Monthly Archives: October 2011

Opportunity or Execution

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Brad Feld on Context and the importance of opportunity or execution:

For a big company that dominates a market, it’s totally focused on execution. The company is built for execution and, assuming it is built well, just cranks things out. What it cranks out might be inspiring, or it might not be, but it’ll keep cranking things out.

For these companies, finding the new opportunity is really difficult. The company is tuned to defend its turf, not go find new turf. Execution is all about defending market position, maximizing profit, expanding market share in existing markets, and allocating resources. In a few extraordinary cases, this activity is massively inspired, usually around companies that love their products (Apple) or their customers (Virgin). So – for most of these companies, “execution” is easy relative to finding the new opportunities. And many of these large companies don’t focus on finding the next opportunity, or expanding their existing opportunity, until their business hits major headwinds, is in decline, or is massively disrupted. I give you Borders, B&N, and Blockbuster as examples here – awesome at execution until what they did became irrelevant and then it was too late for them to do anything about it (other than maybe B&N, who might pull off their transition.)

In contrast, startups are totally focused on the new opportunity. Assuming they find it, and it’s a big one, execution becomes the main challenge in front of them. Their activity is all about scaling up the organization, hiring people like crazy, building a culture of shipping great product consistently, reacting effectively to early customer feedback, and continuing to evolve their products to meet the new massive opportunity they are going after.

Families SA is in the lack of opportunity space (with some emphasis on execution too) and TACSI with the help of the Radical Redesign team is cranking up on the opportunity space and will need to figure out execution and scaling up.

Steve Jobs: 1955–2011

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I didn’t know Steve. I never met him. I never worked for him. I never even got one of his famous one-liner email responses.

But it feels like someone close to me has died. He was so intimately involved in his company and its products (which have become critical parts of my career and hobby life), and he has publicly injected so much vision, personality, and care into our entire industry for so long, that I do feel like I knew him, even though I really didn’t.

So while I’m not qualified to write any sort of obituary, I feel moved to write this. It would be callous to keep writing about iPhone minutia without even acknowledging it.

Steve Jobs inspired generations of people to do great things. He certainly inspired me. He will be greatly missed.

I offer my most sincere condolences to his family, friends, and coworkers.

via Steve Jobs: 1955–2011 – Marco.org.

Every company can be a start-up

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In a post-Steve-Jobs world, there is no longer an excuse for large corporations to be less bold than start-ups. Elegance, character, artistic integrity, and ruthless dedication to design can no longer be derided as luxuries of those who don’t have anything to lose. Apple is now one of the largest, most successful companies in the world, but it still behaves as if all of its employees could fit in a 9×7-inch photo.

In an article in the premiere issue of Macworld, members of the Macintosh team were each given a few paragraphs to talk about the project. The very last entry is from Steve Jobs, who characteristically starts by deflecting credit. “The people who are doing the work are the motivating force behind the Macintosh. My job is to create a space for them, to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at bay.”

He ends nostalgically, a wizened veteran of the tech industry at the ripe old age of 29, contemplating the future of the Macintosh team. “The group might stay together maybe for one more iteration of the product, and then they’ll go their separate ways. For a very special moment, all of us have come together to make this new product. We feel this may be the best thing we’ll ever do with our lives.”

via Steve Jobs: a personal remembrance.

Jobs greatest creation is Apple itself

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When Jobs resigned in August, John Gruber wrote “Jobs’s greatest creation isn’t any Apple product. It is Apple itself.” I couldn’t agree more. While I’m lucky to have been able to have received both product and demo advice from the man, I’m privileged to have had even the briefest experience with the culture of Apple that he helped create. Excellence, quality, passion, attention to detail — those aren’t just attributes of Apple products, they’re attributes of how people at Apple work.

Over the next few days and weeks, we’ll hear a lot about what Jobs did at Apple over the last ten years. While he may be impossible to replace, I have to believe that the senior team at Apple knows that their most important job, and the best way to honor his memory, is to continue the culture he created at Apple. Based on what I saw three years ago — and the products they’ve introduced since — I’m bullish.

via two minutes with steve – sippey.com.

Steve Jobs: Making a dent in the universe

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If you made a movie of Steve Jobs’s life (not that one), nobody would believe it. Think of how many amazing creations have come from a Steve Jobs-managed company. The Apple II, the world’s first mass-produced personal computer. The Macintosh, the basis for almost every single personal computer interface on the planet today. Pixar, one of the most successful movie studios of all time. The iPod and iTunes, which transformed the music industry and changed how we listen to music. The iPhone, which upended the stagnant cellphone industry and created the concept of a modern smartphone. And the iPad, which defines a category and pays off the original Mac’s promise of being a “computer for the rest of us.”

This is legendary stuff. I’m still trying to process it, to give it some time and not just start chanting santo subito, but it’s hard not to look at that list and imagine that Steve Jobs will go down in the history of business and industry as a legendary figure like Thomas Edison or Henry Ford. That those of us who are lucky enough to grow old and rickety (in a way that, cruelly, Steven Paul Jobs was never allowed to) will say that we saw that man stand upon a stage with a giant Apple logo behind him and introduce a new iconic, world-changing product.

via Steve Jobs: Making a dent in the universe | Computers | Mac Word | Macworld.

The management method for knowledge workers by Joel Sposky

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Joel writes here about software developers and hightech teams however, in the end they are knowledge workers. As Drucker has reminded us, Knowledge workers are everywhere – doctors, lawyers, scientists, social workers, teachers, software developers. Just a few excerpts from this three part series. Read the whole thing.

The Command and Control Management Method – Joel on Software

In life or death situations, the military needs to make sure that they can shout orders and soldiers will obey them even if the orders are suicidal. That means soldiers need to be programmed to be obedient in a way which is not really all that important for, say, a software company.

In other words, the military uses Command and Control because it’s the only way to get 18 year olds to charge through a minefield, not because they think it’s the best management method for every situation.

In particular, in software development teams where good developers can work anywhere they want, playing soldier is going to get pretty tedious and you’re not really going to keep anyone on your team.
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In software development teams everybody is working on something else, so attempts to micromanage turn into hit and run micromanagement. That’s where you micromanage one developer in a spurt of activity and then suddenly disappear from that developer’s life for a couple of weeks while you run around micromanaging other developers. The problem with hit and run micromanagement is that you don’t stick around long enough to see why your decisions are not working or to correct course. Effectively, all you accomplish is to knock your poor programmers off the train track every once in a while, so they spend the next week finding all their train cars and putting them back on the tracks and lining everything up again, a little bit battered from the experience.

The Econ 101 Management Method – Joel on Software

Robert Austin, in his book Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations, says there are two phases when you introduce new performance metrics. At first, you actually get what you wanted, because nobody has figured out how to cheat. In the second phase, you actually get something worse, as everyone figures out the trick to maximizing the thing that you’re measuring, even at the cost of ruining the company.

The Identity Management Method – Joel on Software

When you’re trying to get a team all working in the same direction, we’ve seen that Command and Control management and Econ 101 management both fail pretty badly in high tech, knowledge- oriented teams.

That leaves a technique that I’m going to have to call The Identity Method. The goal here is to manage by making people identify with the goals you’re trying to achieve. That’s a lot trickier than the other methods, and it requires some serious interpersonal skills to pull off. But if you do it right, it works better than any other method.

The problem with Econ 101 management is that it subverts intrinsic motivation. The Identity Method is a way to create intrinsic motivation.
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In general, Identity Management requires you to create a cohesive, jelled team that feels like a family, so that people have a sense of loyalty and commitment to their coworkers.

The second part, though, is to give people the information they need to steer the organization in the right direction.