So you and your company are facing a crisis. Maybe a big customer is not satisfied with the quality of your service or product, maybe you have messed up in some way that has shaken the confidence of your shareholders and/or customers. Whatever the crisis you're probably backed against a wall with very little room to maneuver and the next few days will be make or break for you and/or the company. Well I am here to tell you that it's happened before and it will probably happen again. I will try to summarize what I have learned from my experiences and maybe give you a few hints on how to take control of the situation.

Don't panic

This seems to be obvious advice. But believe me many people underestimate this and the moment they face a crisis they panic. They act before thinking, communicate before clearly understanding the issue and usually make things much worse. Take the time to calm yourself down, calm your team down and try to get everyone focused on the issue at hand.

Establish control

To face a crisis it will take concentrated effort, no big sweeping action will help so forget that. The most important thing is to establish a place where your team will be physically present if possible or at least from where you will coordinate and communicate your response to the crisis. To put your feet on the ground and to understand the issue you will need data. Setup a process to collect and analyze data in regards to the issue, document it well and have your best people analyze it. This will allow you to understand the scope of the crisis and hopefully show you where to start looking for the problem.

Work systematically

Establish a process – usually it goes like this:

1. Collect data
2. Analyze & Detect issues
3. Suggest action
4. Challenge action
5. Approve
6. Take action
7. Go to 1.

I can't tell you how many iterations you will need but from my experience this works. In the first iterations you will maybe catch only few issues but once your team gets into this process the iterations will be quick and you will be able to pin-point issues much better and therefore solve them much quicker. Try to keep everyone focused on the process – people tend to celebrate the first detected issue as the root cause but usually it's not. It takes time to find the root cause (that is why it's a crisis) and there is no quick-fix.

Communicate to stakeholders

Communication with your stakeholders is obviously very important. Not only the pissed off customer but also your management, owners, shareholders, partners.  Communication is important because usually to solve a crisis you will need help. And your stakeholders are usually the key to additional resources so be sure to get them involved asap. Be clear about the scope and the impact of the crisis and give them data to support your assessment of the situation. Before communicating make sure what you tell them is accurate and that they really want or need to hear it right now. In times of crisis patience is in short supply so make sure you don't waste their time with useless information.

Show progress

As soon as everyone (you, your team, the stakeholders) understand the situation it is important to show progress. You have put everyone on alert, you have asked for emergency resources so everyone will expect you to deliver results. Usually this does take some time but as soon as you make progress do share it but again with hard data. Saying: "We are doing our best and have already made some progress!" is not going to cut it and is in the "useless information" category. Share exactly what you have achieved and what are the next steps.

There I hope this helps. It may seem this is focused on technological problems but I can tell you most of these recommendations are applicable in any type of crisis. Someone please send this to BP.

As of august I will be leaving my position as director at my current employer and will be heading to business school. I got admitted to Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School for a full-time international MBA program. Although I will miss Slovakia a bit I am really looking forward to the new environment and all the new challenges I will face there. And tbh it's not about "jump starting my career" or "taking my career to another level" it's about doing something I am really passionate about and changing to a really international environment. So I am resurrecting this blog and am going to use it to post about my experience there and hopefully talk about stuff I learn. Btw I am starting on September 1st, 2010 in Leuven, Belgium.

So I am on vacation with friends hoping to get some well deserved rest. There is no wifi where we are staying so the only connection possibility is edge (no 3G here). Can you imagine 100k data costs 26 cents? Unbelieveable. The EU should crack down much harder on the european carriers to lower the roaming data costs. Thank god Blackberry email doesn’t need much data.

Not sure whether you noticed but yesterday the Swedish authorities attempted to take down The Pirate Bay. I don’t want to go into details of what happened – you can read all about it here, here and here (actually on most of the internet) – suffice to say the page was back up in 3 hours due to the fact the TPB crew was ready for a move like this.

Today I don’t want to talk about whether pirating music/movies is morally ok or not.

What I want to talk about is the fact that the music labels and studios still don’t get their own customer.  Why do people pirate music/movies? The RIAA and MPAA would like you to believe that it’s because it’s easier to pirate than to buy CDs and DVDs. And you know what? They are RIGHT.

