Tips and tricks for start-ups

The internet is lastly like a wild west. We move from the east coast and it seems like we are still far away from the Pacific Ocean. Instead of the run for a ground, we reserve the domain names. The cost of establishing your own business in the internet is nowadays very cheap or even free and there is plenty of people with various specialization, who saw the gold in establishing their own web page. If you have the vision how to put particular process on the web and make the money on it, you just need to give it a name, find doers who code it and partner who will host it. This causes that number of enterprises, which did not have a chance in the past, have the chance to exists now. Very good sample of it, are the survey services and web page like http://webankieta.pl/ - one man can do a change.

The reality is not though so colorful and most of start-ups die quickly. If you think about starting your own business and you do not want to finish it as the silent tomb, consider couple of points below...

1. ALWAYS FOCUS ON CLIENTS OR POTENTIAL CLIENTS – do not loose yourself having a fun watching your desings becoming true; that is a business and business is where the money is. Most of start-ups bankrupt before the first invoice appears – if you cash your first client you WON the first and the most important point.

2. Keep your costs low at the beginning – if you fail you will not loose too much and you will have the strength to start up something new. Pump up the money in the working business - if you cash the first invoice, there will be a time to invest money.

3. Check the competition – you always think you have invented something unique, but there is number of smart people over the world, who do amazing things and you must position your idea among them. Very good way to do it, is to discuss with various people and learn to convince them why your idea is better than the others. If you do it couple of times, it means you truely have something.

4. Find the partner – if you can not convince at least one of your friends to the enterprise, it means that you are probably Don Kichot. No... even he had a partner - Sanczo Pansa. Yes... If plan long journey, you should not do it alone.

5. Leave the solution opened and do not spend too much time on details – the only thing which you can be sure of is THE CHANGE

6. Do the nice graphics – if you do it smart the cost of it is low and this is what clients like.

7. Create the prototype as soon as possible so you can quickly show it to the potential clients and ensure what they truly need. There is a big difference between talking about the solution and showing it. That is also about the agile approach and if it is possible the best way to create the product, is to do it iteratively with your client.

8. Reserve quickly nice domain names – it is quite cheap and you never know who may buy it before you, when you start to discuss it with peoples.

9. The best way to promote you idea over the web is to get the partnership with one of big national portals or worldwide vortals. The other option is to buy the positioning service, which will let your dot-com be found, when people search for certain words in Google, but… you will have a time for it later on. You should find your first client personally at the beginning.

10. When you consider the technical realization of the project ask about proposals couple of companies and verify they offer with some of your technical friend or independent consultant. Set up the key criteria like performance or security and ask straightforward how possible doers plan to realize it. Higher the cost of realization is – more formal the process should be.

Start-ups are exiting and challenging, even when that is a high risk mission. Everybody wants to be a cowboy. If only you will put the attention more on your cows and less on a revolver, everything should be fine ;)

Sources of knowledge

Mood: Just after straight-11 free days without ANY business phone call (can you imagine that?)
Link: Odd Christmas wishes

I have got some time ago the very good question: "Where from do I know, what I know?". I am the type of the guy, who asked about non expected thing, usually can not come up quickly with a clever answer, so I answer something not-clever-enough. The problem is that, this type of things keep staying in the darkness of my mind for some clever-enough story. The worst of all, the dark side of the soul wakes up usually 5' after I should be already sleeping and once per a while instead of behaving like the 31 years old man should behave I get to the laptop and write something like right now (tommorow morning will be truely a horrible intiation of the new year ;) ).

Anyway... lets do the home work.

I am the type of the guy who does not like to go to the courses, which I usually very expensive, time-consuming, borning and not-engouh related with the real life. This is way I usually prefer some self-pace paths, where books and web materials are the best, primary friends. In case of Microsoft certificates (MCSD.Net) I also convinced my boss to buy the examination training kit from Transcender (wow! they have a new web page) and I was very satisfied from it. I always focus myself and my subordinates to focus on some certificate. It is not to be some type of a label whore, who needs to have a jeans from Wrangler in order to feel better, but having a material goal is always a good motivator and the one, which you can set in time - usually the certain date and hour of the exam, when you shake like the leaves on a tree in autumn. Anyway I am crossing my fingers for you ;) and I give you one hint...

