johnmaconline

Authority is everywhere, but which do you recognize?

Do you recognize the authority of the laws of your town, state, and country? What about the international laws? Humanitarian laws?

Do you recognize the authority of experts and thought leaders in institutions, industry, and systems? Professors, doctors, physicists, engineers, pastors, your neighbor who runs the book club?

Do you recognize the authority of others in your family? Elders, spouses, or that Uncle that plans the family reunions?

Do you recognize the authority of the chain of command? Bosses, Generals, coaches, and the captain of your team?

Do you recognize the authority of ancient or special texts? The Constitution, the Bible, the Qur’an?

I sometimes wonder if all of our profile bios should indicate the authorities we recognize.

I’ve spent a good deal of time and effort over my career learning how to make myself, my teams, and the teams around me more productive.

In fact, my current venture is fundamentally about helping small software teams be more productive. My team and I have been working on and building our product for almost 10 years. We’re pretty darn good at it.

I’ve talked a lot about productivity in this space — time prioritization, working from home, leadership, procrastination, AI, etc. While I stand behind all of it, in some ways, these are strategies and tools that nip around the edges. They’re accelerators and ways to be more efficient. Not quite as insignificant as cleaning up the mouse poop in a room full of elephant dung, but there is an assumption that the person, leader, or team has a fundamental quality.

Purpose.

Purpose is an engine. Purpose is grease. Purpose can’t be stopped.

Everybody is productive when they have purpose.

In the early 00s, I worked on developing Bluetooth. My company, Agere Systems, was an early licensee of the technology, and we were building a chip and firmware to sell to computer and consumer electronics companies. I suspect you had never heard of something called Bluetooth at this time.

We had some typical marketing, project, and engineering difficulties and missteps, but we were getting there. However, the market wasn’t materializing, and it wasn’t clear that it would, so the executive team made the decision to cancel the project. Zero revenue earned.

My guess is that not only do you know what Bluetooth is, but you have double-digit devices in your home that have it. Almost 6 billion Bluetooth-enabled devices will be shipped in 2024.

Bluetooth was a huge missed opportunity for Agere. All they needed to do was hang on till the market happened.

For the last almost eight years, I’ve been working in fintech. The company I worked at till recently, IDEX Biometrics, makes fingerprint sensors for credit cards.

The idea was good. Our tech is good. Our engineering team is good. Our ability to produce and deliver these sensors is good. However, my guess is that you don’t have a credit/debit card with a fingerprint sensor.

The market hasn’t developed.

Is this the same as Bluetooth? Does IDEX just need to hang on?

I don’t think so. I’d be willing to bet that you never will have a credit/debit card with a fingerprint sensor.

What’s the difference between Bluetooth and biometric sensors in credit cards?

Bluetooth is a painkiller. It filled a market and consumer need. Once it started rolling out, its usefulness and desirabitlity skyrocketed. Fingerprint sensors in credit cards are a vitamin. Only one side (the bank side) sort of wants it because it might help in one particular area (authentication). It doesn’t fill a need.

Knowing when to hang on or quit in all aspects of your life is a magical skill. One way to figure it out is to apply the painkiller or a vitamin analogy.

When I got out of college in the early 90s, I started working on satellites at GE Aerospace. Not long after starting, a colleague introduced me to the sign-off table.

The sign-off table was a physical desk in an office. Usually a drafting table to accommodate both the size and volume of the papers that accumulated. A stack of paperwork that included drawings, schematics, analyses, and memos piled up over the course of about a week. In some ways, it was the most important location within our entire facility because the sign-off table was the gate to GE getting paid.

Each set of papers required the physical signature of the responsible person. An actual person. A human with a name and a location within the building, scrawled their signature on the physical papers to indicate, “I agree this is complete, accurate, and fulfills the intention. I stand behind it.” The signature represented the person.

No money came in until that set of signatures was delivered.

The sign-off table generated tons of drama.

“You can’t sign off on that yet!”
“There is no way I’m putting my signature on that like it is!”
“Why hasn’t she signed off on this yet?”
“Can you believe he signed off on that?”

If it was you who had to sign off, your signature mattered. You thought about it. It meant something to both you and the team. Because your signature represented you, the person. And you mattered.

What does our signature represent today in the world of e-signatures, PIN numbers, and click-this-checkbox-to-sign? I even have a bitmap image of my signature stored in my computer that I can simply copy and paste into a document.

Was it really me that signed it? Am I putting my stamp of approval on it? Am I standing behind it? Does it matter?

Although I sure do love the convenience of these new forms of signature, I think we’ve lost a little bit of the human.

We get all excited about inventors and first to market, but sometimes, fast follower is the best strategy.

In the early 2000’s, the company where I worked (called Agere Systems at the time) was the partial inventor of and first to market with a technology that ultimately transformed everyday life for most of the globe. We called it WaveLAN, and then bewilderingly, ORiNOCO. My guess is you’ve never heard of WaveLAN or ORiNOCO.

But you know it by the more ubiquitous term, WiFi. 

At the time, WiFi wasn’t a thing. Not only the term, but the technology itself — unless you had Apple gear. They were the first one’s to push wireless networking into the consumer world at scale. They called it AirPort and it comprised almost 100% of the early consumer WiFi market.

Our stuff, i.e., Agere’s WaveLAN, was inside all of the Apple products — the desktops, laptops, and the wireless router itself (called AirPort BaseStation). We had a one-size-fits-all solution for all three components. Therefore, we also enjoyed almost 100% of the early consumer WiFi market. At its largest, the WaveLAN business for Agere was between $300 and $400 million. Thank you, Apple.

And within about 18 months, the WaveLAN business went from almost $400 million to zero. Totally gone. 18 months.

Our solution, although functionally solid as a system, was expensive, power-hungry, kludgy, difficult to program, and required a ton of engineering customization throughout the entire system, from the IC design and manufacture to embedded and application software and the PCB board design. We filled in sinkholes and shortcomings in one area of the system by making adjustments in another. 

Then, once the market was established, more computer and router companies jumped in. To support them, more semiconductor companies jumped in to improve on the shortcomings of our system. The IEEE 802.11 spec continued to evolve and new versions came out that increased speed and took less power.

We just couldn’t keep up. Our initial solution was basically a one-off that relied so heavily on our vertical integration, that not only couldn’t we quickly introduce new features, we couldn’t scale. We lost it all.

The fast followers ate our shorts.

Being second in the market has some advantages. You get to see where the first one made mistakes. You get to think about how to apply economies of scale. You get to see what customers really care about. You get to move the state of the art forward in the areas that matter.

First is sexy, but second may win the day.

I was asked that the other day.

It caught me off guard because what do you say? What’s the context? Who’s asking? When? What do they care about?

Like you, I’m many different things, but does “who” ever change?

I’m still working on it.