Citrix Blogger

The best things are found by surprise.  I’ve been wanting a history of storage capacities and costs and today I found a link to “Cost of Hard Drive Space“.  Never mind that it is in a fairly raw format and only goes to 2004.  It clearly shows where we have been and implies where we are going.

Along the lines of projection, read “What would you do with a 500,000,000,000 GB hard drive?“  That’s what you should expect to have fifty years from now based on the current growth rate.  By the year 2066, this kind of storage capacity should be common place (in theory).  What is most interesting is that this one drive could store the entire capacity of storage in the world and still have 1/3 leftover.

Lately, and very informally, I’ve noted that hard drive storage in Australia costs about $1 per GB.  Meanwhile, flash memory costs about $10 per GB.  Very unscientific but a pretty good rule of thumb.  If flash can surpass the value of hard drives, then that would cause a transition to flash based drives for most everything.  This ignores flash weaknesses that most likely would be solved by then.

This post is really just an excuse to share some valuable data.  Perhaps I’ll chart some of this later to see where a terabyte crosses over the $1 mark.

I’m sure this means something to someone.  If you would like your very own logo next to the “Citrix Ready” logo on over 200 items for promotion, I have found you a great website.

Citrix Ready Premium Catalog

The assortment of items is huge.  You can even get your own “Citrix Ready” weather station.

Knock yourself out and get ready for the next gift giving opportunity.  Impress the geeks.  Impress the boss.  Whatever else, you will be well equipped and ready for Citrix.

Finally we are at the last chapter of “Good to Great” with the title “From Good To Great To Built To Last”. This is chapter 9 of a fairly short book if you take out all the extra material at the end. Jim Collins set out to answer the question what makes good companies into great companies. Before he wrote “Good to Great” he wrote “Built to Last”.

Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
New York: HarperBusiness, 1994 (with Jerry I. Porras). 321 pages, 10 chapters.
Built to Last presents the results of a six-year research project into what makes enduring great companies. It has spent nearly five years on the Business Week bestseller list, had over 70 printings, and has been translated into 29 languages.

Writing “Built to Last” actually triggered the research for “Good to Great”. Jim was posed the dilemma that “Built to Last” was a great book but did not reveal the transition from good to great.

Jim, with the help of the research team, determined that “Built to Last” should be ignored to better determine the real reasons for changing. Instead of trying to back fit the original ideas, it was deemed more valuable to start from scratch.

At the end Jim revisits “Built to Last” and matches it with what was found from “Good to Great”. By and large, the “Good to Great” explains how these companies became successful in the first place.

Much of the chapter shows how the two books and concepts are compatible. Several ideas from “Built to Last” are introduced. One of these ideas is where the great companies will have core values and purpose which essentially does not change over time. Another key point is that it does not appear to matter what these values or purposes are as long as they are there. This would be the common rallying point for the company which the employees understand and believe in. Business strategies and operating practices on the other hand change quickly over time. These two different areas are seen as necessary and balanced in their changing and non-changing natures.

“Built to Last” has the concept of something called BHAG. BHAG stands for “Big Hairy Audacious Goal” and corresponds to what the hedgehog concept says. It is supposed to be something really ambitious but also possible within the framework of the company. Boeing had a BHAG to enter the commercial airline industry in the 1950’s. Before that time they were only focused on government contracts. The insight at Boeing came from understanding the market and knowing that it would be possible to be the best at commercial airlines based on their experience with military jets.

The last idea of the book comes from a question “Why bother being great? Isn’t good just good enough?”. This was something I thought about while reading the book as well. It seems like so much work to become great and sometimes it looks like good is all that will come.

The reply, from Jim, is that it actually takes more work to run a good company than a great one. This seems counter-intuitive at first. How could it be less work? Jim explains that when you have the right people, with the right concept, with the right leaders, the alignment is so strong and the purpose so fulfilling that the company essentially runs itself. It comes back to the flywheel. Once you get everyone on board and pushing against the wheel in the same direction with the same simple clarity, it becomes easier and easier to accomplish difficult tasks. The fox mentality has little focus and even less understanding of how to pull in the right people with the right tasks. There is a lot of waste in fox based companies. So, that is the point. Why waste all that time and energy just to be good. Why not be more efficient and be great?

Hard to argue with that.

