View from the Mountain

Sticking to the Shadows

It is human nature to want some praise for the work that you do but sometimes you accomplish more by staying in the shadows than stepping into the spotlight. While it is not written in my rules for a good life, it is there between the lines.

One rule that is in my list is leaving any organization or place where you have been better for your having been there. On the surface you might think it is easiest to do that as a leader standing in the spotlight with a title.  Sometimes it is actually far more effective to labor anonymously in the shadows.

As nice as it is to have someone publicly thank you for your efforts, you can actually get an abundance of satisfaction by just doing your job well.  There is plenty of pleasure in doing something that needs doing and no one figuring out that that you did it.

One example comes to mind easily. When I was first running Apple's federal team, we were so far under the radar, that I made up my own business cards.  We also were not a threat to anyone.  We were able to work with a lot of people in Cupertino who bought into our vision of making OS X an alternative operating system for the federal government.  We got an amazing amount of things done that made it easier to sell to the federal government and our sales were amazing.  However, we were a stealth organization.  I was in an executive briefing with Steve Jobs and he was talking to customers and turned to me and asked if we had an office in the Washington area.  Of course we did, that was where my team was based.

As our team grew exponentially and I got promoted to director, things got a little more dicey.  The second year that we were the best enterprise sales team in the world, Apple sales management decided that the best way to handle our success was to cancel the annual award for best enterprise sales team.  We had become a threat to some people who believed that Apple's best course was to be a consumer oriented computer company. 

My new title actually got me involved in a training course with senior executives.  A video presentation of mine which had customers begging for Apple and Microsoft to cooperate more became one those corporate risks that can unhinge a career.  Tim Cook loved the idea, but Avie Tevanian hated it.  Had we just kept doing it without telling people at the top, we could likely have continued on the path.

I like to tell folks that I flew too close to the sun in Cupertino and my wax wings melted.

There are lots of times in life when you sit around the table and you can accomplish unbelievable things by just being a doer without a title.  There are times when the leaders around the table will give you the latitude to do something without most people knowing what is happening until it is done.  I have never been one to do things behind folks backs but sometimes change is easier if presented as a done deal.  Getting something done which has to be done is far better than having a group paralyzed because not enough people understand what needs to be done.  I can attest to the results of that.

The best possible situation is that people trust you enough to tell you to fix the problem and call if you run into a bump in the road.  That also works great in the reverse.  One night I was having a late night email exchange with Tim Cook, Apple's current CEO. At the time he was COO and vice president of sales.  He asked me why I had not been able to get Apple federal online store up and running.  I told him exactly why.  The total exchange between the two of us was less than ten lines.  The next day I got a call and by the end of the week we had a federal online store.  It sold $12M in product the next year even though we were forbidden to advertise that it existed.

Doing a job well is its own reward. I learned that from my mother and I live by it.  Whether it is scrubbing mold off a boardwalk, taking a picture or putting the finishing touches on a big proposal, if it is worth doing, it is worth doing well even if you remain in the shadows.

I got a nice note from our company's CEO today.  No one saw it but my wife.  I will take that private note to walking across the stage at Apple and getting an award.  In today's world there is no sense in making yourself a target.

As a side note, this is post number 1400 from me on View from the Mountain. I have been writing posts here for eleven years. While I write more at my Crystal Coast Life blog, last month was probably the only time in those years that I have missed posting here.

Living In The Sales Wilderness

A job in sales is a little like this great blue heron living alone in the wild.  Your resources are the ones you can find and you are on your own pretty well all the time.  Sales people get it a little better than the heron.  There are people who say they are going to help you, but the ones that understand your situation and provide the help you really need are few and far between.

A former colleague forwarded to me a copy of a Wall Street Journal article, "Why It's So Hard to Fill Sales Jobs."  I have been selling concepts and products for a living for the last forty plus years. I have led some exceptional sales teams.  I have worked for very good sales managers and for more terrible ones than I dare remember. I have sold for companies that understood the sales process and for ones that did not have a single clue about how a sale of their products really took place.

