isabel wang

Einstein's five houses vs Kevin's five servers

I was reading The Houdini Solution; the last chapter ends with Einstein's Puzzle. Kevin says it can only be solved by 2% of the world's population, but this website claims that the average time to solve it is about an hour.

In the riddle, there are 5 houses of 5 different colors with owners of 5 different nationalities. Each owns a different kind of pet, prefers a different kind of drink and smokes a different brand of cigar. It took at least two hours before I figured out who owns the fish.

On the other hand, I came up with the answer to Kevin's version of the puzzle in 5 minutes. All it took was writing all possible values for each variable in 5 columns and crossing out options as I read the list of clues.

I've always had more admiration for fast thinkers who can dream up creative solutions on the fly, and less patience for methodical people who are obsessed with developing procedures. Now I see the value of having reproducible processes.

Who would have thought?

I came across this ancient Washington Post ad on Flickr. I had never imagined 1920s businessmen having Chinese food for lunch. 

Image from rockcreek's Flickr stream

Out of curiosity I looked up "1920s Chinese restaurant" and found the Google Books' preview for China to Chinatown: Chinese Food in the West:

"The Los Angeles City Directory for 1924 listed 28 Chinese restaurants. The telephone directories for the city of Philadelphia for 1920 included 8 Chinese restaurants... In 1929, when the Chinese and Japanese numbered only 2.3% of California's population, they served 4.3% of all restaurant meals consumed."

The author goes on to mention Forbidden City, a San Francisco night club with a Chinese chorus line, and New Shanghai Terrace Bowl, a restaurant that solicited non-Chinese customers by handing out coupons in department stores.

But neither example is as intriguing as the Republic Cafe, a non-Asian-sounding venue that advertised Asian food to a non-Asian audience. Somehow I've always thought of DC as a less culinarily adventurous place than California or New York, but apparently that's not true!

Help them help you

There's an interesting article in this week's New York Times Magazine about Kiva, a microfinance non-profit that matches sponsors with third-world entrepreneurs. The organization has generated so much interest among supporters that it sometimes runs out of loan-seekers to give money to.

Kiva's lenders get regular updates from the businesses they sponsor; 99.84% do well enough to repay their loans. How awesome would it feel to know that you contributed to such a track record?

The Kiva story reminded me of two related experiences I've had in the non-profit world:

1. A local charity acknowledged my contribution to its Feline Fund with a form letter about its rescue of a... Rottweiler. Over the holidays, it sent out a direct mail solicitation featuring fictitious animals that have never come through its shelter.

The organization's management laments that given their limited budget, it's tough to find funding for systems and processes that improve the level of accountability they provide. The question is, can they (and the countless other traditional charities in their shoes) compete against Kiva-like upstarts without modernizing their operations?

2. Last Friday another organization emailed me with the good news that they've managed to increase the value of my two donations by more than 100x. They plan to use the proceeds to help old-school non-profits reach beyond philanthropy-as-they-know-it by providing necessary technology tools.

I found out about Grassroots.org through DomainNameNews back in December. I was psyched to hear about their Domains for Change program. Instead of letting my unused domain names expire, it seemed like a better idea to donate them for a tax deduction.

I had picked up CheapStudios.com and ImportLiquor.com, among other domains, in GoDaddy's aftermarket fire sales for $15 or $20 each. I'd read that "generic" domains are valuable, but it turned out I had no idea how to unlock their value. They sold for $2,500 and $3,500 in this week's DomainFest live auction.

Grassroots.org says other donors have had great success as well, and more Domains for Change auctions are on the way. So if you've got domains you aren't putting to use, talk to Mary. You could end up making a surprising amount of impact on Grassroots.org, the 1,000 non-profits they serve, those organizations' constituents - and your tax return!

The core problem

1. In 2005, Basex, an analyst firm, estimated that interruptions consume 28% of a knowledge worker's day. Basex CEO Jonathan Spira lamented that whether you're at home, in your office, or working from a client site, "the likelihood of being able to complete a task without interruption is nil." He recommended "finding a place without landline phones, mobile phone reception, Wi-Fi and possibly even people."

2. According to UC Irvine professor Gloria Marks, Spira was mistaken. The good news from her 2005 paper (PDF) was, the likelihood of a task being completed without interruption is actually 42.9%! On the downside, the type of interruptions considered in Basex's report (incoming phone calls, emails, etc) represents only 52% total interruptions observed in her study. Workers are almost equally likely (48%) to self-interrupt by switching between tasks.

