Blogging for $35 billion – Expensive Tankers

So you lose a $35 billion deal to a competitor that you have been keeping away from your major customer for years. What do you do?

Well if you are Boeing, the customer is the US Government (Airforce), the competitor is Airbus and the product is refueling tankers, then you start a blog.

and launch an advertising campaign.

and protest the tender process.

While Boeing can depend on getting some support from local Americans that want the local provider versus the “French” Airbus, in reality the situation is a lot more nuanced. Both competitors are really global companies now – Boeing has outsourced much of its manufacturing to Asia, while Airbus will set up manufacturing in the USA for this deal.

Boeing are risking a lot by officially protesting this decision. If they lose then their reputation is damaged, and if they win then the buyers and users will forever remember that they are getting the second pick. There’s a smell of sour grapes to the whole affair, but perhaps Boeing is being smart by letting the US Government buyers know that they will make it tough for anyone that chooses a foreign competitor.

The comments on the blog are interesting – ranging from the barely articulate to the surprisingly informed.  Here’s one:

Bill Parson (Colorado Springs):

I write to express disappointment at Boeing’s decision to protest.

1. The Air Force asked for a tanker between 300,000 and 1 million pounds gross weight.

2. The Air Force in it’s RPF stated that they would award to the contractor who “met or exceeded the requirements.”

3. The Air Force in its RFP stated this was a capabilities-based, best value competition

4. Northrop Grumman offered more for the same price.

5. Why did Boeing tout:
– Made in America
– Jobs
– Fuel Savings
– Size

None of these were AF requirements?

….

and here’s another:

Paul Jernberg (Michigan):
I too am dismayed by the recent Air Force bid competition. Again the USAF appears to be buying something bigger than what they need or started out looking for (KC30) they also changed the rules of the competition in mid-stream. I also do not understand how/why Northrop was allowed to design the program that the USAF used to make their decision. I think maybe Mr. McCain should start an investigation into wrong doing by Northrop in this case.

I have spoken with the staff of our State Senator, MR. Levin (chairman of the arms committee), they have assured me that he is watching the GAO review very closely and will step in to do what is necessary if he feels the GAO does not respond in the appropriate manner.

Do not give up the fight, this is much too important.

Paul

Kudos to Boeing for putting up the blog and allowing comments to flourish.  Dangerous, but well done to open the conversation.

There is plenty of other commentary online – including pro-Boeing Tanker War Blog run by DC insiders and lobbyists,  Wired’s Danger Room has a great post and the WSJ has an article – which mentions the history that the Boeing blogs conveniently forget to mention:

The decision sparked outrage among Boeing’s supporters in Congress, as well as criticism for Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, who led the fight to scuttle a previous deal that would have given Boeing the contract without a competition. That deal was doomed in part because it was later learned that a Boeing official had engaged in illegal employment negotiations with an Air Force procurement official who played a role in setting up the contract. 

Most of the financial commentary seems to indicate that Boeing has no chance – but like everything in DC, this is political, and anything can happen.

Presenting – bringing in the new way to old industries

The “new way” of presenting seems to be diffusing pretty rapidly through the high tech/web communities, with some industries having seen the back of death by powerpoint bullets.

There isn’t really a “new way” – it’s just that people are beginning to really care about how they present.  The “new way” is really just “anything but the old way”, and it ertainly is not lots of words, repeating logos and bullets.

But there is a long way to go. Older, larger and more corporate companies have an addiction to verbose Powerpoint to kick – they are pretty much the  same companies and industries that thank that Apple computers have no place in a corporate network. (If you have Macs then you probably have people that care about aesthetics and you have Steve Jobs fans, and he has been one of the leaders of the presentation revolution.)

Over here in Western Australia, death by Powerpoint is alive and well, and the ideas from Steve Jobs, Duarte Design, Larry Lessig, Al Gore, Presentation Zen and so on are foreign concepts. And yes – even Apple is barely making an impact.

So we decided to help.

