Tag: Business

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Conference strategy at Karos Health

The Karos Health kiosk at RSNA

I recently spent a week in Chicago at the annual conference put on by the Radiological Society of North America. I was there along with Rick, Michel, and Jeff, three of my colleagues from Karos Health (that’s Jeff in the picture). While it was my first visit to this conference, the others had all made the trip multiple times over the years. We had a great strategy for getting the most out of our visit, and I thought I’d share it here.

We had a minimal presence on the show floor, with just a tiny display as part of a booth organized by the Government of Ontario’s Ministry of Economic Development and Trade. It was perfect for us, though, as our strategy revolved around pre-arranged meetings and visits to specific companies rather than simply waiting for visitors to find us. Our display served as a place where people could find us if needed, with someone always present and ready to talk about our products and demonstrate our latest product, Rialto Consult.

We were able to provide demonstrations for a range of visitors. Some were people my colleagues knew who wanted to see our new product, some were existing customers, and some were new contacts that we made at the show. All were attentive while we showed what Rialto Consult can do and positive in their feedback. In fact, we were a little taken aback at the reception; we were pleased with what we were showing, but the response was even more than we could have hoped for.

There were a couple of highlights for me. One was prompted by a data issue, in which a customer noted that a sample document was missing from what we showed. I was able to add the document that evening, and when the customer returned the next day with some colleagues, the presence of the document did not go unnoticed.

The second was a visit to our booth by a colleague from one of our Karos Innovation Centers, who arrived while a demonstration was in progress. After we completed the demonstration, our colleague was able to answer some questions from the small audience relating to our work together. The timing was perfect!

RSNA 2010 was a successful conference with much positive feedback and a great response to Rialto Consult. In fact, on our return to Waterloo Rick characterized it as perhaps the most satisfying RSNA conference that he had attended. We’ll be there again next year.

This post originally ran, in a slightly different form, on the Karos Health blog.

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Murphy was an optimist

I visited the Accelerator Centre this week to do a presentation/workshop for an MBET class at the University of Waterloo. The first part of the class turned out to be a bit of a challenge. Well, it was more than a bit of a challenge. It was a vivid manifestation of Murphy’s Law in action.

My presentation included supporting visuals prepared in Keynote, Apple’s wonderful presentation software for Macintosh. While I had brought my laptop, and everything else needed for the class, I had neglected to bring the correct video cable to connect my laptop to the projector in the classroom. No connector meant no supporting visuals.

Not a problem. There were other laptops in the room and there was a viable plan ‘B’ — all I had to do was export my Keynote presentation to a Powerpoint version, and transfer it to a Windows laptop. I had, in the past, done this translation many times. On this occasion, though, it didn’t work.

OK, then, on to plan ‘C’ — upload my presentation to slideshare.net. The conversion failed there, too.

Plan ‘D’ was the one that finally worked. A great colleague at Karos Health graciously hand-delivered the right cable after I called the office with my tale of woe. Cable in hand, I connected my laptop to the projector and jumped into my delayed presentation.

Of course, theres an inevitable punchline to this story. The presentation/workshop that I was delivering was about delivering presentations.

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Motivation 3.0: doing more at Karos Health

I wrote earlier this week about the importance of purpose in motivating people who are engaged in creative work. Karos Health has a pretty motivating mission that easily provides a sense of purpose.

We go beyond that, though. Karos has a policy of letting employees devote a percentage of their working hours to doing good out in the community at large. That could be achieved by organizing a fund-raising event for a not-for-profit, or building a web presence for a hospice, or serving meals in a homeless shelter — it could be anything. There are only two rules. First, present your idea to the team — not company management, but the entire Karos team. Second, provide updates on your progress with your activity. That’s it.

We truly believe that allowing people to pursue purpose on their own terms, as Dan Pink puts it, is an important path to growing a high performance team.

Does that sound appealing? Check out our careers and get in touch if you think there’s a fit.

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Motivation 3.0: a sense of purpose

Some time ago I read a book by Dan Pink called Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates. It’s a fine read and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in understanding how to get the most out of a team (or just out of yourself). If you want to get a taste of the book, have a look at this wonderful illustrated version of a talk that Pink gave to the RSA.