If you fails, there is always a possiblity to have a next shoot. I remember until today one exam at my university, when I had three make-ups; the most horrible was that each time I have spend doubled amount of time over the books and the result was doubled misrable :D The professor Jan Węglarz finally gave me the lowest possible note to pass, just to get my out of the range of his sight. Staying in front of him I truely considered to refuse the offer despite my desprate situation, but as usually my opprotunistic side has won ;) EVERYBODY has at least one story of this type - you must to set up and take a challenge.

The second and more interesting source of knowledge are people. There are two main figures who have been the sources and spiritus movens (surprsingly I could not find yet the english explanation of these latin words). One of them is positive and second one is rather negative.

The first one, was Clem Predergast who rather acts than publish and this why there is nothing about him on the web. He was though the one, true manager whom I met and whom I could watch managing and leading the people in software projects. It was more about the soft skills and possibility to motivate people in right direction, but there was also about the "know-how" import from Irish island and Performix company. How the support mechanisms works, how QA labs should look like, what road show is about, where there is a sense to pump the money and how to gain the support from executives. He had tones of his phresals, which I am sure, most of people who have worked with him, will remember for a long time like "all hands on pump". I keep catching myself on repeating them or doing some small things in the same why how he did it like learning first how "cool" and "shit" sound in foreign language, when I am in one these countries where german and english is not the mother tongue. Learning by the example is definitely the best possible method.

The second person is much more interesting and I have been growing up with this feeling for years. This person had probably better hard skills than I had on each, technical level - starting from code, through the architecture and finshing at methodologies knowledge (especially the agile once). I am quite sure that he still has these skills better, but he had some problems with soft skills. Unfortunatelly it has appeared after some time that we do not work together but against. Why I come up the situation? Because he was a perfect challenge, which (or rather who), I admit publically in this new 2008 year, still sits in my mind and keep challenge me in the ares, which about we had this short, usually intense discussions. Of course that is not my main or even secondary motivator, but for example it forces me to review once per a while all the existing methodologies and only the ones, which I prefer or can be useful.

Where books can be treated as hardware, people would be the software - you need both and you need to have some balance. You need to have hardware to load software, you should not have too much software on the weak machine and the most important... do you really need Vista? :D

Humanizing human resources

Mood: Just ok!
Soundtrack: Ruby

First of all the memo:

Offical SORRY to not write for so long but… horrible 2 weeks in Turkey (DO NOT GO THERE!), which were planned as the holiday and became the nightmare, reorganization at work, kiddo sicknesses, thick book (review incoming) etc. and the others - I offically apologize to not follow the rule number 1 from the manfesto.

Since some time there a thought in the back of my head… How quickly and unnoticeably we switched into using the “human resource” phrase. It seems to be some small and irrelevant thing, but in fact IT IS NOT. It is a very important and strong signal that capitalism is replaced smoothly by the technocracy. Write "human resource management" and replace human with the material! The next step on our path to find the theory of everything?!

I bet you do not know also the term "utilizing human resources". That was (luckily) the part of the slang among the managers, whose major goal was to assign people to the tasks, which directly earn the money for the company. Each of them could have utilized or unutilized resources. The term is dangerously close to the chemical extermination meaning, but... that seemed to be actually funny.

One of the most unique and important innovation of the ASDP methodology is focusing on the human as a human and not just… the resource. I have read somewhere once the very amazing receipt for the problem: “How to recognize quickly if the organization is working well?”. 99% of serious article will analyze the cost and profit bars. They are definitely right and… so wrong. You need to focus on something else! People! DO THEY SMILE?!

Yeeeaaah! Forget for a second about all patterns, which programms your behaviour in your professional life! Clean the white board! Tabula rasa! The morning smell of the green grass on your Windows XP desktop! No coffee! Just silence!

I am a young father. My wife laughs, but she is not right! I am just 1.5 years old! And here there is the second thought; I have learnt more about the leadership interacting with my kiddo, than from the unquestioned authorities like Covey. You, tell me bullshit! and I will answer you with a couple of quick samples:

1. You always know, you should spend more time with your (hopefully!) next version and it is always so hard!
2. When your kiddo is playing the wrong game (like treating your favorites CDs as a puzzle game) you should not say stop!, but you should replace the game with the other!
3. How to convince the kiddo to play the other game? Start to play it yourself – the one will copy or join.
4. You should monitor and control the yes!/no! factor!
5. Air brains! Walk on the open air with your baby!

Do you see, what I mean? Do you see also the touchable difference between managing and leading, which I have learnt as well? Maybe if you have a problem with your people cross-wording on the open space, you should watch the super nanny ?

