Biz has a hole in its soul?

A friend was passing around this link, http://blogs.wsj.com/management/2010/01/13/the-hole-in-the-soul-of-business/, to a story in the Wall Street Journal's Blogs section written by Gary Hamel. In short, Hamel argues that the reason people are so often unsatisfied with their corporate workplaces is due to the focus placed on profits, efficiency, advantage, etc.

Hamel argues that companies that focus on beauty, justice and truth are more engaging to work for. In short, if the work itself is meaningful for its own sake, rather than for the sake of the bottom line, employees will find greater satisfaction in the workplace.

I read the post yesterday and identified with it immediately. So much so that I started to respond to my friend who was passing it around. But as I formulated my reply, I thought back to one of my favorite workplaces. It was a small retail bike shop with fewer than 12 employees.

When I applied for a position with the shop, I sat down for an interview with the owner and the manager. The owner asked me, "Why do you think we're in business?"

Barely out of high school, I managed some bull shit like, "I, I don't know, uh, further the benefits of cycling. It's good exercise and cleaner than driving," I was interrupted by the owner before I could finish.

"Wrong. We're in business to make money." He said.

Some how, I got the job and over the next three years, I learned from the shop owner many lessons about business. And I loved working there, not just because it was a bike shop and I loved bikes. True I had many friends who worked there too, but that wasn't the only reason I loved working there. I also loved the owner's appetite for profits. He looked at every aspect of the business with a focus on maximizing profits and he was as transparent about it every day and during every transaction as he was during my initial interview.

We had a big chart on the wall that showed the total sales and profit margins month-by-month. We all worked hard to keep those numbers trending in the right direction. We met regularly to discuss how the business was faring and the owner always pushed us to maximize profits. He celebrated our successes and rarely let us get away with dud sales.

One block north of our store was another local bike shop that had quite the cult following. They were known for giving shit away in order to close the deal. As a result, they sold a lot more bikes than we did. But their margins couldn't compare.

One winter day, I had a couple walk in looking to buy two bikes, helmets, locks, clothing, bags, gloves, lights, etc. You name the bike accessory, they were shopping it. I was making great progress on what would have been a multi-thousand dollar sale during the dead of winter. Towards the end, when I as adding everything up, the couple started negotiating on price. Something we didn't do in our shop.

They told me they were going to walk if I didn't throw in bike locks or something similar. I told them I'd have to speak to the owner about it. I went to his office and explained the situation. He told me to go back to the floor and close the deal without compromising on price.

But the couple would have none of it. They walked and were not pleased with the owner's inability to compromise. I wasn't too pleased either. I knew that we'd been dead for nearly a week. We were bleeding cash in overhead and payroll.

The owner came down and asked me what happened. I told them they walked. I couldn't close the deal. He was disappointed about that. I was disappointed that his inability to give away $40 resulted in a few thousand dollars walking out the door.

The owner looked at me and said, "Oh well, we'll sell all that stuff in time and at full price and with an excellent profit margin. We'll do less work for more money."

It was the opposite of the Wal-Mart approach. Instead of dealing on high volume, low margin transactions, we worked on lower volume and much higher profit margins. We worked less hard for more money and for the most part, we loved it.

Part of it was the fact that it was a bike shop and for the most part, we all loved bikes. Part of it was that it was a close-knit shop. Part of it was the owner's transparency about maximizing profits and using each day to coach his staff towards meeting that goal.

Eventually the owner hung it up, retiring in his 40s, selling the shop to the manager. Who subsequently rejected the previous owner's philosophy and ran the enterprise into the ground.

Author's note:
I received an email from the owner of the shop. I was somewhat surprised. What I post here I do mostly for me, confident in the knowledge that no one is reading. The owner wanted to point out one factual error; namely that the shop up the street from us never came close to selling as many bikes. Go figure. They played the bartering game and still couldn't really compete.

This old thing?

It's been forever. Such is the way of the blog.

I didn't accomplish many of the goals I'd set for myself last year. That's disappointing, but in other aspects of life, I accomplished some great things. I managed to grow my business quite a bit by taking on some contract work for some companies that shall remain nameless due to NDA.

Everyone who knows me assumes the work was forensics related, and some of it was, but the bulk of it has been web application penetration testing. Application security is my primary focus at the day job, so it should come as no surprise to folks, but it does. My clients have been really pleased and every one has come back to me for follow up work, so that's a good sign I think.

I taught a couple Community SANS courses, this is a step up the ladder for teaching with SANS. Instead of doing Mentor sessions two or three hours per week for 10 weeks, the Community events are full six day courses. It's been very rewarding and fun and I'm scheduled to do it a couple more times in the next few months.

I need a way to get time off work so I can teach more, as it is, I use my vacation time so I really don't take vacation and that's unsustainable.

A few days back, I turned 40 so I've now started my 41st year of life! Doesn't feel any different than being 39.

