If you don’t want to read about our rebranding (who could blame you), just know that we are the same Ripple you know, but with a new logo. If you’re the curious type and want to know more, read on.

When Ripple adopted the Chip logo, we were replacing a pretty technical logo, which didn’t suit us very well. We wanted to focus on the user-friendly aspect of Ripple‘s IT service. And I hope that your experience has been that we are, in fact, pretty friendly.

For those who knew us well, Chip did a pretty good job. But for people that didn’t know us, Chip came across as cutesie, and sometimes not in sync with a company that manages some pretty serious stuff. Oftentimes, people didn’t recognize us as an IT company at all (kind of a compliment, but not that helpful when you sell IT services). So, we went to work to find a visual identity that would mesh with the values we already cared deeply about.

At the very top is the principle that we help people, not computers. We put humans first, not technology, and that guides everything we do. We work to be meaningful, strategic, and of course, friendly.

The Speech Bracket logo hit the mark for us for a lot of reasons. It’s friendly, human, communicative, and extendable. It’s fun, but less cute. And in the end….none of those things will really matter. A logo is both a stake in the ground, and a vessel to fill. The stake we have been putting in the ground for 14 years is that humans are more important than computers. And the vessel we have to fill is that when you work with Ripple, we are living up to that promise. So I hope you like the new branding. Or I hope it grows on you. But what I really hope is that we live up to the spirit behind it and treat you the way you deserve to be treated.

Humans First.

A good friend of Ripple (and a client, natch!) wrote a post about asking for the best price. That’s always a good idea, of course, but I think there’s a question to be asked prior to that question: “How do I get the awesome version?” Not for everything, mind you, but for the stuff you care about, the stuff that matters, searching for the lowest price first almost guarantees that you will get what you paid for.

Asking “how do I get the awesome version,” even if it’s only rhetorical, helps you and anyone you talk to establish the starting point, and you are far more likely to get to awesome if you start looking for it than if you start by shopping on price. Looking for awesome beer selection? You probably won’t start at Wal-Mart. Looking for an awesome sports car? You probably won’t start at the Land Rover dealership.

On the contrary, starting with cheap almost always results in the same sentiment over and over: “It’s fine. Not awesome, but can’t beat the price!” Usually said with a shrug, a subconscious affirmation that you don’t really care about whatever it is.

A funny thing about looking for awesome is that you often get it at no additional charge. People can sense your enthusiasm, your passion, and often rise to the occasion, stretching to deliver the awesome they always wanted to deliver. They just needed someone to appreciate it. Once you’ve established awesome, you’re free to ask for the best price, especially if there are multiple people all offering similar awesomes. But don’t start there, because Mr. Discount rarely knows how to be Mr. Awesome.

Now of course this is not a new concept. Most folks do this already, maybe without noticing. For the stuff we don’t care too much about, we start with price, because the implications seem trivial. Janitorial service. Hard drives. Gasoline. But what might happen if we started by looking for awesome first, in everything?

On the flip side of the coin, how do you communicate awesome to a potential customer?

Mac: Keychain Access

The keychain is where your Mac stores usernames and passwords you use in applications that integrate with the keychain, like the Safari web browser. So if Safari asks you if you want to remember the login you used to login to Amazon and you agree, that data is stored in your keychain. Likewise all those WiFi network passwords you let your Mac remember. And Apple provides a simple utility for seeing (and editing) those items in your keychain, called Keychain Access (Applications>Utilities>Keychain Access). The great thing about Keychain Access is that you can also create Secure Notes, containing any text you want, which also get stored in your keychain. Keychain Access prompts you to enter your password to view those notes, and your keychain file is stored with Triple DES encryption. Extra Security Tips: Set your keychain preferences (again via Keychain Access) to lock your keychain when your Mac goes to sleep. Also set a “hot corner” (System Preferences>Desktop & Screen Saver>Screen Saver>Hot Corners)to put your display to sleep, and when you walk away from your Mac, drag your cursor to the hot corner.

