According to a piece by Darren Dahl in Inc. Magazine: "Consulting firm Point B has 223 employees--and no phones, desks, computers, or cubicles."

While there is often much to be skeptical about when talking about a 21st century that doesn't believe in office space, Point B has $46 million in annual revenue. And 223 employees spread out in the Pacific region between Seattle, Denver, Phoenix, and Portland; Seattle being home to 187 of the batch. And only a 4% hiring rate.

Mike Benson, Senior VP of Kroenke Sports Enterprises, the owning company of Denver's Pepsi Center and five professional sports teams, was skeptical of Point B at first but was happy he gave them a chance: "They were always here because they lived right up the street."

Although not a client, Charles Ehin of Westminster College's Gore School of Business disagrees with this approach, saying "There are certain chemical reactions between individuals when we go face to face. That can't happen at a virtual organization."

But as a philosophy, Point B co-founder Tim Jenkins believes that: "Rather than building our lives around the business, we're building the business around our lives."

Where do you stand? Would it be possible for your company to stay profitable and on the edge of what's happening if it were not in a centralized location? Is telecommuting a viable means of employing a loyal staff?

Labels: Consulting, Philosophy, Telecommuting

According to an article by David H. Freedman in Inc. Magazine: "Computers will be able to react based on the sum total of all available data--in other words, on the same information that informs a human being's decisions today." In turn, today's new executives may be "every bit as clever as your old ones," even if "they may not be human."

Thanks to new software, computer systems are "on the verge of making a quantum leap in brainpower" that enables them to "take action" based on years of data compiled. One company leading for this to happen is the California-based iSpheres, which specializes in "complex event processing systems." Presently this technology carries a pricetag around $100,000, although that price is anticipated to "drop over time."

Says iSpheres CEO Deepak Gupta: "People think real-time decision making is only important in transaction-oriented environments like the stock market, but you might want to know when more than four customers haven't had their calls returned. Or if the humidity inside one of our trucks is rising. If you wait until a problem has escalated, then you may already be dealing with actual losses instead of potential losses."

Less costly are "text-mining engines," which Spanlink CEO Brett Shockley encourages the use of: "Most information today is not in any kind of structured database." Of their specific model, Shockley notes: "Our technology can crawl all that information, parse sentences down to words, and compare the words with a lexicon of the English language."

The Massachusetts-based Cymfony has an engine of their own in development called Orchestra. It "not only finds answers to users' queries, such as 'What do people think of blue soda?' but also points out patterns or trends within the results--for example, that people who live in big cities are more likely to want blue soda, or that people who want blue soda tend to hate pink soda." Cymfony CEO Andrew Bernstein explains: "We can do market segmentation to show who the new users of a product are."

From my standpoint, this sort of article raises many more questions than it answers. As some examples:

- Will experience matter to the hiring process when the needed answers may already be there?

- Is all of the information compiled and made available on this software useful and effective?

- Will most companies be receptive to the idea of asking help from a computer?

- Could this technological advancement become useful to other facets of work beyond Management and Marketing like Human Resources?

- When answers and advice are presented with immediacy, what will happen to needed worker assets like creativity and spontaneity?

All of that said, what do YOU think about the idea of a computer guiding your company's decisions?

Labels: Consulting, Management, technology