Smoke and Mirrors

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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

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.

As I mentioned before I visit at least once a day to BeginnerTriathlete.com. There is just so much info on that site.

I even shifted my paper-based log to their training log and got a subscription to the site just to support them.

Here’s my online training log. I’m still maintaining my paper journal as well just in case…

Here’s my “planned” schedule for the next month or so until July 9th. A couple of trips in there will cost me a couple of workouts but even while traveling I hope to be able to get in at least some workouts.

I swear I must have a library about 5-6 books about training in various aspects so far: swimming, biking, running, triathlons, etc. Any questions just ask… I’ve only been doing this a couple of months so I could probably learn a lot from others.

So for the past 6 weeks I’ve been training for a triathlon. I’ve never done anything like this before, and I’ve never generally been all that “athletic”…. It’s been really interesting though as

Do you know anyone else who has signed up for a triathlon without owning a bike? Well, I did. I now have a 49cm LeMond Reno road bike which I’ve ridden about 12-15 times now. It’s pretty cool.

I’ve bought 5-6 books on the subject and used some to build a training plan for myself in preparation for the event. Just a list of things that I’ve acquired in preparation for the last 3 months:

• Aqua Sphere Swim Googles (something like this)
• Adidas Running Shoes
• LeMond Reno bike
• Trek saddle bag (small)
• 2 pairs biking shorts
• 1 long-sleeve Discovery Channel jersey I found 40% off at my local bike shop, Cycling Spoken Here - haven’t worn it yet, but I just got it a week ago.
• Giro helmet
• Shimano SPD pedals - not road bike specific, but seem enough for me
• Nike cycling shoes
• Rudy Project Kerosense sunglasses - just got these after my $7 gas station sunglasses broke…
• Adidas cycling gloves - no velcro on these, just slide on and go

Probably a couple of other things too.

Back from the conferene week and I’m exhausted as heck. Just from my own observations and being at all of them so far, I think we had the best one ever in terms of energy, great speakers, tons of people coming out, etc.

Luckily Marathon happened to fall on a “rest week” where rest at least according to my training schedule is 3 days a week rather than 6, so I really only missed one day.

I think it really helps to have the event in RTP since a lot of our employees get to interface directly with customers who might not otherwise get to.
With the growth in the Conference year over year, though, I guess we’ll have to see how long this is feasible.

eBay has ended, at least temporarily, an experiment with virtually unlimited stores listings showing up in results.

In the meantime, during this experiment, every seller I’ve talked to has noticed an increase in Store sales.

Reasons cited include “buyer confusion” due to too many results. Is that the real reason?? — Usability studies show most people stay on the first page. Beyond that, many buyers stay above the fold and don’t scroll down.

As an example, I searched on “Nikon D70″. Google returned 17 million results. Yahoo returned 4 million results.
I understand that Google continuing to gain search share is separate from the eBay buyer experience, but clearly the game is not just about result count.

The key is relevance. eBay is growing beyond its “sort by closing time” roots. That’s one of the improvements eBay Express is going to introduce when it launches…

Why not rank things like Google does - based on buyer behavior?