Sometimes prioritizing is not the key to being efficient.

Recently, I've mapped out my own time allocated each week to various important priorities. These might be marketing, operations, product development, and strategy. Or Project A, Project B, Project C. Or whatever occupies your world.

What I discovered when I really mapped it all out is that my pie chart looks a lot more like the one on the right than the one on the left:

The Grey Ring of Death is all inevitable "overhead" of working in a large team, especially in a large company.

I think this is true for most people:

There's a lot more to be efficiency to be gained from increasing the size of the pie (by cutting the crap) than there is from fine-tuning the correct allocation of time, resources, and energy within the pie you have.

This is important for your teams too. Could you get more out of them by micromanaging their priorities or by reducing overhead wastage through removing the bullshit from their day to day work?

Lack of Opportunities for Truly Incremental Income

You have an hour. You've got a set of skills that are in demand (you know this, because someone’s paying you a salary to put them to work). And you've got an internet connection. Can you make money?

This is a problem I've been thinking about for more than five years. I've heard variations of this many times: “It’s only $5. You could just work at McDonald’s for an hour to own it.”

The problem with that statement is that it’s bullshit: it’s not possible to get hired at McDonald’s, work, and get paid all within the span of an hour.

I've experimented in many different ways. I aggregated content from pub quizzes I've run in Singapore and published that as an eBook. Also I created a Squidoo lens about the economic fundamentals of building a Singapore dividend investment portfolio. There’s been numerous other failed attempts.

Besides the fact both took me more than an hour, neither worked because they were half-baked and no effort went into polish, marketing, or anything like that.

The closest I've come to getting it to work was on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service. Their idea is brilliant but suffers from several fatal problems:

1) It was clearly conceived by engineers. It’s hard to understand and even harder to explain to others.

2) There is a massive imbalance between demand (too much of this) relative to the supply of available tasks. So, while it does pass my “hour test” – you’re going to spend that hour being paid at best a quarter.

3) I want to use it on the supply-side, too. But the one time I did, I had to task an engineer for two weeks to build out a working prototype for me. It’s not accessible to people who need work done now, but can’t program or don’t have access to engineering resources.

I’m convinced this is a billion dollar or more market. But it’s a tough nut to crack: do you start horizontally building it as a generic platform like Mechanical Turk? Can this problem be solved in a scale-able way through verticals (e.g. like Stack Overflow is doing?) I want to figure this out.

Building infrastructure to accomodate peak usage.

Daily and weekly spikes in usage are a common problem in building out cost-effecive online infrastructure. I know of three basic approaches to dealing with spikes, which I'll outline below, but am wondering if there isn't a fourth, missing option: building for peak and leveraging the inevitable surplus capacity?

Imagine that the area below the wavy line is the daily usage of an online service. Let's say that it peaks for a few hours each day between 7-10PM. Let's assume that you have to pick between owning/leasing dedicated hardware or using a cloud-based option like EC2. My assumption is that, given full utilization, dedicated hardware would be cheaper.

Let's work on the assumption that not catering for peaks (e.g. by letting the service degrade) is really bad.

The options then:

1. Go completely on-demand (cloud). Your usage model would approximate the wavy line assuming your cloud option was perfectly granular. The cost would be high.
2. Own/lease dedicated infrastructure that covers your maximum usage (the top "Full" line). In this case, all the yellow shaded areas are "wasted" capacity. Whether or not this is better than being completely on-demand depends on the relative costs, and the amplitude and duration of the peaks versus the valleys.
3. Go with a "Hybrid" solution: buy enough infrastructure to cover your valleys (the green shaded area) and have some mechanism to send any usage above that to a cloud solution. In theory, this would be the most cost-effective of the three.

But what I'm wondering is this:

Is it possible to go with the "Full" (owned/leased) infrastructure level, and find solutions to leverage the yellow areas? To farm Bitcoins, maybe?

Is this already a solved problem? Are there efficient, scalable, and reliable ways to turn surplus capacity into cash besides BitCoin? Are there real-time brokers of unused processing power out there just like there's companies that aggregate left-over ad inventory?

What in a Company's Name?

I've recently watched a video about the re-branding of American Airlines. They presumably paid their agency a fortune to come up with the idea of painting a big American flag on the tail and re-positioning the brand as "American" to replace the old "AA". Pretty lame!

It made me wonder though: is there any kind of pattern among the names of the best companies? I took a look at the 40 biggest firms by market cap on the S&P 500 and classified them by the origins of their name:

• Random - a variety of trivial reasons
• Descriptive - The core business is described in the name. E.g. "Theo's Pencil Company"
• Suggestive - a word that suggests some quality about the company
• Founder - named after the original founder
• Product - related to its core product, or re-branded to the same name as the product.

Here's what I came up with:

1. Founder - 33.8%
2. Descriptive - 28.8%
3. Random - 20%
4. Suggestive - 15%
5. Product - 7.5%

I wonder: if I started a new company tomorrow, and paid AA American's brand agency a million bucks to come up with a name, would they tell me to call it "Sanders"?