Ian Gotts says nobody seems to care about BPM – on the basis of attending a conference (unnamed) in the USA, that was sparsely attended.  He has a great picture of the room, nearly empty, that presumably he was speaking in.  Of course, that picture could be taken before everyone comes in to sit down – it might not be intended to be taken for a literal head-count.  But the point is clear:

I was keynote speaker at an event billed as ‘one of the USA’s most important BPM events’ – 500 attendees.  Gartner gets fewer 1,000 at their US BPM Summit.

In contrast Dreamforce (image right), which is Salesforce’s PAID annual user event gets 25,000 delegates.

As I pointed out in a comment on his blog, this is a bit of apples and oranges.  I don’t believe any of Gartner’s conferences have 25,000 delegates.  They’re analyst-driven conferences that tend to appeal more to executives than rank and file users.  Gartner’s CRM conferences aren’t attended by 25,000 people either…

On the other hand, IBM Impact was attended by north of 8000 people last year. Appian’s user conference had record attendance, as well.  IBM’s other conferences have similarly large numbers of attendees (I believe the IOD conference is even bigger than Impact, for example).

Ian asks:

So what is it?  Perhaps BPM has been around too long and everyone knows about it, so they don’t need to attend conferences and measuring conference attendance is misleading. But the world has moved on with technology enabling fantastic advances in operational excellence, so surely there is a need for continued education. And similarly, CRM has been around 20 years or more yet Salesforce conference attendance is still climbing.

What is it?  It is vendor-focus rather than analyst focus.  As I commented in his blog, these are just different audiences.  The vendor conferences are more users as well as decision-makers.  Users don’t generally go to analyst conferences, however.  And if you’re going to your vendor’s conference- do you really need to go to one or two more analyst conferences?  Probably not.

It isn’t that BPM is too broad, any more than CRM is too broad – it is just that vendor conferences are a bit more interesting than vendor-agnostic analyst conferences.  And hey, the vendors usually bring in better bands and entertainment!

My experience is that BPM enthusiasm at conferences is running high – at software vendor conferences, that is – and so I find myself in disagreement with Ian on this one.

What a great blog post from Chris Dixon, “Who should learn how to program?” :

Businesses all over the world need more programmers. Every company I know is hiring engineers (e.g. see this list of NY tech startups). Top programmers can make $100K+ right out of college. Yet there were only about 14,000 computer science (CS) majors last year. Meanwhile about 40,000 people got law degrees even though demand for lawyers has been shrinking. America is suffering from what economists call structural unemployment:  jobs are available but our labor force isn’t trained for those jobs.

Plentiful job opportunity is just one great reason for people to learn how to code (program).  Unfortunately, after the dot-com bust, the news media and many cynical people convinced many college students that software jobs were going overseas and never coming back.  It was a classic market-driven overreaction to a correction. In places where students have good data about market dynamics (e.g. Stanford) the number of computer science majors are up double-digit percentages each of the last 3-4 years.  Additionally, there’s been a big increase in software-related fields, not typically classified as Computer Science (like Symbolic Systems, electrical engineering, and certain types of engineering and product design).

Chris also points out that programming is a great foundation for starting a tech company.  Hard to argue with that.  If your goal is to start a company, knowing how to code will give you a much better chance of achieving that dream than just about any other skill.  Taking BP3 as an example-  a services company that you might not think requires programming skills to start: I have a computer science background, and Lance knows how to write code, though it isn’t part of his job description(!).  Knowing how to code and being able to do it were what allowed us to start BP3.  And those skills translate well to nearby fields like statistics, that require structured or algorithmic thinking.

Programming is good for your brain – to misquote (slightly) Steve Jobs, it is like a bicycle for the mind. You’ll be amazed at how well you can remember not only where specific lines of code are in your work, but by how long you can retain this knowledge, often even years later being able to trivially skim through your code to the right spot to fix a defect.

An even better point Chris brings up is this one:

  Programming is an important part of being “culturally literate.”

