Category: General

My Walk Up Music for Work

Posted on by Tracey Pilone in General, Uncategorized

I am a pretty big baseball fan.  I’m not one of those people that doesn’t miss a game, but I am one of those people that catches 3 or 4 games a week.  Baseball has walk up music.  It’s played when each player “walks up” to the plate and gets ready for their at-bat.   

I have walk up music for work.

I don’t know how normal that is.  I have a rotation of music that I play for the day, depending upon my expectations for that day, during my 2 block walk from the parking garage to the office. 

A few years ago, as I was working myself through imposter syndrome, I read a book called The Gifted Adult: A Revolutionary Guide for Liberating Everyday Genius. The book has a quiz that helps you identify areas of aptitude and for me, music was identified as one of them.  After taking that nugget under advisement, I started using music as a coping mechanism and a mood hack.  So now I play psych up music just like athletes do.

I do have a thing for dance music and some language is part of the package.  I’ll leave anything out here but listen at your own risk!  This isn’t a complete list by any means, these are just my favorites.

For a day requiring inspiration:

Dream Bigger – Axwell Ingrosso – “Dream big, dream, oh, f**k it, dream bigger…He told me, never compare to somebody else, the only person you should compete is with yourself, that means your today should totally be better than your yesterday’s you, if you believe.”

Song of choice for days where I am reaching.  Reaching for something bigger than myself, like talking the whole company about something moving forward.  Also great for talking myself into handling something I’m nervous about. I like the bit about not comparing yourself to others.  For an EDM song, it’s pretty positive. Good pump up song.

For a day when you worry you’re over your head:

Right Hand Man – Hamilton Soundtrack – This show is incredibly popular; although this song actually is sung by, and mostly about, George Washington.  The gist of it is that he’s singing this song before getting Hamilton as an assistant and it’s during a rough patch in the war.

“Check it— Can I be real a second? For just a millisecond? Let down my guard and tell the people how I feel a second? Now I’m the model of a modern major general the venerated Virginian veteran whose men are all lining up, to put me up on a pedestal writin’ letters to relatives embellishin’ my elegance and eloquence but the elephant is in the room the truth is in ya face when ya hear the British cannons go…Boom!….” ”Dying is easy young man, living is harder”

This is a great song for days when I feel like I’m over my head.  George felt that way too and he found his way out.  He is one of my favorite figures in history and also in the show, and this is his best song. 

Music to put nose to the grindstone by:

Work B**ch – Britney Spears – Doubles as a great workout song.  The lyrics are pretty much a list of things that people want that they aren’t going to get without working hard.  Which is kinda surprising coming from Brittany Spears in a dance song, but there you are.

“You want a hot body? You want a Bugatti? You want a Maserati? You better work b**ch”

It’s fantastic for putting your head down and cranking on something.  Proposal writing is a good one (in my case).  This is a great song for when I need a little bit of a push. 

For a day with a confrontation scheduled:

Stronger – Kanye West –  “N-now th-that that don’t kill me can only make me stronger” – This one is a little less deep.  This one has a great bass line and is fantastic for playing loud.  Song is great for days I’m dreading, the refrain are really the only words that resonate, but still worth listening to on those days. Usually it’s a difficult conversation I have to have with someone on the team.

After a lousy day:

Take Me Home – Cash Cash – “I’m falling to pieces but I need this yeah, I need this, you’re my fault my weakness…But I still stay cause you’re the only thing I know, so won’t you take, oh, won’t you take me home.” 

Seeing this typed it really doesn’t have the same impact,  highly recommend listening to this one.  This one is really about the conflict between how much I love work and how much it can stress me out, a problem which I don’t think is unique to me by any means. There is no doubt that I need the mental stimulation that comes with doing what I do and how gratifying it can be.  The down side of being as invested and caring as much as a I do is that it can be really hard to separate and it can certainly be stressful. 

Again, sounds great loud, but gets at the double edged sword of it all.

Not sure if this hack works for me in a way similar to the way Power Poses  do but it’s worth a shot for you too! 

Did Toys “R” Us Just Save Barnes & Noble?

Posted on by Tracey Pilone in General, Uncategorized

Toys “R” Us filed liquidation paperwork today, fairly quick since they just started bankruptcy in September of last year.  The toy industry is reeling, based on news reports.

This got me to thinking about my previous blog post about B&N.   Toys “R” Us is currently operating 735 stores in the US with an average size between 20,000 and 50,000 SF.  We’re talking about somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 million SF of toy retail space that is going to evaporate in fairly short order.  Barnes and Noble has about 16 million SF of retail; and even if 50% of both stores is surplus based on shifts to online shopping that math just might work out.

