Chris Dixon recently wrote that the next big thing will start out looking like a toy.  No, he’s not presaging the rise of toys as the next trend in retail or tech (although, with 100,000 Apps on the App store and 3billion downloads, one could be forgiven for assuming that that would be his point).

Chris is pointing out that the next big thing often starts out looking like a toy because one cannot accurately predict how something simple will behave when it achieves network effects due to scale.  And this is why incumbents often don’t identify the next big thing very quickly – because they dismiss it as a toy (at first).  In fact, I’d say they often go through a few stages of denial:

1. It is just a toy, not worth wasting time on
2. It will only work for a certain niche
3. It will never scale
4. It will never work for enterprise customers (or, it will only work for well-heeled consumers)
5. It will never solve the really high end problems
6. Buy a competing product, or buy the original

I’m sure someone could come up with a better list than mine, however.

If you haven’t used the site, hunch, you might want to give it a look.  Its pretty interesting, as it attempts to crowdsource decisions.  Hunch also does a pretty good job of anticipating your answers to questions based on your previous answers to questions.

Recently Chris Dixon made available a blog widget which can help you understand your readership demographics a bit better (assuming the readers participate!).  I thought I’d give it a try…

Of course, I see some interesting possibilities for crowdsourcing vendor selection (BPM vendors), or philosophical debates like BPM vs. Business Rules. So I seeded a starting point, that is on Hunch now.  I need to finish adding vendors to it, and I need help from others to add more results, train the results, and add more questions!  (Anyone can login and add questions and results so please contribute! If we get enough contributions and training in, then this decision tree may have statistical significance )

Here’s the link to the BPMS decision helper…

As previously noted in this blog (see Putting the Band Back Together), we’re believers in hiring Heroes.  Meaning, you find and hire people that can, to large extent, “do it all”.  We want to be the tip of the spear, at the front of the phalanx, for our customers. And the reason we do this is because we believe that BPM deployments greatly increase their odds of success when you seed the team with a few really good people.  So I was very interested to see Chris Dixon’s article “Man and Superman“.  In it, he examines why some tech companies seem to thrive beyond their first great product innovation’s life-cycle.  He points out that Sony, Apple, and Microsoft all achieved this, but all were driven by a “Superman” during that time.  In each case, when “Superman” wasn’t around, the companies did not fare so well.

I once worked for a company that, at the time, believed in great people making a difference.  We studied works like Covey’s Seven Habits, and Jim Collins’ Built to Last (and later, Good to Great).  However, at some point management decided that employees were highly expendable and fungible (the term “resources” entered the lexicon).  The company is a shadow of what it once was.  Reading Chris’ evisceration of Jim’s thesis that great companies are all about culture, not a singularly great leader, I can’t help but wonder if Chris has it more right than not.

Chris points out that most of the companies Jim profiled have since fared poorly – and not just with respect to the current economic climate, but with respect to the S&P 500 (Circuit City, for example, went bankrupt).

Culture might be important – but if you’re Superman in your organization, you better find another Superman to take over when you’re gone.  The real lesson to take home from his post is that people count.  Having good people counts.  Culture alone is not enough.  At BP3, we’re going to keep focused on hiring Heroes – perhaps we won’t live up to the Superman label, but we want the best, and we want people who are driven to keep expanding their abilities and who aren’t satisfied with status quo.

Chris Dixon’s blog, which I recently was turned on to by another blogger, recently opined that the only college major that matters is Computer Science.  Nice to see someone sticking up for my major!  Naturally my bias led me to believe this post was sheer genius.

Of course, let’s put this in context:  Chris is pre-supposing that you are interested in being involved with software companies.  But given that context – if you are interested in working at a Google, Yahoo, Facebook, or any of the startups they’ve gobbled up over the years, the easiest and best way in is to know how to write software. And if you’re going to do anything else for them, it would be good if you at least know what code looks like.  As Chris puts it:

Why is it so much better to learn computer science in college (or before)?  Because after college it’s very hard to find the time and discipline to teach yourself coding.  On the other hand, it’s pretty easy to pick up business skills, economics and all sorts of other skills on the job or in grad school.

He’s right.  Learning computer science requires a lot of long, uninterrupted time to focus on what you’re doing and get the job done.  There’s a reason computer science labs are open all night, but libraries typically have closing hours.  A program isn’t done til it works. That paper is done when you feel like it is done (and you’ll probably get a better grade on it).  The rigor required of proofs and code forces you to spend quite a lot of time on learning the art of coding. Very few people have the free time, or the discipline, or both, to really learn computer science well if it is not done in college, or as a kid, or as their full-time job.  And it is difficult to get a software job if you don’t know how to write code…

I think one of the saddest things is that the media (newspapers, television, blogs) have convinced everyone that all the software jobs are leaving the US.  Meanwhile, corporate America is, in some cases, helping make it so – by actually sending lots of those jobs overseas.  But in fact the total number of software jobs in the US has increased.  And, a computer science major will prepare you for more than one possible career (when I was a kid, I thought computer scientists just wrote games for a living – what else would you use a computer for, right?  So the media scare on this front is a bit overdone.

As Chris states, not everyone who majors in Computer Science will write code for a living – any more than everyone who majors in History ends up studying it for a living.  You can still go on and get that law degree, but now you’ll actually understand some of the stuff you’re protecting or litigating.

So maybe Computer Science isn’t the only major that matters – but it might be if you’re in the software business.