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  • Practicing abandonment is critical to your company’s future
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  • What do you think of when you hear Ecosystem?
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  • What we can learn from Mathematicians
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  • The Value of The Contrarian
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Developers and Users should Party Together

Posted on October 14, 2007 | Filed Under Development

Dave Winer once said “Developers and users should party together.” This flies in the face of traditional thinking. Many managers believe that developers can’t be put with clients. Two common are myths: Developers are not “people oriented”, they will say things they shouldn’t.Sure, there are some developers that very good a what they do — coding - and not very good at relating to the rest of us — but this is by no means “the Rule.” The majority of developers are capable of working side by side with users to better understand their needs and to work together to find a solution. Dave Winer points to this joint activity — users and developers need to dream together, have common goals, and common understanding! Open source is a movement that show the benefit of this kind of interaction — there is a rising tide of awareness in open source — make it easy to use, get a feedback loop and listen to it.There are a couple of ground rules your developers should have when working with clients and community:* listen carefully* don’t make commitments* listen non-judgmentally* don’t say “that’s too hard” — let the customer express what they think they need — even if it is too difficult to implement!* listen without waiting to speak* don’t say “that’s easy” — you’re setting expectations* listen from a user’s perspective — put yourself in their shoes* don’t air dirty laundry — be honest and transparent but not negative.When you put your developers with the users you are creating opportunity and conditions for innovation and customer satisfaction. You are making sure your developers have an investment in what their customers need.

Practicing abandonment is critical to your company’s future

Posted on September 16, 2007 | Filed Under Business, Business Model, Business Process, Leadership, Management, Open Source, Technology

“If you weren’t in the business [that you are currently in] today, would you get in to it now?” is just one of the common sense, yet brilliant questions Peter Drucker taught his students to ask concerning their organizations. “If you didn’t have your current business model, would you choose the one you are using?” is another. If the answer is “NO” then you have much to consider.

Many companies hang on to old processes, products, and business models because they are still bringing in revenue, yet [only] “still have a few years left.”

Leaders need to look at what is going on and make hard decisions about the immediate reality and its consequences. Seeing the future is two-fold; first it is recognizing what is about to happen by identifying what IS happening, and second, it is controlling the future by creating it.

A large part of moving forward is letting go of the past. It is difficult to climb mountains with baggage, and it is difficult to adapt for tomorrow while hanging on to yesterday.

Organizations need a systematic approach to abandoning the old for the new. Their leaders need the discipline to ask the questions “why are we doing what we are doing? And why do we do it this way?” on a regular basis. More importantly leaders need the courage to change when the answers to the above questions point to change. There are no sacred cows, everything must be considered on an ongoing basis.

Once the decision is made, you must “Burn the boats!” as Matt Asay has said (Channeling Hernán Cortéz) while blogging on proprietary software companies going to open source. Companies that attempt to live on the fence have little or no success relative to those who successfully abandon the old for the new. Why? Because the old either doesn’t work or is loosing steam – and at that point it takes your best and brightest to keep the old going. Clinging to the old squanders and misappropriates valuable resources – who instead of building the future are busy maintaining the past.

Management

Posted on August 24, 2007 | Filed Under Business

I was speaking with a close friend of mine regarding “project management” and “management” a few weeks back. He pointed out that we should keep in mind that the word management implied different things in each case. The “management” in Management (as in general manager) should be associated with “making decisions,” while the “Management” in project management should be associated with “facilitation.”

His point was simple. Managers make decisions, project managers facilitate. Project managers generally stay out of the decision making process because it impedes and biases their ability to facilitate. They often work with competing stake holders and need to remain objective and neutral.

I’ve been introspecting about the term Management since then. It is an overloaded term to many of us. When we hear management, we think decision making, leadership, facilitation, and a few other things that, due to their four-letter-word nature don’t qualify for space in this blog.

Leaders lead.
Leadership is the act of leading. It is the act of doing the right thing. What separates the good leaders from the bad is their ability to decipher what the right thing to do is.

Stakeholders take decisions.
Decision making is done by those who have a stake in the game at any particular level: strategic and tactical.

Managers facilitate:
Facilitation is making sure the organization has what it needs to succeed. This means providing the appropriate environment and resources, setting and enforcing boundaries and making sure communication is clear.

Clearly we expect our “Management” to lead, have a stake, and facilitate and so it is clear why the terminology is so overloaded. The key is to know when to wear the different hats. That depends on What you are managing (people, tasks, etc), and what the maturity of the thing being managed is.

Strategic Planning

Posted on August 17, 2007 | Filed Under Business

At some point during the fiscal year every organization has to develop a budget for the coming year or years - but every organization goes through a budget process. I know of no one outside of finance who enjoys this process, but it is clearly a necessary evil. But, it seems to me every organization spends way too much time on the budget process, and far too little time on the strategic planning process.