The most funny… The rules, which I have mentioned above... I apply them in my professional life unconsciously. This is why I respect Covey so much – he is the one of not too many who gives you always samples for the theores in your professional and personal life. These two are truely inseparatable. The success in one area is usually paid from the other account and that is why I do not want to be the best in any of them! I just want to be right, PGP. PGP? Yes! Pretty Good Person! Finding the balance, Yin and Yang.

"Leadership the challenge" - book review

Mood: Relaxed

Soundtrack: I am easy like Sunday morning

Introduction

The book tries to be the ready to use recipe for the success by being the superior leader. The whole story is based on the axis of 5 practices and 10 commitments enlisted on page 22:

• Model the way – Find your inner voice, Be the example of the shared values
• Inspire a Shared Vision – Envision, enlist others in a common vision
• Challenge the Process – seek for innovations, search for constant small improvements
• Enable Others to Act – promote cooperative goals and building the trust, strengthen others
• Encourage the Heart – appreciate individual experience, celebrate the values and victories

Each of these things are described in details in the following chapters with big number of real stories and examples.

The body

The 5 practises, seems to be a little bit pumped up and the best part of the books are actually short stories and tactics rather than “way of living”. The book says in number of places, as on the page 99, that leading by the story telling is very useful and practical technique. Page 381 mentions the David Amstrong’s book, which contains the collection of

“285 stories […] organized around the themes such as “stories that kick start
urgency”, “stories to make people brave and wise”, “stories about core values”,
“stories to inspire innovation””!

The book tries to be something more, but in fact, it seems that is the competitor of that book.

Instead of describe each practice or commitment, I will describe the best stories and tactics. The stories will be scored:
1 is I need to mention it, but nothing else
3 is I need to remember it
5 is Good story
7 is Very good story
9 is Excellent story

The stories

Lindsay’s story about the customer service – page 5; score 5
Lindsay highly improved the customer service in repair vehicles sector (women manager in man world) – couple of weeks after reading the book I remember the sample of the worker who drove hundreds of kilometers to pass the repaired car to the customer. Oh Lord, how much I would love to be their customer! The morale of the story is quite trivial: “it is always about the people”… way it is still forgotten?

Szwarzkopf’s story about the team-building – page 87; score 6
The story is about the new recruits coming into the base. The experienced officer “looking like from Olympics”, run with his team much more than the recruiters used to. The effect is that recruiters run much behind the leader. Szwarzkopf takes the officer on a side and explains him how the new soldiers feels like – they are first day in a new place, first morning run, they try to do us much as they can, then they try more, then they try even harder and they their lungs can not keep the tempo… Their leader, their officer does not even look behind. Where is the team spirit? Where is the unit cohesion? Of course, Szwarzkopf is successful in his couching action and he can see “the light dawned on the captain’s face”. He knew also that “the episode would get talked about around the base”. Ehhh… soldiers :)

Treyz’s Disney story about baking the client – page 88; score 8
Treyz speaks about the ABC-Disney negotiations. Negotiations were hard and long. What unique has happened in here was the personalized customer treatment. During on-going negotiations, Walt Disney (the president) took the Treyz’s wife Janet for whole-day-long personal tour guide to the Disneyland and after the amazing day, he provided Treyz’s kids the personalized gifts (among others Pinochio). The whole effort paid back triple during the on-going ABC-Disney negotiations (Janet convinced the husband to do the deal), couple of years later during the next and the next deal. The power of the personalized customer treatment is proved as nowhere else.

Geof Yang’s story “Vision for the leader is like the vision for the driver” – page 113; score 7
“Imagine you are driving along the Pacific Coast High-way heading south from San Franciso on a bright, sunny day. The hills are on your left; the ocean, on your right. On some curves, the cliffs plunge several hundred feet to the water. You can see for miles and miles” – you have vision, “you are cruising along at the speed limit”.
“Suddenly, without warning, you come around a bend in the road and there’s blanket of fog as thick as you’ve ever seen it”. What do you do? […] I slow way down” – well, you would be stupid to drive fast if you have no vision.
Delicious!

Janus effect – page 119; score 6
When drawing the vision, if you look first on your rear-view mirror you feel much more confident about the future predictions. There is a table 5.1 giving you some hard numbers for it – people asked about prediction gave you on average 3.2 years timeframe instead of to 1.8 years. Before making any vision, think for a while how the previous, similar project in the company or somewhere else looked like!

