zone. I find those incidents to be very rare. What you DO see is people of all ages, race, and sex driving ALL kinds of vehicles doing the absolutely dumbest things you’ve ever seen on the road.
So, it’s with that introduction that I give you a minor but enjoyable Florida driving aside from yesterday.

My family and I were in our truck waiting in the Toys R Us parking lot line to exit on to a major local highway when we became stuck behind a lady in her SUV. Her car was stopped and she was looking down completely absorbed in reading something (looked like a receipt from her shopping). In any event, the cars ahead of her in line had cleared out even before we had arrived behind her. So, I’ve got my, it’s Christmas be patient hat on, since you know when you’re on the road at this time of year that everyone is stressed and there’s just no point in getting bothered.

My wife Shannon and I start making jokes about how long it will be before she wakes up and goes. Another car pulls up behind us in line. Then another. Then another. It’s not like five minutes have gone by, it’s just busy. So, I’m contemplating giving the horn a polite tap just so we don’t wait until Christmas is over but then she realizes what’s going on and jets off. She gets about 20 car lengths before she’s caught up with the line. No biggie, it is not like she was really holding anyone up. Well, it starts to get more Florida like from here out. She decides at the last minute that she doesn’t want to use the exit that she’s been waiting in line to use. OK. Instead she’ll go against traffic in the parking lot where two massive lines of exiting traffic are converging on the single exit that she’s now grown disenchanted with. It’s still not quite Florida class yet. The lady then becomes frustrated by the car in front of her because *they* haven’t quite been able to pull up far enough to let her by (now that’ she’s changed her mind about her exit strategy). So, she veers around the car aggressively and leans on her horn, not a little polite beep, but a YOU MOTHER FUCKER kind of beep, before speeding off in a rage punching the gas, and driving like a maniac. As the sound of the ladies horn is wafting off in her emissions I watch, I ponder, and Shannon and I share an incredulous look and pull up in line. There’s not much to say – we see shit like this here every day.