With that background, one comment in the article struck a nerve of mine.

...few employers have realized they need a different sales pitch to attract a younger cohort

Bear with me as I explain my reaction to that comment.  First of all the whole idea of a sales pitch has been outdated for many years.  If you want someone to use your product, subscribe to your services, or even become an employee, the first step is listening to their needs and figuring out if what you have to offer is going to match what they need. If not everyone needs to move on to plan B.

The reason organizations are having a hard time getting new sales people is that the sales environment they have to offer is not very nice.  Trust me, I have been there. I still remember being vice president of sales at one company when the CEO told me that the only way to get something out of sales people was to threaten them.  I vividly remember having my team skewered by Tim Cook at a national sales conference.  The number we had not made was at the end of a five year plan and we were only in the first year of the plan and by the way, Apple had been unable to ship any product to our customers in the crucial fourth quarter.

In most sales organizations being lucky today equates with being micro-managed to death.

I can still remember my first sales manager, an ex-IBM sales guy, telling me that you have to ask for the order.  There are surprisingly few orders that I have ever personally asked for in a career spanning over forty years.  Each one of those cases was well over $1M. While I learned a lot from my first sales manager, some was a list of what not to do.  Unfortunately sales managers and companies are still doing most of the things on the "what not to do" list.

While companies mumble about creating teams for sales, they most often do not really mean it.  Fundamentally they still believe their best opportunity for success is that lone expert gunslinger who will go in and close the business.  When I first became an official sales manager in 1993, I went through a succession of managers who told me over and over that my job was to create clones of myself since I was widely recognized as a great sales person.

It only took me a year or so of micromanaging to figure out that creating clones of myself was tiring, self-defeating, and not very productive.  It was about another seven years before I got the opportunity and the power to create a sales team with the right environment, diversity and compensation plan to be so successful that people could hardly believe our results.

Diversity brings amazing benefits to a sales team. Male, female, black, white, old and young are all important building blocks for a great sales team. In those building blocks you have the opportunity to fix your own weaknesses as a leader.

Our phenomenal success was actually our undoing.  We were so unorthodox that we challenged the foundations of sales philosophy within the company.  The only solution was to get rid of us which they did but not before we more than tripled sales in Apple's toughest market.  We also did it with our hands tied behind our backs and kept doing it even after Apple took successful markets that we created away from us.

So what did we do that shook the foundations of sales? At my insistence our team got a team goal instead of individual goals.  We also got agreement that whatever sales we could drive through resellers would be credited to us just the same as ones that came direct to us.  We even got agreement that once the Apple Stores were up and running that sales we could push through them would be credited to our team.  Finally we pushed to create an individual government employee direct purchase plan. Its creation was like opening a fountain of sales. 

In our sales plan we owned the customer and worked in the customer's best interest without having to worry about financial implications to our own income.  It made doing the right thing for the customer easy.

Both the government sales through Apple stores and to individuals became so successful that Apple took them away from our team.  It did not matter.  We continued to do phenomenally well in growing Apple's federal business.

Now here is where the concept falls apart, Apple in its wisdom managed our quota to the point that we tasted very little of the financial reward that you are supposed to get if you are as successful in sales as my team was.

I even heard a high level finance person say, "Sales people do not deserve to be paid high commissions, they don't really risk anything."  Seventy percent growth was not enough for them so we were always denied the true reward of remarkable compensation for remarkable sales.

How my team continued to do the great job that they did without the reward they deserved is my secret sauce.

If you want details about the Apple story, read my book, The Pomme Company. It is a look into Apple's sales culture from someone who was there for almost twenty years.  There is no other book like it.  It is an amazing roller coaster ride of a story.

So what should a company do that wants to have an easier time hiring sales people?  You need to change the sales culture within your company.  That might mean getting rid of some good sales people because they will be reluctant to change anything which might impact their compensation.  What might be good for the company in the long run might mess up what has been good for their pockets.  It is a choice a company has to make it they are building a new sales culture.  Do you coddle those that have gotten you where you are or invest in those you are going to take you to where you need to be?

