Monitor110: A Post Mortem

A very frank and detailed post mortem of the demise of a technology start-up, Monitor110 (or on SAI), from one of its leaders, Roger Ehrenberg.

He talks about the Seven Deadly Sins they had:

1. The lack of a single, “the buck stops here” leader until too late in the game
2. No separation between the technology organization and the product organization
3. Too much PR, too early
4. Too much money
5. Not close enough to the customer
6. Slow to adapt to market reality
7. Disagreement on strategy both within the Company and with the Board

The second one caught my eye, and I find it personally relevant since a company I used to work for laid off the Product Department (which I worked for) and folded it into the overseas Development technology department. It was a misguided attempt to correct their own dysfunction, which they still have not solved.

Roger goes on to say:

Another problem: technology and product management were effectively bundled together, with the same decision-makers for both. This was another crucial error, #2 again. Instead of having product management as the advocate for the customer and the product evangelist, we had technology running the show in a vacuum. Huge mistake. This allowed us to perpetuate the science project for much, much longer than we should have. There were no checks-and-balances built into the system. This was a recipe for failure.

Thanks to Fred.

Buckminster Fuller

I’ve always been fascinated with architecture and design, especially Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller. Fuller especially caught my interest with his novel approach for his Fuller Projection map, shown above, which has the Earth on a polyhedron and unwrapped. It doesn’t show the distortion as the typical northern hemisphere weighted ones still used today. It also helps I’m a map whore.

But something I am interested in seeing it a new exhibit at the Whitney: Buckminster Fuller: Starting With the Universe, on view till September 21, 2008.

One of the great American visionaries of the twentieth century, R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) endeavored to see what he, a single individual, might do to benefit the largest segment of humanity while consuming the minimum of the earth’s resources. Doing “more with less” was Fuller’s credo. He described himself as a “comprehensive anticipatory design scientist,” setting forth to solve the escalating challenges that faced humanity before they became insurmountable.

The NYTimes has an article on the show also, Fixing Earth One Dome at a Time.