At Kwinana Nickel Refinery, employee and contractor teams now present improvement ideas to their peers and the GM every quarter. They get a few minutes only, but  with 3 to 5 teams presenting in each session, we have to keep the time down to 3-4 minutes each.

To help the presenters quickly tell a great story, we simply work on the slides together with the presenter. We introduce simple things like dewordificaton (down to one or no words), increasing the size of photos to the entire page and increasing the number of slides so there is one point per slide.* The preparation time for each presentation wis, at worst, a few minutes in front of a screen with the presenter and a walk around the site to take photos, and at best they get it and do it all themselves.

The results so far have been amazing – really amazing. In fact we were staggered.

Each quarter we have about 40 people present from all over the plant – from shift operators to engineers, and the worst presentations are merely excellent, while the best presentations are really inspiring.

The sldies make it easy for the person up front to tell their story.

The instinct when you are in front of a big group (30-60) is to turn, look at the screen and start describing what is there. It’s a giant black hole of bullet point death.

But now the screen typically shows a giant photo, and no bullets, so the presenters just turn back to the audience to tell their great story. In the first round we usually drove the slides while the presenter told the story, in the second round almost everybody chose to drive the slides themselves with a remote clicker. We also didn’t have to do as much preparation work for the second round – people just get it.

Sadly corporate Powerpoint templates are not the best for creating inspirational slides – so we took the BHP Billiton one and made a black background version.  That template has now been used on an increasing number of presentations that have gone well beyond the refinery – so here’s hoping for a quiet revolution.

But wait
1: Dense Powerpoint slides still have their place – in small groups, at senior level whee they want lots of information quickly, and where you are trying to develop and pitch a concept. But – these are not for the screen, but for paper print outs that you can scribble on.

2: While McKinsey and other consulting firms are dependent on the Powerpoint Decks, (like these guys), for real intellectual rigor and structure nothing beats a “vertical” written document. I’ve had the pleasure of working on a few and they really are a lot tougher to do than a deck, demonstrating the crisper thinking that is required. Think about the infamous Powerpoint slides used for Iraq post-war planing – a vertical document would have exposed the gaps very quickly.

*I’d love to show some of the slides from KNR – but I cannot.  

Tracking your portfolio – Sharesight enters the market

Rod just pointed us to Sharesight – a downunder focused portfolio manager website. The website looks to be yummy goodness – simple to use and so forth.

sharesight

I was initially pretty skeptical though – what use is another portfolio manager when you can do things pretty simply yourself, or with the likes of Yahoo?

Yahoo

So first let’s look at Yahoo. They let you construct a portfolio (or as many as you like) using share data from a whole bunch of exchanges – not just Australia and NZ. Here they are:

yahoo

I set up a fake portfolio for Australia/NZ  in about 3 minutes. It lets you enter in the date that you acquired the shares, and will calculate the total return for you. You do need to remember how much you paid for it though.

yahoo
You can create your own view of your portfolio, and, of course, plonk it on your myYahoo home page – handy if you use Yahoo mail. Pretty nice – and free, but old school.

yahoo

Google‘s offering is stunning.  Not only is coverage of NZ (and Au) shares now there, but it is a much more web 2.0 application – dead simple to use.

google finance

From an investor point of view – i.e. “how are the companies that I invest in doing?” the tools are excellent – with fantastic news sitting beneath flexible and comprehensive portfolios.

Google

google finance

you can switch the portfolio view very easily – here a fundamentals view:

google finance

(fake data)

You can add in transactions (with dates) and track overall performance on you iGoogle homepage – which, unlike Yahoo!, I actually use.

It doesn’t seem to bring in historical dividends, and doesn’t track options, but watch this space – Google moves fast. Overall I’m gushing – but really this is a lot better than ladt time I saw it, and perhaps even better than my own etrade account.

Best thing – Google tracks when earnings releases arrive, and you can add them to your google calendar. How simple!

google

eTrade

eTrade (US version) lets me track stocks across 5 different countries –  NZ (or even Australia) is not one of them. eTrade shows me my portfolio, including options, with market values and different views.  Additionally they have plenty of tools to track performance, though they could be better as I don’t get credit for timing my moves in and out of the market. It’s also a US-centric website, and as such everything is based on the US tax year – which is the calendar year. Running my NZ tax this year is going to be entertaining – though I can easily export my eTrade Transactions to excel and go from there.