It is hard to underestimate this today.  I’m raising two children.  We’re exposing them to an immersion school that teaches them to speak fluent Spanish (as well as their native English).  But the school (and through some help from outside of school) we’re also teaching them Mandarin (and a little Cantonese).  If our children graduate from college fluent in English, Spanish, and Chinese – they’ll be able to do business almost anywhere in the world and converse with people from all over the world.  They’ll be much better off than their monolingual father, to face the challenges of the future.  But there are two more “languages” I will try my best to pass on to them:

• programming.  If our children learn how to write software, it will open up vast opportunities to them.  It isn’t about how many software languages they learn – even one will be a big head start heading into college.
• product design.  I don’t think it matters if it is physical design or software design, but I want to impart to the kids something of the language of design – the terminology, the flavor, the subtlety of how you talk about it.  I once compared “design language literacy” to the way chefs talk about food and cooking.  If you want to communicate with a chef (or a foodie) about food, you need to learn their language and vocabulary.  Similarly, for design, we need to learn the vocabulary and thought processes to communicate effectively – even if we don’t intend to become a designer.

These programming and product design skills are “meta” languages in a sense.  They transcend national borders and historical language affiliation.

The comment section of Chris Dixon’s blog puts the exclamation point on the value of this post to the general school of thought about coding.

So who should learn how to write code?  You should.  Your children should.

Great interview of Ron Johnson, the new JC Penney CEO, by Seattle Times… In it, Ron pointed out the stores he admires – Whole Foods and Starbucks, and why:

Q. Other than Apple, which stores do you admire?
A. I admire lots of stores. Whole Foods is a great store. I just like their passion for food. It shows up in everything they do. It shows up in their packaging, their presentation and their employees. Starbucks. It truly has created a community. As I travel around the world, I just know that if I go to Starbucks I will have a great experience.

He’s right -Whole Foods is almost the sale of groceries art form.  Starbucks has an incredibly consistent experience.  These are two companies with a very strong process culture.  Ron focuses on the end result (the store experience), but it is deeper than that -  these companies also go deep into their supply chain and understand the origins of everything they’re selling (and then use their buying power to influence the supply chain).  When you motivate that process-focus with a passion for the product (organic food, or coffee), the results seem to be much better than passion without process, or process without passion.  It is almost impossible to tell whether process-focus led to a designed-in passion for food and coffee (to achieve the desired result) or whether passion for the food/coffee drove the focus on process in order to achieve the goal.  But the two together are a powerful tool for a big company to drive excellence.

Another part got my attention:

Q. What ideals have you embraced from Steve Jobs?

A. The importance of doing everything you do to your very best. And that the journey is the reward. If you do things well one at a time, you end up in a really good place. Don’t get ahead of yourself. Control the things you can.

The Apple approach to building a relationship with the customer starts with doing each of the little things really well.  Being a retailer, perhaps “each of the little things” doesn’t start with designing product, but for sure JC Penney has to be looking at design of stores, pricing, brand presentation, and customer service.  I have such a negative opinion of the JC Penney brand, that it is hard for me to imagine shopping there for any reason, for any product.  Literally, it is hard to conceive.

Yet reading this interview, I’m rooting for Ron.  He gets it.  If anyone can turn this around, he can.  But I’d be more inclined to shop there if the name were changed to “Ron Johnson’s” instead of JC Penney.

Getting introspective for a moment – is your organization getting better, one thing at a time?  Are you prioritizing to address the most important things first – but without forgetting about the little things?  Are you distracted by trying to do or change too many things at once? Are you marrying passion and process and following where that leads you in your business?

The highlight (for me) of last year’s SXSW-interactive conference was the Lean Startup SXSW – a whole day of planned content, mainly in one room (in the AT&T executive center) focused on the idea of “the lean startup”.  Eric Ries and team did a phenomenal job bringing together a set of topics and speakers that you just normally wouldn’t get exposure to in a single day.

Leveraging the success of that forum, SXSW has created the Startup Village this year.  The 4th floor of the Hilton will be converted to startup mecca.  I thought the “Lean Startup SXSW” track might have gone away in favor of this modified (and bigger billing) approach.  Apparently not so.  Today SXSW.com announces that they’re bringing Lean Startup SXSW back – and some of the chief instigators are involved again – Eric Ries, Dave McClure, Steve Blank, 500 Startups, et al:

The Lean Startup SXSW will take place on Saturday, March 10th from 9:30am – 6:00pm at the Downtown Hilton (across from the Convention Center), and the most up-to-date agenda can be found here.