But it’s not easier because pirating enables you to get music/movies for free but because the user experience is much better when pirating.  Imagine until the arrival of the Apple iTunes store and later the Amazon MP3 store the only legal option to get media was to buy it on a CD/DVD. If you heard a great tune somewhere on the radio there was no way for you to get it immediately. You had to jump in your car, drive to a mall and get a CD. Same goes for movies.

The arrival of iTunes a few years back should have been a wake-up call. On every Apple keynote (WWDC or Macworld) Steve Jobs reminded everyone how well the music store was doing. With each passing keynote we saw the rise iTunes on the list of top sellers of music in the US. Did the labels/studios get it? No way. They put pressure on Apple to have all the music DRMed just so none of that music would get pirated. They got the chance to get it again when iTunes introduced movies or when Amazon started it’s own MP3 store but they still didn’t get it. The final straw came when iTunes became the top seller of music in the US.

Pirating is the best competition for the distributors of CDs/DVDs – the user experience is much better. You think of a song and in minutes you can have it with little effort and free.

So why is iTunes successful?

Because the user experience is much better than to go and buy a CD or to pirate music. It’s just that simple. If you think pirating music is easier than to buy stuff of the iTunes store just try it. You have to install a torrent download application. Find the right file that is not compromised by a virus and that contains what you want, you have to hope you got enough seeds for you to download at a reasonable speed and you have the thought in the back of your mind that you are doing something illegal.  Yes you are getting the song/album for free but is it worth the effort compared to the 5-10 $ you would pay for the high quality song/album from iTunes? I don’t think so. 

My point is the RIAA and MPAA should treat TPB as a competitor to the distributors of music. They should step-up their effort in online distribution and try to create space in the online music/movie retail market for an iTunes/Amazon competitor. They should help Apple and Amazon setup licensing of music/movies in Europe so that these companies can make their services available in more countries. I understand that a better service will never kill pirating – there will always be pirates – but the music/movie industry can go a long way of getting a much bigger piece of the music/movies downloads pie and even get paid for it. Isn’t it all about money in the end?

In the past few days 2 interesting bits of information were released by RIM and Google.

• Google released the Google Apps connector for Blackberry Enterprise Server
• RIM released the Gmail enhanced plugin for Blackberry Internet Service

Now this would normally be cool but well nothing special. But in the past weeks many have wondered whether RIM is capable of keeping up with the competition, especially the iPhone. For me these releases are signs that RIM acknowledges the shortcomings of it’s current platform and is not hiding it’s head in the sand. The fact that Google has released it’s connector for the Blackberry Enterprise Server means that there are enough installations of BES on top of Google Apps already that this combo needs to be taken seriously. The company I work for does in fact run on Google Apps so I am very happy about both of these releases.

One big advantage that RIM has in the fight vs the iPhone and other competitors is it’s push infrastructure. Not only is it quite unique even today but also it’s infrastructure is spread well and built up for the future. The most important thing now for RIM is to consider this not as a locked up proprietary service but to open it up to developers to build great apps on. Although the Blackberry SDK is already out there for some time many argue it is yet to be powerful enough to build serious apps on. The success or failure of the Blackberry platform depends on this as in regards to hardware – the berries themselves were always great devices.

And this brings me to my last point. RIM started a developer blog recently (11/08/2009) which is again an indication of where they are heading. Since it’s start it had 10 post in 10 days each rich with detailed information for developers. These guys mean business.

The most current post is about the new Blackberry 5.0 SDK beta that is now available to developers. If you read through the feature list the key from my perspective is

Push API

(net.rim.blackberry.api.push.*)

Makes using Push APIs even easier and more powerful for developers.

This is exactly what I meant earlier. The best move for RIM now is to empower it’s developer community with the access to the unique features of it’s platform. Apple only recently released it’s push functionality and compared to RIM it has still a long way to go.

In the past weeks I have been considering getting an iPhone 3GS to supplement my Blackberry Bold because I felt the Blackberry platform stagnating. Not anymore. I have high hopes for the Blackberry and I also wish the rumors about the browser upgrades are true. Full Flash/Silverlight capabilities on the Blackberry? iPhone beware!

