Chris Writes.

As some of you out there already know, I’ve headed off on a grand adventure this week to race the TransRockies – a 7-day mountain bike race in my birth province of British Columbia, covering 550km, and climbing a few meters shy of 18,000.  The answer to your next question is, of course, “Because it was there”.

My teammate, Mike Cushionbury from Bicycling Magazine, will be providing daily commentary at their site.  Assuming that our internet connections work, you can follow his version of our story here.

I’m planning on doing my own commentary as well, which I’ll post here on the Specialized Riders Club.

August 10th, 2008
Categories: General Musings . Author: chris . Comments: No Comments

As is typical, the smart folks at the economist have wrapped up the whole cyclists-vs-cars conflict in a well-written and impartial way - you can read the whole article on their site here.  But the best part is their summary:

“Managing more cyclists is going to take more than new bike paths or fresh stripes on the roads. It looks as though there is a need, on both sides, for a revolution in manners.”

I couldn’t agree more.  And I’m going to start with me.  For the next month, I’m going to try to respond to drivers with a little more friendly banter, even if they did almost just kill me or flip me off.  I’ll report back then on what happens.

August 7th, 2008
Categories: General Musings . Author: chris . Comments: 4 Comments

Something has changed recently.  As part of my training regimen for Transrockies, I’ve been riding a lot, and commuting by bike to work more often, and I think I’m noticing an unfortunate upwards trend in car-to-bike aggression.  I’ve been honked at more often, yelled at to get off the road, given the one-finger salute, and been passed at high speeds in unsafe proximity.  If I were a new cyclist, I’d be terrified.  Over dinner with a friend tonight, he remarked that he’s observed the same thing recently in his pedal-powered trips around San Francisco.

But the levels of aggression I’ve seen recently are new, and it worries me.  It makes me extra sensitive on my commute, my training rides, and my lunch rides.  It makes me less likely to be understanding in an altercation, were one to occur (hopefully not).  And it makes me worry that new cyclists might get scared off, or worse, maybe killed, because they never had the chance to learn how to ride defensively.

A few hypotheses about why this is happening:

1. Gas Jealousy: after paying for gas, the feeling of driver entitlement is increased, and cyclists are seen as cheating the system by riding for free.  This of course isn’t true, as most of us own cars, pay taxes, and have to pay extra for the fuel our bodies consume…but emotion trumps logic.

2. Frustration at the perception of being delayed: any cyclist might be the cause for general traffic patterns or delays, and thus all are be treated with disdain.  This is often not the case, but yes, we’re slower, and easy to catch.

3. (and this is a stretch, perhaps maybe even sarcasm) Commuting by bike, and cycling in general, is un-American.  You’re not doing your part to chase the American dream by not driving a big pickup truck to work. Clearly all cyclists are communists.

For sure, not all cyclists are perfect.  Cyclists who disregard stop signs aren’t helping anything.  But neither is infrastructure perfect: sometimes bike lanes don’t exist, forcing cyclists into the lane and blocking traffic.  Sometimes stoplights won’t change for a cyclist alone, because they don’t set off the metal detector at the intersection.  It’s an imperfect world, clearly.  But we all have to live in it.  And I’m getting less and less likely to be tolerant of behavior that puts my life at risk for the sake of someone else’s convenience, or simply because of their intolerance.

And in case you need more convincing that we’re actually facing a problem here, check out this short video.  The NYPD officer in question has since been stripped of his badge and firearm pending the outcome of an investigation.

July 31st, 2008
Categories: General Musings . Author: chris . Comments: No Comments

It sounds rather similar to the intellectually uninspired P2P/MPAA/RIAA/EMI/ETC rhetoric: no matter how hard enforcements are pushed, and no matter how many technical and legal barriers are enacted, some clever (and often-but-not-always-young) punk will find a way to screw it all up by, say, holding down the shift key, and then publishing to the internet detailed instructions about how to hold down the shift key. This is basically the situation that many companies will face at the ‘2008 Olympic Games’ (a term I am not technically licensed to use).

