Over the years, you meet and work with a wide range of characters. Each one with its own goodness and flaws. Today, I'm talking about the "Smart Idiot Expert" (SIE for short).
These are the two key characteristics of the Smart Idiot Expert:
He is very smart, intelligent and has 10+ years of experience on his/her area;
He doesn't listen to others opinion, even more so if others are not experts on his/her area.
Have you ever worked with a designer that presented you with a logo, and you tell him that you think the dot on the "I" should be just a bit higher, and he tells you it shouldn't and is just right, even though 3 other people agree with you. That's an Smart Idiot Expert.
I don't mean to pick on designers, and you can find SIEs everywhere: Software developers (lots of them, who refuse to question their own great software architecture skills), UI experts, business consultants, marketers (lots of SIEs here as well), the IT guys, writers, photographers, salesmen, etc.
The opposite of that is when you work with somebody that is a 20+ years expert, unquestionably smart and he presents you with a solution, and you think something should be different, and he listens (!) to you and -- sometimes -- agrees with you.
Are you working with some Smart Idiot Expert? Lose'em. They don't listen to you and they don't listen your customer.
I just published the Seattle Startup Index for February/2008 on the Seattle 2.0 blog and Sampa is at #31, dropping 1 position which can be attributed to two companies debutting above us on the list.
The thing that made me happy this month is that we moved significantly up on the Compete Ranking (from 34,520 to 28,656).
I think Alexa is very good when you are on the 100,000 to 1,000,000 ranking range because they have a much wider reach than Compete, but after you go below 100,000 ranking, the demographic normalization that Compete does becomes a more stable metric of a company growth.
The downside on Compete is that is US only, and, like many companies, Sampa has about 40% of our users outside of the US and that is not measured by Compete.
I'm not a professional "networker", nor I depend on a large network of people to be successful in my profession, like a recruiter, but I'm getting more and more requests to connect on LinkedIn.
There is only two reasons I accept (and ask for) connections on Linked In:
I know the person face-to-face and feel I can ask for a favor (like an introduction to someone else)
I don't know the person in person, but exchanged enough emails that feel like I do and I feel I can ask for a favor.
The "ask for a favor" is a test to know if I feel comfortable adding this person to my network.
The problem is that each person has their own criteria, and, a lot of people are very eager to connect with as many people as possible, or have a low bar to invite others.
That said, I don't feel offended when somebody invites me, but I also will not accept if one of the two reasons above are not met.
I'm thinking of selling my house and we are seriously considering using Redfin.
We read pretty much everything on Redfin's website, talked with many friends that sold/bought houses on the last few months and even talked with a few real estate agents and mortgage brokers.
There seems to be a consensus that using Redfin to sell your house is a potential liability. I know of no one that has done it, so I'm asking you if you did or know someone that did sell their house using Redfin.
The flip-side is that most people are "late majority", and view the "unknown" with quite a bit of skepticism.
Yes, you heard me right. Apple can be brilliant on their design in one hand and just awful in another. Case in point... the iTunes + QuickTime updater.
More specifically, Apple Updater tool is bad because every time there is an update to iTunes or QuickTime I have to download both pieces of software in full. That ranges between 50MB and 70MB. Then there is the whole reboot thing which I just don't get it.
And to makes things worse, today, the stupid updater asked me to install Safari! I don't have Safari and I didn't ask for Safari. Apple is leveraging their monopoly on music players to push for a Web Browser.
Can you imagine if Microsoft was leveraging a monopoly to gain market share with a web browser what would happen?
Subscribe to this Site
is at #31, dropping 1 position which can be attributed to two companies debutting above us on the list.
September, 2007