Quote of the Day – 11-Apr-07

From Joel Spolsky’s Interview in “Founders at Work”. As you can see, totally loving this book.

That was probably the biggest mistake we made. And that’s the advice I give everybody. All those little coupon schemes, this is what General Motors does. They figure out new rebate schemes because they forgot all about how to design cars people want to buy. But when you still remember how to make software people want, great, just improve it.

Talk to your customers. Find out what they need. Don’t pay any attention to the competition. They’re not relevant to you. Only talk to your customers and your potential customers and see what it is that caused them not to buy your product or would cause them to buy more copies of it. And do that, and then ship it. That was something we really, really should have focused on, but, you know, we didn’t know any better.

…We spend an outrageous amount of money on quality office space that other people don’t. That makes it easier to recruit and makes us more productive, I believe. But I’ve heard from people that it would be considered completely unacceptable by the average VC to have private office space—because it’s considered an extravagance of a successful company or something like that. And, you know, “Why aren’t you all in the same room talking?”

I’ve had that argument whether it’s better to have private offices for developers. I don’t want to have that argument anymore. I don’t want to have to try to convince people anymore. Certain features—flying first class, Aeron chairs, double monitors, the best computers that money can buy—these are things which might be considered extravagant, but it’s nice just to be able to do things the way that we believe they should be done, without having to have a big argument educating other people as to why we know how to develop software and they don’t.

…Now Microsoft has forgotten all these things, and they’ve hired a lot of morons that don’t know these things anymore. I think that now Microsoft is kind of a big tar pit where you can barely move forward because there’s so much bureaucracy. But I learned a lot.

…I think what makes a good hack is the observation that you can do without something that everybody else thinks you need. To me, the most elegant hack is when somebody says, “These 2,000 lines of code end up doing the same thing as those 2 lines of code would do. I know it seems complicated, but arithmetically it’s really the same.” When someone cuts through a lot of crap and says, “You know, it doesn’t really matter.”

Quote of the Day – 10-Apr-07

A few years ago I read an article in which a car magazine modified the “sports” model of some production car to get the fastest possible standing quarter mile. You know how they did it? They cut off all the crap the manufacturer had bolted onto the car to make it look fast.Business is broken the same way that car was. The effort that goes into looking productive is not merely wasted, but actually makes organizations less productive.

…In big companies there’s always going to be more politics, and less scope for individual decisions. But seeing what startups are really like will at least show other organizations what to aim for. The time may soon be coming when instead of startups trying to seem more corporate, corporations will try to seem more like startups. That would be a good thing.

– Paul Graham – Foreword of “Founders at Work”

Sheepwalking

In post-Sox environment, as organisations try to increasingly codify all processes, define norms of behaviour, prescribe ways of working and increasingly define rigid boundaries of what can & cannot be done, and how, they ironically kill off the very skills & behaviours required to thrive in the increasingly globalised, aggressively competitive business arena.

Seth Godin calls the management by fear, intimidation, rules & “well-defined processes” by the evocative term Sheepwalking:

I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a braindead job and enough fear to keep them in line.
…It’s ironic but not surprising that in our age of increased reliance on new ideas, rapid change and innovation, sheepwalking is actually on the rise. That’s because we can no longer rely on machines to do the brain-dead stuff.
…many organizations go out of their way to hire people that color inside the lines, that demonstrate consistency and compliance. And then they give these people jobs where they are managed via fear. Which leads to sheepwalking.
…The fault doesn’t lie with the employee, at least not at first. And of course, the pain is often shouldered by both the employee and the customer.
…When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff.
And the sheepwalkers and their bosses just watch and shake their heads, certain that this is just an exception, and that it is way too risky for their industry or their customer base.

And they continue watching, and shaking their collective heads, as they hurtle towards oblivion, while at the same time complaining of lack of qualified talent, the high attrition rates driven by fickle behaviour of today’s “ungrateful/disloyal” employees, and the pressure on their margins.

Purpose Is More Important Than Profits

Our purpose is the compass which keeps us on the straight & narrow. On our path through life, and business, it’s very easy to forget what you set out to do, to achieve, and the reason why you took this path at all.

Tom Peters has a brilliant post on not forgetting why you are here:

…many CEOs epitomize this. They get so caught up in the earnings game that they forget the fact that they are meant to be “of service” to some worthy, Olympian objective. Perversely, I’m pleased to report, this loss of attention to the basics is the wellspring of earnings that don’t measure up.

How True! But it isn’t just about CEO’s & business-people. This applies to all of us, no matter what our chosen path, our calling. Peters suggests asking yourself the following to re-discover your “why”:

Why did I take this assignment, or choose this profession? Am I doing everything possible in my current project to hold to the principles that got me into all this? Is my time here up?

Think about it!

Are you a manager?

The best way to think about management is to treat everyone like an unpaid intern.Each day, your employees ask themselves, “Am I getting enough out of this job to keep doing it?” And each day, you need to give them a reason to say, “Yes.”

Read Penelope Trunk’s “A Manager’s Guide to Growing Happy Employees“.