Only slightly bent

There are few signs of real winter in Helsinki, but as a proof that the temperature has, in fact, occasionally dipped below freezing, here’s a small collage from the weekend. Click to enlarge.

While it seems computer games are increasingly popular, I like to play “old-fashioned” boardgames whenever the opportunity presents itself. I was therefore pleasantly surprised to see The Economist offering what seems to be a hilarious simple boardgame called Credit Crunch in their latest issue – snippet of the board on the left.

You get the board with the great Christmas double issue, or you can download and print one yourself, along with all the other required stuff, from here. I’ve yet to play it, but it sure looks like fun.

There are some challenges with boardgames, however. One is people – while I prefer Settlers of Catan or Puerto Rico to television, Ticket to Ride or Power Grid to an ice hockey game and a round of Citadels to going to a bar, many others don’t. Ever since the key person of our games group moved away (hey Michael, how about coming back to Finland? ), boardgames activity has been far too light. Sure kid(s) present some challenges, but it shouldn’t mean game nights (or days for that matter) are impossible to organize.

On a semi-unrelated note, I’ll try to focus on some of my favorite offline activities like reading, cooking and photography during the holiday period, so I might not (or might, who knows) be blogging very actively for the next ~2wks. With that in mind, I wish Peaceful Holidays to all of my five readers and to be on the safe side, Happy New Year 2009 also!

A few years back I wrote about a Krups blender as one of the best kitchen appliances ever. Well, as it happens, it finally gave out about a year after writing that post. Having been very satisfied with it, I obviously promptly went out and bought model that had replaced it, the Freshmix KB710.

Unfortunately, there was some kind of a flaw in the O-ring at the bottom of the blender (maybe a design flaw? In any case, it was very flimsy) and when making smoothies, it experienced occasional leakages. As this is not exactly desirable behavior, I was a little upset having expected a good product. So I contacted the Krups customer service, fully expecting to get what is the norm in Finland: lip service if you’re lucky.

What happened blew me away. They were exceptionally helpful and promptly sent me a new blender. And they even sent me a better model, the Blender Expert 7000 (pictured right) – at no cost to me. No need to return the old one either. That’s the kind of loyalty-creating customer service that is usually sorely missing from Finland.

I now have about a year of experience from using the Blender Expert 7000 and it has been one excellent blender. No complaints whatsoever – it crushes ice like it was born to do that and the larger glass jug comes in handy when making larger quantities. So I can and hereby am wholeheartedly recommending this baby.

And as a proof of the loyalty creation of this kind of customer service, when I needed a blender bar, I first looked for one from Krups – and purchased the GPA3. It has also been a very good little product.

Next up on the review list is Blue Ocean Strategy: How to create uncontested market space and make the competition irrelevant by W. Chan Kim & Reneé Mauborgne. I say review list because Blue Ocean Strategy is a bit of an exception in that I’ve already successfully used some of the concepts at work last summer. I just finished re-reading the book so it’s time to take another look at it.

Now, Blue Ocean Strategy is very popular book with over a million copies sold. The subtitle contains a lofty promise as is often the case with strategy books, presumably so they’d sell more. “Making the competition irrelevant” always sounds good. But despite the numerous copies sold and, one would assume, attempts at creating a “Blue Ocean” as the authors call markets with no competition, we still see quite a bit of competition in the world in most or all industries. So what gives? Is the promise overstated and is the book just another useless strategy book out of which comes no practical value?

Yes and no. Of course it doesn’t magically make your competition irrelevant just like that. But Blue Ocean Strategy is also far from impractical or useless. So what is a Blue Ocean anyway? It’s an area of uncontested market space, where there are no competitors (yet). Traditionally companies strive at surviving in so-called Red Oceans, the hotly contested traditional markets with clearly defined boundaries and competition. The Blue Ocean Strategy is about a systematic approach to creating Blue Oceans.

One could be forgiven to think that there are no more Blue Oceans left in the world, that the hyper-competition has exhausted all possibilities of new “virgin” markets. But that would be a mistake. All you need to do is to think back only, say, 30 or 40 years, and you will find that many industries we now take for granted simply didn’t exist. One of the biggest in the world, one of the few trillion-dollar industries today, was nowhere to be seen 30 years ago – mobile communications. Or biotechnology, nanotechnology, discount retail, snowboards, home videos… the list is surprisingly long. And then think forward 15, 20 or 30 years – wouldn’t it be simply unrealistic to assume no new industries pop up? There are Blue Oceans, but the question is how to get there.

So how does the book help in this task? By providing a number of useful tools, processes and frameworks, the book actually does help in accomplishing that. One of the key tools is the strategy canvas – a visualization of a companies strategy mapped as a graph of key principal factors. We’ve used the strategy canvas at work and it’s a quite nice visualization tool. There is also a plethora of other frameworks and tools in the book, including some with very poor names – or what comes to your mind from a “PMS Map”? (it’s actually a pioneer-migrator-settler map, luckily one of the less useful tools in the book)

Like many good books, one of the best offering in the book is the wealth of case studies and real-life examples. It’s interesting to note that household names such as CNN and JCDecaux were once seen as radical companies, in effect implementing the Blue Ocean strategy very successfully. There are also many valuable points that may seem counter-intuitive; for one, customer desegmentation is often called for when looking for Blue Oceans, going against the current trend of increasing customer segmentation and targeting. And, despite the pompous subtitle, the authors at the end do acknowledge that companies need to be good at both Blue Ocean and Red Ocean strategies – furthermore, there are no permanently excellent industries or even permanently excellent companies. To stay at the top, the company would need to constantly be re-inventing itself, but very few or no companies actually manage to do that. That alone ought to be a sobering lesson.

