The inaugural Glue Conference was held this week & it was, as expected, fantastic.

When I saw Eric last November at Defrag, he told me he was starting another conference.  My one sentence response was ‘let me know how I can help’.  He promised he would.

Fast forward a few months and there I was at Glue as both a sponsor and panel moderator.  From a business perspective, it was time & money well spent, as I had the opportunity to meet & socialize with some truly amazing technologists & entrepreneurs.   The venue at the Hyatt is very well suited for conferences, and in the heart of downtown Denver, is easily accessible via taxi & light rail.

I’ll leave the deep analysis to others for now, but I do want to share with you the quote I left for Eric on the post-conference survey.  I think it speaks for itself:

"What an amazing group of people. Where else could I have had a one-on-one conversation with Bob Frankston while Mitch Kapor was standing less than 20 feet away, after having had drinks the evening before with a group that included an America’s Cup winner (hey T.A.!)."

Tags: gluecon, defrag

I was having dinner last night with a friend, who recently became Director of Operations for his company. We were discussing how he is navigating the waters, and he relayed a few of his techniques for dealing with “push-back” – that behavioral characteristic displayed by business-persons when confronted with something or someone that is challenging the status quo (usually a status quo in which they are heavily invested).

He noted that rather than argue (or even spend any time at all) with some of the more contrary people, he was simply going around them. I pointed out that while this may be effective for him right now, I would take a different approach: be blunt, and use facts as a hammer to pound down positions that aren’t supportable.

The discussion at hand centered around how to deal with people when they are threatened. If the perception of the threat comes from an honest misunderstanding, then it is imperative for everyone involved to discuss the issue(s), exposing the facts and allowing the “threats” to be dissolved in a non-hostile forum.

But it rarely is a simple misunderstanding, sadly. Most times, most people will see the new guy coming to Ruin Their World. And He Must Be Stopped. So they invent reasons to disagree with the new guy’s position, and go out of their way to “talk up” their disapproval, which usually is done in hallway conversations outside the new guy’s presence. This happens every day, and the degree to which it exists in an organization is an effective measure of its dysfunction.

I interjected that my way of dealing with people like this is very direct: I wait for an open forum where the person is attempting to support his position, essentially throwing FUD at anyone who will listen (“That won’t work”. “We’ve never done it that way.” etc.). And then I flatly, methodically lay out the facts that directly contradict the position that the person is trying to support. But I don’t attack the person, just the position. Clearly, there’s some finesse here, and I have developed great skill in this over the the past 15 years or so.

My friend countered with this post’s title: “That’s a great way to win friends and influence people”, clearly in disapproval of my technique. I replied that I’m not there to win friends or influence anybody – I’m there (very specifically) to provide my best technology-centric business advice to my client. My value lay in exactly that: I don’t bullshit and I don’t candy-coat anything.

I have nothing to gain – literally – by being obtuse, coy or “soft”. And for the record… some of my best friends on the planet are former clients or employers dating back many years. But hey, my friend is still young… and pretty damn smart, so he’ll figure it out.

Tags: consulting, business, fud

Seth Godin is riffing on customer service this morning & mentioned this from Joel, who runs Fog Creek Software. I became so engaged with what Joel is saying that I wanted to link to it here:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/customerservice.html

Good stuff, and I’m pleased to report that Freepository is already doing most of this (and from this point forward will do all of it)

Thanks, Joel (and Seth too…)

Here’s a statistic that I find very interesting: 94% of freepository’s visitors hit us with a direct URI. That is, there’s no referral. They know about freepository already, so they type in the URI.

Freepository is a unique name; while it is possible some visitors simply typed it in randomly or accidently, well.. they probably meant to type it. This means that someone told them about Freepository, and they are checking it out.

Are these simply return visitors, who having found Freepository before now type the URI directly into the browser? Half true. Exactly 50% (a long term trend) of our visitors every day are new visitors. It is reasonable to conclude that these visitors have been told about Freepository, and are typing it into their browser directly as a result.

This is very interesting and represents a very highly pre-qualified visitor base. Referrals from other websites is certainly good; referrals from other people is outstanding.

Thanks.

Tags: freepository, cvs, svn, jbminn

Last evening, DropSend announced that it was For Sale.   Ok, fair enough.  But then a few hours later, it blogged about already receiving several emails expressing interest, including "…one from Geoffrey Arrone (from Flock)".

This strikes me as a bad move.  If in fact there is interest being expressed via email, those persons communicating with DropSend probably had an expectation of confidentiality.  Since I didn’t see any of those messages (why would I have??), I can only speculate about how I would react in a similar situation.

I left a similar comment for Ryan Carson on his blog.  As I said there, I wish him well, but I suggested he reconsider the public discussion of what should be – at this point at least – confidential business discussions.

Ryan has since posted about getting picked up by TechCrunch, where Mike is also questioning the Flock disclosure.  It sure looks like Ryan is seeking publicity above substance here.   

This may backfire on Ryan.

Tags: Flock, dropsend, techcrunch, freepository