Company Sizes

A discussion, this week, about the sizes and lifecycles of companies. With someone who had a vested interest in the subject (being the MD of a growing small company), but believed that all large companies were essentially doomed to die.

An interesting discussion though- starting as it did with something that looked suspiciously like the Gartner hype cycle, with small companies growing rapidly at the start of the graph, and larger ones down the back of the curve, desperately trying to recapture the spirit and entrepreneurship that drove them when they were smaller. He also cited Racal as the only British example of a large company that got it right.

But wait - trying to capture the spirit yadda sounds suspiciously similar to what innovations managers are trying to do. Creating subcompanies, building fast-response groups, developing rapidly into new markets - all things you'd expect to see in a set of startups. And all needing a similar set of skills. Which I've known for a while, but I'vI haven't yet thought hard about what the real differences between these two situations are. So.

Small	Big
Funding - from investors - risk in early years of outgrowing cash supply	Funding - from PV or customer programs. Risk of outgrowing budgetholders goodwill ("funding valley of death")
Resources - whatever you can acquire, plus anything provided by small business schemes. Usually enthusiastic, usually skilled, unlikely to cover very wide range	Resources - whatever you have, plus whatever you can buy in. Variable levels of enthusiasm and experience, range might be wide, but might not if the company has overspecialised
Politics - external, often benign, sometimes positive; company is often image-sensitive	Politics - external plus internal, rarely benign

Might be good, might not: online volunteering

I occasionally check in at IT 4 Communities, but I haven't really found anything I can help with yet. I did just fall over the UN Volunteer Program though. It looks surprisingly organised. I'll see if anything comes of it.

Smart Cities

Like many people, I often wonder how I can best be useful to society. Not all the time of course (that would either make me a saint, deluded or both), but I do take the time sometimes to look at what I do and ask myself whether it's making a difference (the answer, by the way, is yes - in very small ways as befits my very small footprint on the planet, but a hopeful, little-by-little 'yes').

I think sometimes about how societies form and break, and about how we cynical noughties are ever going to repair the societal damage that occured in Mrs Thatcher's 80s. I look around, and see communities of two or three houses, three or four flats in a block instead of the villages and areas that used to keep an eye out for each other, and I wonder where the modern equivalent is (possible answer: activity based, work, online), and what it would take for people to start connecting again.

There are schemes out there, but they too have the stamp of the authoritarian, wait-for-permission society in which we've found ourselves. One of these is The Big Lunch - a day held to meet and get to know the neighbours in your street. I blinked and missed it - and presumably there isn't another organised "meet your neighbours day" for another year now. Another, and yet again controlled from above, is the Smart Cities initiatives. Or rather, there are several Smart Cities initiatives; the EU, IBM, various US cities. The projections are pretty staggering: IBM estimates that, by 2050, 70% of the world's (9 billion) population will live in cities. That's a) quite a lot of people per city, and b) one heck of a chance to improve how those people live - and specifically, to improve how they use and share resources. Interestingly, from reading the reports, it appears that right now the most positive actions people can take are to insulate their lofts (if they have them, given that many cities contain apartment buildings) and to go down the pub when there's a big sporting event on (thus removing several dozen televisions from the total energy consumed). But there will be much more to do than this, and optimisation and information using technology will definitely be playing its part.

Elsewhere is a quote that cities account for 2% of the world's geography. That seems quite a lot of geography, given how much of it there is. So I had a look at said geography in the hope of getting a finger-in-the-air estimate of city population densities. So, assuming that they meant the usable geography (i.e. land), ignoring Antarctica and using WikiAnswers, I make that 134987000 square km to play with, of which 2% is 2699740 square km. And 6398500000 people now - so at 70% of current population, that would be 4478950000 people to fit into the cities, 1659 people per square km, or 600 square metres each. Which, allowing for roads, offices, apartment blocks, hospitals, schools etc is still quite a decent acreage. That shrinks a bit when we use the estimate of 9.7 billion total population in 2050 (and sheesh, those Europe percentage figures are scary) - at 6.79 billion people in cities, that gives 2515 per square km, or about 400 square metres each, which all-told suddenly doesn't seem like quite as much space anymore. And equally suddenly, what looked like a cute idea to make cities a bit more energy-efficient starts to look like a climate-change-sized oncoming train. We lost the tipping-point (the time at which positive action would have made a big difference) on climate change because nobody in power was listening. Maybe, just maybe, they've learnt their lesson and are starting to prepare early this time.