Sharesight

And that’s where Sharesight has a market. It’s a great way to handle working out your NZ capital gains tax on your investments in Australia and NZ.

Overall the website looks entertainingly useful and fun. Plomk in your purhcase dates and amounts, and Sharesight calculates all the splits, dividends, tax credits and the like to give you an overall portfolio return.

sharesight

Check out the Sharesight tour and video.

However – it is not all that useful yet for investors that invest in other lands – and we all should be doing so to have a diversified portfolio. There is space of course for sharesight to expand to accept transactions and calculate tax liability from other markets. So when Sharesight brings in foreign (US) stocks I’d be keen to give it a go.

But not at the current fees.

sharesight

At the current fees I’d simply sign up for a month at the ned of each tax year, work out the tax and then get out straight after. There seems to be no benefit (and certainly a cost) from using Sharesight for day to day management versus either Google or your own online share broker.

Moreover the fees are tiered, and those top tiers are brutal, and kick in at very low usefulness Who owns less than 5 shares? who doesn’t want a tax report?

I’d chop them up and make a single tier, give an annual fee option along with the monthly one and forget about charging $39 for stuff that is “coming soon”. I also believe that the appetite for fees is much lower than portrayed. I’d be going along the lines of $10 or $20 per year, $50 at a stretch.

That’s the other pain – I wish that Google and eTrade could play together so that my transactions could be imorted from eTrade to Google. Similarly Sharesight is hopefully working on one click importing of whatever the local online share trading houses export. I have only a few stocks, but for someone with s portfolio of 20-30 stocks, purchased at differnt times, it would be a real pain to enter them all in. Of course it would be even more pain to work out the tax without Sharesight.

The business case

So  overall if I had an NZ portfolio of stocks I’d probably use Sharelight next month on the 30 day free trial to calculate my tax liability – and then not sign up. I believe that the pricing structure is all wrong – a yearly fee is better, and it should be around $20.

However the market is pretty small. The number of people in New Zealand that want to manage a portfolio would be a percentage of the  number of people that go to financial sites. There were about 31000 UB’s at directbroking, 22,500 at interest.co,nz and a paltry 15,000 odd at sharechat.co.nzduring February. I’m assuming naively that The directbroking customers have some sort of tracking tool, but that it isn’t great and so a percentage of people will come over. Let’s be wildly generous and say 10% come over. That’s 3,000 people.

The sharesight blog implies there are 730,000 shareholders in NZ. That’s a bunch, but most of those would be passive, suing someone else to manage their portfolio, or dead (literally). The Sharesight service is aimed at more active and engaged traders.  So let’s say they can get 5% of the overall shareholders in NZ – that’s about 35,000 people.

ok – so from 3,000 to 30,000 people at, for me, a fair price of $20 per year – that’s $60,000 to $600,000 per year.

If you believe in the $20 per month model, then multiply that by twelve to transform that $20 per year to $20 per month, and we get $720,000 to $7.2m in annual revenue. That upside would be much much lower at that sort of pricing – so my range would be more like $60,000 to $1m per year in the first years.

That has to support 4 owners/directors/principals and an outsourced interaction/ development firm. That’s means not a lot of custard to start. Launching into a massive bear market isn’t going to help – people trade a lot less when the market is falling.

What’s the upside?

Firstly, and obviously, it’s around getting more customers – either Kiwis with overseas portfolios, or overseas folk. The second one is tough, as Google is tough to compete against. More customers means more subscription income, and this is an easily scaled business.

Secondly, with their great usability I’d sign up very quickly if they extended into being an online broker – allowing me to trade shares. that’s a different busines model, but they’d take a chunk of the market pretty quickly.

Thirdly – there’s an obvious exit to a broker or to an internet business media player.

