Alexander Chalkidis

Category: Business

  • What the Oscars and your business can learn from the NBA

    Yannis Antetokounpbo is not your average Greek.  Born in a poor neighborhood of Athens.  Nigerian parents.  2.11m tall and with amazing physique, he is a wonder to watch whether it is in the Greek all star game, Team Africa or the NBA.  A young man with a great smile he can get Nigerians, Greek and people from Milwaukee excited.  At the same time!

    When Dirk Nowitzki plays in New York, Germans flock to watch him.  Maybe because he won the  German Sports Personality of the Year in 2011, maybe because they knew someone who played with him at Röntgen Gymnasium or maybe because he was the first non American to win the Naismith Legacy Award.  In all, around 100 non American players from 37 countries or territories play in the NBA.

    There are young American kids, black, white, yellow or red, buying basketball jerseys with the name “Kristaps Porzingis”.   Ever heard of that name before?   In fact the Latvian player is fourth in jersey sales after Stephen Curry, LeBron James and Kobe Bryant.    And those names you have probably heard of!

    Now let’s compare that to the way Hollywood works.  Another year with protests about no black nominees.   Don’t see many Greeks there.  Nor Nigerians for that matters, or Germans or Latvians.  And you are surprised the ratings are down?   When a young basketball player like Porzingis is truly amazing, it is simply a matter of time before he “ends up” in the NBA.  Family, medical or political conditions can’t stop the process.   As an audience we demand that the best on the planet gather to entertain us.  We want to see how the twenty year old 2.21m power forward can manage against Nowitzki or LeBron.  It is the Gladiator arena of our age, except we pay them well instead of killing them off at the end.

    An excellent foreign actor, director or composer is not sure to end up with an Oscar.  In fact he or she might never even make it to feature films.  There is no draft, no preselection, no scouts sending videos to CEOs saying “hey!  You have to watch this and get this kid on the team!”   No detailed statistics about shot percentages, rebounds or blocks per game averages.  Hollywood is a closed club where who you know is more important than what you do.  No surprise then that the old white guys in there tend to select other white people.  There is no mechanism to freshen them up as long as people keep going to the movies.

    The National Basketball Association on the other hand is race agnostic.  A team owner who made racist remarks last year was instantly vaporized.  No pseudodemocratic dilly dallying or decision by committee, he was out with the first retweets.    Your business should be more like that.  Not just colour.  Forget degrees, business sense or even attitude problems with the kids you are looking at; focus on anything amazing and unique around you and build a work environment which thrives on it.  Remove obstacles like racism or any such -ism.

    The NBA is where the best basketball players in the world gather to complete and put on the best show in the world.  For the entire world.  By the entire world.

  • Trump is right about something! Made in USA counts for a lot

    You probably rushed to dismiss it.  After all, in this globalized world it seems counterintuitive that Apple should produce iPhones entirely in the US.  Some would say impossible.  And it is Donald Trump saying it, the man is ridiculous almost 24/7.

    Now think about it again.  Cost?  Yeah, sure it would be more expensive to produce in America but Apple has the margin to support it.    It would not be more expensive to the consumers.  And even these Tim Cook days of actually giving back to shareholders, it isn’t just about the stock market.  Apple stock has become a global “too big to fail” ticker, it’s price was never really connected to its performance much anyway.

    Some say it is impossible to produce an iPhone entirely in the US.  So let me get this straight.  There are countries out there more advanced than America?  And this is OK with everyone?  Nobody else perceive a medium term threat in the situation?  It is true that no country actually produces an iPhone, it is simply a matter of assembly.  So why can a Mac pro be produced in America and not an iPhone?  Samsung might not seem much of a threat these days but that can quickly change.    You set up your whole supply chain somewhere else and pretty soon “somewhere else” is selling iPhone knock offs at a tenth of the price.    Furthermore they attract more customers on the back of their legitimate claim to be manufacturing or assembling iPhones.  Their countries learn how to produce such items in terms of all their processes, taxes, permits, government procedures and a million other little things we call “know how”.  You are greasing the way for anyone else to roll in and compete.

