Entries from January 2010
I finally got around to reading this book – “The Gift of Fear” by Gavin de Becker after hearing it recommended time and time again for dealing with potentially dangerous situations and to help determine if a relationship is abusive.
This book has been on my list for a long time, but it has always been a lower priority, in the context it usually is recommended (or that I’ve seen it recommended) it didn’t apply to me at all. How wrong I was. This book applies to everyone. I was amazed at some of the common sense advice that can be easily applied to many situations at work and in your personal life.
One of the key messages that hit me revolves around how do you fire someone, and when do you do it. If you are going to fire someone for reasons other than pure performance – for example due to behavior that is threatening or otherwise intimidating you need to do it as soon as possible. This doesn’t mean that you don’t tell the person directly why their behavior is inappropriate in order to remedy the situation. The problem is that most people are loath to approach someone like this in the first place. They wait and wait until a seemingly small infraction becomes the straw that broke the camel’s back. This is bad news. First off, the behavior has been implicitly condoned rather than immediately addressed. Secondly, the perpetrator has become more and more invested in their job over time. And third, since the firing appears to be over a small matter it may be taken badly since the person knows they have done more egregious things in the past.
Another key point of this section is to make sure to treat the person with dignity. If you’re afraid of them, don’t bring muscle into the meeting. No security, no cops, no escorts. This is counter intuitive, but showing your fear and the expectation of a bad outcome actually empowers the person to create one. You are showing that this is what you expect, no? This doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be available if a situation escalates, but this backup should not be visible.
Clearly another key item is to not beat around the bush when you tell someone they are fired. Be clear. You don’t want them to assume that it is just another performance appraisal and a request for change. Also do not negotiate. I loved the boomerang line – “If you had made the decision to leave we would have respected it, and we expect the same from you.”
There are many more lessons in here that can be used in running a successful business. I’ve also added more intuitive skills to my arsenal due to reading this as well. As a woman who has extensively traveled, I’ve become accustomed to late night arrivals and dark parking lots and garages. This book helps me to be better prepared to recognize a situation before it becomes a bad one.
Categories: Book Reviews
Tagged: Attitude, Performance Reviews, Problem Solving, Stress, Women in Business
Every now and then I notice that my weight has gone up by 2 or 3 pounds. This usually happens after a vacation or the holidays. Unfortunately it never wants to go back down on its own, so I figure that it’s time for a tuneup. The best way to do a tuneup is to do a diagnostic to figure out what is going on. Right now I’m in the middle of a tuneup and its not been a lot of fun, but I know I can do better.
First off, I take a look at my exercise program and determine if I’ve been lazy. Am I skipping the hardest exercises? Have I reduced the number of days I lift or my reps or weights because I’m not feeling strong? The worst for me is aerobic exercise. I hate it. Have I been avoiding running or getting on the stairmaster? Exercise is pretty easy for me to address. Food is always harder. I think this happens to everyone. You eat healthy but eventually you sneak in a cookie, or maybe some cheese, or some chips, or what about pizza and beer after volleyball? After a while you get used to that and you add something else. Before you know it, you’re eating a lot more calories. Time to start weighing and measuring. My favorite site for calorie monitoring is fitday.com. It’s free and easy to use and it makes it painfully apparent when I’ve been adding “snacks” to my diet.
This approach can be used on your business as well. Have you examined your costs lately? You don’t want to be cheap, but being frugal sure can help in this economic environment.
- One of the easiest ways to cut costs is to look at your broadband, telephone, and wireless expenses. If your contracts are up you will almost always be able to find a better deal. How do I know? I’ve done it. Actually I cut costs *and* I tripled the bandwidth of a company I worked for by doing a little comparison shopping.
- Does you company have multiple sites? Do you do a lot of travel between them? Do you have a corporate discount at a local hotel? Check out the competition. There is sure to be someone who wants to undercut your current deal.
- If you’re doing a lot of travel – don’t underestimate the savings you can obtain by planning in advance. Short notice flights will cost you dearly.
- If you’re really small do you negotiate with vendors to cut training costs? I’ve managed to secure free conference attendance for my team – something that should have cost $800+ a person. I’ve done this in two different companies.
- When you buy a new hardware or software platform do you ask for a discount? You’d be surprised what you can get if you just ask nicely. I’ve managed 10-35% discounts pretty easily by asking.
This isn’t rocket science, it’s just a matter of paying attention to what you’re doing. Whether is what you put in your mouth at meals or what you spend on an ongoing basis – the solution is the same.