The years that I ran Apple federal sales team were a magic time for me.  I had a very professional sales team that was almost self-managing.  I spent most of my time trying to get what they needed from corporate to be successful.  Apple did not really want that much success out of the federal market and they did whatever they could to prevent it including not even letting us advertise to the federal market that our team existed to help them with Apple products.  Tim Cook also believed that sales teams within the company should compete for the same customer. In world where we were seriously outnumbered that made zero sense. He should try looking at having Apple teams fight over sales from a customer's perspective.

Sales does not have to be a dog eat dog world.  It can be an incredibly rewarding and supportive environment, but that only happens in companies that really understand how their products get sold.  They also have to create the right environments for good people to take their message to customers.

Honing a new sales pitch for new employees is a waste of time unless you change your company's sales culture.

 

The Plague of Incivility

Raymond's Gut and the clouds of summer

My first posts on the web were well before my first post here on Typepad in November 2004.  I have done thousands of posts and seen just about anything that the web can throw at me.  Still, as I continue to write, I am amazed at the hostility and incivility displayed by some people over simple things. It is hard to take when you spend a lot of your life trying to see the beauty in the world around you.

I have been writing articles for ReadWrite for almost two years.  Back in the spring after some particularly nasty comments on an article, How I Moved Away From The Mac After Leaving Apple, which was about why I no longer use a Mac exclusively, I told my editors that I was done writing about Apple because of the personal attacks that I got from a small percentage of Apple users who could not even get far enough into the article to figure out that I still use Macs along with my Windows and Linux computers.

Recently while working on another article yet to be published, I noticed that they were looking for someone to write an article, Why Is Internet Still So Slow And Expensive In The U.S.?  Since I wrote a very similar article for ReadWrite, Just How Bad Is Your Internet Connection?, last fall, I volunteered for the article and wrote it.

The article, Why Is Internet Still So Slow And Expensive In The U.S.?, was quickly published after I submitted it and it was reviewed by a couple of editors.

Nothing I wrote in the article was controversial or something unique that I had pulled out of the blue sky to support my personal opinions.  Most of what I mentioned in the article had already been mentioned in the first article and is similar to the opinions of experts with even more experience than me like Diane Crawford who wrote Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age.

One of the things you agree to in your guest author contract is to answer comments.  I try faithfully to answer comments and have tried hard to maintain a cool head even when under attack by some of the Apple faithful when I hint that I use a Windows computer alongside my Mac.

Usually, I get a final review of an article before it goes live. It did not happen this time with the Internet article but once I noticed a comment notification show up in my email, I read the article and quickly noticed that an editor had inserted a word that changed the meaning of a sentence. I sent a note and got that corrected and started working on the comments.  I take the content of the articles very seriously.

The first couple of comments were pretty simple and then someone with the Internet handle of Second Star Technologies chimed in with this comment.

Mr. Sobotta is the owner of WideOpen Networks. A Gigabit internet provider. Of course this is his opinion. It has nothing to do with need or working from home, those are bullet points for a sales presentation.

This isn't a researched article. It's a sales slick....

I responded back pretty simply.

I am not an owner of WideOpen Networks, I happen to be an employee. I happen to work from home and it is not my full time job currently. I am also an author and do lots of work on the web, some of it for other companies. I have worked from home mostly since 1989 with companies as diverse as Apple, G3 Systems, WebMail, and National Lambda Rail. People who need broadband connectivity really need it and they are usually happy to be given the option of paying for it. A fiber network can as I pointed out deliver a variety of services at lower costs. Not everyone needs high bandwidth and some people buy the equivalent of low end connectivity on a fiber network. You would find that to be the case in many places with fiber. I have the best service that Time-Warner can provide with a cable modem in my area which is a new subdivision with new copper. I rarely have good enough connectivity for a full video conference...