One final point from the book. When you work at a great company, you are happy because you are doing what you are meant to do without having to struggle against the typical lack of direction and focus. You are glad to do what you are doing and you are just as happy to go home and live your meaningful life outside work as well. You are living at your full potential which really just translates to you doing what comes natural. Selling your time to a good company is really just a compromise.

I was curious to see what the state of Citrite.org was recently.  It is now completely gone and has been replaced by another Sam Johnston production entitled “Citrix Universe“.

It is still under construction but it does show what Sam wants to do with it.

I think he originally intended to make Citrite.org a one-stop shop for all things Citrix.  It looks like Citrix Universe is the continuation of that theme.

We are getting closer to the end of “Good to Great”.  This is about chapter 8 which is titled “The Flywheel and the Doom Loop”.  Sounds a bit like something from Indiana Jones.  Seriously, it hits upon the nature of success.  Most people, from the media’s coaching, believe that things happen overnight.    Most people and companies have to work at it.  I remember years ago when Sharon Stone became an “overnight success”.  It turns out that she had already been trying to get ahead for more than a decade.

The flywheel is associated with momentum.  It takes energy to get it going, but it gets easier to make it go faster if the energy is applied in the same direction.  If energy is consistently applied, the flywheel will continue to accelerate and will eventually reach great speeds.

Companies are similar.  Instead of a flywheel, the momentum is a chosen path to a chosen focus.  As long as the ideas are attached to, the momentum builds and the company pushes forward.  It is difficult to be consistent but as long as it is, the velocity of improvement and change will increase.  “Good to Great” companies with their hedgehog concepts are more like to stick with it.  The temptations to be distracted are so huge but focus sees the true mission.

Companies have a potentially unlimited lifespan.  Unlike humans, they can live on long after the start.  This makes them an organism of their own.  The workers and managers and executives are only elements of a much larger story.  This brings in one of my favorite topics of emergence.  The sum is a quite different beast from the individual parts.  And, even more important, the company is composed of an intelligence that would be seen to exceed any individual employee.

Anyways, back to the point.  In order to achieve any kind of consistent vision, everyone has to see it as their own vision.  With the hedgehog concept, it is possible to crystallize the employees around a common vision what the company should be doing.  I would like to introduce this analogy.  Rowing!

Given that there is a goal, if everyone rows in time and in the right direction, there will be momentum and the goal will be reached.  However, if like most companies, not everyone is in sync and the leaders are always changing directions, you are not going to reach the goal.

The fox cannot stay on the same track for too long.  This explains the shift in direction and lack of momentum.  Every time the fox changes the flow, the momentum is lost.  Not only that, it pretty much guarantees that no goal will be reached simply because the goal is always changing.  It looks like much is happening but it is actually more like spinning wheels with no momentum at all.

Given that momentum builds, it will eventually hit a breakthrough.  This breakthrough is where things are actually growing in strength and with less and less effort.  There is no magic instant where the breakthrough happens.  The momentum is built from many many turns of the flywheel.  It is impossible to identify which push created the change.  The point is that it was all the changes that brought about the breakthrough.  This thinking goes against what business leaders like to think.

Also important to mention is that there was no magic program or policy or other enthusiastically promoted internal company goal that created this transition.  Essentially once started, it happens on its own.  It is similar to the difference to cheering on a team versus playing the game.  Cheering might help some but the actually players with real internal motivation that are going to make the biggest difference.

There is always going to be resistance to becoming consistent with the flywheel.  One of the first thoughts might be to worry about the “Wall Street” reaction to long term versus short term focus.   Based on the summary for the book, the flywheel is actually completely compatible with “Wall Street”.  This makes sense too given that the flywheel brings great success.  Which investor is going to complain about consistently high gains over the long term?

The greatest driver in “Wall Street” is not money but rather fear.  Emotions cripple the desire to see the long term view.  Why wait when you can push for more money now?  But why?  Greed.  But what is greed?  I would propose that it is the fear of not having enough money.  Any unsatisfied want is likely to grow, even when it is being satisfied.  The point is that short term investing is bound to run a company into the ground.  It also burns up lots of energy and wastes time.  Many a company has been driven by the “Wall Street” gods without realizing that it could actually be the other way around.

Great companies don’t have to worry about the markets.  They exceed the market easily.  They have bigger fish to fry.  They love their jobs and know what they are supposed to do.  They also happen to be the best in the world.  Who wouldn’t want that?