Windows: KeePass

KeePass is a free, open source application designed specifically for storing passwords. Your password database file is stored encrypted via AES or Twofish, and a single password unlocks the database. You can have multiple databases as well, if that’s your style. KeePass is quite easy to use. Stored usernames and passwords can also have an associated URL and notes, and you can right-click an item and copy its username or password to the clipboard for easy pasting into another app. You can also group stored items and search your database. Bonus Tip: Since KeePass is open source, it has been ported to many other platforms, including Mac, Linux, iPhone, Android, and Blackberry. Some folks store their KeePass database in Dropbox or Box.net, so they can access it from anywhere. So no more excuses. Secure your online accounts so the next time an online service gets compromised you won’t have to scramble to change your password everywhere else.

With the introduction of Creative Suite 5.5, Adobe has introduced Subscription Licensing, whereby you can pay per month for the software you need, rather than buying the licenses outright. This makes a lot of sense for creative companies who might have some number of permanent creatives on staff and bring in contractors and freelancers on a project basis. Bringing in a freelancer for a 3-month project? Not sure you’ll still have enough work in a couple of months to keep that new designer you just hired? Don’t shell out $1,700 for CS5.5 Design Premium, “rent” it instead for $139/month.

IT is, for most modern companies, the means of production. The No. 1 tool of the trade for knowledge workers. That makes it an investment. Ask any craftsman the best ways to screw up a job: Crappy tools. Cheap tools. The wrong tools for the job. But, all too often, since IT is treated as an expense, rather than as investment, it is skimped on, stretched and ignored. Which is weird because the employee using that tool might make $150,000 in the three years that his or her $1500 computer is usable. A 1 percent investment. At Ripple, we try to help our clients see the value in keeping IT current, and we give them strategies for doing so in the least painful ways possible. Here are a few things that can help:

1. Create an obsolescence policy. Decide — in advance — how long the useable life of a computer or server should be. Often it’s three years. The day it is purchased, put a sticker on it, mark the retirement date, and track it in a system. A spreadsheet is fine (of course if you are a Ripple customer, we track all of this for you). That way, there are no surprises about when it’s time for a refresh. Each year you will know, long ahead of time, what needs to be replaced and what the upcoming investment will be.

2. Don’t skimp. If you want something to last for 3 years, it can’t be 2-year-old technology when you buy it. We don’t suggest buying the absolute greatest machine in the world for every job, but the difference between a great tool for the job and an inadequate one is measured in hundreds of dollars, not thousands. If a $1,200 computer is the right tool, buying a $900 tool is a difference of $10 a month. A three-year productivity tax on your $50,000-a-year employee to save $10 a month.

3. Find out what the right tool for the job is. The best person to know? Usually the person that will be using the tool. IT certainly has a role, but IT probably had a minimal role in hiring your new $100,000-a-year sales manager — why should they have 100 percent authority in deciding the tools that are best for the role?

No, we don’t think IT spending should be a free-for-all. But it should not get the same treatment as copy paper. For most knowledge workers, technology is the most significant point of leverage in the business. An investment mindset helps get the most leverage possible.

"How can I help you?"

There are a lot of skills companies look for in IT people. Smart, analytical, experienced. Windows, Cisco, Dell. The one most often overlooked is Nice.

When I started Ripple, it was in no small part because of the way IT people were acting. Busy, smug and secretive. So I set out to build an IT company with a culture of being nice, friendly and approachable. Pretty regularly people will say to me “well, that’s neat, but does it really matter?”  Yes, and it’s a meaningful IT skill. Here’s how I know:

After we engage with a company, we suddenly start getting a deluge of weird, semi-easy requests. Not right away after we start, but about a month after we begin servicing a company (as it turns out it is after they realize that we are nice, friendly and approachable). Things like random pop-ups, people having to reboot twice and other annoyances. For a long time it was kind of a mystery for us, until we started asking people about it. What they told us was quite illustrative. “I hated calling our previous IT guys, and this was just something I could live with.”