The guy from Second Star responded back...

My fault. VP of Marketing. Which basically means shill....

As far as I was concerned that was over the line.  On one of my own blog's I would have told him to go away and if he did not, I would have blocked him immediately or moderated each of his comments.

For anyone who is not familiar with the term shill.  Here is the definition.

an accomplice of a hawker, gambler, or swindler who acts as an enthusiastic customer to entice or encourage others

If you know anything about my history which includes everything from selling cows and balers to high technology at the highest levels of the government, you might understand how offensive it was to me to be called a "shill."  I have spent over forty years in professional sales.  I take great pride in being a salesperson who adds value to the relationship a customer builds with a company before and after purchasing a product.  I have written extensively about sales including how I think it should be done.  Many former customers continue to be friends with me.

I tried to get the editors to do something about the shill comment but apparently none of them have spent there lives in sales like me.  Certainly, none of them lost their career at Apple for standing up and making sure that a former customer was treated correctly. The story is at the end of my book, The Pomme Company.

Anyway, Dan Rowinski, one of the editors finally posted this comment.

Second Star,
Mr. Sobotta has been a long time contributor to ReadWrite and we are well aware of his current and past job history. While David is a guest author, we consider him part of our core family here at ReadWrite. This article was vetted by two editors and upholds our editorial standards. (You can see our guest author guidelines here https://docs.google.com/docume... )
In this particular article, David lays out a fairly reasonable explanation for the problems and potential solutions of fiber in the United States. Enhancing the speed and distribution of wired networks in the US is and will continue to be one of the major challenges for telecom companies and the federal government. Hence any discussion in this area is welcome and debate on the salient issues is encouraged.

We respect the experience and knowledge of David and stand by his work and opinions at ReadWrite.

Thanks,
Dan Rowinski

I appreciated a nice statement like that but the truth is that once you let someone like Second Star get away with a personal attack like calling someone a shill, he is not going to get more reasonable, he is going to be even more unreasonable.  Also, my opinion is more than "fairly reasonable," it is completely reasonable to anyone who has seriously looked at the issues.

Much to his credit, Dan posted a comment supporting my position, but certainly Second Star would have none of it and demanded to see the math behind Dan's comment.  Dan never responded.  I tried one more response about a question about rural areas.

As to rural areas, read the article, I mention the WiredRoad. It is about as rural as it gets. Danville and Wilson are not big metro areas. We don't piggyback on government subsidies. You have to be an ETC to do that.

Here is the response that I got back.

Im not reading anything that isn't 100% fact based. Present your findings here for discussion please. Barstow is as rural as it gets. What about them?

I never responded to his comment, and of course, no one else wanted to make any comments for fear of running into Second Star.  Why would someone want to get involved with a discussion controlled by someone who is completely unreasonable?  It is unfortunate that people like Second Star can use their belligerence to hijack perfectly reasonable conversations.

Second Star's claim that "most people don't need more than 5 Mbps" was backed by his very limited personal experience and "15 years in the IT business" which I take to mean that he is not smart enough to know what he does not know.

I happen to work for the most respected company in the business of helping communities decide what they need for connectivity and if they can afford it.  Our CEO and parent company have been involved in helping well over 200 communities from the Grand Caymans to British Columbia make a decision on whether or not to get involved in helping to provide their citizens with high-speed Internet connectivity.  They have been doing this since 1996.

My personal experience includes a stint working with National Lambda Rail helping to get the message about their ultra-fast research network to the federal labs of the United States Government. I was even involved at the time in delivering a presentation about the network to Karen Evans, who was at the time the federal CIO for the whole United States Government.

On top of all that with a career of nearly twenty years at Apple, I have been on the Internet longer than most people and I have used everything from a 300 baud modem to various combinations of DSL and dishes.  One of the reasons that I took my current (not full time) job at WideOpen Networks is that I believe that we as consumers deserve Internet connectivity that functions more like the Interstate highway system than the system we currently have which has almost no choice and high costs. 

