Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Blog

Best Explanation of Credit Crisis

2008-05-14T07:05:00.002-04:00

Best Explanation of Credit Crisis -- The Giant Pool of Money (mp3), from "This American Life" and NPR.

Recent Twitter Activity

2008-05-09T20:30:00.000-04:00

Recent Twitter Activity --

follow me on Twitter

New PM Blog I'm Reading

2008-05-09T20:29:00.000-04:00

New PM Blog I'm Reading -- Raven's Brain is now a regular subscription on my feedreader. Check it out.

Friday Fun - May 2

2008-05-02T07:36:00.002-04:00

Friday Fun - May 2 --

Someone had too much time on their hands - Creme That Egg! for Rube Goldberg fans - this is impressive.

Hubble images of merging galaxies, celebrating 18 years of Hubble

Variation on a meme theme - Muppet Rolling

Animal cuteness

Thought I had enough for this week, but here's some un-fun

Generalists Contribute to Success

2008-05-01T10:18:00.002-04:00

Generalists Contribute to Success -- Steve Hardy at Creative Generalist points to some research that shows...

"...there are conditions under which it actually helps to have some generalists, especially for fairly small groups, some individuals that you might think of as Jacks- or Jills-of-all-trades or multitaskers,' said Waite. 'You might actually have to pay them more and they might often do the wrong task, but if you don't have them, this whole notion of specialisation leading to greater economic productivity might actually be wrong."

Yet another reason someone should hire me.

Job Search Networking

2008-04-25T22:01:00.002-04:00

Job Search Networking -- Just wondering if any of my readers are associated with or know anyone in a number of Central New Jersey companies that are posting jobs that have caught my fancy.

United Healthcare (Princeton or Bedminster)
Sanofi-Aventis (Bridgewater)
MetLife (Somerset or Bridgewater)
Covance (Princeton)
J&J (Skillman)
Chubb Group (Warren)

If you do, and if you are willing to chat or introduce me, reach me at f p a t r i c k at g m a i l dot com (Tighten up the spacing and replace the "at" and "dot" appropriately) or at my LinkedIn Profile, on Facebook (mention my blog in a friend request), or via Twitter if you've got accounts there.

Thanks mucho.

Test, Test, Test

2008-04-24T08:15:00.002-04:00

Test, Test, Test -- For those of you designing web assets to serve a purpose, how do you know which elements of your landing page, site, or emails are contributing to success in terms of your purpose? You could do basic A/B tests of different versions, but there are often too many bits involved to get a complete picture in a reasonable amount of time.

Another alternative, more efficient and effective approach is multi-variate testing, using what some folks call "design of experiments" and others call the "Taguchi methodology.

Jonathan Mendez - he who lives to test and improve web performance - has put together an excellent 4-part series about multi-variate testing. The series consists of:

Multivariate Testing Overview

Multivariate Testing - Test Design

Multivariate Element Selection - Strategy & Tactics

Multivariate Element Test Variations

Check it out.

A few more good questions - for a PM Process

2008-04-23T07:53:00.001-04:00

A few more good questions - for a PM Process --

How long are you willing to wait to find out you're late, over budget, or not on technical specification?

What are you going to do to get back to some place that is acceptable to all the participants?

From Glen Alleman at Herding Cats: The BIG Question for any project management process

Are You Better?

2008-04-23T06:53:00.001-04:00

Are You Better? --

"Are you better at what you do than you were a month or two ago?"

...along with a few more personal development questions from Seth Godin's latest blog post: Better?

Pertinent questions.

Three Good New Cartoons

2008-04-16T13:41:00.003-04:00

Three Good New Cartoons -- From Hugh...

Creativity and Structure

Flow

Without Collaboration

Good ones, especially the last.

In the Job Market - Process and/or Project Management

2008-04-15T16:55:00.003-04:00

In the Job Market - Process and/or Project Management

Experience: Extensive domestic and international business process improvement, project and multi-project management, operations, and industrial engineering, experience; internally in internet marketing, telecommunications, food, pharmaceutical, and cosmetics industries, and as an external consultant to various manufacturing, new product development, financial services, R&D and IT/IS operations.

Strengths: Assessing, setting up and improving business processes for optimum performance of disparate resources in support of larger organizational objectives, often implemented via innovative and effective project and multi-project management processes.

Bottom line, my strengths are in helping other people leverage their operational capabilities for improved performance and organizational growth.

Attitude: Insists on driving improvements in terms of whole system performance, stepping beyond organizational silos and avoiding local optimization that threatens to sub-optimize global performance.

Ideal Position: In order to prepare for and achieve growth, every organization needs a position that can step back from the day-to-day pressures and assess the bigger process picture that spans multiple functional departments. My ideal position is one in which I help develop strategies at the organization level, and support the team in the definition and implementation of functional or process tactics necessary to achieve them.

Think of it as "a project manager for the company's strategy".

Recognizing that the "ideal" is often just that and may not fit perfectly on current organization charts, other positions that my experience would warrant would include Business Process Management and Improvement, PMO leadership, or management of a Project Management group.

Would like to keep things simple, geographically, and stay in New Jersey or NYC, but as they say, for the right position...

(Also, my wife would kill me if I didn't express an interest in a position in Hong Kong. So much for geographical simplicity.)

Full resume is available upon request or visible online at Frank Patrick's LinkedIn.com Profile.

I can be reached at f p a t r i c k at g m a i l d o t c o m (close up the spaces and replace the at and the dot).

Do you have a plan?

2008-03-26T07:20:00.002-04:00

Do you have a plan? -- From Seth Godin, Managing urgencies...

"...Add up enough urgencies and you don't get a fire, you get a career. A career putting out fires never leads to the goal you had in mind all along.