I am writting this post on my Blackberry Bold via the WordPress app for Blackberry (latest beta build). It’s easy to use, very fast and gets the job done. Not sure how the formatting will work and I got no spell-check but anyway…

…Clicking the publish button…

I couldn’t resist and upgraded to the new MacBook Pro (2,66 Ghz, 4GB RAM, NVIDIA 9600GT, built in battery) from my early 2008 MacBook Pro (not unibody). Not that I needed to but after changing jobs and having some tough times in the new one I figured I deserved a present for myself. Anyway the machine is unbelievable – powerful, long lasting battery and a beautiful screen – I like glossy. I know some people hate glossy and actually Apple in yesterday started again to offer the matte screen (50$) but I really like the vibrant feeling the glossy display delivers. Also I installed the Windows 7 RC build on a 50 GB partition and was testing it. Only issue I ran into was that I couldn’t use my headset mic in games. In the Windows desktop it works fine but once I enter the game the mic just doesn’t hear me… Anyway to anyone wondering whether the new MacBook Pros are worth the money – as far as I am concerned – no doubt about it.

My girlfriend Martina has had her current Acer 12" laptop for quite some time now and she recently asked me whether she should start looking for a new one. As the Acer is equipped with the original Core Duo Intel processor (yep the really shitty one) I told her she is ready for a refresh.

When picking a new laptop her main priorities were size, weight and compatibility – she works as a professional translator and needs a lot of Dictionaries that don’t necessary run on Linux and Macs. Nevertheless when choosing we have actually eliminated all windows laptops and came to the conclusion the new MacBook would be the best choice.

The size is about right, it’s quite light – she didn’t want the original plastic MacBooks due to weight concerns and in addition it’s quite powerful. As far as the compatibility is concerned I helped her by testing all the stuff she needed on my MacBook Pro and to my pleasant surprise all of her applications either run on Mac OS X, have good replacements or you can run them through CrossOver. With her fears silenced she went on and bought the 2.0 GHz new unibody MacBook. In the coming days I will be helping her with the migration to the Mac and I hope she will get accustomed quickly. And if I come across anything interesting I’ll post it here.

I am a very big fan of Mozilla’s open source browser Firefox. As I mentioned in previous posts and as I maintain on the about page Firefox has been my constant companion and main browser like forever. It has served me well with it’s great addons, speed and great inline search. With it’s latest iteration (3.0) Mozilla introduced some great features – the Awesome Bar, smart bookmarks and the amazing speed enhancements that solved most of the issues I had with version 2. As I am rather new to the Mac (4 Month) I didn’t think I would ever touch Safari – I obviously didn’t use it on Windows although I had it installed. It does not have the extensibility of Firefox and you need to hold down the command key to open a link in a new tab and not in a new browser window (!!). So when I heard Leo Laporte talk about using it himself on the Mac as his main browser I wondered what in the world would make anyone use it? In fact Leo uses the open source browser Webkit that is the core of Apples Safari and it’s single most important feature was supposedly performance. This brought me to consider Safari/Webkit again as I do occasionally experience performance problems with Firefox 3 – it still does sometime eat a lot of memory, slows down or die on me. So recently I started regularly downloading the Webkit nightly builds and using them on my MacBook Pro in tandem with Firefox and I installed the Windows version of Safari on my Thinkpad at work.

On the Mac

With the MacBook Pro the difference in performance is noticeable but not to a degree that would make me completely abandon Firefox. The thing is – Firefox usability features save a lot of time and the addons add functionality that is not available in Webkit/Safari. So although Webkit is generally faster when rendering Javascript heavy applications like Gmail, Firefox compensates by it’s features. I will use both for the foreseeable future on my Mac and I can recommend Safari as a decent main browser to anyone in need of a simple browser.

On the PC

At work I found one massive advantage to Safari as a second browser. Similarly to the Mac experience it is indeed faster then Firefox and I make heavy use of that on the Thinkpad. The thing is that I use a lot of corporate javascript based apps at work and their performance in Safari is astounding. No waiting, just click, click, click and go. I hate waiting for forms to validate or content loading CMS systems and with Safari my pain has been eased. I still use Firefox as the main browser but Safari on Windows has become a part of my daily work computing.