If you’re not disastrously rich, marketing your company at the Olympic games in Beijing is nothing short of an effort in futility, even if you’re there: according to this article in the NY Times, 12 companies have paid a total of $900 Million for the privilege to be a marketing partner at the games.  For any other company in the world in any way associated with the games, telling stories related to the games is humorously forbidden.

At Specialized, where I work, we’re a personal sponsor to a flock of competing athletes, contributing their bikes, equipment, and often salaries.  Yet we are limited to rules such as not being able to say the words “2008 Olympics” when we try to tell the story of our involvement.  No matter how many athletes ride our bikes, we are faced with pages of legal jargon that tries to tell us to, basically, go home. This ironically seems to work against the IOC, and I suspect will only get worse in two ways:

1. more small/medium companies will find new, nimble ways around the rules, and
2. bigger companies will cease to see value in $100M advertising entitlements that are increasingly circumvented by these nimble small/medium companies.

Other comedic blunders along the way, also from the afforelinked NYT article: you can’t drink a competing beverage at the games.  Reporters cannot use laptops of non-sponsors unless you tape over logos.  Dutch fans may not wear pants.  The list goes on.

So, while the IOC heads on their merry way to the plush viewing seats in Bolgia 5, the marketing folks up in the Bolgia 10 cheap seats will probably start to entertain some or all of the following ideas:

-  Crowdsourced mass media via twitter, flickr, and any other service that can be populated and broadcast to via any cell phone.  Imagine a campaign where every camera phone image from the 2008 Beijing Olympics that showed the Speedo logo won a new Speedo swimsuit (the maybe-illegal one that already has people talking - and no, they’re not an Olympic sponsor, but like Specialized, they expect to kick ass on the podium).

-    Replacement Marketing via Social activism *inside* China - imagine what Coke’s $100M in marketing entitlement fees could accomplish if it were instead put towards humanitarian relief efforts.

-    Podcasts, v-casts, and other forms of individual commentary that can hit the web faster (and with fewer censors) than official channels.

-   Post-olympic celebrations that utilize photos and videos licensed from the public sector, and/or from CreativeCommons

There is a long list of other clever new toys out there that could also cause havoc in ways that very likely might get people arrested (so no, I’m not going to go there - let’s not put anyone at risk of prison terms, k?), but regardless, the point is that the world has changed in even the last two years since the games in Torino, and certainly has changed since the last summer games in Athens.  Yet the IOC and the Beijing organizers insist that they can regulate their way to “protect the rights of sponsors”.

Fact is, the harder they try to resist the clever ways that marketing can infiltrate any gathering of people, the harder people will try to prove their efforts futile.

June 24th, 2008
Categories: General Musings . Author: chris . Comments: 4 Comments

First off, what a great title for a solid day of insightful discussion. When was the last time you thought about ways to think in better ways? This whole day was about updating your sharpening tools, rather than sharpening your axe. That’s pretty unique, and valuable as it improves not only the one new thing you might do, but potentially everything you do next.

So, a brief recap on the day:
Part 1: Jane Fulton Suri from IDEO. A brilliant and photo-rich monologue about “informed intuition” - the process by which we make small micro-decisions every day, and the ways in which we improve our surroundings by micro-tweaks that suit our individual needs. And the important punchline: these subtle behaviors are windows into what we actually care about, even if we’re not aware of them consciously to point them out in the next focus group.

She had an extremely compelling section on role-playing, once showing a photo of a hospital ward ceiling, pointing out that *this* is what a patient looks at all day, and not the blinky machines that look so very hospitaly. Can we get some reassurance on the ceiling please? Additionally on the topic of role-playing: if you can reenact a customer scenario, what would a neutral non-involved observer say if they watched it unfold?

And her conclusion, which I love: “Stay curious, and reconsider the things you know well.”