Blue Ocean Strategy is certainly a very good book and I definitely plan on continuing to use the tools I’ve learned from it. Of course it’s not perfect; for one, it’s missing some important innovation process information (making “How breakthroughs happen” a good companion read). The book also attributes perhaps too much weight on the new strategies in the lowering of NYC’s crime (you’ll recall the Tipping Point providing an alternative, or at least complementary, explanation). Still, the shortcomings are relatively minor – the book is excellent. Read it. But then again, merely reading it will do nothing for your company. If you don’t do the significant footwork involved, expect to get nowhere.

Farouge, a Lebanese restaurant in Helsinki, has long been one of my favorite places in the city. It’s therefore a bit odd that I haven’t written a review of it before, but better late than never. After a long pause of not visiting Farouge, I went there twice in the past few weeks, so this review is based on the these two visits; one with our team at work and one with Sarita. (Excuse the low quality of the photos as they are taken with my cellphone – you can click to enlarge anyway)

Starters are the signature dish of Farouge; they’re simply awesome. Unfortunately you have to have a group of four before they serve you the full meza selection of Tabbuli, Hummus, Baba Ghannouge, Laban Bikhiar, Falafel, Warakq Inab, Fitr, Sambusik Lahme, Kibbe and Makanek at 24.25eur per person. Get it if you can, because it’s a wonderful selection of scrumptious appetizers. There is no photo of these as it was impossible to capture the variety well enough to a photo; just trust me that you need to get the full selection, you will not be disappointed.

The mains, however, seemed to be a bit of a gamble. On one occasion, the Karakand Mishwi (Grilled lobster with herb butter, 37eur) was decidedly overcooked and tough. This was a real shame as the lobsters themselves are supposedly flown in live; it certainly did not live up to its potential and wasn’t worth the relatively high price. However, on the second visit the Kharouf Mishwi (Roasted lamb carré with dark garlic sauce and potato terrine, 27eur, pictured here) was a far better performance from the kitchen – perfectly cooked and absolutely delicious. Sarita’s Qreides Mishwi (Grilled king prawns with star anise sauce, 28eur) also received only praise.

On the dessert side, good marks but not perfect: on both of the occasions, I went with the Fondant (Chocolate fondant with yoghurt ice cream, 12eur), pictured right. It’s safe to say it was very good, but it shared a similar fate than the lobster, though luckily not to the same extent: overcooking. It was drier than what would’ve been the right level, but quite edible nevertheless. The accompanying ice cream was a perfect companion.

So what’s the verdict? As you can tell, a little bit mixed. Mostly the food was still very, very good, but the occasional major mishaps in the mains and minor mishaps in the dessert departments are somewhat worrying. I’d still classify Farouge as “highly recommended”, but the “highly” is a little bit teetering on the brink.

As I’m sure everyone has noticed, products and services are going increasingly digital every year. What I recently realized is that the trend of online services and digitalization has reached the point where it now has a clear, visible & positive impact on my everyday life. Though some people complain about the technical complexity of things, they have huge potential of making your life both easier and less cluttered.

So what has changed and how does it improve things? The list below is from a personal perspective, but probably applicable to quite many people:

• Digital cameras are among the best inventions ever. They really do have numerous benefits – just as one example, by eliminating prints, digital cameras have saved me not only untold amounts of money but also from a lot of physical clutter. No more B-class prints or negatives or all that stuff to store somewhere.
   
  
• Online news & periodical sources have made me stop most of my magazine subscriptions, leaving only The Economist that is the only physical magazine I subscribe to. Not only are news available sooner online, but online services allow me to access services that would’ve been impractical or prohibitively expensive before – like reading the New York Times fresh off the virtual press. No more newspapers or magazines to pile up and recycle; lots of trees are saved also.
   
  
• Online data storage provides me what additional hard disks or DVDs or backup tapes never could – reliable, fully automated and secure backup that allows me to access my data from anywhere if needed. No more stacks of backup tapes or DVDs or disks cluttering the home.
   
  
• Online e-mail is also among the best inventions ever, GMail in particular. The interface is great and I have access to my mails from any device and any location. 15 years ago it was really awkward to always have your mail archive only on one physical machine. Online RSS readers – again preferring the Google service Google Reader – go to the same category.
   
  
• Online delivery of increasingly many things; software is already widely delivered online. I can’t remember when was the last time I bought a physical software package. Music delivery and consumption is already getting fully digital and TV episodes and movies would be next if only some industries recognized and embraced the benefits instead of exaggerating the perceived risks.
   
  
• Information services like Wikipedia and multiple commercial databases provide access to the latest information on pretty much everything. There is a reason why we never see the door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen anymore; physical encyclopedias are obsolete and a waste of resources.

Considering all the direct or indirect positive effects that Internet services have on many things, perhaps it’s not such a bad thing that it consumes 5% of the world electricity after all?