"...If you work in an urgent-only culture, the only solution is to make the right things urgent."

If you don't have time to fix the processes that result in fire-fighting, you may as well plan for a career in fire-fighting.

Tell Me How You'll Measure My Conversations

2008-03-25T06:01:00.001-04:00

Tell Me How You'll Measure My Conversations...and I'll tell you how I'll converse.

From AdWeek, Conversation Quotient talks about the difficulty in measuring the infant social media channel for ~~reaching~~ interacting with your potential customers.

It's the Relationship, Stupid

2008-03-23T06:50:00.002-04:00

It's the Relationship, Stupid --

The Break Up
by geertdesager

Concentration

2008-03-18T07:43:00.002-04:00

Concentration --

Value is in the eye of the guy who's paying

2008-03-17T08:55:00.002-04:00

Value is in the eye of the guy who's paying -- From Joe Ely, What is Value, anyway?, where he passes along a story about a shop making a value-call for the customer, that diminished that value in the customer's eyes.

I ran into a similar situation on my last visit to my Hong Kong tailor. Decided to invest in what I've been calling (to my wife's distress) "my last Navy blazer", and asked the tailor to base the initial cut on the last jacket they made me, plus some new measurements for my extra couple pounds.

Went in for the first fitting, and "huh?" How come the jacket feels short?

"But sir, that's the current style, shorter jackets."

That school boy might look OK on some little skinny 20-something, but not on my 6'2, 235 pound body. (Plus, I wanted something to last 20-30 years, worn a few times a year, not something in the current "style" that'll look dated in 5.)

Fortunately, they listened to me and made it suitably long, eventually satisfying my parameters of values.

Even for online advertising, there's always a constraint

2008-03-17T08:13:00.001-04:00

Even for online advertising, there's always a constraint -- A potential problem for online advertising, which is made possible by high-speed internet access, lies in the bottleneck constraints uncovered by higher-speed internet access. From Doc Searls: Subtractvertising

"If you�re going to be in the advertising business, either as a site or as a service that puts ads on sites, at least make sure that the damn server gets the ads on the pages.

"Now that our home is served by a Verizon FiOS connection that gives us 20Mb both upstream and down (and a big high five to Verizon for being the first in symmetry as well as speed), it�s getting easier to tell where the bottlenecks occur. And it�s usually not in the pipes. It�s in the ad servers...

"...Here�s a bet. As more people get faster connections, tolerance for time- and space-sucking advertising is going to go down.

"And eventually the advertising-pays-for-everything bubble will pop."

Something that advertising systems will need to address.

Busy vs. Productive

2008-03-17T08:05:00.001-04:00

Busy vs. Productive -- Read it.

Ramblings on NCFOM, The Wire, and Change

2008-03-16T07:57:00.004-04:00

Ramblings on NCFOM, The Wire, and Change --No Country for Old Men DVD last night (forgot how really good it was in theatre - nothing else needed, nothing felt unnecessary), The Wire finale last week -

"'Deserves' ain't got nothin' to do with it." - Snoop

And if "deserves" doesn't matter, then cause-and-effect is hard to discern from outside the mind of the perpetrator, hence difficulty solving, effecting, changing from the outside. Sheriff Bell recognizes that Anton might not be a lunatic, but still, he also feels he's "too old" a man to suss out what feels like a new world. And if you can't understand the complexity of modern urban life, it's a lot easier for police and schools to "juke the stats" than rebuild the institutional system.

Sometimes, companies too. Hence Enron, the housing bubble, and today's credit crisis.

Once again, "Tell me how you'll measure me and I'll tell you how I behave."...most of the time. And it's the rest of the time as well as the unintended consequences of the measures that can feel "lunatic" from the outside and fuck up the intended chain of cause and effect.

(Mind of a blogger...This started as a short tweet - then was headed for my Unfocused blog because I thought it was about a movie and a TV show, but stumbled on a "business" connection in the "juke the stats" sentence, so it ended up here.)

By the way, great summary of The Wire finale by Sepinwall of the Star-Ledger.

The Talent Supply Chain

2008-03-11T15:46:00.004-04:00

The Talent Supply Chain - Again from Jack Vinson, more on Ricketts' book Reaching the Goal and resource management in services - Another view on Services and Talent Management:

"Carry too many people on the bench, and the company is sluggish. The same as if you carry too much inventory. Carry too little, and the company can't respond to consumer demand."

If services rely on talent the way manufacturing relies on inventory, why not manage them in a similar manner, allowing demand to "pull" on an understood replenishment chain? I think I'm starting to get it.

(Also starting to like that word "talent" as a replacement for "resources".)

Twitter in Plain English

2008-03-10T08:42:00.004-04:00

Twitter in Plain English --

On Twitter, I'm @fpatrick. Trying to use it more, but still looking for my 140 character voice.

(via Jim McGee)

Memos are like meetings

2008-03-07T13:11:00.003-05:00

Memos are like meetings --

Bureaucrats write memoranda both because they appear to be busy when they are writing and because the memos, once written, immediately become proof that they were busy.
- Charles Peters

...kind of like the flurry of emails I sent out yesterday, justifying the past few days of work, I must admit.

Competence

2008-03-06T17:13:00.000-05:00

Competence - Playing off the Peter Principal, my old blog buddy Clarke Ching has come up with something that I predict will become a classic - The "Clarke Principle".

In most organizations most employees are not allowed to rise to the level of their competence.

Yes. A classic.

Quote of the Day: Reputation

2008-02-08T09:13:00.000-05:00

Quote of the Day: Reputation --

"The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we have of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us." - Quentin Crisp

...aka Marketing?

On MSFT and YHOO

2008-02-02T07:43:00.000-05:00

On MSFT and YHOO - A tweet on the $44B offer.