The problem is that if you don’t have an open vetting of the strategic plan - and I mean OPEN, take off the gloves, no sacred cow, vetting - you end up funding the same initiatives over and over again, even though at best you might achieve what you have already been achieving, but nothing more. Don’t you want more? Don’t the shareholders deserve more?

Evidence show that for every minute of strategic planning you do, you save three minutes of execution time - WOW!!! So tell me what shareholder would not want that kind of return on investment? If I knew I could invest one dollar and get three back, I would have already retired!

The problem with strategic planning is that it isn’t fun, and generally there is a blood-trail. Some activities come to a sudden halt and some people may even end up in different roles or jobs. Additionally, people and business units are exposed during this process, and well they should be! Such is the nature of GOOD business.

Strategic planning can only be done by and with leaders - thought leaders. Leaders who; are willing to listen to new creative ideas; not adverse to change; free of personal agenda’s (willing to axe or outsource their own pet projects or activities); are willing to leave; and base their decisions on fact!

Does your organization have the stomach for Strategic Planning?

What do you think of when you hear Ecosystem?

Posted on February 20, 2007 | Filed Under Uncategorized

OK! Don’t look at the comments. What is the very first image that comes top of mind when you here the word ecosystem? Once you have it. Post it in the comments. Once we get a few we’ll go from there.

The Open Source Business Model

Posted on February 20, 2007 | Filed Under Uncategorized

What I love most about open source is that not only do you need a product that people want –
which in some ways depends on who you ask: see Clayton Christensen

But in “giving it away” you ensure that survival depends on quality. Quality of support, quality of community, quality of the product as it matures etc. In my experience open source has been an attractive alternative because it changes the dynamics of the business between customers and vendors, customers and other customers. I guess what I am buying is the Quality of those relationships (support, education, community etc.) and it is well worth paying for. The best part about it is that it has to be earned every day.

Earn it every day? Why not just sell them a bunch of pricy software packages that lock them in over the next 3 years? Doesn’t sound like capitalism to you? It does to me. If Sun can’t provide a better Quality of the relationships I mentioned above around Solaris shame on them… they should own the market.

As a competitive type, I can hardly imagine NOT working for an open source company. I whole-heartedly believe I can provide that *Quality better than you can. I’m certainly willing to compete for your dollars. Today open source is probably best defined by an outside observer as courage … courage to conduct valuable business, courage to give the customer the choice, security to know they aren’t going anywhere because you have what it takes to keep them and resolve to prove that value each day. From the inside it is probably best described as an overt acknowledgement of the writing on the wall.

At our current state of maturity lock-in via proprietary software and huge software investments is still a factor — this will not last much longer. As OSS enters the application space, and other industries (journalism, hardware, automobile manufactures, etc adopt similar models) I believe we are nearing the tipping point. Tomorrow Open Source/Clue Train MO won’t be a matter of courage it will be the status quo. Customers only want to pay for the value they receive. They want a say/participation in that value process. They want the option to walk away when the value goes away.

Gillette proved a long ago that “you can sell a lot of blades by giving away a few razors.”

What we can learn from Mathematicians

Posted on February 13, 2007 | Filed Under Business

I am reading a very interesting book by Ian Stuart, “Letter to a young mathematician”. Sounds as boring as could be, but let me assure you it sheds a great deal of light on what mathematicians do and a how they do it.

I am in search of trying to continue to grow as a manager and as a thinker (though some would question if management and thinking go together – however, for the sake of argument, let’s say they do).

Some of the greatest thinkers of all time have had their roots in mathematics, so in my quest to become a better thinker or at least have a better approach to thinking, I have be researching some basic information on mathematics and mathematicians.

For example, there are some significant corollaries between mathematics and management (and virtually everything else), and some of these corollaries are, there are a lot of unknowns – much yet to be discovered. As with students in K-12 and in undergraduate studies, much of math is presented as if math were complete – everything has or can be solved. If we didn’t teach math at the lower levels in this manner, we would see a radical reduction in the, already small, number of people who become mathematicians.

Mathematics is an area of exploration that has no end – in fact as new things are discovered, more things can be explored (each year over one million new pages on mathematics with written as a result of new research). Ian Stuart uses the analogy of an “anti-pyramid”, or what I would call an upside-down pyramid. At the bottom of the anti-pyramid is a basic building block, and as you learn and understand that basic block, you learn more, building upon the first block, and as you learn the next level, other things become possible. You can’t learn division without understanding subtraction or multiplication. I believe the same can be said for business and management. There is much left to be discovered.