King’s speech “I have a dream” quoted at page 146; score 7
The whole speech is quoted. Before reading it, I though it is the exaggeration, but during and after… It is truly a great speech.

Ritz’s daily lineup meeting at page 180; score 5
Quick 15 minutes meeting is one of the key points for the agile methodologies. It is funny thing to see it in the Ritz chain across the whole glob. Funny and teaching… and making you to remember to keep the routine done, wherever you are and regardless from the size of your team.

Physicians story about listening more than speaking at page 187; score 9
“The Journal of the American Medical Associations reported on a five-year investigation of why some doctors were sued, and the others not, by parents who had all experienced the same tragedy (the death of their child during childbirth). […] “Physicians who had been sued frequently were perceived by their parents as unavailable, rushed, unconcerned, and poor communicators, while physicians with no malpractice claims were perceived as most available, interested, through, and willing to provide the information and answer questions fully.” Clearly, listening deeply makes a difference.”
If the kid asks why the man has two ears and one mouth, it is the answer. If you are not sure if you keep the proper listen/talk ratio ask somebody about noting it, during some longer meeting.

Urban’s ski story “you must fail to learn” at page 215; score 10

It was the first day of skiing classes. I skied all day
long, and I didn’t fall down once. […] I skied up to the ski instructor, and I
told him of my great day. […] He told me, “Personally, Urban, I think you had a
lousy day […] If you are not falling, you are not learning

Desmond Tutu incremental approach at page 228; score 3
“You can’t eat the elephant with one bite” and if you count 100 cards it seem to take much more effort comparing to counting 10 times 10 cards.

Axelrod strategy at page 254; score 10
“Two parties (individual or groups) are confronted […] they must decide whether or not to cooperate […] There are two basic strategies -cooperate or compete - and four possible outcomes based on the choices players make-win-lose, lose-win, lose-lose, win-win […] The long term winner was the simplest of all strategies submitted: Cooperate on the first move and then do whatever the other players did on the previous move.” – that is truly the first strategy which seems to may work within the rat-race!

Elliot Aronson Jigsaw groups at page 270; score 3
That is about the academic experiment, which have been divided into 5-6 groups of 5-6 students. Each group is working of some sub-part of the whole topic and then it shares the gathered knowledge with the others. “The results are dramatic […] All students do as well or better in their knowledge, the lowest-performing students do significantly better […] the levels of cooperation, self-esteem, compassion, and tolerance increase.”

Joseph Sensenbrenner’s story “It is their duty” at page 289; score 4
In big organization there is often the big bureaucracy problem. The story is about “the fleet with 440 different types, makes, models, and years of equipment”. That happens because the purchase department bought the cheapest vehicles, which were not the cheapest in maintenance, but parts manager could not change it because “[…]controller wouldn’t let us do it” And the controller?” says it is about the attorney… who says it is not a problem if you make strong and clear specification. Joseph changed the flawed system involving the frontline employees and 24 steps purchasing policy was cut to three. Everything would be truly a cool story, unless the whole thing had to be done by the mayor and none first-line employee including the controller could do the thing.

John H. Stanford story about the key to the success at page 399; score 4

Stay in love

The tactics

Other key things, which are something more that just well rounded sentences:

1. Provide, improve and maintain the two-way communication (page 283), including some practical implementations:
   · a 360 degree feedback mentioned at page 85 and 103 – unfortunately it is just mentioned; no word how to realize it in details (the routines, sample set of questions etc.)
   · the collaboration audit (the only template of the form in the whole book!) form presented at page 267.
   · Passion-compassion game mentioned at page 375; where one person’s role is to speak in passioned way and second’s person role is to listen compassion.
   
2. People want leaders who are honest, forward-looking, competent and inspiring (page 111). It is trivial, but important thing is that these are these adjectives and not the others (e.g. funny, self-confident, generous etc.) - worth to remember.
   
3. Engage others in planning and analysis (page 142) – it also seems trivial, but many people paid a lot for the lesson, that usually teamwork is better than single heroic effort. It is described well within the Chinese wisdom (page 182): “Tell me, I may listen. Teach me, I may remember. Involve me, I will do it.”
   
