Smoke and Mirrors

test

I bought this book a long time ago and put it down. I recently picked it up again and it instantly become, again, one of my favorite books.

On leadership:

Lack of power is a great excuse for failure, but sufficient power is never a necessary condition of leadership… In fact, it is success in the absence of sufficient power that defines leadership.

What do leaders to gain trust of people:

They acquire trust by giving trust. The giving of trust is an enormously powerful gesture. The recipient gives back loyalty as an almost autonomous response.

When is the right time to introduce change:

Growth is the rising tide to life all boats. The period of growth is one in which people are naturally less change-resistant. It is therefore the optimal time to introduce any change. Specifically, changes that are not growth-related should be timed to occur during growth periods. This is not because they are strictly necessary then, but because they are more likely to be possible then.

On middle management:

The key role of middle management is reinvention. … The fact that managers have time on their hands gives them time for reinvention. The extra time is not waste but slack … In order to change companies have to learn that keeping managers busy is a blunder.

On status meetings:

Get rid of them. They are ceremony. If you spot a meeting where after you’ve participated, you check out, and then another person talks about their status, and then another, zzzzzzz., then get rid of that meeting.

Question for all you Facebookers out there.

It seems to me like groups aren’t very customizable. I’d like to do things like:
- add a blog feed in a panel on my group’s homepage. (I can’t find a way to add any panels to a group).
- develop an app that’s custom to my group’s homepage. (I can’t find a way to add any applications to groups).

It seems like applications can’t work with groups, only with member’s profiles. Am I missing something, or is this how things are?

Why can’t I login using my eBay ID?

I’m just saying…

I’ve been contributing more to the ChannelAdvisor blog. Check it out if you are interested in hearing ChannelAdvisor “join the conversation”.
I’m also working on another blog I haven’t yet released to the world yet…

Stay tuned

As anyone who follows eBay is aware, eBay raised their pricing on Store listings last week. Here are some of the messages eBay is trying to send:

1 - if you’re a media seller, put your top sellers in core auticons, and the rest on Half.com.
2 - if you have a store populated with junk that doesn’t sell, we don’t want it on the site.
3 - eBay Stores as a “platform” isn’t viable.

For #3, I think eBay is trying to, in some ways, encourage sellers to get into eCommerce — I’m actually surprised they didn’t mention their ProStores offering as part of their announcement.

eBay Stores has always been somewhat of a red-headed stepchild on eBay, and with the new fee increases, it has even less of a place on the site. I think a year or two from now, there may not be a venue called eBay Stores.

It will be: eBay Core, eBay Express, ProStores.

These were taken from official events photography…

Ok, so I didn’t smoke the course, but … I did pretty well considering. Here are the results from the race. Search for “Rick Watson” — 521. While you’re at it, find my friend Kevin Scanlon. He definitely smoked it with a 138 out of 552 finish overall.

It’s pretty cool seeing your name on a race results list for some reason.

In terms of my ranking (which was pretty far down), I did better on the swim (501), bike (506), and run (513) than my overall ranking. This suggests to me that my transition times (the time spent between swim and bike, and then bike and run later) are holding me up as well. This makes sense because I was taking my time during transitions figuring this whole thing out. Most of the time I was walking, not jogging or running like some other folks. Mostly I was worried about taking things too hard and not blowing up somewhere on the course later on.

Plus, have you ever tried running after swimming for half a mile? Ugh.

Again, I am so psyched about finishing things … and especially at the end of the race I felt I could go further …

I had a great time.

Photos from the race.

Short story: I finished, I didn’t stop anywhere on the course except walking for a second to get water on the run. These were my goals so it was awesome to do them all.

Race report later.

This discussion goes back to my earlier post about relevancy and store listings.

One discussion that has intrigued me recently is what eBay could do instead of MORE trust and safety regulations to increase the health of the marketplace. At this point, Trust and Safety seems to often have the first and last word on tons of policies at eBay. From a business perspective, you could call that a moat, or you could call that a liability if another service could come along and eliminate the need for it due to clever technology.

As Scot likes to piont out, Overture was pretty sure it had a huge moat in that it was supposed to be way difficult to build a paid search platform, and Overture had the benefit of network effects in terms of its distribution. And eBay sellers themselves sometimes convince themselves they have a huge moat in their business.

The truth is, in the face of disruptive innovation or true competitive differentiators, a moat that once kept competitors out can quickly keep you “in”. Overture viewed the fact that it didn’t have to maintain a public-facing site as an asset — all of this was run by partners. When Google came along, they proved otherwise QUICKLY.

What if eBay were to implement its Trust and Safety policies in the form of relevancy in the search? As an example. As a seller, I list 1 million products just to flood my category. No one buys them. Why couldn’t eBay track this and add this to the seller’s relevancy score? The next time the seller lists, if they want to show up in the place they showed up previously, they have to pay higher listing fees (a disincentive), or they show up lower in results.

This way, the system tends to self-correct for this type of things.

Let’s take another space that eBay is currently wading into currently: shipping rates. Unless you have a bright-line policy like Amazon and Half.com does (where they say explicitly what they will credit sellers on shipping), you are treading in a morass of policy upon policy, until soon you are forced to introduce a policy hub to explain it all. And of course, does that really explain it? Well someone has to maintain that policy hub, and the wording behind it. And then you need teams of lawyers to enforce those policies which translates into even higher overhead.

Does relevancy provide a solution here? Perhaps… Perhaps. Personally I think click-through (Google’s current method) is a poor measure of relevancy. It rewards misleading titles and keywords — another huge policy concern for eBay as well BTW. I can’t tell you how many sellers I’ve known taken down for keyword violations in titles on nuances buried in policy portals.

A better solution is to base relevancy and search result position on conversion. A buyer clicks on a listing. Sees $50 shipping - are they likely to buy from that seller? Maybe, maybe not. If eBay keeps optimizing its listing pages like eBay Express does (as opposed to traditional eBay), then it certainly becomes far less likely for the buyer to miss the fact that shipping is $100 on a $5 item.

So what does the buyer do? Click back. For a reasonably priced seller, it is more likely to convert. Boom. This feeds into the seller’s relevancy score, and they are rewarded with more business and a lower listing fee for that behavior. The untrustworthy seller’s listing fees go up due to their overall poor relevancy (likeliness to convert).

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a virtuous feedback loop.