    I know all this sounds very unliberal and unbusinesslike.  That is because we have been schooled to always assume that the free market is the best choice.  It usually is.  Abusing worker rights in China is not.  There is nothing liberal or free about what Apple has been doing (and continues to do) to squeeze its suppliers.  It didn’t join the move of “Made in Argentina” when Samsung and Blackberry did.  Apple doesn’t care about building long term relationships with any market in the world other than America.  Apple always treated its distributors like crap, was always secretive, has always decided from the top and bossed everyone else around.

    Well there is no point running complex business analysis or logistics calculations on it.  It is a matter of soul.  What is Apple about?  If it is a truly global company, why does it act like a bunch of Californians with attitude who don’t care about anything?  Making iPhones in America won’t solve any problems.  It won’t make them worse either.

    And it just might force the company to face up to the fact that it isn’t really sure what it is about anymore and how it connects to consumers.

     

     

  • Greek retail woes part 2 – chains and balls

    Let’s say you want to plan an in store activity for a tech product.  “We have thirty stores all over Greece!” beams the person you are talking with.  Here are a few questions to ask before setting out your promotional strategy.

    1. What is the percentage of traffic of your top 2 stores relative to the rest?  Case in point, a well known chain with more than 40 stores.  The first one had 160 thousand visitors last month.    The next four had just over 50 thousand.  And all the rest had …well…very few.    Unless you want to waste money having people trek all around this beautiful country for nothing, decide where to focus.
    2. Which stores are almost dead?  In the above (real) example, almost half the stores had less than 25 thousand visitors in a month.  They are neighborhood affairs, sometimes not even fully owned by the chain, often family run or with some other story.  They might make their money on computer repairs, selling business software or anything else but what you want them to promote.   A long history of failed promotions can be told by old merchandizing kit in their stores…
    3. How accurate are your footfall figures?  Many stores have multiple entrances.  Even a keen statistician would have trouble calculating what the actual traffic was from their numbers.  Other stores have cafes, restaurants, bookshops or tickets within.  Is that the kind of traffic you want for your product?
    4. What time of day is the action?  This is very complex.  Not just about looking at the data.  Greeks have their own rhythm.  They might window shop some times of day and have the time and inclination to speak to a merchandizer but simply go in to buy supplies quickly at other times.  We have our own holidays and dates which are best to focus on.
    5. Which salespeople are the ones to influence?  Even in these times of multinationals and international (style) marketing, Greek stores often operate in a pretty old fashioned way.  There is often a person who is the gatekeeper for the store to really promote a product.  Often not even on the store floor, this might be the manager (in a smaller store) or the experienced salesperson or the person considered the purchasing expert.

    Everyone in Greece has become much better at pretending they are all business when it comes to in store promotions.  They talk the talk and look good on PowerPoint.  But way too often they operate in an old fashioned, conservative and protectionist way.  Your promoters might be shoved to a corner which looks good on paper but doesn’t work, with little help in rush hour and no real support in order to make sales or change people’s opinions of your products.

    Start asking these sort of questions though and you might gain enough respect to get your job done.

  • Don’t waste good money on Greek retail – part 1, the stats

    From afar, it probably seems like a mystery.  Greece has no money.  So why are so many tech items still selling well?  It isn’t easy to get a handle on the market as it feels pretty third worldly most of the time.

    For starters you need to recognize that there aren’t very good stats for most things.  I can cite several phone calls received from influential trade magazines looking for numbers.  They pretty much take whatever you feed them and have few reference points to know if you are making it up or not.  Often the results are ludicrous.   And they dress it up in wishy washy language or vague charts rather than admitting that “based on brief chats with two people I got on the phone from Greece….”

    Others try and make assumptions or extrapolations based on official figures or trade associations’ statistics.  The former are very sketchy as we have parallel imports galore and many other factors distorting the numbers.  Trade associations in Greece are generally weak, not very active and not very high tech or online.  If you do get any numbers they will probably be out of date and refer only to a few larger companies.  Government agencies are even worse.

    Greeks are generally secretive and don’t give away business information.  To make things worse often the IT infrastructure is spread over many different databases and software.  Many systems might not be online, relying on import/export procedures of various sorts.  So it’s not just that they don’t want to give anyone good figures about their sales;  it’s that even they don’t really know what is going on in their sales!

