The Search for Blame is Always Successful
Quite frankly, I am a little surprised at the Martha Stewart Verdict. I am not a lawyer or legal scholar, and I didn't follow the case closely, but based on what I knew about the case it seemed that the government's case was pretty weak and nothing more than a political effort to show a few CEOs swinging from lamp posts after the bursting of the internet bubble, Enron, Worldcom, etc.

However, I am not holding Martha blameless. Here are a few pointers that were hammered into my head by my business ethics prof (It was a fun class. The prof was like a young version of Professor Kingsfield from The Paper Chase, intellectually skewering young minds that would dare debate with him - and you had no choice but to debate him since he would call on you, ask your opinion about the case being discussed and automatically take the opposite view):

The Line Between Legal and Illegal Isn't Fixed - The prof drew up a wavy line on the board and said that was the line between legal and illegal. And - oh yes - this wavy line moved up and down. In other words, things that were perfectly legal one year could easily be found to be illegal the next year. And a lot of it depended on politics. If you want to stay clean, DON'T stay on the "just legal" side of the line - you could find yourself on the wrong side of the line in a heartbeat. Stay FAR onto the legal side of the line and you will stay in the clear.

Use the Smell Test - The prof liked this one and used it throughout the semester. If something even smelled unethical - even if it was legal - avoid it like the plague. During case study discussions he would often pick out a hapless classmate and simply ask "Does this pass the smell test?". Of course, whatever he said the prof would take the opposite view, so the trick was always to back up your opinion with facts.

The U.S. is NOT the Safest Political Place to Do Business - This was a good lecture. The topic was "safest political places to do business in the world". Everyone assumed that we were going to talk about countries that have a Dictator of the Month. The prof said he was going to start listing countries from top (safest) to bottom. "Wait", he stopped at turned to the class, "who do you think is first?". Everyone assumed the U.S. Wrong! The U.S. wasn't even in the top five.

The risk of doing business in the U.S. is being too successful. Become too big a target and the government will come after you, guaranteed. Standard Oil (broken up the government despite the fact that oil prices dropped for consumers in every single year of its existence), Microsoft (constantly on the defense from government), Halliburton (constantly on defense from the Left), the list goes on and on and on. Or you can be regulated out of existence, have your profits taxed away (anyone remember the Windfall Profits Tax on oil companies?), or attacked just for doing economically savy business decisions (there was an item today on CNN attacking companies for doing things to lower their taxes - like putting subsidiaries overseas. Lowering your taxes isn't illegal - avoiding them is - and there was nothing illegal by what these companies did - and I would say it would pass the smell test since this is like being attacked for deducting your mortgage interest, but my prof would, of course, debate me on that).

This goes into the whole discussion of business bashing by politicians, typically the Left. They love jobs but hate the businesses that provide them. I have never have figured this one out.

The Very Big Fish and The Very Small Fish Typically Get Away - This little rule of thumb didn't hold up for Martha (and maybe not applicable after 10 years): The law is like a fishing net. The really big fish can break through and get away. The really small fish slip through the holes in the net and aren't interesting to catch anyway. It's all the medium sized fished that get caught and eaten.

The warning 10 years ago was this: If as a middle manager at a company you know about malfeasance going on, you are more likely to serve time than the CEO (so come clean, turn State's, etc.). I think this was true a decade ago when I was in business school, but I think after the past few years with Enron and what not, the CEO is more likely to serve than the middle manager. But I think it is still something to keep in mind.

The Search for Blame is Always Successful - This wasn't in business school, but a quote I read somewhere (and can't find who to attribute it to), but a truism whether discussing political grandstanding by prosecutors or office politics.


So while I disagree with Martha's conviction, I think she could have avoided her situation all together if she had known about these little lessons.

posted by Director_Mitch @ 1:45 PM (Permalink)
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Dammit Jim I'm a robot not a doctor.
Rorschach here with a small observation. When I saw this article from engadget:
Japan Seeks Robotic Help in Caring for the Aged



am I the only one who thought of good old Capt. Pike's chair?



Mrs. Hashimoto! Please beep once for shampoo and twice for conditioner!

Just asking.

posted by Rorschach @ 8:49 AM (Permalink)
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Convergence: Inevitable or Marketing Minefield?
Convergence is a word thrown around a lot in several industries - mainly by marketing people like myself - to describe new products that will combine the functions of several distinct products. Today, the term can be found in marketing literature on portable devices (converging the portable phone, PDA, and digital camera), the home network (converging the TV and PC systems in the home), and in several other areas. But these aren't the first areas where convergence has been attempted. While some convergence areas look like a sure thing, a look at earlier efforts at convergence shows that the results aren't always pretty:

The post war boom of the 1950s saw unprecedented growth in purchases of both cars and leisure boats. Some marketing genius decided why not combine them into one?!? While the boatcar did make it easier to tow your leisure craft to the nearest lake or bay, the inability to throw out a good cast from a fishing rod relegated this to the collectors' market, where the few that still exist bring in high prices today.