Part 2: Gerald Zaltman from Harvard Business School. This guy kinda blew my mind a bit. At the heart of his discussion was the idea of ‘Deep Metaphor’, related to his assertion that ’surface thinking’ is not the same as insight or deep understanding (can I get a high five & a ‘hell yeah’ for that? Couldn’t agree more). More lucidly: observation only tells you *what* happens, insight is knowing why it happens, and deep insight is knowing why it happens when the subject actually being observed couldn’t tell you why it’s happening.

The killer punch for me though was when he said “A tennis ball is round. A plate is also round. So why, when a child tells you that he knows the earth is round, do you assume you know which one he means?”. Just when I thought I had this whole “research as a means to understanding” thing worked out, the one-two punch of context and the english language come back to haunt me with a litany of uncertainties. And I probably don’t even see them. As Zaltman said in his closing remarks: “All methods of market research are compromises with reality.” As a marketing guy, that troubles me. It’s true, of course, but it troubles me.

Part 3: Roger Martin and Malcolm Gladwell. This fireside chat between the Dean of my B-School and the venerable king of pop-marketing theory was a wildly entertaining and sometimes inside-joke riddled affair, full of cleverness and wisdom both. A discussion with Gladwell doesn’t seem to center on much of anything, instead attacking a topic as a fog might. But in the midst of the hazy focus, they battled against the epithet of “reliability” and championed the cause of “validity”.

In short: we businessy-types love things that are reliable, such as linear regression that we can repeat over and over to the same result, despite the fact that they’re not necessarily a valid measure of anything. In contrast, we loathe the murky waters of validity, because no matter how correct it is, we can’t always measure it or repeat it, and so validity-driven efforts don’t typically suit the best interests of our compensation schemes (ie: people do what you pay them to do, which is often to focus on reliable things, not valid things).

Some favorite quotes:
Gladwell on the lack of validity in business: “This is a cultural bias towards an intolerance for ambiguity.”
Martin on why we like reliability: “Business likes measurement.”
Gladwell on MBA’s: “As people get ’smarter’ we expect more reliability. This can be called an unfortunate outcome of a generally positive trend, and might be an indication of why MBA education is where it is today.” (Laughter)
Gladwell on IQ: “Any IQ above 120 isn’t useful. Other things matter at that point.”

They then discussed further on the ‘BMW-ization’ of the auto industry, and how the auto industry is trending towards a measurable norm (how close to BMW are you?), which is reliable but probably not valid. Robert Parker’s wine ratings are similar: wine makers are making wines to suit the tastes of a select few esteemed reviewers, in the hopes of a good ranking that will allow them to charge more. Reliable, not valid (especially if you like soft, round red wine!). So I wonder, in areas like these: are niche markets examples of validity showing through the reliable bedrock of an industry or industry segment?

Part 4: Anita McGahan, a new professor at Rotman. With the aid of a few charts, Anita postulated that we’ve got ‘about 46 to 91 years of oil left’. And then asked the interesting question: “which 19th century industries will be revived when we run out of oil?” It’s kind of a joke, but not really.

She offered a litany of questions about how we’ll actually deal with the end of oil, and a great many stats about oil consumption (there are 1500 litres of oil used each year to manufacture the food that each of us eats. That’s roughly a gallon per day of oil, per person, just to produce the food we consume.). But inside this, and the pictures of landfills full of plastic bags, plastic bottles, and discarded cell phones, she pointed out that bicycle commuter traffic in London England has increased 70% in recent years, since the congestion charge was implemented in the downtown core. After the talk, I asked her in the hallway what bike companies like Specialized and others could do to help move this needle. Her answer? “Make more cheaper bikes. A $50 bike would be good.” Alleviate the fear of theft, and make the bikes more accessible to everyone. The only trouble here I see is that this seems to end up in dumpsters full of discarded $50 bicycles, cheaper to throw away as trash than they are to repair. Kinda like cell phones.