    A good example is store traffic data.  This is absolutely essential for planning any retail promotion and guess what?  Almost no Greek company has decent figures.  Most now have some sort of technology installed to monitor visitor numbers but they are plagued with distortions.  Some stores have multiple entrances and exits making it hard to calculate, others have cafe or restaurants within their premises making it impossible to know how many people shopped and how many just ate and left.  Sure, over time, these glitches should straighten out and give a more complete picture; if you combine them with that other data.  Which you don’t have!

    So all these fancy promotion ideas you have, well, just bear in mind that you need a rather big pinch of salt in order to implement them.  Get a feel first hand before you OK any spending. A major problem is that most “chains of stores” that Greek tech retailers say they have are in fact rather unbalanced affairs.  But more on that in part 2…

     

  • Will this idea work?

     

     

    Some time ago I sat in a school committee meeting.  As usual they were wasting time talking too much.  For about half an hour they were discussing what to do about the graffiti on the wall.  I calculated that in that time we could have actually painted it over at least twice.   By doing we would have solved the problem we were thinking about.  It wasn’t about consensus, it was just that everybody was playing with “what if” scenarios instead of “just do it” solutions.

    I have done the same in big business meetings though too.  All too often you come out of a meeting with an idea.  The problem is that the idea that seems better has no data to back it up.  There is no way to differentiate between ideas when they are just blah blah over coffee and stale biscuits at a Monday morning meeting.  That to me seems like a big waste.  If I have spent an hour getting excited about an idea, why leave it to die?

    Business is essentially a series of experiments.  Every day you look for “solutions”.  Which means that essentially you are testing a hypothesis.  “Here is a situation we need to change.  Will this work?”   www.willthiswork.org is something I just started to help you with that.  How to test ideas quickly, cheaply and with little or no risk.  (Depends how you do it and what “it” is.)  I come out of that meeting and start the project.  That simple.

    Anyone who has commissioned a panel knows how frustrating it is.  8 or 10 people carefully selected and coordinated by specialists end up giving you pretty bad data.  You have no idea how accurate or useful it is really.  And it is way too expensive.  Instead of talking about “social media”, I think of them as cheap experiments.  There are ready made tools and keen audiences wanting to partake in your tests.  At worse you get a lot of feedback, maybe some new ideas.  At best you have launched the idea in a spectacular way and proved it works.

    It is pretty addictive.  Having done it thousands of times I have remnants of old ideas all over the place.  That product launch page which is still counting down to a launch that never happened.  That other site which just republished content but got us more than twenty thousand unique hits and saved the day with the search data it provided.  The other software idea which seemed fantastic but a month down the line seemed less fantastic as it would cost way too much.  Some of these ideas didn’t even wait until the meeting ended.  I have automated the procedure so much now, I can launch an idea website within five minutes of thinking of the idea.

    It’s not always that simple.  So www.willthiswork.org has just started from phase one, all rough and ugly right now as it is going slowly so I can explain some of the challenges at every step.  Try it out.  Just do it.

     

     

  • Jesus, fig trees and checking your car brakes

    “Early in the morning, as he was on his way back to the city, he was hungry. Seeing a fig tree by the road, he went up to it but found nothing on it except leaves. Then he said to it, “May you never bear fruit again!”

    Immediately the tree withered.”     – Matthew 21:18-22

    Israel_Bethany_Stone_church_with_silver_domeThe excerpt is well known, the explanation less so.   Most religious researchers believe that Jesus was crucified probably on the 6th of April, 30 A.D.  Which means that when he met the above mentioned fig tree it was not meant to be in fruit anyway as it was long before summer.  However fig trees at that time produce taqsh, small hard, almond sized knobs on the plant which poor peasants were often forced to eat for lack of anything better.   If the tree has no such fig precursors it means that it will not bear fruit this season.  Jesus was not cursing the fig tree but simply announcing what any person who lived in those times would know.  After a long day walking, Jesus perhaps hoped to have a small snack, was disappointed, and thus pronounced the tree barren.