4. There are some useful tips about how to make public speeches at page 184-185 and advices like:
   “don’t say try, say will and are”
   - Do presentation workshops (including video taping), if you feel it is your weak point – there is a lot of people who has a problem with it and you must not be ashamed if you do
   - You must be enthusiastic, emotional, expressive and personally excited
   - Speak clearly and quickly
   - Make eye contact
   
5. “Challenge a process” at page 177 is the story, which I have heard from my colleague from Toyota Bank in Poland – amazing thing, they can achieve really high cost reduction, by making really small (even micro) changes on the production lines. Saving pennies at actions, which happens hundred times daily, can make you saving million bugs monthly and I found exactly the same story in the book (at page 228-229) side by number of the others practical samples:
   - “Pick one major project per quarter. Implement one smaller improvement every three weeks” – page 196.
   

   ”Eliminate the Dumb Things”. Go find what needs fixing in your organization.
   Wander around the plant, the store, the branch, the halls or the office. Look
   for things that don’t seem right. Ask questions. Probe.
   

6. Routine paradox at page 189 – on one hand you want to have one big routine, the process and simple production line on the other hand you must to try making it better, make you and people having fun (page 198, 367; there is even a book “301 Ways to have fun at work” mentioned at page 367) when they work and do some innovative things to keep creativity (page 197). The balance is the best approach.
   
7. “Let ideas flowing from the outside” at page 193 is definitely a good approach.
   
8. “Treat every new assignment as a start-over” – page 185
   
9. “Add a new member or two to the group every couple of years. Rotate some people out and others in.” at page 201 – keep pumping the fresh blood into company’s veins.
   
10. Gather the ideas and give the awards for the best ideas – page 202
    
11. “The weakest muscle in the body is the one between the ears” page 207 – do not let yourself to think that some limitations or beliefs are stronger than you; implement incremental approach in order to achieve the big things. Lu Ann Sullivan at Wells Fargo Bank (page 212) established individual weekly goals and in this way, he could achieve the big win at the end for the whole branch (managing by targets).
    
12. “Collect yeses” - page 232. Tring to find common point is actually kind of NLP method, which causes very quick connection line and improves the communication between persons.
    
13. “Conduct pre- and postmortems for every project” at page 234
    
14. “Rotate team meeting leadership so everyone gets a turn” at page 277; “rotate the chair responsibility” at page 307
    
15. Personalize cubicles and award the best ones. It makes people more tied with the work plus the variety makes the workplace special – page 333. Google is quite well-known from doing it at their offices.
    
16. Do ceremonies for successful people and make them recognizable – page 345. Make the public board, where you can put the public “award notes” for the employee of the month – page 373. Picking up “the employee of the month” is the challenge itself described at page 377 as looking for “extra mile heroes” by ALL the employees. This action causes the extra achievements histories spread across the organization loudly by the employees themselves.
    
17. Be the cheer-manager, the cheerleader among your team – the person who is heating up the team for fight. Do not be afraid to say people thank you if they did a good job – page 345.

The Opinion

All the items mentioned above and number of quotations direct to the conclusion that the book is really cool and practical. Indeed there are fragments where it is, but unfortunately the major part of the book is simple the bubble talk like the one at the page 123 where you find out that you MUST (the word used very often in the book) to listen, read, smell, feel,taste etc. Well… of course you always must to use all of your 7 senses :)

There too many places where you, as a leader, has to be the kind of the saint Santa Claus, who share, cherish and take care of his team mates :) The truth is that the leadership is often about the sweet, stress and all the dirty things, which are not mentioned in the book at all. What about the rat race, which was the plague some time ago and there are still companies which focus on the brilliant individual and not on the team collaboration skills? The “clean laboratory environment” does not surprise actually, as the authors of the book are working for the Leavey School and not for some big corporation, where they could find all of these things. They interviewed number of people, but who washes dirty laundry publicly?

The other problem within the book is that number of sample stories applies to high executives. There is a fragment at the end of the book, which says that anyone can be the leader, but how does it go along with the Joseph Sensenbrenner’s story “It is their duty”. I do not believe that front line employee could change the change in the story. Unfortunately, many stories are told by the chairmen, CTOs and generals – they could do some of the big changes, because they had a power to do it.

The biggest concern is however that unlike “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” the book does not give the full and complex recipe. It seems like the authors collected the very rich set of samples, stories and tactics, but then they did not know what to do with it. Even the proposed way of cataloging them does not seem to work as the same thing is repeated often number of times in various places of the book. Unlike “The 7 Habits …” it does not say also anything about the private life. Can there be the successful professional leader, who is passive in private life?

The book is a big, lost chance to say something more than the bunch of good stories and interesting tactics.

Score: 4(good) /6