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Everyone is moaning about the Wall Street Journal article/book coming out explaining why calling your kids “garbage” will make your kids better. Let’s share some excerpts:

Despite our squeamishness about cultural stereotypes, there are tons of studies out there showing marked and quantifiable differences between Chinese and Westerners when it comes to parenting. In one study of 50 Western American mothers and 48 Chinese immigrant mothers, almost 70% of the Western mothers said either that “stressing academic success is not good for children” or that “parents need to foster the idea that learning is fun.” By contrast, roughly 0% of the Chinese mothers felt the same way. Instead, the vast majority of the Chinese mothers said that they believe their children can be “the best” students, that “academic achievement reflects successful parenting,” and that if children did not excel at school then there was “a problem” and parents “were not doing their job.” Other studies indicate that compared to Western parents, Chinese parents spend approximately 10 times as long every day drilling academic activities with their children. By contrast, Western kids are more likely to participate in sports teams.

I have to say, and obviously a key part of a her argument is, this all sounds hard to disagree with. For my value system, I would say:

• Academics is good, therefore stressing the value of academics does not sound bad.
• Learning can be fun or not fun, but it must be done. There are classes and subjects that are hard. It is nice if it is fun. If is more pleasant if you have a good attitude towards it.
• Academic achievement is related to successful parenting. I think you can’t take all the credit for it, but study after study shows that better parenting situations drive better academic outcomes.

Here is another great quote:

What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you’re good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist; things are always hardest at the beginning, which is where Western parents tend to give up.

That is a good point. Hard work is required to become good at things. Things you are good at are more fun.

But that last area is a critical area where I diverge.

Here is my leap: Teaching your children the value of working hard – and that they must work hard on things they do – is critical. The “Chinese Mother” approach she takes is implying correlation where there is only the tiniest bit.

Before I start down my winding road of parenting tips, allow me to caveat: My wife is Chinese. Her parents are Chinese. My wife turned out great and our kids are working hard to become great (!). My wife and I have a shared value system on this stuff and that is what I am discussing. The concept of “Chinese Mothers” as discussed here is an extremely broad stereotype and we are all reasonable people that understand the context of this discussion.

When I became a parent, I became a connoisseur of the literature, as do many parents. The study I homed in on was a study published in Scientific American that indicated, in short, that teaching your child the value of working hard is critical for success in life. Allow me to quote:

…our studies show that teaching people to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages a focus on effort rather than on intelligence or talent, helps make them into high achievers in school and in life.

The classic study looked at in this article was so simple that a child could do it. Longer quote:

In studies involving several hundred fifth graders published in 1998, for example, Columbia psychologist Claudia M. Mueller and I gave children questions from a nonverbal IQ test. After the first 10 problems, on which most children did fairly well, we praised them. We praised some of them for their intelligence: “Wow … that’s a really good score. You must be smart at this.” We commended others for their effort: “Wow … that’s a really good score. You must have worked really hard.”We found that intelligence praise encouraged a fixed mind-set more often than did pats on the back for effort. Those congratulated for their intelligence, for example, shied away from a challenging assignment—they wanted an easy one instead—far moreoften than the kids applauded for their effort. (Most of those lauded for their hard work wanted the difficult problem set from which they would learn.) When we gave everyone hard problems anyway, those praised for being smart became discouraged, doubting their ability. And their scores, even on an easier problem set we gave them afterward, declined as compared with their previous results on equivalent problems. In contrast, students praised for their effort did not lose confidence when faced with the harder questions, and their performance improved markedly on the easier problems that followed.

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2010 is next!

Many people have done retrospectives on their blog, I am no different. I always thought some of my best work went unnoticed because this blog is not super high traffic. With that in mind, let me review a few highlights from years past that I wanted to share with you. If you are a new or relatively new reader and never sifted through the 300-odd posts on this blog, this is the post for you.

