kindel.com is no longer at home

September 12, 2020
Kindel
Leave a comment

kindel.com has been hosted on my home network since 1996. Today, I finally moved it to a modern web platform. This includes migrating an OG Active Server Pages (pre .NET) & SQL Server app I wrote in 1997 for decoding Porsche option codes By doing this I finally got to turn port 80/443 off on my home network. It’s been bugging me for a long time because it’s a really bad practice as it makes …Continue reading →

Look Back Quotient (LBQ)

August 28, 2020
Cars
2 Comments

Look Back Quotient (LBQ) is a measure of how attractive a car is to the car’s owner. A car with a high LBQ will increase the car owner’s propensity to look back at their car after parking it. Examples of cars with high LBQ: Examples of cars with low LBQ:

Broken Windows – Right Idea, Bad Analogy

July 10, 2020
Customer & Product, Leadership, Technology & Execution
6 Comments

It is well understood that no product is perfect and small issues will always exist. Without an ongoing mechanism to fix those issues, not only do they not get fixed, they pile up. Having a clear Lexicon and Taxonomy is critical to getting large numbers of people moving forward towards a vision. Having the lexicon be composed of terms that make logical sense, disambiguate, and are memorable is important. Over the years of building many …Continue reading →

Kindel’s 3rd Law

March 30, 2020
Kindel
Leave a comment

Kindel’s 3rd Law – Amazon will enter every existing business, channel, and market. If said business, channel, or market doesn’t already exist, Amazon will try to invent it. Charlie Kindel – 2019 See also: Kindel’s Law – Every payment system eventually becomes an anti-fraud system. Kindel’s 2nd Law – Companies with a subscriptions-based business model eventually behave in ways hostile to that company’s customers.

Smart Home + PC = Better Working from Home

March 25, 2020
Coding, Smart Home
Leave a comment

Since the dawn of time I’ve considered the PC (and related devices like Macs, printers, etc…) to be part of my smart home. For some reason, most traditional smart home offerings have treated PCs et.al. as somehow disconnected. Sometime after the dawn of time (2004), I built MCE Controller (mcec) as a way of ensuring my home PCs could be as tightly integrated as my whole-home audio system or lights. MCE Controller is a little …Continue reading →

Mechanisms

March 6, 2020
Amazon Way, Business, Clarity of Thought, Customer & Product, Leadership, Organization & People, Technology & Execution
3 Comments

Mechanisms are complete processes built around a tool, owned by a leader that gets adopted broadly and regularly inspected and improved to ensure things get done, not because everyone has good intentions, but because the mechanism’s elements structurally force the desired behavior. “Good intentions never work, you need good mechanisms to make anything happen.” — Jeff Bezos I’ve written previously about how Good Intentions are Never Enough and why mechanisms are needed, but I didn’t go deep into how to make mechanisms actually work. …Continue reading →

winprint 2.0

February 21, 2020
Coding, Kindel
2 Comments

Ever since I started programming on an Apple ][+ in 1981, I’ve had a thing for printing. My earliest apps focused on printing and my first money-making endeavor was “Tapes”, which printed casette tape ‘J-cards’ for all the mix-tapes of great ’80s music we made for the girls. Whenever I learned a new programming language or OS, the first app I’d write was Spit, an app for printing my source code all pretty (it “spits” source …Continue reading →

Path To Green

February 16, 2020
Clarity of Thought, Leadership, Technology & Execution
1 Comment

A Path To Green (PTG) is a clear, crisp, and complete statement describing a team’s plan for getting a project from red or yellow status to green. This post describes the concept and provides some tips on how to be excellent at articulating a PTG. Organizations that routinely deliver great results hold individuals and teams accountable for delivering those results. Ensuring everyone is clear on projects’ status is key to this (e.g., is a project red, …Continue reading →

Tenets

February 10, 2020
Amazon Way, Clarity of Thought, Writing
Leave a comment

Tenets are a few, carefully articulated guiding principles for any endeavor (a program, business area, or project). They act as a guide for the team, stakeholders, and senior leaders to align on a vision and decisions. Tenets simplify decision-making and help with being right more often; they can be used as tiebreakers when making tough judgment calls. Tenets are ultimately aligned with a company’s mission and core values. At the same time, tenets are specific to the …Continue reading →

Work Backwards From The Customer

February 4, 2020
Amazon Way, Customer & Product, Leadership
7 Comments

At the 1996 Microsoft Professional Developer Conference (PDC) I stood up in front of 8,000 customers and announced what I’d been working on for the previous two years: the Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM). On stage, in front of all those people, we wrote and demoed code running on one Windows 95 PC talking over the network to code on other PCs. This was back in the day when being able to write programs that worked across a …Continue reading →