Spawn0 standing atop the monkey bars.

She play joke

Headless

Ant's view of a shuttle cock

Asbestos anyone?

Snaggle tooth

Yellow slide

Color with me mama

Jayhawk Ruby

Sliding Rubes

Rubes

Progress report

Life is flying by. It's already February. In a few short days my oldest daughter will be nine years old. Where have the last nine years gone? In nine more short years, she'll be finishing high school, preparing for college or whatever it is kids will be doing at that point in time.

Over the last month, I've been making steady progress on my house. Late last year I divided the half of the downstairs in half (quartered it). Taped off the quarter with large sheets of plastic in an attempt to keep the dust quarantined. It's better than nothing, but not perfect.

I've been spending my weekends scraping, skimming, sanding, skimming, sanding and priming the ceiling. It's nearly finished and in the parts that are finished, it is the smoothest ceiling in the entire house.

I've also pulled up the resilient tiles. I had been chipping these out with a hammer and a chisel until I was informed that they likely contained asbestos. I did a little research and it seemed reasonable to me that the tiles did contain asbestos so I decided to take a different approach.

Using a torch, I was able to heat the tiles and peel them up in one piece. I'm soaking them with amended water bagging them up in thick plastic bags and boxing them up and sealing all edges of the boxes with tape. I wear a respirator and leave a HEPA filter running constantly. Resilient tiles present little risk of releasing asbestos into the air and in many states their removal is unregulated.

So there's progress on the home front, but there's still much work to be done.

On other fronts, progress is also being made. We're cooking more meals at home, which has been better for our health and our finances.

And in other areas there has been little progress and even some setbacks. My SANS Mentor session was rescheduled due to a lack of interest. Training budgets are being cut all over, including where I work. I'm going to stage a more concerted effort to market the course this time, but given the current economic environment, it's going to be a tough sell.

I continue to edit the SANS Forensics Blog, and recently helped the CEO of SANS out by proofreading and offering feedback on a book he wrote about Ecclesiastes, which is one of my favorite books of the Bible.

I haven't lifted a finger to create a passive income stream. I don't even have an idea for that one yet. And I've done nothing about writing a GIAC Gold paper and very little work on the presentation front, though I have been collecting some materials and ideas.

With one month down, I've much ground to cover in the next 11 months.

Friday, I'm heading to Washington D.C. for the first time in my life. I'll be attending Shmoocon on my own dime and I'm really looking forward to the trip.

Micro-blogging

Yes, I'm on Twitter (@davehull). I'm way late writing about this, but I don't care. I've been using it since around May of '08. It's a micro-blogging service allowing users to spew messages 140 characters at a time.

Twitter has been a net gain in my life. I tapped into the info sec user community right away. It's awesome being able to eavesdrop on conversations between people I want to emulate and once in a while having something to contribute to the threads that illicit responses.

What I was thinking about today though is the 140 character limit. Twitter is like television. It's bursty. Some smart person somewhere figured out that humans are drawn to action. Look at nearly everything on t.v. The camera angles change every second or less.

I read recently that some evolutionary bioligists who study behavior and the mind believe we are drawn to this frequent change because it causes a heightened state of awareness. During our evolutionary history, those who quickly discerned a harmless leaf falling from a tree from a predator moving through the canopy were the ones selected, naturally, and had more offspring thus passing on those traits.

A sudden movement puts us on alert, gives us a charge and pulls us in. The success of micro-blogging services like Twitter should come as no surprise then, its tweets are like little bursts of movement in the natural world or the changing camera angles of the t.v.

Home improvement

Status update:

I've been busting my hump on my house project for the last four weeks. We're currently living in 3/4s of our house as has been our habit for the last eight years or so. We buy a place, immediately start remodeling making some quadrant of the house unlivable. Our projects start at a good pace. Life happens. Procrastination and laziness eventually give way and the work resumes, the cycle repeats.

Over the last few weeks the carpet and padding have been taken out of the affected quarter. The resilient tile underneath has been removed. Some vinyl sheet goods have been taken up, the glue left behind has to be painted over with a special solvent. Covering the solvent with tin foil and letting it soak for at least 20 minutes reduces the level of effort for scraping up the glue.

Opposite the floor is the ceiling, the other target of my efforts. The ceiling originally had a texture that appears to have involved the sponging on of a thin sheetrock mud mix. It's really not too bad to look at. We have it in our upstairs and aren't going to change it. Unfortunately some time during the history of this particular money-pit, some genius applied popcorn texture.

Popcorn ceiling is devil spawn.

After a couple days worth of effort, the popcorn is nearly gone. A dash of liquid soap (dish or laundry) added to a spray bottle full of water, they call this "amended water." Obviously the water keeps the dust level down and I believe the soap may bind the dust particles together more so that even when the water evaporates, the dust is lessened.

With luck, next week will find me priming the ceiling and moving on to the other quarter of the house where the process will be repeated. Yay!