In a 50-person company we’ll spend weeks cleaning this sort of thing up. Things that are not hard from a technical perspective, and things that are not causing a work stoppage (yet). Often in companies that had had access to professional IT help. Competent IT help. But since the issues were not work stoppage issues, the friction of having an unpleasant experience outweighed the benefit of having a smooth work experience. Think of it as a Smug Tax. These are things that eat up 5-10 minutes a day per person, which adds up to about 20 hours per month in that 50-person company. Those “little” problems would often turn into big problems down the line, eating up even more time and productivity.

The difference between nice IT people and not-so-nice IT people is the difference between people calling to get problems fixed or just suffering through them. The cost of suffering through them is not just an issue of morale; it is an issue of dollars. So how do we quantify the IT skill of Nice? We’re an IT company, so we have a process for it:

1. Nice is a value we nurture, develop, hire and fire for. If it’s not something that is valued at least as much as hard skills, it will never catch on.

2. We test for Nice. We have used a variety of work aptitude profiles over the years, but the two we like the best are Criteria and The Berke Assesment. At Ripple, we are looking for traits like empathy, cooperativeness and patience.

3. We interview for Nice. In interviews, we don’t just probe for IT skills and problem-solving ability; we push people to see how they will act under pressure. IT people are under pressure all of the time, and people with short tempers and dismissive attitudes make people recoil — and live with their problems.

4. We never fall in love with a resume. Falling in love with a resume means falling in love with the IT skill set. Falling in love with a skill set before understanding temperament will lead to hires that fail the Nice test.

5. We ask our grandmother. Not literally, but we ask ourselves: If this person was working with my grandmother — who knows nothing about computers and has unending questions — would this person make her feel good? Or would this person make her feel stupid and small? We love our grandmothers and we love our clients. We don’t want either of them to feel stupid or small.

When someone has the hard skills, plus the Nice skill, they are a complete IT asset. Without Nice, they are incomplete. In the end, treating Nice as a nonnegotiable IT skill makes moral sense and financial sense. Nice is a killer IT skill.