2007 Best Blog Posts

• How To Name Your Start-up
• Marketing and Sales in a Web 2.0 World – Interestingly, I think I was talking about an unrecognized trend that today, in a world of consumer web apps and the iPhone, is fairly well recognized.
• Cogmap and the Web 2.0 Business Model – Like many bloggers, I came out of the gate with a slew of great posts. Another oldie, but goodie.
• When Fewer Clicks Are A Good Thing – An interview I did that I pointed to from my blog

2008 Best Blog Posts

• NDAs Are Not Documents I Agree To
• Does Paying For Comments Work
• How Do You Manage Your Email? – I am a nut for email management processes and a believer that my process is the best.
• Reviewing Business Plans Before You Show Anyone
• Publishers Love People That Pay Them
• “Too Big To Fail”

Actually, I recognize this is information overload. I will break this into two posts and bring you 2009 and 2010 tomorrow.

Etacts should send me some schwag for all the good love I gave them that they did not give back.

After my post lauding their service, within days Salesforce.com acquired them. As always, we are on the bleeding edge of technology here at Cogblog. The comments in the TechCrunch post lead one to believe that Etacts was acquired for $6m. Nice exit for Y Combinator and Ron Conway and further proof regarding my long standing theory that raising a lot of money makes it hard to do a small exit. It is nice that a company with great products and poor traction can find a way out that leaves investors “not unhappy” and is ok for the employees as well.

Congratulations to Etacts, now I have to find a new technology to use since I didn’t like the others.

This is going to be a monster post. Great post to start a great year.

Let’s put an end to suspense: I am using Google Tasks today for To-Do lists. Here is the story of how I got there:

Different people have different needs in Task Management and To-Do Lists and an understanding of your needs is important in aligning expectations and picking appropriate tools to support your work. Quick example that illustrates the point: Advertising.com believed in Franklin Covey. They were bananas for Franklin Covey and it was fairly obvious why: They were an organization driven by delivery managers. Delivery managers at Ad.com had incredibly transactional jobs: They would come in every morning, look at the 30 campaigns they were managing, and take away from it a list if 50 things that had to get done that day. They probably had a few meetings that day with product management or sales, but that was it. They had to get those 50 things done. And then they did it again tomorrow. Franklin Covey is fantastic for this kind of transactional environment. It focuses on daily to-do lists and the intra-day prioritization of those lists.

Franklin Covey typically doesn’t work well for engineering jobs. Engineering jobs daily to-do list typically looks like:

Monday:

• Code Feature X

A hard core Franklin Covey lover might say, “Decompose that”, but then it simply looks like:

Monday:

• Think About Feature X
• Code Part X of Feature X
• Code Part Y of Feature X

Bottom-line, these jobs are not heavily transactional so the intra-day prioritization of to-do’s loses importance.

I had used a nice leather binder and it had worked well previously, but I became a Franklin Covey guy at Ad.com. I used a Franklin Covey for three years, then I switched rather abruptly. When I took over New Product Development at AOL Advertising, I suddenly realized that Franklin Covey was no longer working: I was in so many meetings that I never sat still for 10 minutes. Also, I had transitioned from executing to leading. I have always found it hard to be both a leader and clipboard guy. Any project manager will tell you that leading a meeting and taking notes on the meeting is an exercise in folly, so I generally made sure that I had someone following me around with a clipboard as we went from place to place. Now they were taking the actions and following up on them and as long as I had a couple of those people to alternate meetings with me, stuff got done.

At this point, I went paperless and it worked incredibly well. I used Remember The Milk and any to-do that I had went into it. I chose RTM at the time because it appeared they had the best combination of iPhone and desktop platform (in their case, the web app) that I could find. I used RTM for two years to take relentless to-do’s in meetings and it was great.

Last year, I left AOL to start my own company. I quickly realized that I had to bring Covey back, but not for why you think: My job didn’t become transactional. I could have continued to use RTM, but I found that meeting with customers works better with paper. It annoys the crap out of clients if you are mucking with your phone while they talk to you. They assume you are playing brickbreaker. It is that simple. So for a year I was a Covey guy.