The momentum is so strong that it brings along the whole company in a way that could never be dictated from above.  It is more like a realization that everyone reaches over time that “We can be the best at this and we will be”.

On the other hand, the Doom Loop is found at most other companies.  The doom comes from a lack of understanding that drives the company deeper and deeper into the abyss.  It starts with bad results that lead to a bad decision that leads to changes that bring more bad results and so forth.  It smells of fox.  It also brings a company down fast.  Obviously it is much easier to fall into this trap.

The Doom Loop is all about stopping momentum.  It takes a working company and brings it virtually to a halt.  All the easy changes are tried (laying off, changing CEO, changing focus, employee education) but it just makes things worse.  Part of this comes from sheer bravado/ego.  The new leaders think they can make things much better but fail to realize that there is something still good about the existing company.  They also tend to want to make it theirs and discard that which is associated with the previous leaders.

From the outside, the Doom Loop is easy to recognize.  Any long term gain is either negative or very small.  It is kind of like going on a family holiday with a destination in mind.  As the trip begins, the parents squabble over the destination.  Half way there, the driver changes direction.  The next day, the direction is changed again.  The car is in turmoil since no one is getting what they want.  Eventually they have to turn around and go home because they don’t have enough time to make the destination.  The holiday is ruined.  The family is unhappy.  No one wins.

A company with a mixed up purpose is only going to give you a mixed up result.

There is only one more chapter after this.  It’s been good writing about “Good to Great” and hopefully some of you will get the chance to read the book.

Just remember “healthy flywheel with momentum is good, doom loop bad”.

Give these people a real budget!  This is incredibly clever.  It reminds me of Fantastic Voyage but with a Citrix twist.

This is short movie following the lives of two youngsters caught in the Internet - and how they use Citrix Application Delivery to get home.

This video came out last year and was most likely a result of the YouDeliver competition.  Based on the fact that four thousand people have watched it since last year,  I would guess quite a few of you have already seen it.  I hope not.

Imagination can carry you a long ways.  It’s fun to see a sense of humor as well.

I was looking around YouTube for Citrix related video and found an interesting TV show segment from BestPlacesToWork from KPIX in the Silicon Valley.  This video which is five minutes long, promotes Citrix as being an excellent place to work for within Silicon Valley.  Top executives are interviewed along with some employees as well.

Best Places To Work is television show on KPIX channel 5 educating the public about what makes Bay Area companies some of the Best Places To Work.

Watch more videos at www.bestplacestowork.tv.

Watching the video instills a certain aspect of not matching reality.  Of course, the video could be seen as a promotional video with the intent to recruit.  The aspect I would disagree with is the startup mentality.  We are simply too big for that.

For those of you living in Silicon Valley, you are certainly invited to apply.

We are now up to chapter 7 of “Good to Great” with the chapter title of “Technology Accelerators”. Most good companies understand that they need technology to progress. Great companies realize that not all technology is useful and that technology is more of an aid than a primary mover. Adoption of technology should always be bound by the hedgehog concept.

Most young companies believe that it is possible to jump up the ladder of execution by relying on technology to pull them upwards. Heavy investments are made in making sure that the company is using all the latest popular tools. Unfortunately, unfocused application of technology only leads to wasted time and money.

It is easy to panic and overreact about being left behind. This comes back to the fox and the hedgehog idea. A fox is going to search for many solutions without really understanding what the problem really is. The hedgehog is going to examine the problem and determine with care what should be tried. Steady wins the race again.

No where is this more obvious than the web. During the time around 2000, the hype factor was in overdrive. Basically it was implied that anyone on the Internet was going to earn a bucket load of money. As we can clearly see, this is not true. If it was, this blog would have earned me a great fortune by now :). Seriously, it is dangerous to jump into technology fads without understanding the true value of the technology. This is true in every aspect of technology.

The funny thing is that hedgehog companies can actually pioneer technology to solve their biggest problems. With focus and determination, the great company can create new technologies that will best suit their purposes. A good company is more likely to just react and participate.

When you stop worrying so much about the competitors and do what you passionately do the best, you can stop looking to your competitors as threats and stop using their models to do your business.

“Good to Great” makes a great point that technology is an accelerator and not a creator of momentum. You cannot count on technology to do your work for you. You are going to need to think and build the hedgehog concept on your own. Technology should not be the master of your policies but rather a tool to help you get where you need to go.

