Sunday, March 21, 2021

Hanlon's Razor

You've probably heard of Occam's Razor, but have you heard of Hanlon's Razor?

"never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"

Friday, March 19, 2021

Multimillion Dollar Citigroup Mistake Highlights Bad User Experience of Internal Business Software

Part of my Strategic Simplicity® framework is User Simplicity. I've always stressed that user simplicity should also be about providing the same care about user experience to internal employees that you do with external customers.

Too often, however, I've seen companies provide their employees with clunky user interfaces and software that they would never dream of selling to their customers.

Yesterday, I read in the Wall Street Journal about how bad internal software caused $900 million worth of loan errors to Citigroup. Citigroup is putting some of the blame on the financial software product, Flexcube, from Oracle. According to the WSJ article, Citigroup even shared images of the user interface during litigation: "The screenshots showed a user interface with dense type, low contrast and small buttons and boxes."

While this example made news because of the large dollar value of the mistake, everyday even more money is collectively lost in corporations from inefficiencies and failure work related to bad user interfaces.

Your employees are internal customers who generate value for you beyond their salaries. As an executive, you need to insure that you provide them with the same user experiences as your best customers.

The Best Survey

I stopped filling out surveys because I value my time. The best "survey" I've seen is in the bathroom at La Guardia. It's by the exit, one question: "Was the bathroom cleaned to your satisfaction?" and two buttons (one red, one green) to register your vote.

Saturday, March 13, 2021

My Latest Article for the "Chicago Business Journal" has been published

Peoria’s Covid-19 vaccination success holds lessons for businesses

https://www.bizjournals.com/chicago/news/2021/03/12/peorias-covid-19-vaccination-success-holds-lesson.html

Monday, March 1, 2021

"Sell the innovation, Not the product"

"The best–maybe the only?–real, direct measure of 'innovation' is change in human behavior."

- Stewart Butterfield

https://medium.com/@stewart/we-dont-sell-saddles-here-4c59524d650d

Thursday, February 25, 2021

Life Isn't Pass or Fail

In school, we learn to pass or fail our courses.

But, in real life, there is no pass or fail. It's "pass or iterate".

You only fail if you give up. If you don't succeed, then analyze, pivot and try again.

Wednesday, February 3, 2021

Minimum Wage

Regarding the minimum wage: Instead of fighting to change it every few years to an arbitrary amount, they should peg it to welfare. Have it automatically reset each year to something like "the rate where a single parent with 2 kids working 35 hours/week would not qualify for welfare." Because why should we subsidize companies where their workers have to collect welfare to make ends meet?