Almost all people in the industry, government, and forward-looking communities believe that we need better Internet connectivity. Which is exactly what I believe. If you want to enjoy some of the planned Netflix offerings, you will need lots more connectivity than most of us have now, especially if you have more than one device. 

That we need better connectivity is not a revolutionary view. It is even baked into the government's broadband goals.  The government hopes to get us to 50Mbps by 2015.  How we get to that better Internet connectivity is where people have disagreements.

Many people and cities like, Chattanooga, Tenessee, Wilson, North Carolina, and Danville, Virginia believe the best way to bring that connectivity is through cities and areas working to deliver fiber to their citizens. It makes sense to almost everyone except cable company executives who are happy to make huge profits and deliver marginal service.

Our company is not an Internet service provider but we do work with cities and areas like the Wired Road to create and manage networks where a variety of services are available. Some services are priced to make sure many people who have avoided using the Internet can do so at a very low cost.  While our company has had no involvement with the people in Wilson, North Carolina's Greenlight project, I did interview them for the first Internet article and continue to believe that most of us would benefit from services similar to what they offer. I know that looking at what they offer, I could get much faster Internet services, similar cable, and phone services and save nearly $500 a year.  Overpaying for Internet services is very similar to the way we paid for long-distance calls before there was competition. Cable companies lobbied the North Carolina legislature to make future projects like Wilson's illegal.

On the day I wrote the Internet article, I sat in a conference call with the FCC about their latest plans for increasing broadband access and speeds in the United States.  It is one of several where I have been involved.  I feel that I am far more up to date on what is going with broadband in our country than the vast majority of people including Second Star so I stand by my qualifications to talk about the subject knowledgeably.

So how do we fix the problem of people like Second Star? It is simple.  We kick them out of the discussion as soon as they cross the line.  If you have ever been on a debate team, you know there are rules.  Certainly one of my rules is if you attack my reputation, I am not interested in arguing with you.  I am quite happy to let my career and writings on the web speak for my professionalism. If you start by calling me a name, I am done with you. It is rude and unacceptable.  Most people would not do it if they were in a room with a person so why do we accept it on the Internet?  I don't and I am not interested in arguing with people who seem to be hell-bent on shaping the dialogue to fit their twisted view of reality.

We will continue to be plagued with people like Second Star as long as we let their immature behavior take over our dialog. I seriously doubt that you can find anyone with experience in broadband that would agree with Second Star that we do not need faster connectivity. 

It is a shame that the discussion on the Internet article got hijacked since I would have welcomed a debate on the best way to get better Internet connectivity at a lower cost.  It never happened and it will not as long as we let people with no civility drive the discussions.

It is a good thing we had much more forward-looking people thinking about bringing electricity and Interstate highways to our country.  Otherwise, we might live in a very different country.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Experts and their skills are no longer needed

Our Dock On Raymond's Gut

Sometimes it seems that anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can do anything including the most difficult tasks that would never have been attempted twenty years ago.

We have commercials that say that if we pick up the latest Apple iPad gadget, we will be writing the next page in human history.  Any task is possible with a computer and Google.

Want to takes the most unbelievable pictures in the world?  Canon, Nikon, and Sony make it dead simple.  Just hand over $1,000 or so and the world will be your digital canvas.

I even saw a commercial that promised that anyone can build a website.  That is certainly true.  Just about anyone can also build a house.  However what you get from a skilled builder will look a little different than what you get from a chain saw carpenter or with a website in a kit.

We live in a really strange world.  On the one hand everyone seems to be trending towards being experts in everything.  On the other hand for those things which cannot be achieved by the iPad or a Google search there is an expectation that those who have taken the time to learn how to do those things or who might be really good at what they do in their jobs should share their knowledge and skills for free.