Part 5: Dan Ariely. This guy is my new favorite superhero. Speaking with excerpts from his book “Predictably Irrational”, Ariely stunned the audience with anecdote after anecdote about how humans are basically terrible at making decisions, and there are several very counter-intuitive ways to increase the chances that people will make a clearly irrational choice.

Examples:
1. Doctors recommending hip replacement are asked to reconsider their diagnosis: hip replacement, or ibuprofen. A majority choose ibuprofen, which in some cases works. Second: some docs in similar situation asked to reconsider between hip replacement, ibuprofen, or another fancy sounding drug. Most overlook both drugs and go straight to hip replacement. The complexity of choosing between two drugs makes the default choice more likely.

2. Free trip: rome or paris. people polled are mostly split even between the two. Then add a third option: Rome, Paris, or Rome without coffee. Now the vast majority chose Rome, because it is clearly better than one of the other choices (Rome > Rome without Coffee).

Of all the speakers, Ariely’s book is the one I’m most looking forward to reading.

June 4th, 2008
Categories: General Musings . Author: chris . Comments: 1 Comment

So in an unexpected turn of events, I ended up on the start line of an Oakley-sponsored criterium within 24hrs of landing in Shanghai. I’m not sure what surprised me more: the fact that it happened, or the fact that this little regional race was full of haze-reducing vibrance and was seething with the enthusiasm of a new cyclist on a new bike on the first day of spring. I heard that among the four categories (Mens A, Mens B, Womens, and MTB) there were 178 registered riders. That’s comparable to lots of regional criteriums in the USA. What was astonishing were the number that belonged to local teams, all wearing matching kits, posing for team group photos, cheering each other on, and generally having a hell of a good time. For a race that was organized and run entirely by ex-pat civilians, it was indistinguishable from one organized by a promotion company: there were police at intersections, a lead car calling out the race over a loudspeaker, a photographer on the back of a moto, a starters pistol, a podium ceremony with magnums of champagne to spray, glass trophies and certificates for top 5 in all categories (including two sprint preems in the Cat A race)…all for an entry fee that didn’t quite hit $4. Oh, and the title sponsor, Oakley, threw down 3 pair of sunglasses for a random raffle. When that was announced, the crowd went crazy. Apathy? Not here. Not one bit.

A few other observations worth mention: the range of bikes here went from 20″ wheel folding bikes (seriously - one guy raced the MTB category on one), to 1992 vintage Frankenbikes with random collections of parts, to $10,000 Time and Colnago dream bikes, in a land where the average working class wage is $200 per month. Lycra was worn, though lots had a sort of loose-fit (probably because it was bought on sale, I’m told). The pace was decent in the Cat-A (a hair over 40kph avg), though I should note that there wasn’t more than 2 ft of elevation change during each of the ten 5km laps. There was at least one crash that I thankfully wasn’t involved in (but I saw it, and it was ugly).

One of the most interesting things, and apparently the reason why races like this are successful: they had a bus system of their own devising. Few people here own cars (see previous mention of average wage), and public transport doesn’t go to this race location; it’s about an hour from downtown Shanghai in an Intel-anchored industrial park. So the race organizers get a few private buses, schedule a few stops in town, and everyone rides in together. A separate box van follows the bus, with all the bikes carefully wrapped in cardboard. Again, all included in the $4 entry fee. Some teams and riders showed up in their own cars, but a majority used this bus.

As for me: I placed third overall, and took the 7th lap sprint preem, so I was quite happy (astonished might be a better description, actually) given that I was on a borrowed bike and my training over the past week has been very, very limited by work travel. But more important: I got to see for myself that there is a very real and growing racing scene in China, and despite the flat terrain and poor air quality and impossible traffic, they have found a way to make it work. And it works really, really well. I’m told that just 3 years ago, they might have had 4 or 5 riders out to something like this. That’s pretty serious growth.

May 26th, 2008
Categories: General Musings . Author: chris . Comments: 1 Comment

Tokyo_2

Originally uploaded by Chris Matthews.