So, more central location, same Saturday location in the schedule (good call).  The agenda already has enough speakers identified for me to plan my Saturday schedule.

Once again, good evidence of how SXSW adapts and co-opts good ideas from the outside.  Congrats to the organizers, I’m looking forward to it.

I guess if we can have Technical Debt, and Process Debt, why not Management Debt?

Ben Horowitz’ post on Management Debt is a good read, but one thing that separates it from technical debt or process debt is that it seems to my own naivete that it almost never pays to pick up the management debt if you can avoid it, as described by Ben:

Like technical debt, management debt is incurred when you make an expedient, short-term management decision with an expensive, long-term consequence. Also like technical debt, the trade-off sometimes makes sense, but often does not. More importantly, if you incur the management debt without accounting for it, then you will eventually go management bankrupt.

He gives three tough examples – two in a box, overcompensation, and no feedback loop.

In the end, it comes down to leadership even more than management.  In each of his scenarios, good leadership cuts through the problems or is willing to pay the debt now rather than later.

In Brakoniecki’s post on Lean Start-ups and the idea of Entrepreneur, he delves into the apparent conflict between the Taylor “Great Man” theory, and the Lean Startup’s emphasis on leadership, and learning (all while in essence refuting the idea of the Great Man). I commented on his blog directly but thought I’d share my thoughts here as well:

The relationship between the Great Man theory and Entrepreneur is a bit of a quandary in the lean startup community.  On the one hand, many people in the startup business contend, paraphrased, that “entrepreneurs are born rather than made.”  But the lean startup seems to say that entrepreneurship can be taught, learned, rather than born inside you.

The “born with it” argument, to me, seems to be in alignment with the idea of building companies around Great Men (very Ayn Rand, in my humble opinion).  But that doesn’t make it correct.  In my experience, these things aren’t mutually exclusive.

I’d put it this way.  For some people, being a good entrepreneur *appears* to be innate.  We don’t know the person well enough to know how this talent developed, and what their experiences were – they’re a black box. To us, as if by magic, they are really good at entrepreneurship (and leading).  For others, it is more obviously a learned, thoughtfully acquired skill.

But I would argue that for literally everyone – born with it or not – if you decide to begin the journey of entrepreneurship, you can improve your chances if you learn.  And learning what Lean Startup has to offer is clearly a benefit- even if you choose not to apply lean startup methods to your efforts, at least you’re making an informed decision.  If you do apply lean startup, then of course the goal is that you also learn about your potential market and customers faster as well.

One thing clear to me is that lean startup (any startup) still requires leadership.  It’s hard to imagine any other possibility.  Critical decisions, pivots, and hires have to be made.  I just don’t see how you do that without good leadership.

And of course the other wrinkle is that not all leadership looks the same.  Contrast Tony Hsieh‘s style with Steve Jobs for example…

I never considered myself a Mark Cuban fan.  But when I read his blogs and excerpts from his book I find him very convincing.  It just doesn’t translate into most of the TV appearances I’ve seen.

One Entrepreneur.com, they’ve run an expert from his book “Mark Cuban’s 12 Rules for Startups” that really hits the spot for us at BP3.  A couple of highlights for us:

1. “Don’t start a company unless it’s an obsession and something you love” – well, I’d have softened this a bit- either starting a company, or what the company is focused on, needs to be an obsession and something you love.  You need one or the other. Preferably both, but one or the other are mandatory.  When Lance and I started BP3, we were passionate about BPM and convinced we needed to start a company to achieve our vision around BPM services delivery.  But it started with passion on the subject matter for us. That said, it wasn’t the first time for either of us to venture off on our own and attempt to start something, and we’d both worked for other people’s startups.
2. “If you have an exit strategy, it’s not an obsession.” Very true.  Another bad sign: you have hobbies.  When you’re starting up, if you’re passionate about the startup and the subject matter, where is the time for hobbies? Many founders are like Lance and I – married with kids.  There’s no time for hobbies for the time being.
3. “Hire people who you think will love working there.”  Right.  If they think BPM is boring, we don’t hire them!
4. “Sales Cure All.”  Absolutely.  Almost any problem your company has can be fixed if you sell more (or more profitably) so that you have the funds to invest in fixing the problem.
5. “Know your core competencies and  focus on being great at them.”  - If you’re doing a services startup, this is a must.  Time is really precious, focus is really precious.
6. “An espresso machine?”  I think coffee is critical – for me even if it isn’t for everyone else!  But we also dig the free sodas.  And there’s a deli on the first floor.  And a small gym. It matters.