After the fiasco of the carboat, the boys in marketing (they were all boys back then) went back to the drawing board and figured out their problem: they mixed the wrong product with the car. It should have been a plane instead of a boat! Alas, this attempt also resulted in failure, mainly due to the inability to find wide enough parking places at the new indoor malls that were starting to crop up by the end of the decade.


The 1970s saw new advances in science and the produce people figured they would get into the convergence game by combining two vegetables few liked into a single one everyone could hate. They succeeded by creating a vegetable that had the blandness of cauliflower with the rough texture of broccoli. While you can occasionally find broccoflower in the store, it has never been offered at any of the finer (or less fine) dining establishments of the U.S.


The 1980s found convergence success in the Multifunctional Printer (MFP) by combining four products that functioned poorly by themselves - fax machine, printer, copier and scanner - into a single product that functioned even worse. But people needed to reclaim desk space from all the gadgets that were taking over their office, and trying to get help from a single source when things went wrong was easier than trying to call four different help lines.


The 1990s saw politicos getting onto the convergence bandwagon with their introduction of Billary. Fortunately the initial product was rejected, although there is a reintroduction planned for 2008.

And the 00s? I think we'll see many more attempts my marketers to converge dissimilar products since it is easier for a marketing person to combine two or more products that are already on the market than to create a brand new product. The proposed business plan is deemed less "risky" since markets already exist for the current single products, meaning it is easier to get buy-in from management. Sometime convergent products make sense, but as I think I have shown here, the result is often ugly.

Extra Credit: Can anyone name the "convergence product" from a Classic Saturday Night Live "commerical"?

posted by Director_Mitch @ 8:20 PM (Permalink)
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Hotels and WIFI
The hotel industry gets it.

I used to travel extensively, but things slowed down with unemployment and limited travel in my last job, so I haven't traveled a lot for business in the last two years. I am now traveling again (I'm on a one week swing through North America now) and am pleasantly surprised to find that (so far) 100% of the hotels I have stayed at have all offered free WIFI in the room. And I'm talking mid-range business hotels like Crown Plaza and Residence Inn. This is a big service to business travelors, and hotels that offer it definitely get a big plus in my book.

So when Rorschach leaves the comment Damn boy, you blog more on the road than at home!, it is a combination of having handy WIFI access along with some dead time on my hands. On this trip I spent a couple of days at corporate HQ where there were no dinners and the client visits haven't included any dinners yet (just lunches), so having an internet connection plus a few hours in a hotel room alone equates to a lot of email and blogging.

Beats drinking in the bar, I guess. Although in this hotel they did inform me that the WIFI DOES reach into the hotel bar, so if later blog entries this evening seem incoherent...

posted by Director_Mitch @ 6:52 PM (Permalink)
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Everything You Wanted to Know About Semiconductor Packaging…
(but were afraid to ask).

I don’t know how many times I have been stopped on the street by people with a burning desire to know the finer points of semiconductor packaging. And then I get emails like this one from “Stephen”:

Director Mitch, I have been unable to sleep. I have been wondering about the intricacies of semiconductor packaging including ecapsulation, singulation and if backgrinding is always necessary. Please answer some of these questions so I can stop tossing and turning at night.

So, Dear Readers, I will start a series of entries that will answer these burning questions so many of you have. But let’s start from the beginning.

Intro: What is a Semiconductor and Why is it “Packaged”


(note: For this first entry I am going to assume the reader has NO knowledge of electronics, so you engineers go read Gizmodo or something).

A semiconductor is the technical name for what most people refer to as a “computer chip” (even when they are used in things other than computers). As the name implies, a semiconductor conducts (transmits) electricity neither particularly well, nor particularly badly. But semiconductor material can be modified through manufacturing processes to increase or decrease its electrical flow through desired regions to create an electrical circuit.

Think of having a box in front of you with a transparent front so you can see through it. There is water at the top, sand trapped in the middle, and nothing (an air pocket) on the very bottom. The sand doesn’t stop the water, but it doesn’t really let it flow - the sand is a semiconductor of water - the water sort of permeates the sand and eventually flows to the bottom, which isn’t particularly useful. But by creating little paths in the sand you could make the water flow exactly where you want it to in order to do something useful, maybe make it turn little water wheels. And by adding some additional materials to the sand (“doping”) you could make sure that the areas where you didn’t want water to flow would stay impermeable to water.




