Lifehacker’s list of skills important to succeed:

1. Public speaking
2. Writing
3. Self-management
4. Networking
5. Critical thinking
6. Decision-making
7. Math
8. Research
9. Relaxation
10. Basic accounting

I don’t really agree that skills are most critical factors for success (vision is), but surely many of these are important.

The ones I personally plan to work on in nearest future are relaxation and self-management.

From September I will have no choice but to master “basic accounting”, too.

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The buzz around China set to dominate the world sounds similar to previous predictions viewing Japan as the next superpower, in the not so distant past. China got a couple of things right, and all the others wrong. There is an insightful article in Washington Post by John Pomfret, who spent there 28 years. He highlights the most important issues facing the future growth.

Demographic trends will undermine China’s main competitive advantage:

No country is aging faster than the People’s Republic, which is on track to become the first nation in the world to get old before it gets rich. Because of the Communist Party’s notorious one-child-per-family policy, the average number of children born to a Chinese woman has dropped from 5.8 in the 1970s to 1.8 today — below the rate of 2.1 that would keep the population stable. Meanwhile, life expectancy has shot up, from just 35 in 1949 to more than 73 today. Economists worry that as the working-age population shrinks, labor costs will rise, significantly eroding one of China’s key competitive advantages.

China’s economy is going to be big by the virtue of size of its population, but living standards are low:

One important nuance we keep forgetting is the sheer size of China’s population: about 1.3 billion, more than four times that of the United States. China should have a big economy. But on a per capita basis, the country isn’t a dragon; it’s a medium-size lizard, sitting in 109th place on the International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook Database, squarely between Swaziland and Morocco.

Environmental issues are out of hand:

By 2030, the nation will face a water shortage equal to the amount it consumes today; factories in the northwest have already been forced out of business because there just isn’t any water. Even Chinese government economists estimate that environmental troubles shave 10 percent off the country’s gross domestic product each year.

The environment is not innovation-friendly:

The place remains an authoritarian state run by a party that limits the free flow of information, stifles ingenuity and doesn’t understand how to self-correct. Blockbusters don’t grow out of the barrel of a gun. Neither do superpowers in the age of globalization.

These rather serious challenges should give everyone a pause before extrapolating China’s past growth to the infinite future.

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I just followed Google Reader’s recommendation to Lost Garden. It’s a blog about game development. Some time ago I was interested in the topic, but I consider it frozen for a while, so I didn’t expect to find anything of immediate interest on this blog.

But this article proved I was wrong:

In every project, there are issues that that frighten the bejesus out of the team. They are so frightening that no one wants to talk about them publicly. The schedule might be impossible. There might be the lurking suspicion that Management does not believe in the project. More commonly, there is a major technical flaw that no one is handling.

The article relates to game development, but the issue is relevant for any other project. The urge to keep sensitive issues under the carpet is familiar enough.

Here are some steps I recall from the latest consulting project that helped in management of the “scary” stuff:

• Carefully store and process remarks sent by the client (there is good chance that sensitive issues are among them): store all remarks in one document, color-code them to distinguish difficult ones, dedicate a meeting with a client for walking through the remarks to ensure that they are understood properly and agree the solution
• When sensitive issue is identified, create dedicated approach to solve/mitigate it: brainstorm possible solutions, create issue tree to structure the thinking, identify constraints related to the issue (e.g. define most pessimistic scenario and start from there)
• Dedicate resources to follow the agreed approach to resolve/mitigate the issue

Some issues may really seem scary, but it turned out that solving them (or at least addressing them and mitigating related risk as far as it was possible) raised client’s confidence in the overall direction and justified all the effort that went into sorting them out.

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At last, I bid farewell to Kiev (for a while). I already had a Lonely Planet guide for India shipped, but in the end I am going to Cuba.

Plane ticket to Cuba was not as straightforward as usual. I will fly charter for the first time, because there were no acceptable regular flights available.

But first, I will have an opportunity to revisit Moscow (I wish the opportunity were not in the heat season..)

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Report from our research on social lending in Poland is now publicly available.

You can download it from Gemius webpage:

English version of the report

Polish version of the report

The research was an idea I had after February Bootstrap meeting devoted to social lending. Initially I thought of writing a simple article, but then decided that it would be cool to have some original primary data. So I asked Gemius (leading Internet research agency in Poland) to participate, and then involved Accenture as well.