This is especially the case if you are a writer. I was amazed during the early winter when our local outlet for the Raleigh News & Observer would sell out of the Sunday edition.  I finally asked the clerk what was happening, and it turns out people were coming in and buying five or six copies of the paper just for the coupons.  That means the coupons were worth more than the content.

As a writer that is hard to take, but understandable. With the death of the newspaper, writers are a dime a dozen these days.  On top of that many of us including the newspapers have given some of our content away for free for years in the hopes that some sort of Google model will work for us.  Of course Google is bigger and better at it than the rest of us so we struggle on and sell a few articles or books while continuing to churn out free content.  Writers only find success by drilling down and knowing a subject better than other writers like I recently did in my articles, It’s Time To Give Up On Swiping Credit Cards, and We Worry About Technology Even In Paradise.  It is a fiercely competitive world.

It works the same way on photos.  Rarely a month passes by when someone does not ask if they can use one of my images for free.  If it is for a non-profit or a person who wants one for their desktop background, I always oblige.  However, if it is someone who is going to put my image in their magazine from which they will make money, I expect a little money.  I sold prints for years until it became hard to justify an expensive printer and inks much less the time when you are only going to get $20 for most prints.  I sold some huge prints for only $100.  However, the printer they came from took eight ink cartridges. Each cartridge cost $80.  Usually as soon as you ask a publication for a few dollars, they disappear because the world is awash in free content.

I recently spent a lot of time putting together the best 100 photos that I took in 2013.  I published them in a $2.99 Kindle book, 100 Pictures, 1000 Words, A Crystal Coast Year.  The $2.99 price is only about 75 cents more than that Raleigh paper and unfortunately I do not have grocery coupons.  I did set up a site where you can buy the pictures for your own use for 99 cents.  A print shop can use one for a print for $9.99 and a commercial book publisher has to pay $25.  I have also created a site where I will put occasional free photos.

But in a world filled with expert photographers, I am not surprised that the book has only sold in limited numbers.  I did it more for my own satisfaction that for the money.  I knew upfront that if you have a Nikon around your neck why would you want one of my photos?  Surely your better, more expensive camera takes better pictures than my $400 one.

I recently read a tongue and cheek article about a photographer running an ad looking for people who do their jobs for free. He was obviously tired of being called by people who wanted to use his photos for free for all the great exposure they can provide him.

I share many photos on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Pinterest and Google+.  However, in a world overwhelmed with free content, some of which is mine, why pay for my other photos at 99 cents a piece even if they are great when you can see lots of almost as good or maybe even better photos for free.  I do take very good photos and many of them are from places that only a limited number of people will go but I make no pretension about making my living from photos. I am amazed that there are still photographers out there who can make a living from their craft.

Last fall I read an article about why IT people should never repair friends computers for free.  The article, Ten Reasons Not To Fix Computers For Free, is a good read.

One of his reasons is "People don’t value things that are free."  I have seen that myself.  When I was working in real estate, I was amazed at how unappreciative some people were with the time we spent trying to help them find new homes.  Most real estate agents work for commission only so if they spend six days showing you homes and you do not buy anything, they end up losing money since they are paying to be real estate agents and covering all of their own expenses.  Because real estate agents do not charge for their time, it is not valued.

I have a great working relationship with a couple of clients in my consulting business.  They tell me what they want done and it is sometimes with photos.  I give them some prices and options.  They decide what they want me to do.  I deliver what they picked and they write me a check. Everyone ends up happy.  I get paid for my work and they get the photos that they want and you can be sure that I have never given them one where the picture isn't level like I see so often in real estate listings.

Working with a good client is much easier than when you are writing an article. Sometimes you spend hours on an article, submit it, get a request for revisions, do the revisions and they still end up deciding not to publish the article.  That is how some of my free content gets done.  Often when you have worked on a story for so long, you do not want to fight the battle again with another set of editors so it is easier to start on something new.

It is the reality in the world where we live.  Content may be king but it has a shaky valuation. In a world where everyone has an amazing array of information available to them, why is my knowledge worth anything to anyone?

