Remote Control
If you are like me, you grew up with a romantic notion of what remote control meant. It involved gas-powered airplanes, speedboats, race cars, and even the Zenith TV in your living room. It implied this amazing and exciting ability to sit back and relax while you do minimal work to make your fun take place in hyper-speed. In that dream, you know exactly how the machine (whatever it is) operates. You understand it’s parameters and how to make it do amazing tricks from barrel rolls to figure eights to running up a wall and flipping over. And when you’ve had enough fun, you bring the machine home to where you are reclined and it stops at your feet and you put it away until the next time. Hard to imagine we ever thought that was possible.
I understand that a TV remote is different, but in the early days of vertical hold, screen snow and horizontal scrambling, I recall that the remote had a similar differential between the dream of couch potato channel surfing and the reality of banging on the set or giggling the rabbit ears. After the early days of TV remotes, we went through a halcyon period of TV remotes working very easily. Then came the proliferation of Cable TV, VCR’s, DVD’s, BlueRay’s and TiVo/DVR (let’s not even start with home theaters), so everything got complicated again with multiple remotes and functionality that got way out beyond the knowledge base of most of us TV viewers.
You would think that the elimination of recording devices might have helped, but no. Now we have Apple TV or other providers giving us access to Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBOGo and God knows what else that I don’t dare click on for fear that I might never find my way home. You have to love a TV that will shut itself off if you don’t reaffirm your interest in continuing to watch. You better have your remote handy when that happens since who today knows what to press on the TV itself if you can’t find the remote? And, of course, I hate to admit it, but the tremendous drop in large flat-screen TV prices has been largely offset by the new universal remote that you almost have to buy if you expect the babysitter (dog sitter in our case) to be able to use the TV without screwing up the system to a fair-thee-well.
Before leaving the peripheral topic of TV remotes, I don’t know how many TV’s you have in your home, but I now have three others (Master Bedroom, Guest Room and Study). I keep the study only on MSNBC (to which we are now admittedly addicted). But the bedroom TV’s are simply not worthy of universal remotes for cost reasons (you can, no doubt, tell that I am quite a frugal guy). I think that is further helpful to force us not to ruin our sleep with too much late night MSNBC. And let’s just say I don’t want my guests to be too comfortable, if you get my meaning.
Back to other remotes, I must admit that while I have had planes, boats and cars with remotes, those now seem juvenile compared to full-fledged drones and their attendant remotes. Since all drones now have video cameras, these remotes are very sophisticated things. In movies like Eagle Eye, we see military drone operators working as a team in some Nevada bunker. It takes one operator to fly the drone (and fire the weapons) and one operator to control the video camera. With a hobbyist version of a drone, you get a remote that makes you take on both roles. You have multiple toggles and joysticks as well as a screen. Do you watch the screen or watch the drone up in the air flying? Let me tell you, as a guy who has owned and subsequently wrecked at least four drones, there is nothing easy about remote controlling a drone.
My first drone flight gave my daughter what she had wanted for years, something stupid that Dad did to send off to America’s Funniest Home Video’s. The script went like this, set the drone out for the flight, turn it on with the remote from 20 feet away, lift-off and go up 30 feet, lose control and have the drone veer off to crash at full speed into a parked construction truck nearby. It was all over in five seconds. I eventually got pretty good at drone flying and got some nice footage, but it’s a lot like flying a helicopter I imagine in that you lose your touch with the remote very quickly if you don’t stay in active practice.
I did not write this piece to discuss remote control “toys” or TV’s, but once I started I can tell that it’s a far richer vein for exploration that I intended. What I wanted to discuss, was the thought that it’s easy to work in a managerial capacity from a remote location. As a venture CEO who has his dream house (San Diego) 2,700 miles away from the HQ office (New York) and 5,200 miles from the majority of the technical staff (Dundee, Scotland), remote working is an inevitable topic. I’ve been out here for six working days and today I spent from 8am to 2pm in shorts and a t-shirt (even though it was a rainy morning…it seems it almost never rains in California) responding to emails on a non-stop basis, making perhaps four phone calls in addition. I was trying to coordinate several different presentation preparations being done in London, New York and Los Angeles with people in all those places plus L.A., Las Vegas, New Jersey and Scotland. I’m sure I pissed off half the people I talked to or emailed today.
My point isn’t about my work ethic or my management style, it’s about how hard it is to remote control a business or team of people. It can be done, but it just takes a lot of screen and phone time and it has lots of speed bumps. I liken it to a drone remote control or a universal remote. You probably don’t know what some of the buttons or toggles do, so it’s best to stick to the controls you know well. Don’t get fancy or you’re sure to veer off course and crash. Make only gentle movements with a light touch or it will take you to some channel you will never find your way back from. Whatever you do, don’t sit back on the couch and expect everything to come back to your feet when you want it to. Companies are just another machine. All remote controls should come with a warning label: Objects in your field of vision are closer to crashing than they appear.