As important as technology seems, it is still the business decisions that make the biggest impact on the company. Executives in great companies rarely point to technology as being what made them great. However, it is sometimes conceded that technology helped them become greater.

One way to view this is to think like an artist. Does technology make for a better artist? Can technology make a good artist into a great one? The answer, in most cases, would be no. The point is that the artist has his or her own hedgehog thinking in place and this usually translates to using mediums (paint, sculpture, fabrics) to build what is already in their minds. The artist already knows the vision of what they want to do and only need technology to express this.

The same is true for companies. Without that inner vision the technology is largely wasted. Also of note is that medium of business requires cognition which cannot be expressed by technology alone.

From a Citrix point of view, we are very heavily invested in our technology. Because of this it is often hard to realize the value of thought and of the hedgehog concept. It clearly makes sense to be the best at what you can do. It also makes sense that you need the passion and the ability to find the right monetary measure of profit. Technology, as great as it is, is nothing against the passion of a hedgehog company.

The reason is simple. A hedgehog company has a vision of where it is going and what it is best at and will create technologies as needed as well as extensively using matching technologies. It is going to make itself great simply because it sees beyond good and can do the work to get there.

Technology can help, but it is not going to make you great by itself.

Do you agree?

This is about chapter 6 of “Good to Great” and it is called “A Culture of Discipline”.

In every new company is a seed of creativity and a sense of entrepreneurial spirit.  Bold moves are made and if success comes, the company grows.  This growth triggers problems however.  It is much more difficult to control a growing company and soon things start to go wrong.  This is perfectly normal.

The most common reaction is to bring the company back into control.  This is accomplished by hiring people to enforce process and to manage the day to day business more tightly.  As a result, the company is controlled but ultimately loses its early energy to innovate and take risk.

It is common at this stage for the originating members to become disillusioned and eventually leave.  As in other company, this is true with Citrix as well.  What is more uncommon is for the company to keep the young seed alive.

The Good to Great research team found a pattern that allowed the company to remain intact.  Some companies kept this initial energy going.  The premise is that with great freedom comes great responsibility.  A company will trust its employees with freedom but must also expect that the employees will act in a responsible way.

It is key that the company hire people that are self-reliant and self-disciplined.  The business needs people that can not only be trusted but also can be viewed as having their own guidance that will fit well with the company’s hedgehog concept.  They have to understand that the two go together and that the cost of freedom is the ability to do the right thing.

What is the right thing?  Well, the simple answer lies within following the hedgehog concept closely.  It also implies thinking clearly and thinking openly.  It is difficult to balance creativity and risk with a strong sense of responsibility.  Life is like that.  Once you get that balance however, there is a sense of control that cannot be surpassed.

It is important to note that discipline does not imply a dictatorship.  It is more about self-discipline than controlling other people.

Successful companies are going to build frameworks that guide many actions but when it comes to the things that can change quickly, that responsibility will lie with the employee.  The book gives an example of an airline that has lots of rules about the operation of the planes.  The pilot is expected to follow all the rules for the sake of safety.  However, the pilot is given the freedom to decide on highly variable environments.  In the case, the weather might be terrible and make the pilot decide whether or not to land.  It is not a process decision but rather the pilot.  This makes sense because process cannot anticipate every situation and the pilot is likely to have the best data on what to do in such a situation.

Another key point is that disciplined action comes after acquiring disciplined people and thought.  All three conditions should be there in order to make sure the company fulfills its concept.

It is the role of the Level 5 leader to build the culture of discipline.  This would largely be acquired by trusting people and by example from all levels.

It takes a great deal of discipline to focus on the hedgehog concept instead of being tempted by the latest fad or potential acquisition.  It is like the mind wants to be a fox when the truth is that being a hedgehog is much more healthy for everyone involved.

A concept worth respecting is the idea of “stop doing it”.  Success is based on both action and stopping negative action.  This is an awareness thing that means that you have to realize that you are doing something wrong first.  Once realized for what it is, it should be much easier to melt away this bad habit.

Budgeting for correct action means to drop the incorrect ones.  Again, this is defined by the hedgehog concept.  Once unfunded, the incorrect action is destined to go away.  Some companies find themselves in the wrong business and have the guts to drop the old business for a new one.  As usual, this means that it has to fit in the philosophy of the company’s hedgehog concept.