Pink identifies three things that matter to people who are working in creative positions, or positions that don’t just involve repeating the same kinds of tasks again and again.

  • Autonomy. Ideally, over what you do, when you do it, who you do it with, and how you do it.
  • Mastery. Your abilities are finite, but infinitely improvable; improvement demands effort; and mastery can never be fully attained, which is part of the allure.
  • Purpose. Within an organization, use profits to reach purpose, emphasize more than just self-interest, and allow people to pursue purpose on their own terms.

At Karos Health, last week, I was vividly reminded of the role that purpose plays.

Karos Health is about improving the quality of health care through information-sharing and collaboration amongst health care stakeholders. Among the things that our products do, for example, is moving diagnostic images like CT scans from a scanner to a radiologist who will read the scan, and moving the resulting diagnosis from that radiologist to the physician who requested the images.

In a meeting with a customer we heard that in many cases their expected turn-around time for having a CT scan read by a radiologist and a result delivered to the requesting physician is under twenty minutes. Why? It isn’t for money-related or market-related reasons. It’s because for a stroke victim waiting to receive treatment, every second counts. That’s a highly motivating purpose for us at Karos.

Obviously purpose isn’t confined to helping save lives. What’s your purpose?

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Learning about cameras at Snapsort.com

I worked with many engaged and thoughtful people at Primal Fusion. One of them was Alex Black, who left the company last summer to launch a new venture. The fruits of his and his team’s labour first emerged last January with a very simple initial release of Snapsort.com, a resource for people who are shopping for cameras. Since then, they’ve continuously improved the product, incorporating feedback from their users and adding functionality that has pushed Snapsort.com forward. Last week’s most recent release has taken the product well beyond what it was less than six months ago.

For example, visitors can now explore the similarities and differences among ultra compact cameras, among other types, with nice faceted navigation for filtering the presentation. There are also some fine learning resources for helping visitors understand how they might best think about a camera purchase.

The approach that Alex and his team took has made for a fine product, but is also a model for how to make progress with a consumer-facing software product: release early, listen to your market, and iterate often.

Congratulations on the new release guys!

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Getting Things Done

I’ve had occasion in recent weeks to talk with a few people about personal productivity, and about how to manage competing priorities and get work done. There are a variety of systems and products out there that promise to help get you organized — Jim Estill’s thoughts on Time Leadership come to mind, as he did a great presentation on it to the Primal Fusion team while I was there. An approach that has worked well for me for several years comes from the book Getting Things Done, by David Allen.

I was introduced to Getting Things Done indirectly in 2005 while working at Platform Computing; my manager at the time left a printed copy of a >New York Times article on my desk. “Meet the Life Hackers”, by Clive Thompson, provides a great overview of the problems with, and possible solutions for, dealing with information overload. As I recognized from personal experience that information overload is an issue, I spent some time tracking down many of the references in the article. One of the things that I found was Allen’s book, which resonated for me when I first read it, and which is well-worth reading if this topic is remotely interesting to you.

(As an aside, those of you who are familiar with GTD may have guessed that the reason that I’m able to cite Thompson’s article after so many years is because I’ve implemented a reference system to keep track of useful things like the article.)

I won’t describe GTD in detail here, as many others have done so elsewhere. I will say that the keys to its success for me have been the inbox, where I put all the bits of information that may otherwise interrupt me during the day, and the weekly processing of inbox items into projects and tasks that can be completed in particular contexts. I’ll also say that truly understanding the power of GTD may be elusive based on just a description or on just reading the book. It was only after I had tried it for a few weeks that some of the nuances started to make sense to me.

Early on I used a variety of GTD implementations. Some used files on my computer, others were paper-based. At one point I created a database implementation in Filemaker, including a mobile version for my Palm PDA that synched with a version on my Mac. It worked reasonably well and was fun to build.

The GTD solution that I use now, and have used for quite some time, is OmniFocus for Mac and iPhone, in combination with Google Calendar (along with a physical filing cabinet for reference items). There are other tools available, but OmniFocus has worked well for me, and Omni is a pretty cool company.

Having finished this post, I can now mark it as “done” in OmniFocus!