Below a couple of comments and slides from the report. (read more…)

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See article in Gazeta Prawna. Provident, provider of home-delivered and rather pricey cash loans, accuses Monetto, a social lending startup, of unfair comparison of interest rates on its loans.

If Provident’s goal was to give social lending additional publicity, then it greatly succeeded. Average reader will remember from the article that you can get cheap loans on the Internet and that Provident is expensive and therefore afraid of social lending sites.

Fortunately for Provident, Gazeta Prawna is probably read by a tiny percentage of their target customer base.

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Hey, I didn’t even advertise it, but I made some long overdue changes to the blog. First of all, I changed, at last, categories that I use for posts, so now they make more sense:

It required a manual re-class of some 300 posts. Ugh.

But there is more - in addition to categories, I now also use tags:

This allows to navigate to post related to Poland, for example, or social lending. I’m usually quite skeptical about usability of tags, but in context of my blog I like them a lot.

Unfortunately, the upgrade to wordpress 2.5.1, that I had done before all these improvements, broke the gallery section. And apparently also google ads. For photos, I’m seriously considering outsourcing all this stuff to Flickr, so I don’t have to bother with endless tweaking of spgm script. Or continue waiting for someone to make gallery that integrates with wordpress and just works. As for ads, I have no idea why they are broken.

More importantly, in short term I expect to finish an intensive Kiev project, close social lending research that I did, and have more time for blogging. And a better position to blog in general. I might even post more often than once in a month. Stay tuned.

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I came upon this, in an article by Andrew Sullivan:

The playwright Richard Foreman, cited by Carr, eulogised a culture he once felt at home in thus: “I come from a tradition of western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and ‘cathedral-like’ structure of the highly educated and articulate personality - a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West.

“[Now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self - evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available’.”

The article adds to the discussion about how the web is changing the way we think. With ever shorter attention spans, are we losing the ability to think deeply?

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Kokos, one of the social lending sites in Poland, announced that it started cooperation with Allegro, the dominant online auction player (through antyweb).

According to the research that we did (Accenture and Gemius), this is a rather promising idea for Kokos - Allegro is the top site that potential borrowers actively use (i.e. visit at least once a week):

(there is similar data for potential investors, among which Nasza Klasa has better penetration)

The full report will be public shortly, also in an English version.

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See here:

PARIS (Thomson Financial) - France Telecom’s Orange is “in discussions” with
Apple Inc. to sell the iPhone outside France, where it has distributed it since
November.

CFO Gervais Pellissier said the company is in talks with Apple on the
subject, in particular with regard to Spain and Poland “among others”.

Let’s hope so, I don’t like the idea to buy a hacked phone.

But meanwhile, I’m busy enough not to have time for anything. Hence no posting. I even worked on May long weekend, can you believe it.

The only exception is playing with my new mac. I’m typing on it right now. Hopefully I will have time to post about first impressions & issues.

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Antyweb quoted the Next web article about search in Russia. What’s interesting in Russian search? It is not dominated by Google:

Most European search markets are dominated by Google and there seem to be no real local competitors. In Russia however, a fierce battle for the search query’s of the consumers is going on. Yakov Sadchikov from Quintura even mailed me that “the Russian search engines are coming.”

Reasons? Commenters point at different character set and language peculiarities (for example different grammatical cases).

Thanks to friends at Gemius I had an opportunity to read some interesting stuff about Internet markets in other CEE countries.. and Russian case is not the only one, even though in most countries Google rules the market.

In Czech Republic, for example, Seznam.cz has approximately 60% share in search. But, Google search is gaining share there.

“Other” search engines have also significant share in Ukraine, Slovenia and Estonia.

In Poland, on the other hand, Google has 90% of the market, grammatical cases notwithstanding.

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Businessweek suspects Steve Jobs of a hidden agenda, aimed at getting into corporations.

Hints: iPhone functionalities aimed at corporates, co-existence of Windows and OS X made as easy as ever.

Meanwhile, my Mac just changed hands in Wroclaw and is set for the final ride to Warsaw. It’s been a long journey.

Mac’s purpose is far from innocent as my corporate colleagues, knowing me, could immediately tell.

