Dan’s Chocolate Adventure

This is crazy interesting. A man who just lives where he is.

Ok, the business school crowd is doing themselves again. FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out, is leading to supremely lavish school lifestyles ($80K per year on the T&E budget).

The stereotype that comes to mind when you say “artist” is a gentle, unemployed creature. (Unless of course you are Bono or Yo Yo Ma.) Yet I know quite a few artists who are entreprenurial, talented, and very successful in a business sense. Their creativity and their unwillingness to view the world from the same viewpoint as the generic masses help them design products and services that are unique.

While they may not have the standard-issue HBS blue collar shirt in their wardrobe, these people pack some serious punch when it comes to design and inspiration.

Abou three years ago the NY Times ran an article on a big study that showed that, within a year of their purchase, 95% of electronic gadgets and accessories went unused. I wish I could find the link.

I totally believe this, and it’s one of the reasons we designed the dans.com shopping cart to be so simply. There is a strong negative to adding features, in that almost no one uses them, and they just confuse people who want to get in and check out quickly.

Surprisingly, I seem to get this question from a lot of people. It is amazing to me that all of the manufacturers that make scanners and fax machines put a million features into them but don’t work on the basic issue of getting paper to feed through the machine easily, one sheet at a time. On my HP Officejet G85, my Dell 964 All-In-One, and my Dell 946 All-In-One, the sheet feeder would always jam, because the paper sheets would stick together.

What is going on? A Staples employee in Burlington, Vermont, finally had the answer for me. The recycled content in many office papers creates extremely small hooks, almost like velcro, that protrude from the paper and stick to the sheet above or below. He advisesd me to buy paper with no recycled paper content for faxing and scanning, and sure enough, the problem vanished.

This is an unfortunate solution because I’d rather use paper with recycled material all of the time.

Another study, this time from German researchers, has been released linking cocoa consumption with postiive effects on health.

Apparently chocolate has a different type of polyphenol than tea, called procyanids, that have superior health benefits to those found in tea.

Note of course their disclaims with regard to sugar and fat addivitives in the chocolate!

One of the arguments of supply-side economics is that consumers don’t know what they want until they learn about it from a company or organization that produces the good. Hence, the innovators, or the supply side, are valuable in the economy, because they design these products. Henry Ford summarized this when he said “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse.”

Modern marketers, from what I’ve seen, stay too close to the supply-side logic. They tend to think anything they or their design team creates is a good product, because they like it, or their artists think it’s beautiful. They associate their emotions with the general market - a big mistake.

A more effective strategy is to design a wide range of products and then let the market darwinistically kill off the ones that it thinks are good and those that are not good. This is more expensive and time consuming, and can be damaging to one’s ego. But if you really push the boundaries of the test products, and test a wide range, the customer base almost always chooses something different from what the marketers and/or designers would individually.

p.s. Focus groups will not give you good information. Use live tests.

p.p.s. Companies like P&G or Apple don’t always have to live by the approach above, as they have so much advertising and PR power that they can bend the consumer to their view of the world.

The conundrum of politics in the workplace fascinates me, as a large number of very smart people have tried to solve the problem, and not many are successful. And it is something that, as a company grows, almost by definition will present itself.

One of the defining inputs is the number of people in the organization per unit of business done that requires incremental human work. The smaller the number of people per this unit, the less politics. Note that a small organization of, say, 30 people can have bad politics if there is not much business to do.

To reduce this factor, all team members have to be willing to take on more responsibility and decision making. Whoever is responsible for coordinating this (traditionally called a “boss”), has to be willing to embrace this approach. They are either going to do this, and enjoy a less political environment, or everyone is going to do less and spend more time bickering over details.

It’s sad to say, but the above rule is why remaining employees are often happier after layoffs - the politics in an organization drops substantially.

So, find people who like responsibility, like to work hard, and have this type of attitude as Step #1 to reducing politics.

This quote popped up today on my Gmail:

Sigmund Freud - “Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.”

I know a bunch of people in Boston who sold companies and retired early, and how many are happy now? Exactly zero. I wonder if Freud has the reason why?

Allowing employees to work from home accomplishes four things simultaneously:

• Family Friendly. In a large city, employees can transfer roughly 300 hours, or 7.5 weeks of work, from the highway to their families each.
• Good Business. If employees do not transfer all 300 hours to their families, they can transfer more of that to productive work.
• Environmental. It reduces variable energy consumption (fuel), and base commodities consumption (raw materials to build roads and vehicles).
• Patriotic. It reduces demand for foreign energy, a big cause of our gaping trade deficit and other worldwide commitments.

