Leadership

Lessons Learned (RE: Software Purchases)

I’ve been reading Fred Wilson’s blog for years and I’ve benefited from the advice and knowledge he shares.  I’d like to pay it forward and share a recent experience in hopes that it might help others.

Last week we moved our enterprise software to the cloud.  I knew there would be hiccups in the transition (I worked on the other side of the table as an application consultant a long time ago).  We went live on Monday and by Friday afternoon we still had web orders that weren’t coming through.  I’ll spare you the details, but it was due to settings that needed to be configured to match the old setup.

All week we entered support cases online and worked our way through the appropriate channels.  Little progress was made.  Late Friday afternoon we had a call with a high-level support member.  In a 30 minute Teams meeting we were able to correct all our problems.

So what did I learn?  If I’m involved in software negotiations in the future, I will make sure to include in the contract a required daily status call with some combination of the software company employees (think upper level technical support; the sales representative; a member of the management team that ideally oversees both the support and sales department) until all outstanding support cases have been closed.  You really want there to be some degree of inconvenience on the side of the software provider. This will motivate them to resolve your issues as quickly as possible.

This is a very good advice too:

You should also check your license agreement with your software vendors. Most software vendors only grant you a license for use of their products for as long as you own your business. Most license agreements aren’t transferable to a purchaser of your business unless a new license fee is paid. I make a purchase price adjustment to cover the cost of relicensing the software to run the business if the license isn’t transferrable for free. The time to negotiate for a no-fee, transferable software license is when you are negotiating to license the software, in the first place. Most software vendors are anxious to get your business and will grant this concession at the time of the initial sale, not afterwards when you have no leverage.

Jim Sobeckvia Upstate Business Journal

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Leadership

As a leader, you’ve got to live in three time zones simultaneously, the past, the present, and the future. Everything you do has got to honor the past, deliver in the present, set the table for a more prosperous future.

Former Campbell Soup CEO, Doug Conant via Farnum Street Email Brain Food – Aug 29, 2021

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Facts

Facts – and reality, more broadly – are inherently messy. And, remember, we look at facts that may tend to disconfirm what we hold dear differently than facts which may tend to affirm our priors. About a disconfirming fact, we ask if it must be true. About a confirming fact, we consider if it can be true. In a world chock-full of information (real, fake, and everything in between), particularly about a fast-moving health crisis at the bleeding edge of scientific inquiry, one can always find reasons to doubt what we don’t want to believe and to accept that of which we are already convinced.

The Better Letter by Bob Seawright

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A Little Crazy

“In the 1960s, before he was old, Warren Buffett joked of taking advice from old investors. ‘They know too many things that are no longer true,’ he said.

The strongest opinions form when a trend persists for years or decades, and a narrative of “this is just how things work” is the path of least resistance. It gets reinforced when that narrative becomes part of your identity – where you work, or how you invest your money, or who you hang out with and discuss what’s true.

But things change. Technologies become obsolete and markets exploit opportunities and people get bored with what used to excite them. Regulations change. Generations evolve. Accidents and chance push the world in ways that are impossible to predict….

…There’s rarely a time when the people who were right in hindsight didn’t sound a little crazy at one point.

That’s not to say you should pay special attention to people who sound crazy – most contrarianism is just attention-seeking cynicism. But when expectations move slower than reality you should always expect that whoever ends up being right believed something that at one point defied most people’s common sense.” (Emphasis Mine)

The Collaborative Team

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Know Your Borders

Bad investors, Greg told me, often had flat, loosely drawn maps of their own knowledge, but good ones were careful cartographers, distinguishing between settled, surveyed, and unexplored territories.

Joshua Rothman via The New Yorker

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You Are My Sunshine

There are (at least!) two ways to consider the flower. One is that the flower is the sum of its parts: bud, leaf, pistil etc. Each part does a job, which sustains the flower. Sunlight, rain, earth are all inputs to the production of ‘flower’.

Another way is that the sun, the rain, and the earth are part of the flower too. Sunlight then is as much part of the flower as the bud.

Mike Dariano via The Waiters Pad

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Cast Your Vote

Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.  No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your identity.  This is why habits are crucial. They cast repeated votes for being a type of person.

James Clear

See also, How We Spend Our Lives