Intellectual property and patents are a good thing, right? They protect your inventions and prevent your competitors from stealing your innovation and making money off of them, right? Wrong. That’s the theory, anyway, but the reality is considerably different. They don’t stop your competition from stealing your ideas and inventions, they only give you the right to go after your competitors in court for damages if they steal your inventions. And moreover, they make it easy for your competitors to duplicate your invention.

Remember, in order to patent an invention, you have to completely define the invention in enough detail for someone to easily reproduce it. (And it clarifies why many companies would like to keep as much as they can trade secret for as long as they can.) It’s like handing a car thief the keys to your brand new custom made Ferrari and asking him if he’d like a joyride.

But that’s not the worst part. Let’s say your competitor fully replicates your invention and starts selling it to your customers and making all the profit. Your only recourse is a lawsuit, and if your competitor is bigger than you, has deeper coffers, and more expensive lawyers, it’s going to be an expensive lawsuit. Even if you know you are in the right and there is a very good chance that you could recover legal fees in the award (after multiple appeals), you might not be able to afford the suit. In fact, even initiating a lawsuit might bankrupt you.

But this is far from the worst of it. The worst of it is that many companies file, or buy, patents not to protect their IP, but to prevent you from selling yours (and this has been going on for a decade as per SI’s classic post on how the patent pirates will plunder away. Since patent clerks are not experts in anything but the rules associated with filing patents, and the reviewers are typically not experts either, many patents that are much broader than they should be, and that actually patent innovations that exist in prior art as part, or all, of the invention, get pushed through by firms with big pockets and persistent lawyers. These patents are then used by companies, known as patent trolls, with no intention of actually developing or selling such products to go after companies with similar technology, like yours, for patent infringement, even if these technologies and companies are not actually infringing the patent. The idea is that, since you know how much a patent lawsuit will cost, you’ll simply cave and pay a small license fee to “license” the patent you are not already using. These patent trolls know that all they have to do to bring you to court (in Marshall, Texas) is make a reasonable sounding (not reasonably effective) case to a non-technical judge who will allow them to bring you before a jury. Now, it is true that the US is finally trying to put a stop to these trolls (who make the nasty trolls who live under bridges look like oversized benevolent gnomes) with a a new bill (S. 1137) that requires that trolls not only stipulate what patents are being infringed, but precisely how, before a case can be filed (and prevent filing of vague claims that are enough to get you on a Texas or Delaware docket on-demand) (and also requires that all claimants be listed and expensive discovery delayed until prosecution has progressed). It’s a good start, and will minimize the tens of billions of dollars of damage these trolls do every year (as these trolls do over 1 Billion in damage to the economy every two weeks as summarized in this post on how the US is still letting the patent pirates plunder away), but you know that, since the bill already passed the US Senate Judiciary Committee, the patent trolls already have their legal team looking for loopholes to use against you.

The reality is that the US is just not as smart as the EU Parliament, which quashed the Computer Implemented Inventions Directive 648 to 14 when it was introduced (and a significant portion of bullsh!t patents these days are computer related), and, for a big enough payday, the patent lawyers will become more and more creative and manipulative. Since the US allows business process patents (which, in the doctor‘s view, is a bullsh!t patent), this insanity is here to stay. So, you’re damned and you have to play the damnation game (and spend tens, if not hundreds, of thousands filing your own bullsh!t patent just to prepare a defense against the bullsh!t claims you know are coming if you get big, or threatening, enough).

This is another damnation that should not be unexpected, as the doctor has been proclaiming the dangers and dysfunctions of dashboards since 2007. As per the doctor‘s classic post, a dashboard CAN NOT tell you how well you’re doing. It does not, and can not, know everything your organization is not doing well or how much the lack of efficiency is impacting overall organizational performance. As a result, it can not report on this ever important metric.

