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Some CEO emailed me the other day. I don't remember who it was; people mail me all the time about their blah blah yawn product service thingy, and on the rare occasions I bother to read mail from strangers, I don't usually remember anything about the email, even if I respond to it. I can remember broad categories of questions I get, but everything else is just a blur. That's senility for ya. But this dude, or possibly dudette, asked me a really good question. One that made an impression. And by "really good", I mean it was one of the flat-out wrong-est business questions you could possibly ask. It was like asking: "How can I get the most out of my overseas child laborer pool?" There's no right answer to a question that's just wrong . But his question, well, people ask it a lot. In fact there are whole books that give answers to this inherently-wrong question. His question was: "Hello, blah blah, I'm the CEO or C-something-O or wh...

Disclaimer: I do not speak for Google! These are my own views and opinions, and are not endorsed in any way by my employer, nor anyone else, for that matter. Everyone knows and quotes Joel's old chestnut, " Smart , and Gets Things Done ." It was a blog , then a book , and now it's an aphorism. People quote Joel's Proverb all the time because it gives us all such a nice snuggly feeling. Why? Because to be in this industry at all, even a bottom-feeder, you have to be smart. You were probably the top kid in your elementary school class. People probably picked on you. You were the geek back when geeks weren't popular. But now "smart" is fashionable. That's right! All those loser kneebiter jocks in high school who played varsity and got all the girls and sported their big, winning, shark-white smiles as they barely jee-parlor-fran-saysed their way through the classes you coasted through: where are they now? A bunch of sorry-ass bank manag...

I will once again plagiarize myself by transcribing a talk I gave. First: be warned! I offer this gesture of respect to you � yes, you! � when I say that this is at least 20 minutes of reading. This is long even for me. If you're surfing reddit, gobbling up little information snacks, then it's best to think of this entry as being more like a big downer cow. Unless you're really hungry, you should wait for it to be sliced into little bite-sized prion patties before consuming it. If you do read it, you'll see the CJD analogy is surprisingly apt. I ramble even more than usual, and lose my train of thought, and the slides might as well be scenes from a David Lynch movie for all the relation they have to my actual talk. But once again I find myself astonished at how much I agree with myself, by and large. Funny how that works. And I made a few decent jokes here and there. So I'm transcribing it. If you're impatient, and I wouldn't blame you a bit, the be...