Ah, perception

Dealing with difficult people, part one. I believe in people. I believe that the prime role of a manager is to create the environment in which the people that work with them (note: with, not for) can concentrate on their job. In practice, this means providing tools, training, encouragement and psychological safety that anything untoward that's heading for them will be stopped at a level above them. This may sound naive - and in part, it's deliberately naive, in that although I know about the monsters that lurk out there in office world, I don't want my people exposed to them any more than they need to develop a basic toolkit to deal with them. And mostly, this works (with engineers it does, anyway) - I have watched my people grow and become in many ways better than me, and I've been proud of every single one of them. Yep, even the one that tried to get me sacked. But it's difficult to keep taking the knocks sometimes.

This week, I volunteered at W-Tech: the recruitment and career development fair for women in IT. I've stopped trying to get a new job for the moment myself (it's not the right time out there, and it's been quite a long journey to work out what exactly I want to be next), so it was quite good fun to kick back, relax, listen to the talks and try to connect as many women as I could to the chances of getting somewhere better than their current job - or in the case of far too many good people at the moment - of getting somewhere that won't mistreat them post-redundancy. Which is probably a whole post in its own right.

I go to a lot of women in technology events - the WIT, the Girl Geeks etc., so I'm not unused to the kind of sensible work advice that was given out at the fair. But it was still quite an eye-opener, from just why men are so different in the office (I've fought it for years, but even I have to admit that the 9-week change in foetal brain chemistry just can't be ignored any more) to what the differences between relationship-based and meritocracy-based office politics are. It would be no surprise to anyone except me to find that I've been using a meritocracy-based approach in a relationship-based system. I hope the advice from these talks will help me a little, and I'll be (slowly) publishing my notes in the hope that it might help other people (both male and female) too. But the juiciest piece of advice came from one of the evening speakers - a very sane, sensible director - "if you're using your Blackberry whilst exercising a horse, be sure to get your balance right".

On being a geek

I went to a geeky event this weekend. It was fun, but it's left me in a reflective mood. It's one of those scales-from-the-eyes moments. I know that I'm geeky. But I also know now that that's not such a good thing.

The problem, I think, is intelligence. For too long, I've bought the popular (and blue-collar) line that to be seen as being geeky is to be seen as being bright. I'm wrong.

As always, it took two events. One, me upsetting one of the other girls by getting over-passionate about an image processing technique, then not being able to explain why to her as I apologised the next morning. And listening to an old fart (there's nothing wrong with being old; it's the fart part that I had problems with) rattle on around midnight about some subject that I knew he was right about but desperately wanted to tell him to shut the f up. I heard him, I agreed with him, but something about his delivery just made me want to shove in some earplugs and pretend I wasn't there. Which was a deeply uncharitable reaction, even for 1am at the Guardian. So I thought about why.

Being geeky is not a state of mind - it's a signal. It says "I believe you should hear my thoughts and enthusiasm about this technology". Like prayer, and religion, it assumes an interaction from the listener, an acknowledgement of involvement regardless of the listener's state or status. And that's not really fair. Unless the person you're talking to is also a geek, and one interested in the same things that you are. But I'm also driven by a fear - that if I think about something and don't say what I think, I'll lose those thoughts and they'll have no validity without a listener.

I need to work on this. It's not going to be easy. I need to gauge who I am talking to, to test and read their responses. I need to manage my enthusiasm, to find other ways of recording and testing my thoughts (like carrying around an ipod or notebook everywhere with me).

I also need to think carefully about the value of my thoughts - especially following an honest conversation with Hwsgo about just how bright/ capable I am.

Sometimes there are no winners...

Today, things started to unravel for some of the people who have made my life difficult for the last few years (which can be a bit of an occupational hazard for someone doing the new and different). At the height of the trouble, I just wanted to be believed, for someone with enough authority to see and recognise what was going on. But now, as it starts to happen, I just feel a bit sad. I've lost, and I've won in all this: had a difficult 2 years followed by a terrible 5 months, but found a strength and a perspective on life, and dare I possibly say even a wisdom that I didn't realise was possible. The others have both won and lost: they've won a great deal over the past couple of years, but are starting to lose the things they've won, with only the faint hope that wisdom, perspective and strength might eventually come from that loss.

It takes a lot of courage to reach down into yourself and face exactly who you are with neither praise nor prejudice. And it takes some very special people to stand by you because of who you are, not what you may or may not have done. To my one reader, who has stuck with me throughout this terrible time, I say thank you. And there are still 6 beers left in the cupboard.

Don't neglect the simple things

A lot of innovation is about showmanship. It's not enough to have a great idea and develop it, to understand how it fits into the world and how to make money from it: you have to sell it. And one of the easiest ways to sell something is with simple, pretty demonstrations. If they can see it and play with it, then people (and by this I mean the people with the real money) are more likely to buy into it. And that includes innovations groups too: doing great things will not be as crucial to survival sometimes as being seen to do small but visible things. So today I did some small things, like linking all our company webmasters together. And a lot of people are happier for it.