I have spent much of my life as a sales person and my earnings have been directly tied to my ability to assess customers' needs and suggest solutions that make sense for them.  I have been very successful at sales and on February 28, my friend, Stephen, who is also a very good sales person sent me a WSJ blog article about how big data and analyzing it will "remove the black art from sales." All I have to say is good luck with that.  The world still needs some Stephens.

I guess CISCO has a program that predicts when companies will buy their next router.  I am happy they can do that but there will always be sales situations that are best managed by a good human sales person.  It is a little like me saying that I have a computer program, plenty of sensors and data which will actually predict who is going to catch the first keeper drum out of the surf at the Point this season. I am thinking Dr. Bogus who does measure the water temperature but also spends a lot of time actually fishing will do a lot better job predicting at least when the fish will start biting than any computer.  I think humans still have the upper hand in some situations.  I am predicting that we will continue to hold an advantage because we can be present, use all the tools that God gave us and tap into our years of experience.

There is still room for expertise in our strangely tilted world, it just requires more work and pays less.  Maybe we will get to a point where we value good content as much as we value a ticket to a football game or grocery coupons.  It is a little sad that we gotten to a point in the world where our senses are so overwhelmed that we have a hard time valuing things that will last like a good book or a nice picture.  I am a little bit old school, I still have a couple of boxes of favorite magazines and even some newspaper clippings that I have hauled around with me.  I miss the great newspaper writers, the sometimes stunning covers of Life Magazine and National Geographic. I also enjoy writing enough that I try to rescue and update some of my old free articles that provide useful information.

I still value my own talents and enjoy sharing my pictures and articles with people who seem to appreciate what I write even if it is free.  I can tell you more about what is going on in the picture of our dock at the top of the post than any computer and most of folks reading this article.  There is value in being present and actually on top of a situation. However, most times it will not buy you a cup of coffee.

Just for the record, I have never charged a friend to help them fix their computer.  The only time I have ever turned down a friend with a computer problem is when I really did not have the time or thought I was the wrong person for their problem.  Also most of my close friends have prints of mine hanging on their walls. They came from my big printer and they were all free.  Our former church in Roanoke has more than a few of those prints and I feel blessed they were able to use them in such a wonderful setting.

Life is certainly not about getting money for everything you do. It would be a very miserable life if we could not give freely of our talents. I have friends who are very generous in helping me and I try to be thankful for their help and help them in return.  However we have to be careful in today's world. With all the free stuff we do provide, there is a line that we need to draw in the sand or eventually all of us but the politicians will be working for nothing.

Why Are There So Many Answers?

Not many of us would argue that the world is getting less complex.  There are nights that I have a challenge sleeping.  Those nights are most often times when my mind refuses to stop when my head reaches the pillow.  I have solved problems during the night in a fitful state of almost sleep, but I usually have better luck finding answers after a full night of rest.

Like many who spend their time at keyboards, I have grown accustomed to asking Google questions that I would like solved.  Sometimes I get useful answers especially to technical problems. The world is full of a lot of very bright technical people and most of them are willing to share their knowledge in the hopes you can take our accumulated knowledge a little further.

Unfortunately we also have more people than I care to count who are willing to declare themselves experts on everything with little or no true knowledge of the problems.  Some of these folks will take a position on something which they obviously do not really understand.  In fact the less they understand something, the harder they become to engage in any meaningful dialogue.

I long ago learned that the best way to figure out something was to listen to someone who knows more than me.  Failing that, I have always resorted to reading something.  Forty years ago, I read books to learn how to do something that I did not understand.  When I was at Apple, I had the benefit of being able to hire smart people to help me figure out markets where I had no expertise.  

In our web obessed world of today there is so much information out there that it is sometimes scary. Some of it is even pretty good if you can wade through it but just look at the number of results you get the next time you do a Google search for something.

