Vyer Blog

Taglines and cant

When I followed the advice of several marketing gurus to create a tagline, I really crafted it carefully. It read:

Vyer, LLC helps its clients realize valuable business opportunities through innovative and pragmatic use of information technology.

The feedback is in, and here's what it amounts to:

Your tagline sucks.

Now, when I review taglines, pitches, or whatever, I ask the question: as opposed to what? So here are the answers as far as my soon-to-be-abandoned tagline is concerned: realized as opposed to "identified" or "imagined;" valuable as opposed to "marginal," or "incidental"; business as opposed to "technical" or "geek candy"; opportunities as opposed to "systems" (I don't build those); innovative as opposed to "obvious" and "conventional"; " pragmatic as opposed to "easy to imagine, hard to do."

Still, I agree: the tagline sucks.

Prospectively sizing up software complexity

If you study the objects in your everyday life, you'll realize that most of them are incredibly complex. Something as simple as paper requires a capital-intensive process industry with razor-thin margins and technology that exceeds any one person's ability to master.

It's generally understood that for example a house requires a significant collection of specialists to be built right. There's scarcely an object around that is made from scratch by one person, or even a group of people with the same skills. Everything requires close coordination of diverse specialists.

This is only barely catching on in software development. The roles of a software development team are ad hoc at best, and most organizations do a terrible job of establishing ways to coordinate their efforts.

Accepting less from the best

The difference in productivity between a pretty good and an excellent professional is counter-intuitive to the point of being astonishing. This is the stuff of research - Frederick Brooks's book The Mythical Man-Month stipulates that the best software engineer is an order of magnitude more productive than one who is average. The implication is that software development teams should be organized like surgical teams, where the lead engineer (the surgeon) is heavily leveraged with support staff.

Most consulting firms aren't built to take advantage of the productivity of their best people. Three typical manifestations:

- A variation on Peter's Principle in which the best performers must advance to sales or managerial positions in order to get pay and recognition. A counterexample is Microsoft, where Steve Ballmer manages the company while Bill Gates is chief software architect and bully-at-large.

- A risk-averse culture that discourages individuals and teams from setting stretch goals that require them to make the best out of their people. And clients often play right into this by punishing even those mistakes that could have worked out as successes.

- A tendency to reward rapid career advancement over real professional growth. Consulting - in all its varieties - is a life-long craft. But style is all too often valued over substance, breeding impatience among practitiones to reach their career apex as soon as possible.

There are economic reasons for this: consulting firms pay their owners by extracting high margins at the bottom of the "pyramid" in return for promising apprentices the chance at higher financial returns if they rise to the level of becoming partners. This only works when firms grow, and growth is only one (and maybe even a lesser) measure of success for a professional services firm.

Welcome to Vyer Blog

We haven't found many business-oriented blogs yet, so maybe this is a pioneering effort.

This blog has a couple of objectives:

First, it is a journal of the lessons learned from actual business experience, as close to the action as possible. In order to preserve client confidentiality, these lessons are phrased in general terms - but this also should make them more universally relevant and interesting.

Second, it is a way to broaden the discourse that forms the basis for a consulting practice. In practical terms, it means that we want people to comment, write to us, link to this page, and ask us to link to theirs. More fundamentally, it means that we want to learn from others, and allow others to learn from us.

Third, it should allow potential clients, partners, and others to understand more fully what Vyer, LLC is all about. The entries are examples not just of what we do, but how we think, what our values are, and perhaps most importantly what bothers us.

Structure and patterns will emerge as this blog unfolds. We hope you'll stay with us.