    Google searches for “fig tree” are also, as expected seasonal.  From March through until September people are more interested in it either because they want to plant a fig tree, or take care of a fig tree.  A modern day Jesus could see the following pattern of seasonality in Google searches:

    figly datachart seasonality of google searches for fig tree c 2015 figly

    That green line is the amount of searches (U.S.) for “fig tree”.  Every year they spike from March to September.  But what is that blue line which follows them so closely?  It is the google searches for “brake caliper”!    In fact the correlation is extremely high at r=0.9069.  Similar in seasonality, yet not so exact in volume are searches for “paint code”, “oil filter”, “valve adjustment”, “oil drain” and “gear oil”.  It seems that as Americans come out of winter they have two things in mind:  fixing their car and tending to their fig trees!

    Here is the full excerpt from the book “Hard Sayings of the Bible”, (Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., Peter H. Davids, F. F. Bruce, Manfred Brauch)

    “The problem is most satisfactorily cleared up in a discussion called “The Barren Fig Tree” published many years ago by W. M. Christie, a Church of Scotland minister in Palestine under the British mandatory regime. He pointed out first the time of year at which the incident is said to have occurred (if, as is probable, Jesus was crucified on April 6th, A.D. 30, the incident occurred during the first days of April). “Now,” wrote Christie, “the facts connected with the fig tree are these. Toward the end of March the leaves begin to appear, and in about a week the foliage coating is complete. Coincident with [this], and sometimes even before, there appears quite a crop of small knobs, not the real figs, but a kind of early forerunner.  They grow to the size of green almonds, in which condition they are eaten by peasants and others when hungry.

    When they come to their own indefinite maturity they drop off.” These precursors of the true fig are called taqsh in
    Palestinian Arabic. Their appearance is a harbinger of the fully formed appearance of the true fig some six weeks later.

    So, as Mark says, the time for figs had not yet come. But if the leaves appear without any taqsh, that is a sign that
    there will be no figs. Since Jesus found “nothing but leaves”—leaves without any taqsh—he knew that “it was an ab-
    solutely hopeless, fruidess fig tree” and said as much. But if that is the true explanation of his words, why should anyone trouble to record the incident as though it had some special significance? Because it did have some special significance. As recorded by Mark, it is an acted parable with the same lesson as the spoken parable of the fruitess fig tree in Luke 13:6-9.

    In that spoken parable a landowner came three years in succession expecting fruit from a fig tree on his property, and when year by year it proved to be fruidess, he told the man in charge of his vineyard to cut it down because it was using up the ground to no good purpose. In both the acted parable and the spoken parable it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the fig tree represents the city of Jerusalem, unresponsive to Jesus as he came to it with the message of God, and thereby incurring destruction. Elsewhere Luke records how Jesus wept over the city’s blindness to its true well-being and foretold its ruin “because you did not know the time of your visitation” (Lk 19:41-44 RSV). It is because the incident of the cursing of the fig tree was seen to convey the same lesson that Mark, followed by Matthew, recorded it.”

     

  • Why Google will never post profits like Apple just did

    The Imitation Game was not as good a film as it was made out to be.  Maybe if you know nothing about Turing or the history around it all, or if you enjoy watching whodunnit TV shows.  Some people summarized it as “the story of how a closet gay shortened the war by two years”.  Well that is a terrible summary.  Probably because the film isn’t sure where to focus.  What is much more interesting is that thanks to his invention, the computer, we can quite accurately guess how many gay men in the U.S. are in the closet looking at Google searches.

    In the film, the only part I found interesting (but the film just glossed over in a video clip like quick series of shots with music) was after they broke the Enigma code.  They had to use some of the intelligence, but not so much that the Nazis figured out they were eavesdropping.  If they saved every ship from Uboat attacks, the Germans would know they knew how Enigma worked and change the whole coding system thus rendering it uncrackable again.    They had to calculate the impact of every Nazi move on the war effort and decide where they could pass on vital information to the Allies to make a difference.  Only just enough of a difference though…

    In that sense, Google is much much worse than Hitler and the entire Nazi empire.  They own the global search market.  They know what we want better than us because not only do they have our individual searches, but the technology to evaluate it too.   And how much do they tell us?  They statistically jiggle, hide, mix up, muddle and do everything they can so we can’t reverse engineer what they know.  Which is a lot.   Google knows what we are looking for.  Google knows what we are thinking.  It is the closest to an omniscient being we have ever had.  Even without their impressive number crunching technology, just looking at the raw data of searches in a country or particular region would spark a million new business ideas in the head of even the most ignorant person.

