Sunday, November 28, 2010

Facebook & the Original Idea

After watching an interesting movie, I make it a point to go online to read the articles & points of view that are presented on it. It helps to know the 'various versions of truth'. Movies, after all, burnish specific positions in order to segue into a particular outcome. While that works well on screen where a five year period can be compressed into a slick & compact 120-minute capsule, life events are much slower and more nuanced. Last night, it was time to watch 'The Social Network', the excellent film on the founding of Facebook and adapted from the book 'The Accidental Billionaires', and do some follow-up reading.

Mark Zuckerberg is indeed a genius. You don't have to watch the movie or read the book to tell you that. For those of us that long looked for a delightful, easy-to-use application to express our thoughts, stay in touch, post pictures, and see what others are up to, Facebook is a beauty. It has kept content clutter-free and exquisitely easy. The Wall is your canvas to post your musings. Boxes allow you to diversify and add color. The Search helps you pull out long lost friends out of the forest. In short, Facebook is everything what you want it to be.

But what was niggling about the movie and various articles was Mark Zuckerberg, the person. Now I really don't care that his earlier application Face Mash was written to spite his (ex)-girlfriend. Nor do I care much about the fact that he once read mails of other Facebook members. People do stupid things, and one's actions at the age of 21 must not really frame one's character.

But my specific grouse is with the ownership of ideas. Very clearly, Facebook was NOT Mark's original idea. He heard it from fellow Harvard students, the Winklevoss twins and Divya Narendra. They wanted him to join them and build this application that would keep Harvard students connected. Equity ownership was discussed. Everyone agreed to them. There were no contracts, but for heaven's sake, this is college life when one still experiments. No one thinks of contracts as much as wanting to build something cool.

Right after hearing the idea from them in December 2003, the movie depicts Mark Zuckerberg telling him as being hard pressed for time while building Facebook in the background. And in an incredible two months, thefacebook.com is launched. Records in public domain present a slightly different - and a more devious - picture. Mark actually told his 'partners' for a while that he was building their application. There were even white-board sessions where he outlined some code. In short, he was keeping them close so that they would not go to a different person to build this application. And once his code was finished, he just turned around to tell them that the idea would never take off while launching his own site with the exact same idea.

Bill Gates also faced a lot of public criticism while he built Microsoft. His testimony during the anti-trust trial against Microsoft was widely panned. The contribution of Microsoft to the demise of the original browser, Netscape, was deemed heavy-handed. There were also lawsuits about ownership of code. But say what you want, nobody accused Microsoft of stealing the idea that constituted very core of the company.

And that precisely is Mark Zuckerberg's problem. The perception in the public domain is that he is a cheat. That he did not give credit to his Harvard mates who came up with the idea, and that it took him ages to share the profits. He may be the world's youngest billionaire, but it is clear that from now on, he needs to do a lot of incredibly good things for the rest of his life to erase this blot. For now however, my respect of him has been lowered by miles.

Monday, November 22, 2010

The Harvard Business Review on Supply Chain Management

An excellent collection of eight articles on Supply Chain Management published in the Harvard Business Review during 2003-04. While they are indeed dated, it is clear that they remain as relevant today as they were six years ago. After all, supply chain maturity - as a concept - remains a distant dream even in today's world.

The first two articles in this collection outline the importance of building collaborative partnerships with your suppliers, and use case studies from Wendy's and Honda Motor. The next article features a holistic approach undertaken by Zara - the much discussed fashion clothier from Spain - towards supply chain operations and supply chain costs.

The construct and inter-relatedness of agility, alignment and adaptability within a supply chain framework are well argued in the 'Triple-A Supply Chain' while the challenges of aligning incentives across the chain are well-fleshed in another piece.

My icing on the cake? Two articles on Toyota Production Systems show once and for all why replicating these principles is such a tall ask. Toyota, after all, has been a beacon of production excellence, and has freely shared its practices over the years. Yet other than Toyota Motor and its suppliers, no other organization till today has even come close to replicating their world-class manufacturing processes. This article explains why. [To those who may want to question Toyota's vaunted processes in the light of its recent vehicle recalls, I would argue that these incidents would, in all likelihood, turn out to be an issue of non-adherence & non-conformity to the very production systems it pioneered. Let us all wait for the results of the investigation to come out].

All in all, the 'Harvard Business Review on Supply Chain Management' is an insightful & stimulating compendium that will hold your interest and evince a deep appreciation of such an important topic.