Japan is pretty darn cool. Some random observations:

incredibly clean. as in, at busy downtown streetcorners, there are ashtray boxes. People will stand by them and smoke, carefully flicking their ashes, and then cigarette butt, into the ashtray. No one walks around with a cigarette. Lots of smokers, yet difficult to find a cigarette butt on the street in downtown Tokyo.

Almost no garbage cans. Very difficult to find. When you find them, they have 5 or 6 different ones, for different types of recycling

iPods are very popular, but rarely used in public. On the trains and subways, where you see them most often in USA and Canada, they are almost non-existent

Younger fashion does not follow traditional lines. Lots of really elaborate apparel, crazy garish outfits, girls dressed up as dolls…very deliberate, very distinct. Older/business folks are straight traditional: blue/black suit, white shirt, conservative tie.

There is a word in Japanese that translates to, and accurately means, “died from overwork”

There are guards everywhere, not really police, but rather, people standing near worksites watching to make sure people don’t trip, or watching over workers.

I went into a starbucks in downtown tokyo. There was a line, maybe 5 people in front of me. I almost couldn’t keep up with how fast the line was moving. In a starbucks that might have been 120 sq ft, there were 12 people working there. I was out with 5 coffees in less than a minute.

Very trusting culture, sort of. Bikes should always be locked up, but you can lock up the front wheel of a $5000 bike to a signpost with a $3 chain lock and it will be fine.

Food is, of course, excellent and always fresh. I had chicken sashimi last night, which I had (up to now) always thought was impossible and unsafe. Apparently safe, as I’ve lived. In a skinny culture, they sure do eat a lot of fatty foods. They’re more about balance. Portions are smaller, and there are sometimes “US portion size” options on the menu, which I was told is about 50% more.

Cell phones are ubiquitous, and utilized more often for web access and maps. Which is good because often, even with maps, locals will have trouble following directions to a small restaurant if they’ve not been there before.

Very common sight is to see a 2D barcode on ads and fliers that people can take a picture of with their camera phone: this activates a hyperlink to a related mobile-optimized website.

Culture says “thank you” (and there are many ways to say it) more often than any other culture I’ve seen. Every chance they get, they say thank you. Often, when entering a building, the thank you is punctuated by great flourish and sweeping arm movements of welcome. They say thank you, and they’re DRAMATIC about it.

If you’re in the company of Japanese colleagues, and you suggest something “might be good” or you ask “if they think it’s a good idea to ___” or anything else that suggests some sort of action, they’ll take this to mean that you’d like them to do it. And they’ll often do it without further discussion. To find out what they feel about a situation, you must directly ask what they think, in a way that isn’t a leading question.

It’s common, because of a cultural bias towards never saying no, to get into trouble with sentences and questions that involve double negatives. For example: if you ask “So we’re not eating now?”, the reply is “yes”, meaning “true”, but conversationally, this is typically answered “no” in a conversation between westerners.

It is an INCREDIBLY bike friendly culture, with a ton of commuting by the young and old alike. Lots of cheap bikes, and lots of bike parking lots – some with clever 2-level storage systems to fit more bikes into small spaces. Also, a reasonable number of high-end bikes and cycling enthusiasts. Almost none wear helmets.

Oh, and gas is about $7 per gallon

May 25th, 2008
Categories: General Musings . Author: chris . Comments: 3 Comments

So it’s officially bike to work week. I didn’t ride to work today, but I rode home, so that’s gotta count for something. All the sordid details of my 24-mile commute into a 13-mph headwind can be found here, but the bottom line is that by riding home (and by riding back into work tomorrow, since that’s where my car is spending the night), I’ll at least be a participant in this week of trying to convince people that short trips *can* be done by bike.

Ride a bike this week. At least once. Please.