As the doctor said in his classic post, the best [a dashboard] can do is capture the data it’s been programmed to capture, roll-up the metrics it’s been programmed to roll up, and do the built in calculations of efficiency based on those roll-ups. Whatever went undefined goes undefined and stays undefined. The best that a dashboard can do is provide an upper bound on how well you’re doing — and this is useless. In particular, a dashboard that says you’re warehouse efficiency is 98% when it is only 92% is useless as it is totally unactionable. (the doctor can tell you that your efficiency is at most 100%, always be correct, and he doesn’t need an overpriced software hack to tell you that!)

And it’s not just the doctor who has this view. About five (5) years ago, Robert D. Austin, author of Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations, penned an article in Intelligent Enterprise on how “metrics can lead [us] in the wrong direction” which echoed many of the doctor‘s concerns. Mr. Austin states:

“Kaplan and Norton’s cockpit analogy would be accurate if it included a multitude of tiny gremlins controlling wing flaps, fuel flow, and so on of a plane being buffeted by winds and generally struggling against nature, but with the gremlins always controlling information flow back to the cockpit instruments, for fear that the pilot might find gremlin replacements. It would not be surprising if airplanes guided this way occasionally flew into mountains when they seemed to be progressing smoothly toward their destinations.
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It’s as the doctor said. Not only will your staff be lulled into a false sense of security when all of the gages in the dashboard are in the “safe” zone (and not look for the faulty wiring about to spark a devastating explosion), but, and this is especially true if their compensation is based on those numbers, they’ll start to perform dysfunctionally if such behaviour improves the score. For example, many call centres once thought (and some still do) that number of calls processed was a good metric. The result? The reps, who do their best to get you off the phone as soon as possible, don’t take the time to understand the true nature of your problem and instead focus on a “quick fix” to get you going again (even if such a fix, like “reboot”, doesn’t fix the issue and will only result in the problem re-occurring again and again). As a result, not only did the number of calls processed a day increase, but the total number of calls processed by the organization increased, because people have to call multiple times to get their problem solved. Not good. Not good at all.

And while an integrated view is necessary, the doctor was right when he said that integrated dashboards are deadly. Common issues are inconsistent views, propagated errors, and the overconfidence they instill. Despite the fact that they always increase risk, dashboards do not always improve visibility. Unlike a top-of-the-line spend/data analysis tool, dashboards do not give you real intelligence. You should ditch the dashboards before they are your downfall.

Spreadsheets. You can’t run your business off of them. But you still can’t run your business without them. Despite the fact that it’s 2015, and that better, customized, back-office systems exist for every facet of your business, most business still run at least one key aspect of their business on spreadsheets.

This is, literally, the only technology worse to run your business, and supply chain, on than the ERP (which, as we pointed out in a recent post, is a supply chain disaster waiting to happen. Do you have to remind you again that Spreadsheets Will Cost You Billions? That Fidelity lost 2.6 Billion due to a simple spreadsheet error? That 1.13 Billion in Fannie Mae Shareholder Equity went out the window due to an honest spreadsheet mistake?

And do we need to remind you that trying to run a business off of spreadsheets is fraught with peril and could result in your organization tossing 20 Million into the trash on an annual basis? That your new support centre could be woefully understaffed upon switchover? That unavoidable delays will result in your projects as a result of spreadsheet gaps?

You know spreadsheets are a damnation because they still exist, five years after the Harvard Business Review told us why good spreadsheets make bad strategies. There’s just no such thing as good spreedsheets. All spreadsheets of any level of complexity contain errors. The most recent statistic, as reported in Forbes last year in Sorry, Your Spreadsheet Has Errors, 88% contain errors (and the vast majority are human. But what can one expect when one in one hundred keystrokes is erroneous?) And so will 88%+ of spreadsheets going forward as forecasts, models, and financial statements just keep getting more complex.

As long as they exist, spreadsheets will be an eternal damnation that might just burn your business to the ground if the sea of red isn’t detected, due to a human error, until it is too late. If it’s the last thing you do, get rid of them.