    I am pretty serious when I say that I would willingly cut off a finger in exchange for access to Google big data.  It really would be the closest to playing God I can imagine.  Surely way beyond any previous homo sapiens could even imagine.

    So when Apple posts “record profits” I just smile.    Google could easily make ten times as much.  But then everyone would start asking questions.  When Google chooses certain cities for ultra fast access, how are they choosing?  Should we all be focusing on those cities?  When Google buys a company, what do they know that we don’t?  Exactly like Turing’s team in World War II, Google is carefully giving away only just so much so we can’t reverse engineer what they are up to.

    Unfortunately my finger is still on my hand and I am none the wiser though…

  • Mastercard hits rock bottom in advertising

    The poster in the Athens metro featured a young man next to a swimming pool at Santorini.

    “Waking up in the sky: Priceless 
    With your MasterCard you are welcome all
    in resorts, hotels, villas and spas.”

    Oh really?  Welcome are you?  Whoever wrote that hasn’t travelled much in Greece, have they?  Sure, major hotels and fancy spas in major tourist locations might accept Mastercard. But that is the tip of the iceberg of course.  Most rooms to let don’t have any way to accept a Mastercard.  At best they might take you down to the tourist shop, charge the card and get cash from their friend there.  (I have done this!)  But wait, another ad:

    “With your Mastercard you are welcome all over Greece, in supermarkets, fruit markets and grocery stores.”

    Yeah right!  Outside of major cities and big supermarkets, if you try showing a credit card in a “fruit market” everyone will laugh at you of course.   And any small “grocery store” on an island is more likely to accept your jewellery as payment than a Mastercard!

    I tried hard to think what else Mastercard might want to achieve.  Maybe they want to pressure store owners to install credit card machines.   So advertising in the summer when everyone involved in tourism isn’t in Athens to see their campaign makes loads of sense….not!   Maybe they will just run it for a couple of weeks, take pictures and then tell everybody that they did it, see if that impresses them!

    Coming face-to-face with
    your schoolbook pictures: Priceless®
    With your MasterCard, you are welcome all over Greece,
    in museums and galleries

    This one cracked me up.  If I had a pen with me I would have added “if the museum is not on strike, or the keeper hasn’t left early that day, or it isn’t some weird holiday you have never heard of, or it isn’t one of those little museums with just one guard and no electricity or internet connection which doesn’t accept credit cards….”   The picture of a statue was also really weird, some angle which felt distinctly uncomfortable.  Surely not an image any one found in “schoolbook pictures”!

    But the fourth advert of the series in the metro was probably the best:

    Forgetting to update your status: Priceless
    With your MasterCard you are welcome all over Greece
    in bars, night clubs and discos

    This whole campaign is some sort of weird fiction.  As if some exec in the US dreamed up a campaign in ten minutes projecting a long term goal from one of his powerpoint presentations.   It is in many ways like holding up a “everything that is wrong with Greek tourism” summary in four advertisements.   In an upside down world maybe you can go to a noisy bar and pull out a Mastercard to pay for your drink.   But surely not in Greece!

    Oh, and it is impossible not to “update your status” because all the Greeks do at the club is play with their cell phones…

     

     

  • Moving the i-Goalposts

    In the old days we used to have great flame wars of PC vs Mac.  Back then Apple was going to conquer the desktop.  They never even got close of course.  Everyone talked about Apple machines but bought PCs.  There was always some secret plan, some new technology, a “gamechanger” just around the corner that Apple was about to reveal.  There was firewire (much better than USB!) or other Apple-proprietary flops which remained in the Apple ecosystem or just quietly died out.  Apple fan boys still talk about them.  Apparently the world was wrong to go mainstream with Windows and Intel, “if only they had all picked the better technology” and gone with Apple….

    Similar story with iPads.  For the second time in Apple’s history, education would be key.   Schools apparently would fill up with iPads.  The PC is no longer important, check out market share of all devices and iOS is conquering the planet!  Well, no, it didn’t.  iPads are already retreating big time in terms of market share.   Apple’s latest hope, the collaboration with IBM is probably first fanboy fiction which actually has a hope.   But only because of IBM infrastructure and serious technology.