Categories: Corporate Strategy
Tagged: Financial Prudence, Goals, Problem Solving, Taking Responsibility
Having held both product management and product architecture roles I’ve had a lot of experience determining product requirements. One thing that I’ve learned is that there are never enough hours in the day to implement everything that you’d really like to deliver to your customers in the time frame expected. Releasing a product can be compared to a 3 legged stool. You have the requirements or content, you have the amount of resources available (people and machines to do the work), and you have the amount of time it will take. One or more of these has to give in order to ship a product.
In this economic environment adding resources is unlikely – companies can’t afford to add to their payrolls. Many are reducing them. Adding too many resources really doesn’t help anyway. We’ve all seen the impact of too many new hires – everything actually takes longer to get done because of the ramp up time and the rework.
Typically a release is scheduled to occur at a set time as well. Many industries have large trade shows at which you want to demonstrate your product’s new features. Sometimes you have a large potential customer with a tight deadline and that will drive a release as well.
The one thing that is left is winnowing down the product features or content. How do you do that? Well, you have to prioritize and decide what is “good enough”. This can cause a lot of friction in organizations.
A lot of arguments over “good enough” are a symptom of a fragmented corporate culture. Disagreements about what is really necessary come about when the various teams involved have completely different understandings of what the customer’s needs and wants are. This usually happens when information coming directly from customers either wasn’t obtained at all (so the teams were making it all up on their own), or the information wasn’t disseminated throughout the organization in the form of priorities.
Questions to ask in prioritization:
- Is the functionality an integral part of the product as a whole? Is it a way to showcase the product and sell it? Is it the “hook” to get customers with?
- How frequently will the customer use this particular feature or bit of functionality? Always, frequently, often, sometimes, rarely, never(!!!)?
- If this feature fixes a problem, how likely will it be that the customer hits it in their use of the existing product?
- How difficult is it to access this feature or functionality? Number of screen traversals? Clicks? Custom programming or scripting? Does this make sense based on how often a customer will use it?
- Do competitors have this functionality? If so – is it a major selling point of their product? Is this a feature that the company wants to compete with? (or is this not an area of focus?)
- Are there standard performance requirements for the functionality that must be met? (UI, networking) If not, what will the customer tolerate? What will delight the customer? How hard will it be to delight them vs satisfy them?
- Is this a feature multiple customers are begging for? (might be a reason to give them an unpolished version for feedback)
- Is this a feature that your biggest and best customer (or potential customer) really wants?
- Is this a problem multiple customers are complaining about? (and how vehemently? Might be a reason for some extra polish)
Product roadmaps and feature prioritization are living documents. As you learn more about your customers and competitors your product has to change and grow. Make sure you concentrate on the right things first.
Categories: Corporate Strategy · Tactical
Tagged: Priorities, Problem Solving, Productivity, Taking Responsibility
Thanks to The Mad Peacock’s Is It Safe? post for my inspiration today.
In small companies there isn’t a lot of focus on redundancy and reliability in personnel nor in infrastructure. How many people have worked for a company where the corporate e-mail system has gone down for an entire day – or more? I have. Has anyone had a failure in their source code control library that lost a day or more of work across an entire engineering organization? Yup – been there too. Have you ever had someone quit on the spur of the moment and someone else had to figure out what they were working on and what it did? Oh yeah.
Companies are running lean these days and that means that every penny is scrutinized. Unfortunately a lot of times decisions are made that can lead to catastrophic consequences. Consider this scenario – due to budgetary reasons you determine that an automated $40,000 backup and restore system is too expensive, so you have IT run scripts to backup critical data on a weekly basis. Near the end of a weeks worth of work, a critical server goes down. That means that every bit of work your 20 person engineering team introduced has to be mentally recalled, reimplemented, and retested. If your average loaded labor rate is $100k (very low) your average weekly cost for those engineers is ~$38,000. One outage would pay for the entire system – a system that could protect not only engineering data but other corporate data as well. You may argue that a server failure is unlikely, but do you really want to play Russian roulette with your information – especially if it is the intellectual property that makes your company valuable?
There are certain areas that should never be single points of failure.
- Product Development Repositories
- Gold Masters for Released Products
- Financial Records
- Customer Contracts
- Customer Support Issues
- Expertise in Crucial Systems Development
You may be thinking that I am focused on redundant data. That is key, but I believe that the last item in the list is the most important. It is expensive to have two people know exactly the same things – most times it just isn’t feasible. However, through careful dissemination of information through design and code reviews (and the associated documentation) you will be able to piece together developer intent and methodologies much faster than if someone comes in completely cold.