Finally – there is something about Sharesight being a custodial system. National bank are about to start changing a staggering 1% of portfolio value for “Custody fees”. That’s a significant amount, and if Sharesight can bring people over  then it is game over. They seem to think they can, but they need to really spell it out for people in single syllable words.

Well done guys – lovely execution, a business model with potential and some good PR to kick things along.  Fix the pricing though.

Would you let Telecom design your website?

Telecom is launching something – I’m not really sure what it is, but apparently it will be some sort of Business Oriented Internet plan/ISP – where you get bundled internet access, hosting and things like Xero.

Business broadband plans will be “slightly differently priced” …

I read that as “more expensive”, but gee I’d pay anything for half decent NZ internet access – maybe even set up a business specifically to get it to my home.

and the services they encompass will also be different, she says. “There will be some guarantees about helpdesk and support.” 

Good. Indeed I do not know why more businesses don’t follow Trade Me’s example and set up 0900 (paid) customer service lines. When I want help, I want a really competent human to immediately answer the phone 24/7.

The business Internet service will register domain names for customers and offer to develop and host their websites. It will also provide managed e-mail services suitable for businesses and online backup.

Hang on –  why on earth would we want to get Telecom to provide those services?

Domain names, well maybe. But develop websites? Telecom outsourced their own unmitigated disaster of a website, so why would we not use any number of the excellent NZ design and development shops?

As for hosting, well let’s see what Xero themselves do…

Currently Xero is being hosted at Rackspace, in Houston Texas. (Follow that first link for all sorts of other fun stuff about Xero.com’s presence.)

Now – and this is really important for any Telecom employees involved in this effort – go to that Rackspace site. When you get there for the first time a popup appears – a real live person is actually offering to chat with you.

Close that down and browse the site – it is all about “fanatical support”. View the video testomonials, check out the offers and go ahead – order up a server and try them for real (or maybe just call some of their customers)

That’s the standard to aim for – fanatical customer service, 24/7. That’s what you’d need to offer for this service in order to make a difference, and sadly you’d need to do it at prices that are competitive with getting services straight from the USA.  (and that’s not a lot).

So – overall – it is good that Telecom is targeting small businesses, and I hope that they’ll stick to investing in providing reliable, speedy access to the internet and not get diverted into competing away from their core.

Mac Book Air unboxing

As with Rowan, I always have plenty of half written posts in the draft stage.

Here’s a belated MacBook Air unboxing. If you have not purchased an Apple product before, the unboxing can approach a quasi-religious experience.

The quality of the black Air box below is something else.

macbook air

Open the box to reveal the impossibly sleek Air.
macbook air

Underneath the Air are the well presented cables and so forth.

macbook air

The end result – LED lit Air screen next to HD Fluorescent lit MacBook Pro.

macbook air

Lingopal – the blog begins

Shamelessly copying once again – my Cousin Richard’s first entry on the new Lingopal blog. You can see some of the history of Lingopal… while the future of Lingopal is mobile translation.

Faux French

Pretending to be foreign in the hope of making one seem more attractive to the opposite sex is not an uncommon thing – I failed miserably as Viktor the Lithuanian poet, and Helmut the German conscientious objector, until Phillipe Jeanneau emerged, the sailor from Marseilles.

Back then I had a bare smattering of French words, but a passable accent and enough fabricated mistakes when speaking English worked wonders.

Of course they were never sustainable.

Rosie caught me out the following night when she passed me in a bar as I was talking to a friend about rugby.

Tamara (I placed bogus emphasis on the second syllable of her name) overheard me talking normally on the phone, and things really hit the skids on the night I made moves on a young lady who turned out to be a French teacher.

Much the same thing happens in Foux Da Fa Fa, an amusing parody of ’60s French songs by Flight of the Conchords, the NZ duo who recently won a Grammy award.

A tale of two friends – the impact of South African flight

This is an article written by Charl du Plessis – a buddy of mine from business school in the USA. He is an expat South African, and is writing about the flight of talent from South Africa. They still have not found equilibrium there, whereas in NZ it seems the flow just might begin to reverse. No names.