The process of making a path in the sand and adding materials to prevent water from flowing into the unwanted regions is similar to making an electrical circuit in a semiconductor material - the sand is the semiconductor material and the water is electricity (and the height of the water above the bottom is potential, or voltage, and the viscosity of the water is electron flow, and the size of the box…). Okay, in reality semiconductor manufacturing is a lot more complicated, but this is a good analogy for the layman.

The most common semiconductor material is silicon, the main component of sand (so the analogy is apt in more than one way).

So you made your circuit on a semiconductor material, and it comes out as a small, flat, rigid rectangle, like a small piece of glass (this is actually where the term computer “chip” gets its name since these look like little chips of…something. “Chip” actually isn’t used in the semiconductor industry at all. The very technical term in the industry for a raw chip like this is “die”, although old timers sometimes use the term “bar”. The etymology of these terms is unclear, but “bar” may be a reference to the original Kilby experiment – the first integrated circuit - although this term is now becoming obsolete).




You now need a way hook up a power supply to get it going and you need a way to get data on and off the thing. You also need to make sure this fragile thing doesn’t break, get wet, or shatter. And you do of this by putting it into a semiconductor package.



The package provides protection to the semiconductor from the elements (heat, humidity, etc.) as well as provides pathways to the “external world”, called “leads” where voltage can be input and data (electrical 0s and 1s) can be put on and taken off the thing. This is the end "semiconductor" device that is used to design all the consumer electronics goodies in your home.

However, a single chip usually can't do everything in a computer, disk drive, what have you. So they are put together with other chips on a printed circuit board (PCB) to create a complete product (computer, CD player, etc.).




One of the goals of both the semiconductor and packaging industries is to integrate more and more of these different chips that are on a PCB into fewer chips in order to reduce size and cost of the end product, and is the reason why everything electronic in the last 30 years has shrunk so much. Both industries (semiconductors and packaging) invest literally billions of dollars a year in order to achieve this goal and the technologies involved to do this on a mass production level are literally amazing. I hope to go into some detail on these technologies in future entries.

posted by Director_Mitch @ 9:11 PM (Permalink)
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Maybe the Reason They're Unemployed is NOT About Offshoring
Here are a few reader comments to a CNN article on offshoring. My company has more than half a dozen tech jobs open and I guarantee that no one who writes something like this would ever get a job in a position I had any decision making authority on.

I want to find a political party or movement that will try to save American jobs. I am ready to vote for the Communist Party, the Nazi Party, or whatever it takes. The system we have now is a disaster. The system we have now is KILLING ME...If an enraged laid-off American engineer were to go up to his Indian replacement, and shoot him dead -- if I were on the jury the verdict would be NOT GUILTY."

"I don't give a hoot how much you and other pseudo-intellectuals write about paradigm shifts or globalization or off-shoring or whatever tired cliche you're recycling this week: American white-collar workers are going to fight against off-shoring with their votes. A jobless, highly educated, and angry voter doesn't give a rat's ass what you and the other windbags at consultancies like McKinsey or Gartner have to say

Do they think this attitude doesn't show up at interviews? You think any manager in their right mind wants to have anything to do with them?

I was unemployed for six months during the tech bust, and it was one of the more depressing periods of my life (and my wife was laid off at the same time, so there was no fall-back). However, I never blamed the government for losing my job nor looked to the government to pass special laws to get me a new one. If worse came to worse I would rather dig ditches than try to get a government handout job. Unemployment is now the average of what it was during the entire Clinton administration, and, as a manager in tech, I see dozens of open jobs and unemployed people I know getting jobs (all 42 people at my busted tech start-up are working in some capacity).

Those still having problems finding something won't have their problem magically solved by some politician in Washington trying to make offshoring illegal. Besides the practical issues (what are you going to do? Turn off the internet?), how fast do you think Michelinn, Toyota, Samsung and the thousands of other foreign companies that hire millions of American workers would retaliate?

I remember the oil bust in the mid 80s when well over 500,000 people lost their high paying jobs due to falling oil prices (my father's company went from 50 people to him and a secretary). The collective response of the nation? Yawn. But did the Nation benefit more from the lower oil prices everyone paid, or are all those oil workers, petroleum engineers and geologists still unemployed 20 years later? (hint, I occasionally run into a Chem-E or a Pet-E in high tech companies. Dad is now doing environmental consulting, nothing his Mech-E trained him for). These guys trained decades in the oil industry and had to start over. Maybe some of those people could provide advice to those going through the same thing today.

posted by Director_Mitch @ 11:01 PM (Permalink)
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Who's Monitoring This Network?
I'm on the road today visiting HQ before hitting a few customers. I attached my computer to the HQ network and find there is INTERNET MONITORING/BLOCKING SOFTWARE ON THE HQ NETWORK!