The challenge is when you need to go beyond web advice and the top four or five search results.  I think we have fewer real experts and more people who are willing to pretend to be experts.  The company where I work helps communities build fiber networks for high speed Internet connectivity. Our parent company has been doing this longer than anyone in the business.  

I recently saw a newsletter for a competitor which claimed that they serve "hundreds of city, county, and regional clients." Turns out their "hundreds" are more likely to be "tens" and they really have no expertise in certain areas.  Still they get some business because lowest bid often wins in the government world and far too often our leaders are willing to accept any answer to a problem instead of working to get the right answer. Often the experts they turn to are half-baked ones who care more about the fees they receive than the advice they give or the results of the solutions they provide.

I still remember a software project that a company I worked for completed for the military.  We were one of over twenty companies delivering training projects at the same time. We were also the only company out of the group which actually delivered a project that worked.  As far as I could tell, all the other companies got paid even though their projects never worked.  They probably added the failed projects to their advertising anyway.

Perhaps we are in this situation because our world is so complex that it is hard to create real experts, but I do not really buy into that.  I think most real experts just have their heads down and their noses to the grindstone.  We live in such a strange world.  We shower money on athletes and CEOs. Some of those folks cannot even find their way out of limo. Yet we devalue learning and knowledge to the point that everyone thinks that information should be free.  Strangely the same folks think there should be no consequences to the shoddy performance of a job.

Learning and information has a cost in time and money. The old saying is that you get what you pay for and I think it is true.  If you do not pay anything, what you get is probably not worth much. If you pay people a minimum wage and expect them to know everything and serve your customers well, you are going to be disappointed.

People also assume the Internet can provide all the information they need for free so why should they have to pay someone for their information.  I guess most of the people trusting the free information on the Internet have never read about companies manipulating their web reputations with false paid reviews. Companies like Google have figured out how to make money out of free, but most of the world has not mastered that.

I have never regreted paying for a book that taught me something or hiring a real expert to help me fix a problem or come up with a plan for a solution. There have been plenty of times that I wanted to hire an expert and I just could not find one to hire.

I have now done several books for the Kindle, but when I started doing one focused on images, I bought some very inexpensive books that in theory told me what to do.  The books did have some answers but did not have all the answers that I needed and when I went searching on the Internet for more information,  I found lots of conflicting answers but few if any that had any real value.

I ended up solving the challenges mostly on my own.  It took a lot of time.  I would have loved to have paid someone fifty dollars to give me the right answers which I know would have taken less than hour, but I never found that person.  Hiring instant expertise is something we have yet to master, but we can get next day delivery of almost anything.

If I had wanted to find a recipe or how to tie a special fishing knot, I probably could have found some relatively good information on the web but it is likely I would have still ended up doing some tests on my own to make sure I got what I wanted.  Getting knowledge to where it needs to be when it needs to be there is not an easy challenge to solve, but encouraging a minimum wage workforce to think they have all the answers when they do not will not make solving this lack of real expertise any easier.

A lot of this comes from companies who do not take the time to train people on the products that they are selling or companies who are unwilling to pay their people a decent wage.  Then there are those companies who are even worse.  They do not test the products they are selling and expect their customers to figure it out for themselves.  If there is a problem, good luck getting any real help. These companies hide behind unintelligible phone trees and depend on frustration making you hang up as you are transferred from one person who supposedly can solve your problem to another who promises help but never delivers.  I have spent hours doing this with Time-Warner cable.

I truly hope that the overabundance of answers and pseudo experts are not the long term trends that I fear.  There is certainly no shortage of people out there with answers.  The problem is that their answers never solve the questions we are asking or the problems that we bring to them.

Unfortunately today's fake experts and the people employing them are not willing to take the time to understand that.  Employees have little incentive to gain any real knowledge. The companies they often work for are too cheap to really train anyone or pay for training to teach people how to actually think and solve problems they have never seen.  Without real thinking skills, they fall back on denying the plausibility of the problem.

Of course an education system focused on standardized testing instead of teaching critical thinking skills is a root cause of this, but that is another story.