Matt Simmons, who has been an oil investment banker for about 40 years, discusses oil and commuting in this video. He points out that “transportation is 70% of the oil barrel.”

A few observations about work-life balance:

• One of the dumbest remarks I ever saw quoted in a business magainze was the former CEO of CompUSA, who was on the road 200+ days a year, say that it wasn’t the quantity of time that mattered with his kids, but the quality. I mean, that was such a dumb statement that I still remember it, almost ten years later.

• I have read Sam Walton’s autobiography (twice actually, which I rarely do). He admits that he does not enjoy self reflection, but in the last chapter he talks about whether sacrificing time with his family during their teenage years was wise. Keep in mind that Walton was around the family a lot when his kids were young, because Wal-Mart didn’t really start taking off until he was in his 40’s. So, here is a gentleman talking about whether it was worth missing half of his children’s lives, and doing so in order to build the largest corporation in the history of the world. Was it worth it? Yes, he says, but barely. “Barely” is the key word here.

• And remember, Warren Buffett claims he rarely works more than 50 hours a week (which I don’t really believe when you factor in travel time).

About a year ago, we dropped Amazon.com as a partner. Their API was so huge and complicated that it was absurd to deal with, and not worth the small number of sales they were sending us. They actually wanted us to hire a consulting firm to come in and integrate their beast with our lean, unix system.

About ten years ago I interviewed with Jeff Bezos for an engineering job at Amazon. I would have been engineer #14. I would call Bezos at home and he would call me in my dorm room in college. I went out to Seattle and kicked the tires, and the engineering team was definitely reflecting Bezo’s super-geek personality. They were trying to solve problems that were a long way from critical. I passed on the job (though largely for other reasons, maybe the topic of a future post).

In any case, I discovered years later that the API with external merchants reflected many of the characteristics I had observed in those early days - it was overbuilt, had too many features, and was designed to handle every possible scenario in this known universe, at the expense of actually being usable by 99% of small businesses.

I pointed this out to Amazon, and showed them a well-designed API,, but they just shrugged it off. Note that they may have updated their approach in the past year.

The reality is there are not that many fields that need to be passed back and forth to ship a simple package. This could have been done with a very small xml file to the vendor, such as Dan’s, and a very small file passed back.

Businessweek did a summary of this study (scroll midway down) of the inverse relationship between a CEO’s house size and stock performance. Extravagant, big spending CEO’s are not the people you want managing your money.

I’ve always like cheap, crusty CEO’s, like Jim Senegal at Costco. Though I don’t own any shares of Costco, if I’m going to give someone capital to invest, they better be darn frugal with it.

It seems that many CEO’s feel like they have spent their whole live working to get to the top, and the company owes them something, irrespective of how they perform. So they loot company.

No, this isn’t a post about a restaurant. It’s a post to let you know that if you have pneumonia, as I did about 6 weeks ago, you may still be coughing 6 weeks later. The amazing thing is how long it is taking the muscles around my rib cage to heal. I’m not sure if this is a normal byproduct of pneumonia or a symptom of my severe upper-body lethargy.

In truffle making, once you’ve created the truffle ball, you drape a layer of low viscosity chocolate couverture over it. This couverture has a high content of cocoa butter, which is largely what lowers the viscosity, such that it will form a very thin, smooth shell. This shell is appealing aesthetically, it forms a smooth foundation for decorating, and the courverture runs down the side of the truffle to form what is called a “foot.” The foot is the little pad of chocolate at the bottom of a truffle that keeps the truffle upright.

To apply the couverture smoothly, we place the truffle balls on a belt and run them under a curtain of warm chocolate. The machine that does this is called an enrober. Here is what the chocolate balls look like before they go into the enrober. Note that these balls are still in their molds - they will be removed from these molds before being placed on the enrober belt.

Here is a shot of the truffle balls approaching the enrober’s wall of chocolate:

And here are the truffles, newly enrobed, leaving the enbrober curtain:

That white stuff you see on the left and right in this photo is actually white chocolate. We often decorate with white chocolate, and were doing so right before this photo was taken.

The long arm of the law has reached all the way into the photo studios of chocolate makers. Did you know that we cannot photograph items that are not edible? Accompanying garnishments may not be edible, but anything that a consumer can buy and eat must actually be food itself. For example, we cannot spruce up the decorations on our truffles with Elmer’s glue (though this used to be done all the time in the chocolate industry).

It’s an interesting little tidbit that has not made the front page of your local paper recently, I’m sure.