As in math (Einstein, Pythagoras, Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw, Fermat, Newton, etc.), business/management has its stalwarts, Peter Drucker (the father of management), and Jack Welch (perhaps the best business practitioner of all time) come immediately to mind. These two great thinkers didn’t just go to the head of their class – they challenged the norm, in some instances they were judged by their peers as out of touch. Drucker and Welch were pioneers – and others reap the benefits of their hard work today. Their ability to look at what people believe, and to question it, equals that of the great thinkers (movers and shakers) of history.

As managers and business professionals, where do you sit in the scale of thinkers? Do you actually consider yourself to be a thinker? Or are you a follower of others practices? If you follow others, you will only be as good as them, at best – but if you build on what others have done (discovered), then it is likely you too could move the head of the class and set the example for further generations to build upon!

Being a thinker doesn’t have a slogan - Nike, Just Do it. Being a thinker includes questioning your beliefs and others, experimentation, pondering the results, and starting new experiments with new assumptions and new questions.

Innovation

Posted on February 5, 2007 | Filed Under Business

Innovation is an oft overused but misunderstood term. The following are excerpts from some web resources about innovation:

• the successful implementation of creative ideas within an organization
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovation)

• is about making the leap beyond what you have into something genuinely new
(http://www.intelligententerprise.com/)

• is a process, and the “innovator” is often an organisation of people providing a diverse
range of complementary skills and knowledge. Consequently, it is rare for just one
individual to be an innovator. (http://www.acrologic.co.uk/lib/innentown.html)

What is clear is that innovation doesn’t just happen. Innovation comes from an environment that encourages study and experiment; emphasizes creativity; goes beyond what we have; and is done by groups, not individuals.

There is so much to be considered when declaring “we are going to innovate.” We must be willing to take risks – that’s right – willing to fail!!! Not many organizations have the capacity to fail. However, I would suggest that failure is OK. Yes, it is OK to fail as long as there is something to be learned from the experience. Exploration is not a pass/fail type system. Innovation and exploration or indissolubly linked – you can’t have one without the other. Yet, entire organizations are convinced they can innovate without exploration and without risk.

Exploration should be exciting – but when management states what they want as a result, by definition exploration is flawed. Exploration is about uncovering what is unknown – if you know the answer, then there is no exploration.

From a management perspective – Are managers ready to loosen the reins? Are managers prepared to take risk? Lose their jobs? Are they ready to allow their staff to “find their way”? It seems to me that the organizations that succeed in innovating have an environment that encourages or even demands creativity.

One cannot determine what to innovate before they have thoroughly explored.

Hint of the Day – Loosen management’s grip. Stop micro-managing! Explore the possibilities!

The Value of The Contrarian

Posted on January 31, 2007 | Filed Under Business

I have had a change in thought regarding whom to surround myself with - who my “inner circle” is. As a new manager many, many years ago, I surrounded myself with people who in general agreed with me. We would sit around and think large thoughts, and since my direct reports thought like I did, and were strong supporters of me (i.e. “brown-nosers”), our discussions were self fulfilling. What we thought was right – it had to be, since we all thought the same way. What a dope!

As I have matured as a person and as an executive, I have become far more aware of the value of surrounding yourself with people whose view is contrary to my own. The value of contrarians cannot be over stated.

When trying to solve problems or when doing strategic planning, adding differing opinions and philosophies adds incredible value. With contrarians there may be more discussion, and even more upheaval, but when you embrace the effort it takes to value contrary opinions, your results far exceed what you could have accomplished alone or from a single perspective.

The key to surrounding yourself with contrarians is you have to make sure that they know you hired them as a contrarian and that it is important for them to understand and adhere to that role. You must value differing views and opinions, if you want to achieve great results.

Fair and Equitable - Goose and Gander

Posted on January 30, 2007 | Filed Under Business

What determines what is fair and equitable? For example, what is fair and equitable treatment of employees? Does it matter if they are management or staff? Should managers get more perks than staff? They already get one big perk – more money? But when it comes to other things, should managers get more than staff? My quick answer is no, but I am not sure if I’m right.

Say there is a request from someone to attend a conference or to take a course – does their status as staff or manager matter? Not likely – you would make sure that what they wanted to do was in line with their professional development plan. No big deal? But when it comes to dealing with menial things like timesheets or tracking time off, does it matter? Probably not!

Philosophically, shouldn’t rules apply to everyone? If a day off is a day off for staff, shouldn’t it be for managers? If staff isn’t allowed to do X, shouldn’t managers also be banned from the same? Seems simple, but it’s not. Especially if you are the one who sets policies. The attempt to treat everyone equally and fairly is far more difficult than appears on the surface. Perks for management are without question better salaries and parting gifts (for some but not all), but it shouldn’t go further than that.

A sign of good management is that everyone understands the rules, and everyone abides by them – including the policy maker! Shouldn’t executives be setting the example of work ethics and habits? Executives should be model employees! The old adage, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, does in fact hold true!!!

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