There’s more in the article, worth reading.

Steve Blank consistently writes one of the best blogs.  His installment (at least 2 parts) on the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps is no exception.

Of course the knee-jerk reaction from most people is that government cannot help in such situations without screwing things up… but then you see things like this:

63 scientists and engineers in 21 teams made 2,000 customer calls in 8 weeks, turning laboratory ideas into formidable startups. 19 of the 21 teams are moving forward in commercializing their technology.

That’s a great result from what they set out to tackle.  And of course there are no guarantees that these ideas will work – odds are most of the 19 proceeding will fail. But if the NSF can get scientists thinking about commercializing the tech they produce, the economy (and the US) will benefit as a result.

And keep in mind Steve Blank’s “Secret history of Silicon Valley”:

The Scientists, the NSF and the teaching team were all going to go where no one had before.

Given that Silicon Valley had started with scientists and engineers not MBA’s, I thought this was a bet worth making.

Pretty cool.  But the crazy thing is that they’re going to keep going – doing cohorts of 25 going forward.  Have to applaud this program for trying to get the most out of government R&D dollars – and hopefully spawning some startups in the process.  Just another interesting test case for the “process” of teaching entrepreneurship (and as he put it, applying the scientific method to developing a business).

Happy New Year to our readers!

2011 was a very good year for BP3 – again, thanks to our customers, and our team.  Our customers continued to invest in BP3 and in BPM, and we’re grateful for the opportunity to help customers achieve success with BPM.  We had some great moments this year – we spoke at IBM Impact with one of our customers, rolled out more production deployments than ever, and had our first all-hands meeting.

Our team is the other major factor in our success.  It is a really good feeling to see teammates pulling together to help each other.  The maturity and experience of our team is the best, bar none.  And yet, our team is humble enough to keep trying to get better, to be well-aware of our weaknesses and strengths.  Every day we go to work thinking about how to improve.

We also made the 2011 “Fast 50” list in Austin for the first time in 2011 (covering years 2008, 2009, and 2010).   We followed up with another banner year – we doubled revenue in 2011, above our expectations.  Without releasing the exact number, you can do the math based on previous publications.   One can argue that a rising tide lifts all boats, but it isn’t so much the big, general, service providers that I see getting traction in the market, it still appears to be the focused “pure play BPM” consultancies that are getting the most traction (and creating the most successes).  This isn’t just true in one vendor ecosystem – it appears to be true across several different OEM software vendor ecosystems.

2011 exposed several memes that were circulating among pundits and bloggers.  My summary of our learnings follows each:

• BPM is Dead.  In fact, 2011 has seen BPM achieve more mainstream success (and press coverage) than ever before.  Far from dying, it is still fostering innovation, consolidation, and customer adoption.
• BPM won’t do well as the economy improves.  I think we could all agree that the economy in 2011 was better, but not good enough to really test this theory.  I still contend that you can’t predict the next economic cycle based on the results of the last cycle – each one is just enough different to surprise you.  This one might be the one where companies continue to invest in process improvement even as growth resumes.
• BPM innovation is over.  I still see interesting innovations happening across a number of vendors-  IBM BPM’s chief innovation has been leveraging IBM’s software in an environment that still feels like Lombardi’s user-friendly BPM environment- versioning and all.  Appian continues to innovate in cloud deployments and mobile BPM.  Isus continues to blaze its own path.  Tibco has picked up Nimbus to add to its own ActiveMatrix BPM.  Activiti and Bonitasoft continue to improve open source options – and Activiti in particular is taking a few different turns as they build out their feature set.  And that really doesn’t do justice to the other folks who are testing out innovative ways to build processes – from data mining for processes to using natural language to express them.
• Austin and Texas will fare better than the US in general in 2011.  Based on Novembers statistics of a 6.6% unemployment rate in Austin, I’d say that’s true.  It appears likely to drop again for December.
• The Process Body of Knowledge effort kicked off with the aim of being the wikipedia for BPM.  These kinds of efforts take a long time to get momentum and really take on an inertia and life of their own.  But if they can get it going, it should be really interesting for the BPM community.
• We started to hear concerns from within the ACM community itself about its risk of  failure.  In fact, in February, ACM was declared dead by one of its own.
• Simplicity and Experience.  These themes just seem to be driving value in the software and consumer markets right now.  And yet many enterprise software companies still aren’t paying attention to these key value propositions.
• There is a lot to learn from startups, which can be applied to our BPM efforts. As startups examine the process of starting, and the process of product development and customer discovery, they’re exposing a lot of nuggets of wisdom about BPM, though the terminology and perspective is different.  Moreover, researchers and entrepreneurs are starting to coalesce around a set of processes for starting up companies and developing products.  It is really fascinating to both observe and participate in.
• SXSW-interactive is a monster.  The conference continues to have an impact on tech and social media.  And despite being “too big” every year, it just keeps getting more interesting and evolving in unexpected ways.  The latest transformation seems to be more startup orientation.
• BPM conferences’ attendance was up.  Both Impact and Gartner had much higher attendance in conferences closely aligned with BPM in 2011.
• We had our first all-hands meeting.  We should have done it sooner.  Leadership and people are the heart of any business, and the heart of any BPM initiative.
• There were several more acquisitions. Consolidation continues, even as new seeds are planted in new startups.

The future for BPM never looked brighter. And by implication, the future for BP3 has never looked brighter.  We see some really important opportunities in front of us, and we are, right now, making the investments that we think will position us to better help our customers going forward.

We’ll have some interesting announcements to make in 2012 as we get deeper into the year.  We have a few opportunities to really improve our value proposition to the BPM market and intend to follow through on a couple of those this year, and we’re looking forward to sharing our thoughts about the future soon.

What a great year for BPM 2011 was.  And it was also a good year of blogging for BP3!

Not that volume page views is our goal per se, but something happened in 2011 as pageviews jumped from a ~3000/month range to a 4500-5000/month range.  Hopefully this means we’re doing our job well, which is writing about BPM, startups, staffing, and other topics that affect business processes.  Our main goal is to communicate our passion for BPM and foster discussion and thought in the space.

One change in 2011 is the iPad2.  With this new device, I was able to take notes at conferences more comprehensively than before – no concerns over battery life, and it is lightweight enough to lug it around all day without needing to see a chiropractor.

Most popular posts in 2011:

1. Apple and Business Process Management
2. Penny for Your Thoughts (IBM BPM 7.5)
3. BPMN 2 Examples Courtesy of Camunda
4. IBM Quietly Updates BPM
5. The Battle of TLAs: BPM is Transforming ECM
6. Consulting Math vs. Software Math
7. Why use BPM over other workflow tools? – A succinct explanation of why you use BPM
8. Migrating to IBM BPM 7.5
9. SXSW 2011 day 2. The Lean Startup Phenomenon
10. Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder with IBM BPM 7.5. #ibmimpact

Clearly posts about IBM’s products were well-received, perhaps because of the practical and immediate value of this kind of information.  But it is nice to see the staying power of a few other topics.  The most surprising thing about this list is that the most-read blog is from 2009.  Yes, Apple and BPM is still a hot topic in 2011… and that post still shows up regularly on our daily top-reads list.  Perhaps the reason it is still well-read is that it didn’t become quickly dated.  Similarly, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Consulting Math vs. Software Math on the list next year. Finally, “Why use BPM” is a post that is from 2008 – and still cracks our top-10 for 2011.  It is as relevant today as it was 3-4 years ago.

For a second year in a row, despite plenty of posts and comments, the ACM posts did not crack the top 10 most-read posts.