    Apple couldn’t support going mainstream.   Much like Facebook struggled to keep up with demand as it growed.   Billions of hits on your servers from all around the world is quite something to handle.   On Apple-only technology it would be impossible.   Since switching to Intel of course, things are much better.   Apple can pretend to be running on Apple hardware, get real software companies to handle the software and actually gradually catch up with Microsoft and Google, SAP, Oracle and all the other serious companies.  They use Oracle and IBM for their data centers since 2010.  In order for Apple to support its own Content Delivery Network they will need to steal a damn lot of specialized engineers, copy or buy the pop count models of Level3/Edgecast/Limelight or buy them out, figure out how iPhone users are different and then lose money big time for several years until they figure out the optimum configuration.

    The plateau reached by iPhones is typical in this respect.  While others talk about iOS catching up and iWatches, I watch the total user base numbers.   Only Google can handle the number of Android devices around.  People nag about the Play store but who else could build an infrastructure able to handle the payload?   If Apple made a cheaper iPhone and sold more of them, they would need to outsource even more of their infrastructure.   Sooner or later the myth bubble would burst.   Apple needs to keep up the fantasy of a “different” and “superior” ecosystem.   Have you striving for the “ideal” of living with iPhone, iPad, MacBooks all around you.   And this despite the fact that Apple was never able to build a proper retail channel?

    In fact, the greatest news about the Apple-IBM deal is that IBM might force Apple to stop changing adaptors, connectors, file formats and everything else they change all the time!  Because which corporate buyer in their right mind will invest in a company that suddenly stops supporting a device you bought only 2 or 3 years ago?  Steve Jobs might get away with telling consumers to hold their iPhone differently in order to get better reception, but corporate contracts don’t have quite the same patience….   IBM might also provide some much need oomph in terms of Artificial Intelligence through the Watson platform because – let’s face it – Siri has no chance in hell of catching up with Google does it?

    The myth of a superior operating system has been maintained by Apple not through real innovation but through acquisitions.   They never spent enough on R&D to come up with real technological breakthroughs.   Steve Jobs was a genius not in “giving the people what they didn’t know they wanted” but in dressing up technologies that already existed.   You can only do that so much though.   So he bought in stuff.   Look at a the list of Apple acquisitions.   When Apple wanted to pretend they were kings of digital video they knew their software was rubbish.  It was written by the same guy who wrote PremierePro, the software they made fun of!  So they bought other companies and gave it away with Final Cut.   Software that used to sell for $10,000 on its own, was suddenly thrown in the suite for free.  As long as you buy in to the Apple fantasy…

    I have written before that Tim Cook really is Apple’s only hope.  IBMesque moves will save the company.  But handling their fanboys fanatic approach to everything is slowing them down.

  • In defence of experiments

    The recent uproar concerning experiments run by Facebook is really worrying.   Because without experiments, there is no business, there is no progress and we learn nothing.   Most of my working day is spent conducting experiments or setting up experiments.   Most of my business advice ends with “well, let’s try it!”  Facebook being accused now is ludicrous.  Google runs much more experiments on a much grander scale and nobody has ever complained about that, have they?

    Anything we do on the internet is set up as an A/B experiment.  I, Facebook or Google do exactly the same thing: we send one user to one type of setup and the next to another.  Then we measure.  It is no different to what I did when I was in retail.  You set up a shelf one way, see how it sells, how people react.  You set up a different store differently.   Then you measure.

    This attitude really is the only way to learn.  Whether you are Leonardo DaVinci or Bill Gates, this is your tool.  Experimentation.   And of course in business, until animals get their own credit cards, most experiments concern human behavior.    We want to sell more, change attitudes, change beliefs, influence you.   We play music at different volumes to change the speed you walk in the supermarket, we use different colors to change the way you eat in McDonalds, we use even smells to sell more in a travel office.   You do the same thing everyday in your job too.   Two year olds do the same things to test their parents limits.

    Much of my best consulting has been in finding ways to conduct experiments despite limitations.   How to test demand for an eshop idea without actually building it for real?  How to find potential buyers for a service which hasn’t been completely defined yet?   How to run a competition for our product without risking the edgy concept backfiring on us?

    So give Facebook some slack and stop pretending.   Look at your everyday life.  If you’re not experimenting all the time, you’re not learning.