I am a little amazed. I have worked at MUCH larger corporations and at a small start-up where internet blocking didn't exist. And it wasn't porn I was trying out. Here is some of the sites blocked:

Yahoo Mail - I do quite a bit of personal mail for personal correspondence, some side consulting, and for managing and communicating for this blog. The main Yahoo site and home page weren't blocked, but mail.yahoo.com was. This is actually what pissed me off - I actually get quite a bit of info to my one of my personal accounts that helps me out considerably in my present job. And it's not like I couldn't have my internet mail sites auto-forward to my corporate account (and there is no written restriction on doing personal correspondence on corporate email).

Business Pundit - I had some time to kill while I waited for my VP for lunch so decided to cruise some blogs. BP was blocked ("ENTERTAINMENT SITE"), but Instapundit, the most frequented blog in the world, wasn't (so, Rob, you are considered the bigger blogger at my company. Congratulations!). My own site wasn't blocked (I thought they would put a block up for anything off Blogger), but I wasn't going to hit it too many times since the troll who monitors the network may check it out and block it.

Ebay - This wasn't completely blocked (I checked it for an auction I was holding). The software said "Blocked for Personal Use. Hit Button to continue for Business Use". It's not like my manager would care, but I decided not to push it.

What shocked me is that the culture of this company doesn't seem to be one that would do something like this. Management is pretty laid back, so my guess is that this is some pet project of someone in IS, or more likely HR. Luckily my hotel has WIFI (I was going to go to a Starbucks down the road, but this is more convenient), so I can do my personal internet cruising when I get "home" in the evening. How frustrating.

Is anyone familiar with "forwarding" sites or other work-arounds for this type of site-blocking software?

posted by Director_Mitch @ 10:28 PM (Permalink)
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Off Traveling
I'm off criss-crossing North America for the next week so blogging will be light to non-existent. Maybe one of my guest bloggers will contribute.

Am writing this sign-off during the Oscars since they are LAME this year. I agree with Captain's Quarters that the opening bit with Crystal was great and went down hill from there (seeing Moore getting crushed was a nice trade-off for the inevitable left-wing speech that follows the documentary category). I don't know why they lifted the time limit on speeches. The only thing I am happy about is that LOTR seems to be winning every category it was nominated for, so I am waiting for best picture/direction in, what, 3-4 hours now.

posted by Director_Mitch @ 8:14 PM (Permalink)
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Create Your Own On-Line Country
Friend Jim Carson sent me a link to a on-line political game where you create your own country. I am just getting started and can't say if the game is any good, but I do like my country (although with my tough-on-crime policies, I am surprised I have a lot of it)

The Republic of Director Mitch
National Motto: "No Handouts"
UN Category: Capitalist Paradise
Civil Rights: Very Good
Economy: Thriving
Political Freedoms: Excellent
Location: the West Pacific

The Republic of Director Mitch is a tiny, socially progressive nation, remarkable for its complete absence of social welfare. Its hard-nosed, hard-working, intelligent population of 5 million are either ruled by a small, efficient government or a conglomerate of multinational corporations; it's difficult to tell which.

There is no government in the normal sense the word; however, a small group of community-minded, pro-business individuals is mainly concerned with Law & Order, although Commerce and Religion & Spirituality are on the agenda. Income tax is unheard of. A robust private sector is led by the Uranium Mining, Door-to-door Insurance Sales, and Cheese Exports industries.

Crime is pervasive. Director Mitch's national animal is the owl, which teeters on the brink of extinction due to widespread deforestation, and its currency is the hayes.

(I'm crying a river over my owls, but I'll put some in a zoo somewhere and start a cloning program).

Sounds close to paradise to me, especially since I'm running it.

posted by Director_Mitch @ 4:26 PM (Permalink)
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I Agree with Reuters?
At least it's on a business/marketing issue. According to Reuters: Cost of Mini iPod Raises Questions

As I noted when they announced it I thought Apple priced it $100 too high. I went and checked one out at an Apple store yesterday and wasn't impressed. I thought its construction was a bit cheap (it felt "plasticy") and what was once an impressive interface seems a bit dated now. However, due to its trendiness, it appears that initial demand is healthy.

And that has what made Apple able to hold on in its niche in a brutally cost competitive market. It isn't the cost/value proposition of its products that people like, but their trendiness, almost their ability to get their electronics positioned as fashion statements: candy colored desktop computers, pedestal-with-attached-screen iMacs, and now multi-colored mini iPods.

At the end, even at $100 too high and something I wouldn't buy (even though I am an iPod owner and love it), I think Apple will have a profitable product on their hands.


posted by Director_Mitch @ 9:22 AM (Permalink)
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