B&N caters to children specifically in a chunk of their stores already.  If you presume that the long term trend is still smaller retail and more online shopping, but B&N has leases to run out, then they may have a unique opportunity on their hands to buy them enough time to bootstrap their transformation to a different physical and virtual store setting.

B&N needs to strike some favorable deals with toy manufacturers (who now are extremely concerned about distribution channels and discoverability).  Given they can work that out, my strategy would be to expand the children’s sections of existing stores to include more toys.  So long as we’re really just talking about moving shelves around this should not be a large capital investment.

The challenge for B&N will be to carefully execute their branding during this period.  Most children’s toys have associated books.  My suggestion would be an expansion on some of what they do now, not a toy section per se, but a Harry Potter section with books interwoven with toys, colorful displays, and perhaps even store events themed around the books.  You could expand that to a magic section with related toys and books nearby.  The goal overall still needs to be moving toward analog things in the stores and a healthier online presence, and making sure they don’t get branded as a toy store will be important for their long term health.

Executed well, this could be a win-win.  B&N gets additional cash flow and foot traffic to wind up their big store leases, and the toy companies get foot traffic to boost sales. Given that B&N stock edged up 6.25% today, it looks like I’m not the only one thinking this way.

The toy companies should be using this time to sort out their branding strategy and shift to their own online sites but that’s another blog post…

 

What if I was the CEO of Barnes and Noble?

Posted on by Tracey Pilone in General, Uncategorized

Over the holidays, I spent some time in the mall and I found myself in a Barnes & Noble this one was a two story store and you can get a good view of the whole store at once – and when we got upstairs I was shocked to look out and see that a good third of the store was full of toys. Toys? I haven’t been to a B&N in a while and I was pretty surprised.

First off, it’s a bookstore and, well, Amazon. Since the bankruptcy of Toys ‘R Us was a big deal in my household (kids were very concerned) and having that having happened so recently it occurred to me that B&N is not in a great spot, between paper books and toys. So of course I spent two days digging into news coverage and annual reports to see what was going on with B&N.  I just kept thinking, What do you do?

Here’s a great blog post about Amazon’s footprint in the book space that’s quick to point out any print book sales increase is becuase Amazon is selling them, and at a discount. Amazon, who is getting headlines now for disrupting everything, started by disrupting the book industry years ago.  Borders is gone.  Books-a-Million is hanging on, but it’s really just Barnes and Noble vs. Amazon.

Barnes & Noble was a Fortune 500 company, it’s actually ranked 555 now, but we are talking about a massive enterprise.  Over 600 stores and 28,500 employees and $4.4 billion in revenue.  But if you walk through the store, it feels like it’s teetering. 

Based on their annual report, B&N has had executive turnover and don’t have much in the way of cash, although there is a sizable credit line they haven’t really used yet. If I was in charge, the first thing to figure out is what the enterprise is really about.

Is it about books? If B&N is really about paper things, including books, they could go this way.  Vinyl records are having a big resurgence, maps, Moleskine notebooks  (I’m a huge Moleskine fan), board games, coloring books, they are all manifestations of analog that aren’t going away.  From a volume perspective, I imagine it would be difficult to match the book volume that they are pushing through stores (or were) but it seems like a viable path to me.  The stores would likely need to shrink, but that’s something that B&N is pursuing already, with 500 stores for renewal in the next 5 years.  It’s something you can build an identity around, keep retail locations open, stay true to your roots. 

Is it about the story?  The concept of a book is pretty fluid right now.  Is it the paper thing? What about eBooks? (my preferred way of reading) Audio books?  Blogs that are compiled and printed? Oral tradition? My argument would be that it’s all of those things and that’s pretty tricky to monetize right now.  Besides paper books, the other things I listed are web-based in some form or another.  That means that B&N would need to get a more robust and innovative web presence and making them primarily a technology company. That doesn’t seem like a good fit for them. 

Is it about the store? It’s a daily occurrence to see an article go by about a retail entity closing, reorganizing; retail is really in flux right now. Retail is often entertainment, which used to be an area they capitalized on.  It’s possible that B&N could move back into that type of footing; it’s certainly how Amazon is moving with their concept stores.  A place to browse books, spend time, get coffee, host all those community book reading and signing events.