MCE Controller V2 Released

October 8, 2019
Smart Home
Leave a comment

I spent some time the last few weekends hacking on a product I first developed in 2004: MCE Controller. MCE Controller lets you control a Windows Home Theater PC (or any PC) over the network. It runs in the background listening on the network (or serial port) for commands. It then translates those commands into actions such as keystrokes, text input, and the starting of programs. Any remote control, home control system, or application that can …Continue reading →

Have Specific Conversations, not General Conversations

August 9, 2019
Clarity of Thought, Leadership
Leave a comment

If you are discussing a topic with colleagues, it’s almost always better to have a specific conversation instead of a general conversation. General Conversation Specific Conversation “We need to figure out how to scrub all open bugs.” Followed by a lot of non-specific debate… “There are 42 open bugs. 42 bugs fit on one screen in Excel. Lets look at them all right now and see if there’s a pattern.” “Customers are angry. We need …Continue reading →

Kindel’s 2nd Law

July 30, 2019
Business, Kindel, Leadership
Leave a comment

Kindel’s 2nd Law – Companies with subscription-based business models eventually behave in ways hostile to their customers. Charlie Kindel – July 2019 Once a company gets addicted to annuity-based revenue, all it can do is focus on the lifetime value (LTV) of a customer, the cost to acquire a customer (CAC), and churn (the rate at which customers unsubscribe0. These things are the opposite of customer obsession. Eventually, the motions of the company become dominated …Continue reading →

Taxonomy and Lexicon

July 3, 2019
Clarity of Thought, Leadership
Leave a comment

How many times have you been in a heated discussion only to find out that the two sides were talking past each other because they were reading from two different dictionaries? I bet you can also remember situations where just a little more structure got everyone aligned quicker. Creating, explaining, and re-enforcing a strong Taxonomy and Lexicon is a critical skill for all leaders (reminder: everyone in our business is a leader, not just managers). Taxonomy …Continue reading →

One-Way and Two-Way Doors

June 27, 2019
Amazon Way, Clarity of Thought, Leadership, Technology & Execution
Leave a comment

Effective decision-making starts with understanding; in the long-term, very, very few things actually matter. The vast majority of the decisions made day-to-day are either minutia or easily reversible and can be made quickly. However, a small number of things (about 1 in 10) matter a lot (in the long term) and are worthy of serious pondering, discussion, investigation, investment, and decision making. A mentor (Chris Jones) introduced me to the pithy phrase 90% of the decisions you make don’t …Continue reading →

Mental Models

June 22, 2019
Clarity of Thought, Leadership
Leave a comment

The secret to clear thinking and decision-making is to learn, invent, and adopt mental models. You’ve probably noticed effective leaders can frame complex ideas simply. They’ll lead conversations like this: “Well, I think there are three things we should focus on, not 15, and they are…” “Folks, I think there’s another way of looking at this problem. What if we viewed the problem through these four lenses…” The key to simplifying the complex like this …Continue reading →

Lead Without Authority

June 11, 2019
Amazon Way, Leadership
Leave a comment

There are two forms of influence in the world: Influence by authority Influence without authority When a ‘boss’ (a manager or someone with a big title) attempts to influence change or drive action using only their authority, it is rarely successful in the short term, and never in the long term. “Because, I told you so” may work a few times on a kindergartner, but doesn’t inspire confidence or long-term results in the business world. …Continue reading →

Focusing on users is not Customer Obsession

May 30, 2019
Amazon Way, Customer & Product, Leadership
1 Comment

Let’s talk Customer Obsession and how it is different than user obsession. My definitions: Customer: An individual (or entity) that pays you, directly or indirectly, for value you provide. User: An individual that is forced to use something you provide. Users fall into three buckets 1) people unhealthily addicted to something (heroin), 2) employees forced to use something in order to do their job (IT systems), or 3) people who are products of services that sell them …Continue reading →

Debate Tenets

May 23, 2019
Leadership
Leave a comment

I’ve long thought having a set of guiding principles for any project is important (see my blog post “the 5Ps”; Purpose, Principles, Priorities, People, Plan). At Amazon I learned there was a synonym to the word principle: Tenet. I’ve heard Jeff Bezos say repeatedly “A team can never spend too much time debating their tenets.” Why is debating tenets so important? First, debating (and writing down) tenets ensures everyone is in agreement about critical questions that can’t …Continue reading →

The Tension is Intentional

May 16, 2019
Amazon Way, Leadership
1 Comment

It is no accident many of the Amazon Leadership Principles seemingly contradict each other: they were carefully selected and crafted to encourage leaders to be thoughtful about the gray area. Bias for Action vs. Think Big represent favorite example of this tension. Bias for Action – Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk taking. Think Big – Thinking small is a self-fulfilling …Continue reading →