Now I am going digital again and I thought it was a good time to re-survey the market. Here were my requirements:

• The ability to make multiple to-do lists
• The ability to associate a note with a to-do
• iPhone && (Mac Desktop || Web) && (optionally iPad)— Syncing + off-line iPhone
• I wanted it to be free. I had used RTM Pro to get iPhone syncing, but they just made 1 sync per day free and I actually thought that was enough for me. And I knew RTM was good enough to meet my needs, so unless a product was mind-bogglingly over the top, no point paying.

I don’t need to schedule to-dos: I have always simply put those in my calendar and it works fine. I don’t need to prioritize to-dos. If I can rank order them that is fine. One of the things that always annoyed me about RTM was that I couldn’t drag and drop to-dos, I had to use priority to set the order I wanted. Okay, but a little annoying. Many of my to-do lists are not really to-do’s in a classic sense, but rather lists: A list of feature ideas for Application X, a list of ideas of new companies I could start, a list of potential gifts for my wife. Things I keep track of in to-do form, but I don’t need to schedule them, just prioritize them and maybe hide a note with them (requirements for the feature).

On to the showdown; I looked at a few products. Let me talk about some popular products I dismissed out of hand:

Evernote

Evernote is a note-taking product. I am actually excited about using Evernote to fill the gap in my toolset for recording meeting notes electronically. Alas, they are not technically a to-do list and this is manifested in how the product works. They suggest that people that want a to-do list should make a note called to-do list and keep their list in it. A text file is not good enough for my to-do list.

Things

Things looks awesome. It is a Mac desktop app with an iPhone app that looks great. It costs money both for the desktop app and the iPhone app (and the iPad app). Didn’t look great enough to justify shelling out for it. There you go.

Ta-Da Lists (from 37signals)

No offline support for iPhone, end of story.

Now let’s talk about the finalists:

THE WINNER: Google Tasks

Google Tasks started out as a to-do list that I saw whenever I was looking at my gmail. That worked surprisingly well for me as I started to use it. Then I wanted to take it to my iPhone. Google doesn’t have an official iPhone app for tasks, despite the friendly mobile web interface, but because it is Google there are APIs and many people have built iPhone apps. This allows you to take Google tasks offline, which is great. I tried about 4 different Google Tasks iPhone Apps and the one that was hands down the best was GoTasks. I am not going to rehash that process, just trust me on this one. Or don’t and go try yourself. Whatever.

GoTasks was the best for three reasons:

1. Easy to add new tasks
2. Easy to access notes associated with a task
3. Easy to reorder tasks and check off completed tasks

GoTasks Screen

“But that web interface sucks!”, you say. There is a secret interface to Google Tasks that makes it much more awesome: The Canvas interface. Give it a try. I found it met my needs as well as Remember The Milks web interface.

Google Tasks Canvas Interface

Remember The Milk

One of the most popular task management systems, I felt like it had jumped the shark a bit for me.

As you can see from the web interface, they make it really easy to access the notes, which I like, and easy to add a new task, but it seemed like the focus in how they evolved the platform was scheduling to-dos. If I wanted to-dos scheduled, I wanted it integrated with my calendar. I lose a lot of screen real estate on the iPhone to the ability to view completed tasks (never used it, never will), and look at scheduled tasks (don’t have any). Also, they had focused on things like priorities and location-awareness and these features never helped me. My priorities are all relative: I like re-ordering, not re-prioritizing.

Also, I tried all the desktop widgets people had written for RTM and didn’t like any of them. FWIW.

Wunderlist

Wunderlist is the new hotness right now, but I found the product quite 1.0. I liked that it was a Mac Desktop app and that it had a lot of sex appeal, but there were problems. The iPhone app made it really hard to re-organize lists. You had to go to a separate screen after you had made a task to re-order it. I might have been able to live with that, but the real crime was this: The app did not support notes, it just kept to-dos. Of course, 3 weeks later, it supports notes. So yay for them. I think this app is really evolving in the right direction.