What would I do? If I suddenly find myself on B&Ns board, here’s what I would recommend:

  • Smaller stores.  Most of their locations may need to be not just reduced, but moved.  They’ll need to be in places with foot traffic, and if they are in a shopping center with 4 other box stores, facing the same problems, that’ll need to be sorted out.  That seems to be the direction B&N is heading now.
  • Focus on the analog.  Build out the vinyl section, notebooks, pens, board games. Give people places to test all these things out.  Listening to records, playing the board games. Consider talking to companies that have large board game divisions, like Hasbro, to see if they can strike up a preferred vendor status.
  • Reduce the number of titles. This is the one I’m least sure of.  But unless they can out-Amazon Amazon, it seems to me that the footprint of carrying and distributing a vast inventory is not worth the return.  B&N has the depth of expertise to figure out the blockbuster books and then the metrics for their biggest sellers, and then stick to those swim lanes for now. Harry Potter type books, The Fire and the Fury, books that people want the day they are released and build out a reasonable library from there.
  • Build a more robust events calendar.  Board game tournaments, book signings, school book reading events, poetry readings, musical performances that feature artists that are selling Vinyl.
  • Keep and extend the cafe concept.  Sell coffee, tea, upscale concessions, wine and beer.  Host wine tastings in the store.  A key thing is to stay away from sitting down. Everything should be able to walk through the store with the customer, not keep them away from the things.  If they come in to participate in one of the events, they can grab a snack or a drink and stay a while.
  • Build a web presence to match. By reducing inventory, they can tailor the web experience to match the analog offerings.  Everything in the store is the same price as online, and many of those experiences can move online as well.  Recording the events for re-distribution on the web to drive traffic.  Love this reading? Click here to buy the book!  There is even a path to integrate mobile into the store experience directly, increasing traffic both ways. With the reduced inventory, the web can specialize to support the store.
  • Exit from toys, Nook, and the restaurant direction of their concept stores. The first two have been thoroughly disrupted by Amazon, the third just isn’t a bookstore.   

At the end you’d have smaller stores with a greater focus on community and analog entertainment that people seem to be craving.  The customers are going to be monetized through food and drink, and analog things, but likely at lower volume. That allows B&N to stay a retailer, involved with books, and true to their roots.

Based on what I’ve found about the history and the assets of the company, it seems as though there is a path to pivot, but my assumption is that there will be years of shrinking and reorganizing before the growth comes back.  But they are a public company.  With the constraints of Wall Street expecting earnings, that may be impossible.  I hope that they pull it off.

Why the Software Engineer Shortage Matters

Posted on by Tracey Pilone in General

Software is a depreciating asset that is produced and maintained by a national pool of engineers that is too small.  Turnover accelerates the speed of that depreciation – so finding an engineering team that is strong and keeping them happy is the key to strong and stable software.  That’s important since we have software running large portions of our lives and the greater economy.

By 2024, the Labor Department estimates that there will be 426,900 open software development jobs in the US.  With the current pace of US software engineering and programming graduates running at about 60,000 annually, we somehow are going to need to double our output of software engineers in the intervening 7 years to close that gap. 

Even with that huge labor shortage as an outstanding risk, more and more of our lives are moving to software.  The entire financial sector runs on software, Tesla is producing computers with wheels and calling them cars, people are spending hours per day with their smartphones and even reporting symptoms of depression without them.  My sons have laptops in their classrooms, use Google Classroom, online textbooks, and don’t know a world without the internet at their fingertips.

ALL of this is developed, managed and maintained by software engineers. 

Software needs to be maintained and improved almost constantly.  It’s an ongoing process with security patches, performance issues that need to be addressed, and updates to the underlying operating systems that need to be addressed or the applications stop working.  All that work takes engineering and project management talent to keep everything tracked and addressed in a timely fashion.

We are faced with a scarce resource responsible for an increasingly important share of our economy.  Software engineering talent currently commands high salaries, that will likely go higher.  Unemployment among software talent currently stands at 2.4%, unchanged over the past year and frighteningly low for those of us that are hiring them. Opportunities abound for strong talent, with high salaries and challenging intellectual problems in an engineer’s choice of domains.  An important, and potentially defining, factor that sets different companies apart from each other is their culture.

Software companies with dysfunctional or destructive cultures that emphasize internal competition,  unhealthy work environments, and push engineers toward burn out are putting their internal IP at risk as well as their user base – all of us.  The more engineers that are transitioning between jobs, checked out at work, or not able to do their best work, the more the nation wastes valuable engineering time, and simply exacerbates the talent shortage.

Keeping the team of highly skilled engineers that I work with happy and challenged means that they can do their best work for our customers, who in turn are using that software to solve all sorts of problems.  It means that I am doing my part to protect a valuable resource.