Laura’s Winning Ideas

“A tournament for computer programmers crowned a champion Thursday. The winner’s secret: avoiding bells and whistles, and asking questions until he knew exactly what the judges wanted his software to do.

From Best of the Business Tech Blog, The Wall Street Journal
By Ben Worthen

Tim Roberts was the winner of $25,000 for his dedication to avoid the usual pitfalls of technical projects: late delivery and/or failure to meet expectations. Poor communication is usually the culprit, sometimes paired with project creep, when new features are added along the way.

Same goes for most projects I can think of. Proposals, projects of all kinds benefit from a clear understanding of the requirements. The winner in this competition spent one hour reading the requirements and then asked “at least 30 questions” before designing his response.

I remember showing a winning proposal to a manager who exclaimed that the proposal seemed
too plain for his oh-so-complicated projects. Actually, the “black box” approach fails more and more often as competitors figure out the wisdom of “making the complex simple to understand.”

Would it help if you could have proposal images and/or audio available to the customer at their convenience?

Below, you can watch a PowerPoint presentation I created for an SMPS meeting several years ago. I can restrict access to the folks whose email addresses I provide, or leave the file open to the public.

The service I’m using here is authorSTREAM. The service is free, so its a good thing to tuck away in your bookmarks.

I’m playing around with some new toys that might be ideal for a proposal. Sketchcast is a new service which allows you to make your own sketch with or without sound. It’s my favorite price: free!

I could see embedding links to several of these in a proposal. Almost like putting Easter Eggs in your document code.

If I were doing this for a real proposal, I’d do several things:

1. Get a graphic sketch board (as low as $50 at Amazon.com) rather than use my mouse to sketch.

2. Have one person sketching and another speaking. It was hard to draw and talk at the same time, but your experience may vary.

3. Use a headset. I was simply using the built-in speaker on my computer. The sound will be louder and clearer with a headset.

Play with it and see what you can do!

Here’s another company’s promo done on Sketchcast, with the founder’s 11 year old son narrating and explaining what his Dad’s company does.

Sometimes you have to wonder just what these executives are thinking when they cook up stupid stunts like this. . .

Adidas won a Trademark suit this week as covered in The Wall Street Journal here. (available for 7 days from this post, thereafter you’ll have to register in order to access the story)

It seems that Payless Shoe Stores purchased Adidas shoes, sent them to a Chinese manufacturer with instructions to copy but change the three strips to either two or four stripes. They sold approximately $400 million of these knock-offs.

The jury agreed with Adidas, that Payless had infringed the trademark of Adidas with the intention to benefit from knocking off the Adidas shoes. The award of $305 million drove down the stock price by over 16% with the news.

The formula for the award was as follows:

Actual damages = $31 million
Disgorged profits because the jury found willfulness in the defendant’s actions = $135 million
Punitive damages (equal to the disgorged profits) = $135 million
TOTAL VERDICT = $305 million (figures above were all approximate and added up to $305 million)

Payless says they plan to appeal, but they might want to rethink this strategy. The attorney for Adidas acknowledged that the verdict might be reduced on appeal, but it is possible it could be increased because the judge could add plaintiff’s attorney’s fees and may also triple the actual damages portion of the verdict. Add the plunge in stock price to the mix, and this was a very expensive stunt to pull.

Food for Thought

Copyrights and Trademarks are protected property. Next time someone delivers a nifty photo they found on the internet for a proposal, you might want to ask a few more questions before inserting it into your document. And don’t think a quick photoshop “editing” of an image makes it your own, it is merely proof of “willfulness” and expensive when discovered.

If you’ve heard me speak on the topic you know that photographs are exceptionally well protected by copyright law, so don’t think you’ll even get as much grace as the music industry has extended to folks caught downloading music files illegally. (which ain’t much grace if you’ve followed the news.)