Unfortunately, I decided that all the sexiness of this app was not a completely good thing. GoTasks UI is incredibly utilitarian. Screen space is utilized in a very iPhone way to help me read things more easily and interact with things quicker.

Wunderlist iPhone Screenshot

And I don’t want to hit “Edit” to re-order, don’t want to waste space on the stuff at the bottom.

I will definitely check back with Wunderlist in a year, but I felt like Google has a ton of room to grow in this area and they don’t care about the money. They will just invest crazy resources until they are the default to-do list manager for everyone. Seems like a no-brainer idea for them.

So there you go, the to-do list showdown of 2010 and how it all worked out.

A review of Gist, Rapportive, and Etacts

Everybody wants their email to be better. I recently tested a variety of email plugins that focus on bringing social data into gmail. The short answer is: Use Etacts. Here is what I saw:

Three companies are the market leaders in the space:

• Rapportive
• Etacts
• Gist

Rapportive has raised $1m from an impressive group of angels: Dharmesh Shah, Jason Calcanis, Paul Buchheit, Dave McClure, David Cancel, CRV, etc..

Etacts has raised $650k from Y Combinator and Ron Conway.

Gist has raised $10m+ from Foundry and Vulcan Capital.

Interestingly, I think this explains why Gist has seemingly much better marketing, but it fails to explain why Gist’s product seemed not as good.

Disclaimer: I was looking for a specific kind of added value. It could be that these products do other things that I just fail to appreciate. Most specifically: I am not interested in spending any time on other web sites, I just want my gmail to be better. Caveat emptor.

Gist

Anyway, here was the Gist UI in my gmail inbox.

I was looking at an email thread with my lawyer, so it shows his latest tweet and my latest tweet. Links to our facebook and twitter.

It also put the whole thing in an iframe out to the side. It felt like it loaded a lot slower than other things. While I bet owning an iframe is a lot easier from a backend support perspective – you don’t break when they change gmail, it felt a lot more web 1.0 than the other solutions.

Rapportive

Rapportive was well implemented, but had no features. It successfully found that I am LinkedIn to Mike, but didn’t include tweets. All it really lets me do is easily click through to Twitter/LinkedIn/Facebook and record a note about a person – kind of CRM-ish.

Both Etacts and Rapportive integrate neatly into the gmail pane so I barely notice they are there unless I want data.

Etacts

Etacts is the easy winner, hands down. It identifies that we are LinkedIn and shows me shared connections. It shows me several of his last tweets, and it shows me other related threads. Finally, they offer me the “Remind me to contact” feature (a note feature similar to Rapportive was below the fold here), which I am actually intrigued by – I should stay in contact with people better than I do.

I participated in the Baltimore Hackathon this past week and had a ridiculously awesome time. How great: we won!

When I got there and did my chat about my project, only two people self-identified as PHP developers – both college students that seemed uninterested in the small scope of my project compared to other ambitious plans to build entire web apps. Then, right as I despaired at attracting sufficiently skilled talent to be able to bang this out, Pete Bessman jumped in and said that he loved the idea and wanted to work on it. What did Pete love? As he said repeatedly, “The reach to grasp ratio on this project is very good.” Pete and I hunkered down in the quietest corner of the Hackathon (hence I think there are fewer pictures of Pete and I working than any other project at the Hackathon, I suspect) and got to work. While Pete started working on the basic infrastructure of the app, I dissected some WP plug-ins to understand how WP handled things like namespaces. I found the first few API calls that Pete needed to implement and I wrote the algorithm we would use for testing headlines. Pete then implemented everything lickety-split. By the end of the first night, I had realized two things:

Huge thanks to all involved – having events like this to help people like me scratch an itch is awesome. Also, I got a much bigger job done: As I told Chris Brandenburg when I saw him the first night and he asked what I was doing there, I said: “Scouting for talent”. His response: “Yeah, me too.” Pete Bessman has a job for life. He is awesome. Thanks to all my friends at Millenial. I would like to think that when Millenial doubled the prize money, that was really Chris hooking me up as he anticipated my victory. Thanks Chris!