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Jeff Nolan wrote:

I wrote recently about VC loss of attraction in Web 2.0 and the thing that was frightening about that thought was the inability to answer the basic question “what’s next?”. The Valley thrives on the new new thing (possibly one of the most poignantly titled books ever) and with every turn of a generation there is an awkward moment where we’re just figuring out where we’ve been but have yet to see where we are going? right now is that moment.

(…) I’m still left with the uncomfortable question of what’s next? When Facebook doesn’t deliver world peace, and FriendFeed fails to be better than sliced bread, what will we do?

I suddenly realized that I missed the exact moment when web 2.0 ceased to be the new thing.

Ideas for the new thing: web 3.0 (too obvious), enterprise software (Jeff doesn’t like it, I also doesn’t like it much because it is difficult to scale), AI (as in the last 50 years), gene tech, …other ideas?

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Polish PM Donald Tusk, as the first among international leaders, declared that he is not going to the Olympics opening ceremony (bloomberg).

Amazingly, even opposition leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski supports this decision.

As well as Lech Walesa, and 60% of the population, according to polls.

Polish government asked other EU leaders to join the protest.

This might not be the most pragmatic approach. It may damage economic contacts with China, for example. And some people argue that boycotting the Olympics will not help Tibetans much.

Still, this is Poland and there is more to the stance one would expect from it than pragmatism.

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Is working in a corporation a waste of life and learning opportunities?

Paul Graham attacks corporate way of work in his essay You weren’t meant to have a boss. The essay starts rather strong with the analogy based on observing a group of programmers taking part in corporate team-building event. He compared them to the programmers that he typically works with, who typically happen to be founders of their own companies:

I was in Africa last year and saw a lot of animals in the wild that I’d only seen in zoos before. It was remarkable how different they seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive. They’re like different animals. And seeing those guys on their scavenger hunt was like seeing lions in a zoo after spending several years watching them in the wild.

Then he goes into more detail and argues that people are not meant to work in too large groups. Of course, corporations are aware of this and divide people into small teams to avoid management problems:

Companies know groups that large wouldn’t work, so they divide themselves into units small enough to work together. But to coordinate these they have to introduce something new: bosses.

These smaller groups are always arranged in a tree structure. Your boss is the point where your group attaches to the tree.

The tree structure implies, according to him, that at a group (represented by a manager) should work as if it were one individual, otherwise a higher level group composed of managers would not be able to operate.

As a result, the higher the tree, the less freedom of action is available to individual team member:

Anyone who’s worked for a large organization has felt this. You can feel the difference between working for a company with 100 employees and one with 10,000, even if your group has only 10 people.

His conclusion: corporation does not provide a good learning environment, specifically for programmers. In corporation, programmer will see his ideas blocked by the structure and legacy way of doing things. As a result, he will learn less. Best way to start is through own startup or joining organization which is small enough.

Statements like this can provoke some strong responses. Jeff Atwood, for example, attributes all this talk to Graham’s narcissistic (and self-interested) idea of a perfect career path. It’s true, but Graham spent a good deal of his essay admitting his bias.

Almost everyone would agree that working in a founding team of 10 gives the individual more freedom than working in 75,000-strong organization. But not everyone would agree that one cannot learn anything useful in a corporation. Actually a lot of people, including me (though I’m not a programmer), treat working in a corporation as a learning stage before going after own ideas.

Also, corporation provides resources unavailable in a startup. Joshua Haberman commented about benefits of working in Google:

All the boring sysadmin stuff is taken care of. There’s extremely good components you can use for your projects so you don’t have to reinvent the basics (RPC, storage, monitoring, etc) yet again. Your job is to solve big, hard problems and your toolbox is filled with the best of what the brilliant programmers around you have come up with. They’ve iterated many times and solved problems you wouldn’t have even imagined at the outset. And yet there’s always more to do, because the data gets bigger and the appetite for bigger problems grows.

Then again, does knowing that all this stuff exists make it easier or more difficult to start your own company at some stage?

It’s better not to know that something is impossible because then you simple go ahead and do it. In other words, if you are going to start from scratch, maybe better start earlier, while you are happily unaware of all the reasons why you shouldn’t.

Looking at the people who went startup way from the very beginning it’s hard for me to tell if they are better off, because I still work in the corporation. But I’m going to find out.

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