Michael's musings

Wed, 02 Dec 2009

Profit on Farmville

I'm level 14 on Facebook's Farmville. Why do I play? Because my 4yr old likes it. Of course, I want to maximize my profit.

I only run it about once a day, so crops that wither before I can harvest them are out, but what next? It costs 15 coins to plow the field each time.

It turns out that longer growing crops aren't worth much more. I did a spreadsheet to work things out.

cost sell harvest profit profit/day wheat 35 115 3.0 65 21.7 eggplant 25 88 2.0 48 24.0 artichokes 70 204 4.0 119 29.8 daffodils 60 135 2.0 60 30.0 squash 40 121 2.0 66 33.0 soybeans 15 63 1.0 33 33.0 cotton 75 207 3.0 117 39.0 bell-peppers 75 198 2.0 108 54.0 aloe vera 56 85 0.2 14 56.0 strawberries 10 35 0.2 10 60.0 cranberries 55 98 0.4 28 67.2 pumpkin 30 68 0.3 23 69.0 rice 45 96 0.5 36 72.0 peppers 70 162 1.0 77 77.0 raspberries 20 46 0.1 11 132.0 </pre>

Raspberries take 2 hours. Sometimes worth it, but the profit margin is very low unless you do it all day long.

Ruling out the things that take less than a day, leaves me with peppers, bell-peppers, and cotton as the highest grossing.

Too bad that the market price didn't depend upon other factors, like how many other people were growing it... or if you grew some things properly, you could keep the seed.

Or maybe you have to rotate your crops. Or grow eggplants next to pumpkin will keep away the racoons, or the blight.

Wed, 18 Nov 2009

My personal MBA

I blame Mike Charlton. I'm pretty sure it was some email of his that suggested that I read The Goal. This was back in Winter 2008, I think. Wait, can Amazon tell me... Yup. Ordered the book in February 1, 2008.

The Goal is a novel, in it we learn about the fate of a branch manager, who learns that his branch, in his original home town, is going to be shutdown, unless he can figure something out in just three months. Our hero learns the Theory of Constraints http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Constraints and saves the day... except that now Peter's principle gets applied to him, and in the next book he has to save the division. A great read, and I learnt lots that I didn't think I'd ever use. When I got the second book It's Not Luck, Amazon suggested I get Critical Chain, and I did.

It turns out Critical Chain is about project management of all sorts, including software. It's written ten years later (mid-1990s), and some of it's a bit naive about things, but the essential theory is great, and furthermore, it's very much compatible with Agile Methods.

I wanted more. I wondered how to get more. In early 2009, I started to wonder if I business school might teach me more. I had not quite understood part of the underlying story in Critical Chain was probably autobiological, and that the frustrations of the business professor in the novel expressed Goldratt's experience that it was very hard to get TOC accepted into business schools.

I also began to understand that a difficulty I've had in many companies is that I'm a techie, and I explain things from that point of view often. Unlike other techies, I tend to be pretty good, given some face to face time with a non-technical executive to explain things in terms that he can use, but I am missing many of the shortcuts that would come form having more language in common. It's not enough to talk about ROI, sometimes I think it might have helped to be able to start from the CFO's terminology and relate it back to mine. (i.e. to lead them from where they are, to where I am, instead of having to entice them to start where I am, and discover the path back to where they are)

I investigated executive MBAs. Ottawa U failed to impress me at all. A meeting with the director was offered, but the whole thing just didn't feel right. I went to a Queens executive MBA session, and they got me the information that I wanted... yes it is expensive, yes, the content is mostly there, but doing it in Ottawa is probably a mistake. I won't meet the people that I really want to understand.

The Theory of Constraints does not figure prominently in either program. At least Queens mentioned it. I started from the other end, who teaches this? Google told me that it's popular at one university in Mumbai, at the Goldratt Institute, and that the Harvard MBA also teaches it now. I talked to my mother's cousin about all of this, and he pointed me at Henry Minceberg. http://www.henrymintzberg.com/

I highly recommend reading: http://www.henrymintzberg.com/pdf/productivity2008.pdf

He hasn't got nice things to say about the MBA. I certainly agree. MBAs should only be done as executive MBAs, you need ten years out there before any it can make any sense. Harvard only offers the residential 2 year MBA.

Many of my colleagues and mentors quietly discouraged me from an MBA. One of them pointed me at http://www.personalmba.com/ --- essentially a reading list. In August, I decided, this would do, and the price was right.

So far I've read:

10 days to faster reading

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High

Indispensable: How To Become The Company That Your Customers Can't Live Without

Necessary But Not Sufficient: A Theory of Constraints Business Novel

I'm in the middle of reading:

Results Without Authority: Controlling a Project When the Team Doesn't Report to You, A Project Manager's Guide

The Unwritten Laws of Business

Throughput Accounting

Managing

Necessary But Not Sufficient is another novel. Set in 1998/1999, and apparently written just after the dot-bust, it explains the dot-bust very well, but also talks a lot about software companies, and manufacturing companies, and ERP systems. It's supportive of Agile Methods (even though I don't think Goldratt knows that term, it certainly wasn't coined until after the book was in print).

More important, it basically concludes that software is best sold as a service, not a product, and that actually there no value in the software itself, only in how it reduces or eliminates limitations, permitting a person or company to do more.

I take this to suggest that open source licensing of a lot of software is the right way to go, particularly for anything which is targetted at business.