On diversity

Diversity in high tech is a hot topic these days.  Well known bloggers like Vivek Wadhwa, Brad Feld, Eric Ries and the guys at Venture Hype have been trying to advance the case for women in technology.

As a woman in a male dominated industry, I find it both funny and depressing to watch these powerful men speak up for the women.  I only wish an equally powerful woman could have told our side of the story!

Gender issues aside, Eric made many great points about why diversity matters.  Here is a quote that I particularly like.

One of the most pernicious effects of groupthink is the sense of entitlement it breeds. Teams that are complacent are less likely to challenge their own assumptions, less likely to listen to feedback and, therefore, less likely to learn.

This is absolutely true.  I see this phenomenon everywhere.  Teams that are all the same gender, or race, or age, or economic circumstances, all tend to think alike.   Since they are all so alike, they project themselves on everyone else and remake the world in their image.  It’s a lot harder for teams like that to understand what it’s like to be someone else. This hurts when they are designing products and services for someone else.

A little diversity goes a long way in shaking up this complacency.   It makes people uncomfortable.  It rocks the boat.  It makes people think and wonder.  It makes it a little easier for folks to realize: People are Different.  And that’s the beginning of the end of arrogance.

Show up on time

I just read a new post by Dan McCarthy from the Great Leadership blog about how being on time is an important attribute of a good leader.  I could not agree more.  Being late (or worse, being AWOL) says a lot more about who we are than we realize.

• If we are habitually late, we are telling people that we disrespect their time.
• If we are always on time for meetings with big kahunas, but are habitually late to meetings where we ourselves are the big kahunas, we are telling our team members that we respect our rank more than we respect them.

Lateness in deliverables also communicates disrespect.

• If we are habitually and substantially late with our deliverables to other team members, despite a clearly defined schedule everyone agreed upon, we are telling people that we not only disrespect them, but we think little of our commitment to the projects we are working on with them.
• We are teaching people not to trust us when we promise anything.
• Over time, if people have a choice, they will try to avoid working with us altogether, since they can’t get their job done if they have to depend on us.  It doesn’t get much more career limiting than that.

Punctuality is a window into our core values.  We should all watch what is showing through that window.

New Year’s Resolutions

Happy New Year!  Here are my New Year’s resolutions.  What do yours look like?

• Live more in the moment and enjoy what we have.
• Celebrate small victories.
• Spend more time listening and less time talking.
• Pause longer before reacting.
• Socialize and help facilitate socialization at work while maintaining productivity.
• Make professional development plans for all team members.
• Make good enough decisions based on good enough data, then iterate.
• Make it easy for everyone to keep the main thing the main thing.

Top startup articles from last week

Finally caught up on my reading after a nice long weekend.  Here are some good articles from last week.  Enjoy.

• Trading deals: a lost art
• Fear of bad ideas
• Releasing early is not always good? Heresy!
• Valuation metrics: what’s your company worth?
• Early adopters don’t make your market
• Stealth startups, get over yourselves – nobody cares about your secrets
• How many hats do you wear? Team leadership: roles and responsibilities
• 10 lessons learned in 2009

Contractors or permanent hires?

In this uncertain economy, a startup is often caught in a Catch 22 situation when it comes to staffing and team building.  What do you do when you have a lot of work now, but you cannot predict whether the work will be there in 6 or 12 months?

Nobody likes to let good people go.  A decision to take on a permanent new hire is not something I take lightly.  To avoid hiring on spec, a lot of people turn to hiring consultants or contractors to get the work done while mitigating risk.  The thinking is that we can plug the current need with contractors now without resulting in a long term bump in the company’s operating budget. If the work stays and there is budget for it, wonderful.  If not, no hard feelings – we simply part ways when the work goes away.

This method can work wonders, but I have seen it being taken too far.  This is particularly problematic if some specific and esoteric domain knowledge is required to build the product itself.  So the next time the company needs to get something done, they have to incur the learning curve all over again.

I believe in striving for balance between the conflicting needs of not over-hiring and not building core competencies. I like the following model:

• Hire contractors with domain expertise to address specific and transient project needs
• Hire excellent generalists to become permanent members of the team. Do temp-to-hire if possible so we can test-drive the relationship and make sure the team member will thrive in the company in the long run.
• Have the contractors work with in-house staff to complete their projects.  The project is done as quickly as possible, the in-house staff is cross trained in a new area they are unfamiliar with, and the company gets to build up its core competencies. It’s a win-win situation.

How have you addressed this challenge in your company?

Top 10 startup articles of the week

Here are 10 great articles I read last week.  Enjoy and have a good weekend.