A Tale of Two Friends
The Brain Drain

Words by Charl du Plessis Pix ©

I was thinking about two old friends this week. The one is undoubtedly the smartest person I have ever known. The other, simply the most successful. Common to them are their humble roots somewhere in mid-South African society, and secondly, that the local business environment could not find a place to accommodate their phenomenal talents. The smart guy, because his best ideas are too new and threatening; and the successful guy, because his pursuit of the best available ideas took him to greener pastures. They were both in South Africa last week. The smart guy, because he lives and works here, although his contribution is grossly underrated. The successful guy jetted in for a press conference, where some local newspaper desperately tried to claim him as still one of our own.

I met Dr Success at primary school. When Chopper first introduced those bicycles with the long handlebars, our bloody knees testified to our better understanding of the word “speed wobble.” We got puppies from the same litter and gave them equally ridiculous names. The early death of his father introduced that scary concept into both our young lives, although it always remained unspoken. Our mothers shared the same dream of upward mobility when conniving to send us both to boarding school at an old, reputable institution. Here, for five years, our friendship drifted apart as we jostled either to ingratiate ourselves with kids from the affluent neighbourhoods, or to compete for their respect, in the only arenas we had to our disposal – sport and schoolwork. Trust was broken somewhere along the way as he managed both. After school, he went on to accrue a list of blue chip distinctions before settling in Australia as the heir apparent of a global company that will shape the future of our children in significant ways. We lost touch, then connected briefly on Skype for a while where I found that his country of origin was no longer an important point of reference. His kids all spoke Mandarin even as the local business press called him “Boertjie.”

Mr Smart and I met during the indignity of university initiation – running up a mountain before daybreak in a uniform T-shirt and suffering abuse, mostly verbal. He was already obnoxious then, questioning and challenging every step of the process. This would become the central theme to his studies and career. Always questioning and challenging, to the point that he would never humble himself by graduating. The regurgitation of stale ideas was just too unpalatable for him then, and that has only grown more acute through the years. He dabbled in a few things to keep alive, while reading three books a night. Someone in advertising spotted his intellect over a dinner table and offered him the chance to help shape the fortunes of local companies. Every ad agency worth mention on an advertising resume put him in the front-line at some stage or the other, including a few stints abroad. As we reconnected every few years, the scope and intensity of his insights were becoming progressively abstract and futuristic, but the cynicism that showed through when he told of good ideas lying rotting in client boardrooms was moderated by his enduring belief in the potential of people. What was clear when talking over a glass of wine last week was that he has finally been forced to change tack. He was dumbing down his ideas so that his clients could still feel that they owned them. It was too scary to open up for what the new could bring. The market was losing his talent, because it lacked the daring to engage with challenging thought.

These talented individuals are flip sides of the same phenomenon – the South African brain drain. Dr Success represents the common garden variety, where the talented have migrated to the next level of opportunity elsewhere. Mr Smart shows how thin our business strawman has grown around the top as the talented depart. The old joke where both countries’ average IQ increases when a talented South African shifts abroad has grown stale. The vacuum of talent at the top has created a lack of competition in the local market for ideas, and an enormous complacency with our own prejudice. Built on the legacy of Apartheid education, that either discouraged critical thinking, or plainly denied learning, our tolerance for disruptive intellectual horsepower has dissipated. But what an opportunity for the company that can create an environment within which no idea is too far-fetched for consideration, or where no “gut-feel” opinion goes unchallenged. Are there gutsy managers in your organization who let good ideas penetrate their comfort zones? Or is the only idea left how to afford the move abroad?

Bernard blogs – video style

I also caught up with a few folk – including Bernard, who is now blogging and vblogging at Interest.co.nz.

Here’s a sneak behind the curtain… literally.

bernard Hickey

Bernard writes the scripts himself, then records them in front of a green curtain screen.

bernard Hickey

He can even do this from home if he wants, but this was from interest.co.nz’s small and humming office in Auckland.

bernard Hickey