I see this mostly as a means of following through with the hedgehog concept.  Without discipline at the employee level, the company is much more likely to become a bureaucracy.   It makes sense that “Good to Great” companies would be run much more efficiently with less hierarchy and wasted imposed control.

Freedom and discipline.  That’s what you need to be great.

Marketing is a fascinating field.  Ever since my close up exposure to early Citrix marketing, I’ve always wondered how these things really work.  There was always a taste of what it was, but never any really deep understanding.

Recently I searched for marketing related topics and found one that really interested me.  It is called positioning marketing and is used primarily to shift how consumers think about particular products or companies.

Surprisingly it is a fairly new field having been created in the late 1960s.  It probably needed something like television to really catapult the possibility of doing this kind of marketing.

Wikipedia has a brief description of positional marketing that is a good starting point.

In marketing, positioning has come to mean the process by which marketers try to create an image or identity in the minds of their target market for its product, brand, or organization. It is the ‘relative competitive comparison’ their product occupies in a given market as perceived by the target market.

Re-positioning involves changing the identity of a product, relative to the identity of competing products, in the collective minds of the target market.

De-positioning involves attempting to change the identity of competing products, relative to the identity of your own product, in the collective minds of the target market.

The original work on Positioning was consumer marketing oriented, and was not as much focused on the question relativity to competitive products as much as it was focused on cutting through the ambient “noise” and establishing a moment of real contact with the intended recipient. In the classic example of Avis claiming “No.2, We Try Harder”, the point was to say something so shocking (it was by the standards of the day) that it cleared space in your brain and made you forget all about who was #1, and not to make some philosophical point about being “hungry” for business.

The growth of high-tech marketing may have had much to do with the shift in definition towards competitive positioning.

Positioning is all about changing how you look at products and companies.  In many cases the products and companies do not change.  Rather, marketing is responsible for portraying the product or company in a different light to cause a mind shift in the consumer.

The most likely benefit comes from isolating the product/company away from the competition by providing something that the other companies cannot provide or as well.  Echoing the thinking of “Good to Great”, marketing is responsible for identifying the “Hedgehog” philosophy of how to sell the image most successfully.

Companies are constantly re-adjusting their image based on new opportunities or threats.  Most companies see this process as a sort of battle that occurs between new products or services.  Probably the most important realization is that the thoughts of the company/product become more important than the actual true benefit/performance provided.  Obviously loyalty will overlook a newcomer even if they are better.  Loyalty comes from thinking which comes from marketing image.

There are two people credited with popularizing the concept of positioning and their names are Al Ries and Jack Trout.  I went looking for more information on them and they have spent their lives refining this model and trying to convince companies how important this is.

Please watch this video from Jack Trout.  It summarize his exploration of marketing and strategies for business success through marketing.  It stresses that business needs to focus on marketing and innovation.  Marketing is seen as a differentiator from other companies.  This all makes sense once explained but someone like me does not find this kind of advice as being obvious.

Jack has a column on Forbes.com that covers different topics that he cares about.  As an example, please read “Differentiate or Die“.  Once you get a feeling for what he is saying, you can see the value of the advice.  His experience in the business has led him to form many conclusions that clash with popular marketing thinking in some companies.  He gives a good example with Coke being so focused on the “show business” angle of advertising and losing touch with differentiation.  Jack calls this a lack of focus.  He does have a point.

Perhaps I enjoyed this topic because it is so different from what I normally do.  Obviously I’m way behind the understanding of someone trained to do marketing from the field or school.  However, I do have a good sense for knowing which teachers to listen to and apply.  Jack Trout is certainly on my list now.

To summarize, positioning is used to convince customers of the relative value of something they can buy.  It essentially is the art and science of getting you to think a certain way about a thing that makes it different from everything else you know but yet be relative to what you know.  Said more simply, positioning is about putting the ideas in your head about what relative value the product or service has.  It can’t be the same as something else otherwise the consumer will most likely pick what they already know.  However, you can refer to the other product so that the consumer knows why they should pick you instead.  It sounds easy to explain but it is not.

The ultimate goal is to find the spot of your brain that does not have any current opinion and give it one.  The idea is that consumers don’t like mind conflict on the same topics and will better receive a new product when it comes with a new story.  Something radically new would be perceived as being too risky to try so that is why being relative to other products is so valuable.