Obviously, I should thank my wife as well.  She watched the kids Friday and Saturday while I indulged my inner geek. It is very tough for old guys like me to do things like this, but supportive significant others are critical for career success and we saw further evidence here.

One of the new meme’s I have seen sweeping the Internet is the new three.sentenc.es concept.

Here it is:

Tim Ferris blogged about it, TechCrunch wrote about it, I have seen people email me with this as their footer.

It is kind of silly.

Why?

If people want to start sending emails like they text, they can, but I have to say: I don’t think I would text my boss or my customers. People deserve well-crafted sentences and coherent thought.

This policy is actually dodging the real fact of the matter: You cannot convey content using this policy, so you are basically saying I will only communicate via phone unless you want a decision – which you could not possibly ask for in three sentences, so you will have to call me if you want to (as is implied by the footer) meet my expectation of sending incredibly brief emails.

People write dumb emails all the time, but getting religious is even dumber.

Great post stating the obvious for the record (a frequent tactic of my blog) by Alan Pearlstine on AdExchanger.

His point is that last click attribution overvalues the last click, particularly in retargeting campaigns.

I see more and more companies offering CPC retargeting on display inventory (that they probably had to buy on a CPM basis).  This is kind of a no-brainer to offer because click-through rates are so high that the cost of testing is probably not excessive.

Here is my question coming out of that:

Are the CPCs that people are paying for retargeting campaigns greater or less than the appropriate proportional value that should be attributed to a retargeting impression?

Post your best guess in the comments.

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I wanted to spend a minute on my blog telling a great, telling, instructive story about delivering great customer value.

For the purposes of this discussion, I want to keep all the names confidential, but here we go:

I was at SXSW a year ago and was talking to an incredibly well known creative director/site designer who works for an incredibly well known web design consultancy.  Let me put it this way: He is one of those guys that everyone knows and thinks is awesome and he works for one of those agencies everyone wishes they could hire.

The consultancy had recently completed a project for a web application that I used from time to time, so I am talking to this creative director at SXSW and I mention a few things about the interface that had left me ambivalent or confused.  His response: “Yeah, I totally agree.  Unfortunately, we had a really small budget and just didn’t have the time to do a better job.”

Unfortunately, I thought that was totally the wrong approach.  This project was kind of unique in that it is one of the more popular and better known web applications in the world.  While the company has a ridiculously popular product, it was still quite start-up-ish and not rolling in cash, so you could tell that the consultancy probably did the project because they wanted to be able to say, “We were the guys that they wanted to do this project!”  The company blogged about the awesome work that the consultancy did for them during and after completion, the consultancy blogged about how they did the work, etc.  The marketing was clearly a big part of the sale in convincing the consultancy to do the work despite the constrained budget and there was good marketing.  The marketing was so good that even I was aware of it.

Unfortunately, the project work was just OK.  My impression is the the company was all too aware of their budget limitations (maybe good project management by the consulting firm there!), so they were quite happy with what they got for what they spent, but for outside parties, it was quite evident that the work done was inadequate in a number of ways.

If Apple asked your company to redesign the iPod and then they would take out full page ads in every newspaper in the world giving you credit for the work you did, could you afford to do anything less than awesome?

Having the opportunity to redesign an interface that millions of people interact with is a unique opportunity for a design firm.  In many ways, the work you do there will become a proxy for your portfolio.  Being able to say, “I designed the iPod” instantly translates into an understanding of the kind of quality of work you do.

I think what the consultancy missed in this story is that when you accept that opportunity, you have to commit to being awesome.  You cannot afford to be anything less.  If you make a terrible iPhone interface and then Apple tells the world you made it, it doesn’t matter if they paid you $10 or $10 million.  You own it.  If they agreed to do the work even though the budget was limited, they have to do the best job they can.  They have to treat it like a million dollar project because external parties will only care about the outcome.  An application used by everyone is an amazing opportunity to make your mark in the world.

Are you identifying areas where you need to go above and beyond the call of duty to make your product (in this case, their portfolio of work) remarkable?