• What is being a startup really about?
• 10 common mistakes that startups and small companies make
• How to eat a five hundred pound marshmallow
• A VC’s advice on how to pitch VC’s
• Comments are the new black
• How to bring a product to market / A very rare interview with Sean Ellis
• Launching a new product
• 10 ways to recognize the innovators in your organization
• What is lean about the lean startup?
• Beware the hockey stick in your budget

Cultivating a sense of community in the workplace

Last night I went to a holiday party with a bunch of ex-coworkers from one of my prior lives.   As we caught up with each other and shared memories about funny people we knew and funny things we did, I had an incredible sense of community.  Here we were, many years later, fondly remembering the time we worked together as a team, and thinking of ourselves as a group even though our career paths have dispersed us far and wide.

Why did this team feel such lasting loyalty to each other?  While many of us are the same age, some are more than 10 years north or south of the median.  Some of us worked together during the so-called golden years when we took our technology to market for the first time (before we realized what can’t be done), but others joined well after that time.   There is no discernable pattern in our backgrounds – some are engineers, some are in sales and marketing, and we are ethnically all over the map.

I finally realized that we were the product of a company culture where people were expected to work hard AND play hard.  The playing seems to make all the difference.  I remember the time when my entire engineering team went AWOL in the middle of the day.  One of my software managers had spontaneously organized everybody to go see “Star Wars: Episode II”.  This happened only once in the 7 or 8 years I was there.  It would have resulted in an inquiry in any other company I worked for.  Here, everybody knew the engineers would make up the lost time, we didn’t slip any deliverables, and it was a vastly better bonding experience than any other organized company outing they attended.

This team was well socialized and it showed. They worked together well, they helped each other out, information and knowledge was shared freely and spontaneously.  This team was one of the highest performing teams I’ve worked with.

Of course, this only works if the coworkers genuinely like each other.  This starts with recruiting for cultural fit as well as technical skills, and is fostered by a work environment where there are occasions for people to hang out socially while at work (by providing free lunch or free beer on a recurring basis).

Team building is an art and a science, but when done right it can elevate the workplace into a community that people are proud to be a part of.  I am proud to be an alumna of this team and will always use it as a template for team building in the future.

Top 10 startup articles of the week

Here are ten great startup articles from the past week. Enjoy!

• Want to be a CEO? Try product management first
• What is really meant by failing early, failing often, and failing cheap?
• The cowardly manager’s guide to dealing with poor performers
• What is good enough? Lame duck versus phased releases
• The arrogant venture capitalist: a view from the trenches
• Venture capital 2009: the year in review
• 10 skills I look for before writing a check
• Startup software development – do your homework before developing anything
• How to get others thinking strategically
• Introducing the X-lists: the region’s best resources for innovators and entrepreneurs

Peanut butter resource allocation

I came across a great article on the peanut butter approach to resource allocation. Here’s how it works.

• Start with way too many programs to be properly staffed or funded with current resources.
• Experience extreme reluctance to axe any of these programs (because they are all such good ideas).
• To keep everybody happy, spread a thin layer of available resources across everything, so everyone gets a share.

Everything is staffed lightly, so nothing dies.  However, nothing really takes off either, because no single program is staffed for success.  At the end of the day you have a swarm of zombie projects that collectively spell failure.

My take: keep the peanut butter in the pantry.  Step up and make the hard choices.  Figure out what’s important and axe what’s not important.  Not doing it is an invitation to a spectacular flop.

When your first product isn’t selling

I’m a big fan of the lean startup philosophy.  Applied judiciously, this can save a lot of startups from developing a bloated product that nobody cares about.

While I don’t think the minimum viable product concept can be naively applied to hardware products, I do think that the basic principle of not over-designing the product and testing early and often with real customers are the key to developing a great product and a successful business around it.

One of the key tenets of lean startup is the pivot.  Eric Ries has a great post that explains this concept. The core idea is that when your product isn’t performing in the market, pivot, don’t thrash.  Change direction, but stay grounded in what you have learned.   Take prudent risks. Over time and across multiple pivots, the company could end up in a substantially different place from the  original vision, but it will have done so over multiple iterations with a process oriented approach, always grounded in facts and in customer feedback.

Pivoting is easier said than done. Generally when something doesn’t work, the leadership team does one of two things:

• Prematurely announce the product is a dead loss, and launch a new product development effort to chase the Next Big Thing
• Refuse to give up and doggedly try to get it to work long after all rational alternatives have been exhausted

None of these are helpful.  Abandoning ship prematurely throws away valuable customer learnings and brings the company back to square one, resulting in thrashing.  Doing the same thing over and over again in hopes it will work eventually is a measure of insanity.

The trick is to find the courage to acknowledge there is a problem, take a deep breath, and find a way to do a course adjustment that is solidly grounded on facts and learnings, that will hopefully lead to the right solution.  Easier said than done… but it’s the only responsible thing to do most of the time.