Genuine Curiosity

Author Dwayne Melancon is always on the lookout for new things to learn. An ecclectic collection of postings on personal productivity, travel, good books, gadgets, leadership & management, and many other things.

 

Is there a hockey stick in your world?

You may have noticed the deafening silence in my posting this week (or not - but it was there). That's because I work for a software company, and it was the end of a quarter.

In our business, the end of every quarter is a frenzied period in which a large portion of our quarterly business closes in just a few days time. This is fairly common within every software company I've ever been associated with, and it can be an exciting and stressful phenomenon.

Exciting, because there are a lot of great, game-saving "plays" that pull a team together to do what it takes to get the business in. Stressful, because it's really hard to predict where your business will come in when so much of it remains "invisible" until the final days of the quarter. The fact that any delay in process on either side (the company's or the customer's) could cause the business to slip beyond the end of the quarter. In these cases, it can affect the software company's profitability or, in the case of many customers, the budget may "disappear" if it isn't spent.

This is called the "Hockey stick effect" in our business, because it means a big spike at the end of the quarter, causing our daily business graphs to be shaped like hockey sticks.

This effect seems to be rooted in the quarterly-focused metrics of the public software company, but it happens in privately held companies, as well (like mine). I often wonder how much customers perpetuate this phenomenon by holding their buying decisions until late in the quarter to gain extra pricing leverage against software companies?

This has gone on so long in our business that I think it's baked into the fabric of the software business.

What about those of you in other businesses? What kinds of cycles do you deal with? Are they good or bad for you, your customers, and the business?

I'd love to hear your stories.

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Do you know what you're talking about?

I've been involved in (and even instigated) a bazillion shapeless, formless conversations in business. You may know the kind I'm talking about - you have a meeting, a bunch of folks show up, you talk for a while, and the meeting breaks up. Did you get what you needed out of the meeting? Nope.

Here are some of the things I've learned (some, the hard way) that can help make these conversations more productive - especially valuable for sales situations, partnering discussions, "buying stuff" meetings, and things like that.

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I was big in the 60's...

If you're in for a few minutes of interesting, trivial research (or, if you are having a baby and want to do some statistical research on names) you should check out "Name Voyager."

This browser-based app lets you type in a name and it will tell you how popular it's been since the 1880's, whether it was popular as a boy's name, girl's name, or both, and other interesting things. For example, I found out that my name was very popular in the '60's (when I was born) and has had a recent uptick (see the graph).

Other interesting things I discovered:

  • "Osama" has never been in the top 1000 names, according to this app
  • "Elvis" was more popular in 2003 than any other time since the 1880's
  • "Shakira" came out of nowhere in the 90's, peaked in 2003, then dropped out of the top 1000 (thanks to "Hips Don't Lie" I bet it has a big resurgence)

You can use this for some fun prediction games, too. For example:

  • What impact do you think "The Simpsons" has had on the popularity of the name Bart?
  • What about Justin Timberlake's effect on the name Justin?
  • Why has the name Jacob been so popular in the last 5 years?
  • How has the popularity of the name "Gay" changed since the 1880's?
  • Has the name "Jamie" been more popular as a male name or a female name?

This doesn't answer any of the mysterious questions of the universe, but it's a fun way to spend a few minutes on the web.

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Is something eating you?

If you're a regular visitor to this blog, you may have noticed that I no longer have any of those hover popup windows coming up for any of my links.  Those originally came about out of my fascination for futzing around with things, and went away because of something that happened today.

Here's what went down:  I got an email from Eric, who told me that he was very annoyed with them and asked if I'd consider taking them off.  No problem - I figure that his one complaint could represent numerous other folks who find them annoying, so they are gone.

As he pointed out, he could have simply moved on and stopped coming here.  Instead, he chose to let me know so I would have the opportunity to make this site a more enjoyable place for him.  I love that.

It's unlikely people will fix things if they don't know they're broken

Fistshake Is there someone in your life that's bugging you, but you haven't let them know?  If they don't know it's a problem there's not much hope they'll do anything to improve the situation, is there? 

What can you do?  Here are some possibilities:

  • Complain about the person who's annoying you to someone else
  • Bottle it up inside and tough it out
  • Wait until things reach the boiling point and unleash the rage
  • Walk away and give up

Unfortunately, none of these is likely to make the situation much better.

Take responsibility for your own well-being

From time to time, I'd venture we could all take a cue from Eric.

If someone is doing something that annoys you:  In the spirit of wanting to make things better, let them know you're not satisfied with the current situation, and tell them how you'd like things to be. 

Sure, the popup thing was a pretty small issue for me to fix.  But Eric's approach works for the big stuff, too.  And who knows - you just might get what you ask for.

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