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What my mom taught me about search engine optimization

Screen image: Google search results for Mark Connolly

Actually, my mom taught me just about nothing about search engine optimization (SEO). What she did, though, was do a Google search on her son’s name. She discovered this blog was the number one response, and she told me about it on the weekend.

I checked myself, it having been some time since I had done a vanity search, and discovered that this blog is, indeed, the number one result for a search on ‘Mark Connolly’. It was a pleasing result at some level, though it did make me wonder how it happened; SEO is big business, and there is more than one Mark Connolly in the world who might be expected to show up higher in the results. Somehow, I stumbled into the top spot.

As it turns out, I may be number one on Google (for now, anyway), but this blog didn’t show up until the third page of Bing results for the same search. On the other hand, I turn up twice more on the first page of Google search results (my Twitter page and my Ignite talk video).

I am curious as to whether this result is peculiar to Canadian Google users, or is it the same elsewhere. Any input, blog readers?

And if you’re reading this, Mom, thanks for letting me know!

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This boot camp needs you, no marching required

Next week is the Canada 3.0 conference in Stratford, Ontario. I mention it because I’ll be there on the afternoons of Monday May 10 and Tuesday May 11, facilitating/hosting DigitalMediaCamp from noon until 4:00pm. The great thing is that DigitalMediaCamp is free, courtesy of The Record. All you need to do is register for either Monday or Tuesday and then get yourself to Stratford.

What should you expect? As it says on the site, “the DigitalMediaCamp will allow participants to interact with others, experience new software and provide input to decision makers shaping the future of Digital Media in Canada.” DigitalMediaCamp registrants are also entitled to attend the morning keynote presentations that are part of Canada 3.0, and to explore the showcase booths and more.

Sounds like fun to me. Tell your friends, get thinking, and bring your ideas and an open mind to Stratford. Take the opportunity to work with others to help build a digital media vision for Canada.

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A fretboard tribe leads to print success

Traditional print publishers have been facing a challenging environment the last few years (though I have to think that there have been challenges of one kind or another for as long as there has been print). More astute observers than me have written extensively on the travails of the industry, but as a former designer of print publications it’s hard for me not to hope that the industry figures out how to make it work.

There are pockets of hope out there though. For a while now I’ve been telling friends and colleagues about one publication that I read that seems to have found a winning formula.

The Fretboard Journal started life as a high-quality quarterly magazine featuring beautiful photography and well-written articles by people passionate about music. Now in its fifth year, it remains that today, but the FJ team has augmented the magazine with a variety of online activities that support the printed product, build a community of passionate readers, and make real offline connections.

  • There’s a monthly email newsletter to subscribe to on their home page. Perhaps that’s a little quaint in the Internet of the 21st century, but I devour it as eagerly as I do the quarterly print magazine.
  • FJ is active on Twitter via both a @fbjournal and, somewhat more erratically, individual staff accounts. They’ve also created Twitter lists related to various fretted instruments. Nice!
  • I have to confess that I make little use of Facebook these days. In fact, the main reason that I check in is to see FJ updates — there’s a steady stream of announcements and pointers to YouTube videos.
  • The FJ podcast (also on iTunes) is an audio treat, with the focus being great conversations with a variety of musicians, luthiers, music store owners, and other folks. It has been weekly in the past, but seems to be on hiatus right now.
  • The FJ blog was far more active in the early days, and seems to have been supplanted by other activities. Still, it’s a presence. Of course, there’s also a website.

Is this a formula that can support a business? As it turns out, a new issue of The Fretboard Journal arrived in my mailbox while I had this post in draft form. It included the following from editor Marc Greilsamer in his ‘Opening Notes’ column:

It seems that the death of the magazine industry is upon us, or so we’ve been told by whatever media outlets still remain. But while it’s certainly true that many publications — young and old, big and small — seem to be falling by the wayside, The Fretboard Journal somehow continues to grow. For that we only have our wonderful readers (and fellow tribesmen) to thanks.

Not just a community, but a tribe. Sounds like a pretty healthy business to me.

Update (April 7, 2010): FJ recently unveiled a new web site and blog, with exclusive web-only content.