Thoughts

1. Yes I know – we got Google Chrome now – also based on Webkit, lightning fast and also PC only and unstable. Until it’s reliability is on the level of Webkits nightly builds – no thanks.
2. Firefox also has an early 3.1 b1(and 2 actually) build that Mozilla calls Minefield. It has a greatly improved really fast javascript engine so it’s performance exceeds that of Webkit according to benchmarks. Unfortunately it isn’t reliable yet for everyday use and therefore it’s a no-no for me in the same way as Chrome

If you are on a Mac and for some reason want to skip Firefox – Safari is a great browser. Do not fear using it – I don’t.

I have my iPhone for a week now and am starting to actually like it. Not only that it’s a great mobile media device but also the connectivity and productive applications that make your life easier. The one great disadvantage to it is obviously battery life but I have learned how to manage it’s usage when on the road and am so far capable to get around a day and a bit out of it. My Blackberry Pearl 8120 could last 2-4 days with push email so I will need to adjust to this new reality.

Initially I wasn’t sure what my setup (PIM) would be like on this device. I know that you can use the iPhone to it’s full potential using Mobile Me and although I do have an account there my main mail, calendaring, contacts stuff is Google. Switching from one to the other makes currently no sense to me – I am not using a personaliized domain and Mobile Me does not even support this. With that I decided I would setup both the Google stuff and Mobile Me and just see how it goes.

Gmail

Setting up Gmail is easy – you can either do it using the prepared interface or do it manually (selecting other and filling in the IMAP server information). I don’t see any difference in the result of both of these approaches so I would currently go with the prepared interface. Gmail works like a charm in the iPhone email client (much better then in Mail.app on the Mac – no dual unread message alerts…) and I use that mainly for my email needs. One small thing – as you can’t currently use the iPhone mail client in landscape mode I experimented with the Gmails web interface using Safari and bookmarking it to my homescreen. This works great and typing is amazing in this way with the only downside being it’s slower and you don’t get new message alerts. I will be testing both the mail client and the web approach and post about it a bit later.

Google Calendar

I am a heavy user of Google Calendar. I share calendars with my familly, subscribe to public calendars (holidays, Twit.tv,…) and intergrate with Remember The Milk (more about that later). Therefore having the iPhone calendar synced correctly to my Google Calendar is of great importance to me. For this I use a new experimental service called Nuevasync.com. What I presume they do is they setup an Exchange server, you create an account and they access your Google Calendar and sync it to your Nuevasync account. Then you can access this through the Exchange features of the iPhone.The syncing works well but currently I didn’t find anyway to sync my other calendar subscriptions. Again Google has a mobile version of the Google Calendar webapp which is nice but offers only a list view which isn’t exactly the best option. Nevertheless it’s still a viable option to view your calendar in the most current state.

Google Contacts

Similar to Google Calendar contacts can be synced via Nuevasync.com. This has one major disadvantage – you get all of the junk contacts. On the other hand you get it all and hey – there is a nice search feature in the Contacts app on the iPhone so it’s ok. And additionally it give you incentive to sort out your contacts and to put some effort into maintaining them.

Task Management

In my general effort to be a bit more productive I maintain to-do lists and try to get the hang out of GTD. It’s not like I worship this uber personal productivity movement but I see some things that really help me. With this in mind I have a cool setup of Task Management on RememberTheMilk.com. There is a great write-up about this somewhere on the web – look it up, worth the time. So anyway they have a great iPhone webapp and so I use this setup via a shortcut on my homescreen.

Mobile Me

Mobile Me was obviously an easy thing to setup and works nice. The best thing about it is obivously the seemless integration and push capabilities. My problem – I don’t use it. If I were to switch to Mobile Me – I would lose the calendar sharing capabilities and would have to change my email address. Although I consider Mobile Me to be a compelling product – to be as good as the competition won’t make anyone switch.

Yahoo

I also have a Yahoo email account and use that on the iPhone aswell. I haven’t tested it much yet but it seems to be working fine.

Final thoughts

So in general the iPhone is a great mobile media and PIM device. If you got the patience to set everything up the way you like it then you should be fine. Although I still miss my push email from my Blackberry – I hope this functionality will be added by Apple as Steve said at WWDC 2008 by opening the push API to developers. Also yes the keyboard sucks compared to almost anything – not a showstopper but well…