A guide to make work *not* suck

Let me put this out there: I am a Work Utopia guy. I want people to come to work and feel like it’s more than a job. I want them to feel a deeper sense of meaning, connectedness, and engagement. I have implemented many, many ideas that would help make Ripple a Work Utopia. So when I read about ROWE in 2006 I was struck by how Work Utopia it was. Complete freedom! A Results-Only Work Environment. How much more Work Utopia could something be, really? Even with a Work Utopia mindset I still struggled with the perceived loss of control. I wondered: “How the hell could that even work?” I mean there are a lot of things 4,000-person Best Buy can do that 15-person Ripple can’t. Maybe they had the infrastructure to manage it. Maybe they had money to burn. Maybe the old culture there was so bad, that anything, no matter how difficult, was worth it to turn things around. Ripple had a pretty great culture, and things were going fine. So I stopped thinking about it and put it on the back burner. What we had just didn’t seem broken. The Pre-ROWE period I spent the next 3 years managing people with various levels of success. Implementing some rules here, some policies there. My great performers needed very little from me, but my under performers needed lots of structure, managing, and cajoling, and I found myself making more and more rules to reign those folks in. When to arrive, when to leave, what constituted work. All the while, I watched productivity drop. Some of us remembered with nostalgia the “old days” when we didn’t seem to need all of this structure. When people would just dig in and get things done. That seemed to have changed. At our worst, our revenue per employee had dropped by 50% from just a few years earlier. That’s when ROWE came off the back burner. I read Why Work Sucks, and realized that I was building the wrong kind of workplace. The workplace I was building assumed that there’s a few great people out there, a bunch of good ones, and an inevitable chunk that needs to be constantly managed. We were hiring the whole bell curve, then using the tools of the industrial revolution to manage them. The tools of time and place. The Realization What I really needed to be doing was hiring only the best, and managing them by results. Because the best don’t really need to be managed, they need tools and goals. They are also terrifically more productive than everyone else. I needed a workplace that would attract those people, reward those people, and weed out anyone else — fast. ROWE seemed to fit the bill. I decided to bring in my team and let them know what I was thinking. The Meeting We assembled for our annual retreat, everyone gathered around ready for a day of brainstorming. I had been pondering and thinking about ROWE for months. It took me quite a while to come around to the idea. But I figured when I plopped it out there, people would go nuts for it. How could they not? Who doesn’t want complete freedom? Unlimited vacation? No having to ask permission to go to the doctor? As it turns out, two types of people are skeptical: 1. Responsible people. 2. People who can follow all of the rules of a conventional workplace and still do very little work. The people in the #2 group don’t exactly present themselves ( in meetings, that is. They definitely present themselves later), but that’s OK. Most of my team fell into the #1 camp. They wanted to make sure Ripple was servicing customers and functioning as a healthy company. There are 150 years of conventional wisdom that has built the proxies we substitute for work, and a 20 minute speech from me wasn’t going to overturn all of that. We spent most of the rest of the day discussing ROWE, goals, and what Ripple would look like as a ROWE. The Course of Action In the end, we decided we would test it for three months. We also decided to keep the results measures minimal and add to them as needed, instead of starting with a lot of measures and missing the mark on a bunch of them. We all agreed that if things seemed to be sliding, we’d stop and reevaluate. And with that, we launched ROWE. There was no sliding, only accelerating. Within those three months the people that were not a good fit for a ROWE had exited and the people left were the best of the best. By the time three months had passed, there wasn’t anyone with even a passing thought of going back. Our work was better and our lives were better. Change comes at a price, especially when that change involves rejecting a philosophy that is practiced by most of society. Where some ROWE companies struggle with internal enemies, we mostly struggle with external ones. Friends, associates, and even family that look upon ROWE as some sort of an excuse not to work. Assumptions that ROWE is code for lazy or unmotivated. Lots of “oh, you’re ‘working’ from home again” commentary. From my entrepreneur friends I often get sort of a wistful “that sounds awesome, I wish something like that could work in my business.” The Results The results speak for themselves. In the two years since we started ROWE our productivity has shot through the roof, and with it, profitability. We do the same work with about 60% of the headcount. That has been an astonishing turnaround. Can I attribute that all to ROWE? Probably not. But to the naysayers I say this: At minimum ROWE didn’t keep it from happening. Anarchy did not reign, the sky didn’t fall. People can, in fact, be trusted. The real truth is that there is no doubt that the culture shift that came with ROWE enabled a whole lot of that productivity. At Ripple, no one has tolerance for non-performers anymore, and non-performers don’t have anything to hide behind. They are either getting the results, or they are not. ROWE is a work in progress, and just like any human system, it is not free of problems. But that has proven no reason not to embrace it. The system we were working under before (invented when people rode horses to work) had tons of problems. It may not be Work Utopia, but ROWE has gotten us a whole lot closer.

Image via Wikipedia

The last time I was an early adopter of technology was when I blew 1100 bucks on an Apple Newton. I was convinced it was the future, and showed it to everyone. I tried like hell to make it part of my normal life for about 6 months before realizing the effort required wasn’t justified by the payoff. It was the future, but not until it was 75% smaller and had a Palm logo on it. These days I wait months, sometimes years, for a new product to prove itself before I’ll spend money on it. So you can understand that I was in no hurry to buy an iPad, and only have one (actually two!) because my generous Apple evangelist boss gave them to all of us as end-of-year bonuses. Having used one for about 4 weeks, I can tell you that an iPad makes a really decent eBook reader. The Kindle app works great, and so does iBooks. But I would imagine the actual Kindle device is a better eBook reader. Reading email works fine, and composing email is maybe 20% easier than on an iPhone, which is to say slightly better than terrible. It may be a productivity device for some, but not for me. No, I didn’t come to fully appreciate the iPad until this week, having been snowed/iced in at the house all week with two kids. The iPad is an entertainment device, and one that is so easy to use that 5- and 8-year-olds can easily figure it out. This may not be what Apple was aiming for, but I can tell you that being able to work without interruption for hours at a time while the kids played Bakery Story and Angry Birds, searched for and watched cats and dogs videos on YouTube, listened to music, and watched Phineas and Ferbepisodes, was priceless. All this entertainment with all day battery life? Awesome.

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"A little short for a Stormtrooper, aren't you?"