3. If we roughly assume that internal and external interruptions are equally disruptive, a worker is left with just 46.2% of his day for productive work.

(Marks' study showed that on average, workers take 22 minutes to get back to the task at hand after being interrupted by someone else, versus 29 minutes after switching tasks on their own. In addition, only 47.6% of self-interrupted tasks are resumed on the same day, versus 53.3% after external interruptions. So while workers experience slightly fewer incidences of self-interruption, they are more damaging on a per unit basis than external interruptions.)

4. So multiple monitors might be a must-have for anyone who wants to get anything done. Lifehacker reported a couple of years ago that having two monitors increases the rate of task completion by 20%-30%. Maybe the additional display space reduces attention-shifting frequency? I definitely tend to leave half-read/half-written documents all over different windows and browser tabs. If I could see everything all at once, would I be more likely to finish what I started? Probably.

5. So I was telling Dmitri that maybe the real message behind this chart isn't his software's ability to do more. Instead, it prevents self-interruption by corralling the user's attention. Maybe that's why customers of Salesforce and Zoho, among others, have asked for Relenta-like email/CRM consolidation under the same interface? And maybe it wasn't just marketing-speak when Dmitri insisted that not only does he eat his own dog food, he wouldn't have any free time ever without Relenta.

6. I feel like I understand marketing so much better after reading It's Not Luck. Everyone talks about focusing on benefits vs features, but the book goes farther in pointing out that benefits only matter if they address customers' "core problems". Nobody wants CRM software as much they want more free time, so CRM apps are valuable only to the extent that they help users get more done (and hopefully close more deals) in less time. It sounds obvious, but I don't think I've ever thought of it that way before.

Courtastic is right!

Would you buy DialUpISP.com (the domain name, with no customers/equipment/etc attached) for $5K? That was its owner's asking price at yesterday's DomainFest auction (spotted via DomainNameNews). No takers.

Still, if you think *nobody* uses dialup any more, you'd be wrong. The US District Court does!. According to the Washington City Paper, jurors get free dialup access while they wait to be called! How awesome is that? The service (also no takers) will be replaced with wifi in the spring though.

Kind of ironic

I listed a bunch of old books on Amazon Marketplace. I like it better than eBay: there are no upfront costs, and all you have to do is set your price. No worrying about choosing the right auction format/duration/starting price, no wondering whether you should pay for upgrades to make the listing stand out...

I like the instant results, too: 7 books were sold in as many hours. While I was dropping them off at the post office, the branch manager commented that I must do a lot of business on eBay. She had no idea you can sell stuff on Amazon. At the other end, people will think the books' new owners bought them on eBay, too, thanks to the eBay logo on the postage labels I bought through PayPal.

Amazon does ask sellers to "prominently label package with the message, Your Amazon.com Marketplace Order". It also recommends looking up each buyer's 9 digit zip code; "they'll certainly appreciate you taking the extra minute". And don't forget your return address. And use metered postage!

In contrast, eBay/PayPal replaces all of these instructions (as well as Amazon's page of links to shipping providers) with an auto-generated printout - and looks popular even when Amazon's getting the business.

"Let's not sell the physical iron...."

I stayed up until 3am to finish reading It's Not Luck, a manufacturing thriller in which a fast-thinking manager races against the clock to save three ailing companies from disaster. Against all odds, he comes up with one miraculous solution after another for near-instant turnarounds. And he doesn't even wear a cape.

The third and final story about Pressure-Steam, Inc sounded oddly familiar - even though I don't even know what pressure steam is. Our hero asks his VP Sales what it takes to increase business. The answer, as expected, is to reduce prices. The boss nods in agreement. The economy is tough and prospects are under a lot of financial pressure. What else can we do to help them out?

The VP Sales doesn't have quite as much empathy for his customers. Those weasels! "If we listen to them, they'll try to put all their financial burden on us. You know that some of our clients want us to give them spare parts on consignment. Can you imagine such guts?"

But the boss seems curious rather than outraged, so he jokes that maybe the company should offer all equipment on consignment? As a matter of fact, if we want to be really popular... "Give them everything. The best would be if we own and run the customer's need for pressure steam for him. This is ridiculous!"

But it's not. In the end, the company is saved by "selling not the physical iron but the real thing that the client wants - where he wants it, when he needs it, in the amount that he needs".

It's Not Luck is the second in a series of Theory of Constraints books by Eliyahu Goldratt. I heard about them from Dmitri, who found out about them through Vladimir. They're a fun read - especially if you work at or do business with 3Tera or Amazon Web Services :)