Remember to consider the opportunity cost of NOT protecting your resources, not just the outlay for the processes and tools to do it.
Categories: Corporate Strategy
Tagged: Financial Prudence, Priorities, Problem Solving
I recently read the Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen. 
Some parts of this book feel a little bit outdated due to the primary case study that is used: sustaining vs disruptive changes in the hard drive industry from the 1970s until the 1990s and how the companies in the industry coped with the changing business landscape. However, the messages that are represented are still valuable.
Key points for me include:
” Most managers learn about innovation in a sustaining technology context because most technologies developed by established companies are sustaining in character. Such innovations are, by definition, targeted at known markets in which customer needs are understood. In this environment, a planned, researched approach to evaluating, developing, and marketing innovative products is not only possible, it is critical to success.
What this means, however, is that much of what the best executives in successful companies have learned about managing innovation is not relevant to disruptive technologies.”
In a nutshell, if you are going after the same customer base or market segment you always have – with a known set of needs you won’t get any market research information to help you create disruptive technologies. In reality this data will discourage your attempts.
-and-
… the vast majority of successful new business ventures abandoned their original business strategies when they began implementing their initial plans and learned what would and would not work in the market. The dominant difference between successful ventures and failed ones, generally is not the astuteness of their original strategy. Guessing the right strategy at the outset isn’t nearly as important to success as conserving enough resources so that new business initiatives get a second or third stab at getting it right. Those that run out of resources or credibility before they can iterate toward a viable strategy are the ones that fail.”
Here, the message is that no one gets disruptive technologies right on their first attempt. Make sure to conserve resources and iterate repeatedly until you find that market or that strategy that works.
-and-
Not only do you need the right people to be able to develop your disruptive technologies, you need the right processes, and you need the right values or priorities. This is what makes it so hard to succeed in large companies which have qualified people and the money for the resources. However, the bigger the company, the more rooted in existing processes it is, and the more likely that the priorities of the organization as a whole are tied to large percentage gains in revenue which a new disruptive technology in a nascent industry is unlikely to provide.
Categories: Book Reviews
Tagged: Creativity, Innovation, Management, Priorities, Problem Solving
Unlike a lot of folks, I’ve never really been one for New Year’s Resolutions. I typically address issues as I go throughout the year – it’s easier that way – at least it is for me. I’d rather quietly make small changes in my life on an ongoing basis than try to do a big bang, make a lot of noise and fail. Besides, I already eat pretty well, I work out 5-6 times a week, and I floss my teeth regularly. After about 10 years of effort to make many small changes in these areas I’ve got most of the typical resolutions covered.
However, that strategy isn’t a lot of fun to blog about this time of year. BORING. There is one new thing that I have been working on lately – I started it the week after Christmas and I found that it is helping me get more focused on the things that I want to do with my life going forward. I’ve decided to make a list of my 100 dreams. You might call it a bucket list, but I’d rather be more positive than that. As I cross items off the list I plan to add new items to it. These are things big and small that I want to accomplish in my life. The big ones were easy. I want to be financially secure, I want to hike the entire Appalachian Trail, I want to climb Machu Picchu, and I want to run a successful company. These are things that will take time and a bit of planning. Just putting them on the list gives me permission to start the investigative phase. How? When? Where? What skills and resources (time, people, money, equipment) do I need to collect first?
I’ve come up with 31 out of 100 so far, and I am turning over rocks for some of the smaller ones. Some of the smaller ones are subgoals of the large ones. Some are just things that I want to be able to do. I’d like to be able to deadlift 200lbs. I’m probably not that far off on that one, just been lazy. I need to learn how to roll my kayak at some point. I would like to have a successful vegetable garden – so far I’ve had dismal failures. This time my plan includes getting my soil tested by the agricultural division at NC State.
From a blogging perspective I have a lot of ideas. The biggest thing that I plan to do is to get more involved with other bloggers. I’ve signed up on blogher (women bloggers), I’ve guest blogged for The Mad Peacock Perfection is the Enemy of Good Enough. Very exciting – my first guest blog!
I’m also putting out a request for guest bloggers on my site. Do you have something that you want to say about leadership?
Categories: Personal
Tagged: Branding, Communication, Goals, Motivation