How is it that Macs have gone from being the computer of choice only for graphic designers to becoming a popular choice for mainstream computer users in business? Well, Macs always had a reputation of being easy to use, but, for a variety of reasons, lost the business market to Microsoft after the release of Windows ’95. It really wasn’t until after the iPod that things began to shift. Everyone started using iPods, then iPhones, and a ‘Halo Effect’ started making people curious about Macs. That led to an increasing use of Macs for people at home. For a lot of people, they started wondering why they couldn’t use their Mac at work. So it was, in many ways, a home-user invasion of business. So why would a business want to take a look at Apple? What are the advantages?Right now, businesses are often not looking at Macs at all. They just come in the door. When the CEO starts using his Mac at work, things start to shift for IT people. They are often thrust into the world of Macs, and its trickier cousin — cross-platform networks — as the PC network has to begin accommodating the Macs. I would suggest that a business is better served if it has a Mac strategy in place now, rather than having rogue Macs popping up in the office. The reasons people want to use them usually boil down to:

• Macs are cool. This might seem like a silly reason, but there is value in the cool factor. People used to dismiss cool offices, casual work attire, flexible work schedules and other ‘squishy’ work things too. Increasingly, people want the computer they use to be something they like to work on. More and more, that’s Macs. Happy people is a high-value strategy.
• Macs are less vulnerable to viruses and malware. There are basically no serious Mac viruses in the wild today. In the future, that probably won’t be true. But the Mac world will start some 300,000 viruses behind, so it’s a safe bet that Macs will be less prone for the foreseeable future.
• Lots of business software runs on Macs. With the release of Microsoft Office 2011, the last gross vestige of incompatibility (an Outlook client) is gone. So, The Office Suite, Adobe Creative Suite, Quickbooks and many others have Mac native versions. Cloud apps also run very well on Macs since Safari is one of the most Web-standards compliant browsers available (Macs can also run Chrome and Firefox).

What are the disadvantages of having Macs at work?The disadvantages are generally compatibility issues. Those break down into two categories:

• Some business software either doesn’t exist for the Mac, or the Mac version is different. A lot of accounting packages, including Quickbooks, have different functionality. There are legacy apps that were written for PC that are not being actively developed. And there are a lot of apps out there for the PC that just don’t exist on the Mac. So it’s not for everyone.
• There are issues of network compatibility. Network issues are nearly all non-issues with IT people that have a track record of experience integrating Macs and PCs. But for a system admin or an IT company that is new to Mac and PC support, there is no shortage of ‘gotchas.’ File naming conventions, file server configuration, e-mail setup and configuration, fonts and Active Directory authentication are the most common issues. That’s generally why we think it’s best to have your Mac strategy in place before the Macs come walking in the door.

What if someone wants to use a Mac but needs to access applications that are only available on PC? There are a number of solutions for that, some more complex than others. Generally, there are two options though: Running PC virtualization software on your Mac (Parallels or VMware Fusion), or accessing PC applications using server-based solutions like Citrix XenApp or Microsoft Terminal Services. If it’s a few people needing a handful of apps, local virtualization is probably most effective. If it’s lots of users, then server-based needs to be considered. One thing we hear is that Macs are more expensive. Are they worth the cost? Macs are a little more expensive, but I think that issue is negligible. A few considerations: Macs generally have no truly bare bones configurations. But for most business users, bare bones won’t work anyway. So the purchase price is often much closer after the computer is configured the way a business will need it. Macs hold their value. After using a Mac for three years, it has a decent value on places like eBay. PCs are usually depleted of their value, and we often find that businesses have to pay to have them taken away. One thing to beware of is that Macs come with only a one-year warranty included. Most business-class PCs have a three-year warranty, which we would recommend. So it’s usually best to buy an extra two years from Apple. That adds to the price. In the end, a comparable Mac might be $200 more than its PC counterpart. Over three years, including interest, that’s going to be about $8 a month per user. Probably less than a company spends on coffee. So my feeling is that if it will make an employee happy or more productive, it’s probably worth the eight bucks. That said, costs will go up dramatically if you don’t have a properly configured network or the support you need, so a proactive strategy for handling Mac users is the best bet for making a transition smooth and keeping costs down.