Month: September 2005

Piano Lessons

I take piano lessons. I took lessons briefly as a kid and started again in March of 1999. I have very little if any natural talent and even after 6 years of lessons I don’t think I’m very good but that’s not the point. I really enjoy the whole process. I play for myself.

I am a firm believer that almost anything can be learned if you work hard enough at it. Algebra comes easy to me but to a lot of people it doesn’t. I have some talent at Algebra but even someone with no natural Algebra talent can learn Algebra . It is that way with me and music. I’ll never be great but as I take lessons and practice regularly I am constantly improving. I love seeing the  progress.

I find that playing the piano takes total concentration so not only am I learning music but I am also learning how to stay focused. And most of all I just enjoy it.

I also believe that taking piano lessons is good for me. There was an article in the New Scientist a few months ago called 11 Steps to a Better Brain. It is a very interesting article but the point that is relevant to this  blog entry is that music lessons may improve your brain. I can believe it. But the bottom line is playing the piano is just plain fun.

 

Dunkirk

As I read about New Orleans and the failure of the evacuation efforts I am reminded of Dunkirk. If you don’t know the story it is an inspiring one. At the beginning of WW II the British and French Armies were  trapped by the Germans at Dunkirk in North-East France. What happened still gives me chills when I think of it. An army of military and civilian boats, many of them small pleasure and fishing boats captained by fishermen and  private citizens evacuated over 330,000 Allied troops across the English Channel. I urge you to read this account.

When our Dunkirk happened and the citizens of New Orleans were trapped by the rising waters or even before that when the poor needed evacuating before the hurricane, imagine if the mayor or the governor had called for a citizen army to help evacuate New Orleans. There is no doubt in my mind that a call for an American Dunkirk response would have resulted in awesome results. We would have risen to the occasion. If the English government had not called for every small boat available to help evacuate Dunkirk, Dunkirk would have been a New Orleans kind of disaster instead of one of Britain’s finest hours.

A Somewhat irrelevant Question

When I read this blog entry about Google arrogance that Dan Gillmor posted  on Bayosphere  it made me think of a question I have been asking myself every time I drive by the Google headquarters in Mountain View. The Google headquarters is in the former Silicon Graphics building on Amphitheatre Parkway just down the street from Intuit. At each entrance to their parking they have a uniformed guard posted. The guard  checks cars as they drive into the parking lot. I wonder why their parking lot needs guards? Maybe there are other corporate headquarters building in Silicon Valley that have parking lot guards but I don’t know of any.

What I am Learning

I’ve been at Intuit for three months now. There was an article in The Economist on August 25 that I thought caught some of the essence of how Intuit operates. The article was titled The King of Disrupting. Unfortunately you have to subscribe to the Economist to read the article but I thought I would talk some about the way Intuit operates as described in the article.

I’ve been reading The Innovator’s Solution by Clay Christensen of the Harvard Business School. The Economist article starts out by pointing out that Intuit has stayed on the list of companies that continue to be disruptors. Other companies like Sony were disruptors but aren’t any more. Sony pioneered the use of transistors in consumer electronics . Their products were major disruptors but Sony no longer releases disrupting products. Intuit on the other hand continues to create disruptive products.

There is no question that the concepts described in The Innovators Solution are a part of the fabric of how Intuit operates.  You can see the concepts reflected in a lot we do. The Innovator’s Solution says that "The Key to success with low end disruptions is to devise a business model that can earn attractive returns at the discount prices required to win business at the low end." Intuit did this with Turbotax, Quickbooks, and Medical Expense Manager.  When we  get it right we attract the non consumers and that leads to market disruption.  I see us following the disruptor model in a lot of areas. I know that in the product I am working on building a low cost model while still building  a product that customer’s want and need is key to what we are doing. It is certainly not an easy thing to do.

The Economist article also talks about Intuit’s passion for Customer Driven Innovation.  It is clear to me that this is part of Intuit’s DNA. We have been visiting our Beta testers to see what works and what doesn’t work in using our product. It makes releasing a product harder but I firmly believe that we will eventually get it right because we are not relying on what we think customers need  but instead on what they show us and tell us.

I highly encourage you to read The Innovators Solution. I am only half way through it and I haven’t read the Innovators Dilemma but certainly The Innovator’s Solution is a  fascinating and thought provoking book.