May 12th, 2008
Categories: General Musings . Author: chris . Comments: 2 Comments

This month’s issue of Fast Company has given me pause. The cover story, and its sensational headline, are touting Ning.com as being the next revolution in social networking. And when I first read the story, while squinting to filter out the noise (”srsly, if we call it a “viral expansion loop”, people will be impressed and not realize that it’s just a fancypants way of saying word-of-mouth”), I did catch myself thinking this was a rather nifty little idea.

Then I read a little more, I talked to a few more smrt people, and thought about it more, and I have a trio of questions that haven’t been answered. First though, the cool/unique part of ning: it puts the community in control of starting a niche community. That’s neat, but it presupposes that people want to create niche communities that don’t exist. That’s true sometimes, but I think it’s more rare than it is common. I think we’ve learned with the Riders Club and by watching other social networking sites, that people want to join communities for the sense of community. It’s the fact that there are other people there that make it exciting, worthwhile, and fulfilling.

For example: imagine, for a second, if Ning was instead a church: a place where anyone could start their own religion. You’d get some takers, I bet. But the reassurance that most people are looking for comes from the population that’s already there, and I suspect that some might peer into Ning sects with curiosity, but not much more. So this gets to the heart of question #1: under what conditions would people want to start a social network, instead of joining an existing one?

And this brings us to question #2. Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, there are conditions that dictate a social network is needed, and somehow, Facebook/Flickr/myspace/linkedin/etc just doesn’t suit the need/culture/features required. Now, one of two things will happen: the community will have 5 or 6 members, and email will remain more effective as a way to communicate, and this new online community will remain unchanged and offline. Or, more optimistically, suppose this social network actually becomes popular because it answers the community needs of a group of people. If the latter is true, why would this community remain on Ning?

But it’s question #3 that really gets me. It seems to me that Ning misses out on something we think we learned early on with the Riders Club: building a niche social network from scratch takes a metric crapton of effort, and it won’t just grow because it’s there. It takes pavement pounding. It takes salesmanship, sweat, convincing, hard work, and most of all, it takes time. And if there isn’t someone tending the hedges every moment of every day, the vines will dry up. Q#3: Who’s going to be the champion of each one of these new social networks? Who’s going to do the work?

I think Ning is cool concept, and I can see it being a “my first social network” tool for small companies. But once traction is achieved, the temptation to bring that community in-house would be huge. And their projections for growth through a “viral expansion loop” seem predicated on an assumption that networks grow by themselves. They most definitely do not. Railroads are networks too, in a way, and no matter how well intentioned, the tracks never laid themselves.

April 30th, 2008
Categories: General Musings . Author: chris . Comments: No Comments

Click for my Pics from Bring Yur Own BigWheel!

This was a riot, exactly why San Francisco is a fantastic place to spend a sunny Sunday afternoon. A twisty steep hill. A hundred-or-so BigWheels, and similar kinder-intended rides. The chaos was nothing short of brilliant, and the crashes spectacular. M’lady did a fine job, racing all 5 heats without anything disastrous happening, save for a skinned knee.

So what about this made it work? I think a few things:

1. The weather. It was awesome out. [external]
2. Participants and observers all smiled for a solid 90 minutes. Not many things do this.[internal]
3. There was noise, and not just any noise. It was the nostalgic noise of childhood, those hollow echoing plastic wheels and squeals of delight. [external]
4. A distributed network of bloggers and websites to spread the meme.[internal]
5. Did I mention the weather was awesome? It was. You should have been there.[see above]

Sometimes, social networks work because they’re a good idea, but in almost every case they need an array of external elements that the network doesn’t create, and rather instead relies upon. I think this might be why some networks work, while some don’t. It could also help to explain the slow death of Facebook we are witnessing: the external element of curiosity and reconnecting with lost pals has become banal. The external elements can make all the difference. BigWheel racing is an awesome idea, but without the nostalgia and that first perfect spring day that we all remember, it’s not as exciting.

March 25th, 2008
Categories: General Musings . Author: chris . Comments: 1 Comment