1. Search engines -> Search results
2. Twitter
3. Google
4. LinkedIn
5. Lijit
6. brsilver.com – thanks Bruce!
7. activiti.org
8. paper.li
9. Google Reader
10. BP-3.com

So search is the #1 way people find our blog posts apparently.  But what were they searching for?

1. IBM BPM 7.5
2. Apple business process
3. Apple operational processes and procedures
4. bpms definition
5. bpmn examples

Look for more guest posts from our team in 2012, and more about BPM!

According to Naval, we’ve got the problem all wrong:

“There isn’t a shortage of developers and designers. There’s a surplus of founders.”

He makes a compelling argument as to the “why” :

The cost of starting a company has collapsed. It’s now just (minimal) salaries. For entrepreneurs, desks are free, hosting is free, marketing is online, and company setup is cheap.

Raising the first $25K for product development is easy – join an incubator. Raising the next $100K is easy – investors are following the incubators with automatic notes. Building a product and launching a product are easy – develop on Open Source Stacks, host on Amazon, launch on Facebook, Android or iOS, get your early traction.*

Getting real traction is hard. Raising millions of dollars is hard. Building a sustainable, long-term company is hard.

Basically, he makes the point that if you’re pre-traction, you have to expect to give up a lot more equity to grow your company than if you’ve already got traction.  In the microcosm of the overall market that I see, in professional services, you could easily argue the surplus of founders argument. If you consider all the individual contractors as “founders” that haven’t gotten traction yet.

We’ve always felt that it was important to hire people who valued being part of a team, and building something bigger than themselves.  Being part of a team enables us all to execute at a higher level for ourselves and our customers. It makes it easier to take a vacation and still sleep well at night.  It makes it easier to get health insurance.  It is a long list of benefits to being part of a firm.  Including, building value that is sustainable even after the point when you’re ready to move on to another phase in your life. For builders, this is an attractive proposition.

Eric Jackson of Forbes recently wrote the Top Ten Reasons Why Large Companies Fail to Keep Their Best Talent.

The article lays out some very good reasons why top talent gets frustrated with big companies. But the focus is still too much on secondary effects.  My thoughts on a few of the points:

#1 : Bureaucracy. “No one likes rules that make no sense. But, when top talent is complaining along these lines, it’s usually a sign that they didn’t feel as if they had a say in these rules.”  Actually, there are just too many rules.  Big companies have the resources to actually have bureaucracy that makes the lives of top talent easier, not harder.  But they don’t take advantage of that capability, because it shows up as a hard expense that can be cut.  When the economy is strong you see startups and smaller firms offering free dry cleaning or laundry service (or if not free, convenient in-office pickup).  There are free meals and caffeine at the office.  This is convenient for employees and saves them time out of their lives.  But for some reason most companies cut back both on the perks, and on the benefits of large size, as they get bigger.  Instead of requiring employees to fill out a lot of paperwork for expense reports, make it easy for them to send in their expenses and pay lower-skilled labor to process them.  Or set policies that require fewer receipts for reimbursement and thereby reduce the total bureaucracy.  Use per diems.  Have a travel group that adds value in booking and rebooking flights and hotel reservations.  Have administrative help that helps produce critical paperwork without a lot of barriers to entry and TPS forms to fill out. These are trivial examples, but wherever you can reduce the exposure your team has to bureaucracy or administrative work, the more productive and happy they’ll be.

#2 : Finding the right project.  “they usually don’t have people going around to their best and brightest asking them if they’re enjoying their current projects or if they want to work on something new…” This item in particular seems hopelessly vague.  It almost sounds like the idea is that the top talent shouldn’t have to do any of the tough, dreary projects.  Who wouldn’t want to opt out of the project that takes them to Ottawa in the winter? (No offense intended, Ottawa!)  But there’s a kernel of truth within this point:  big companies have really interesting jobs to offer high performers.  But they (typically) don’t.  Those top performers aren’t afraid to ask for a better assignment or put their name in for promotion.  But they’re told they have to wait – “we don’t promote someone twice within one year.”  Or “you can’t get a raise of more than 3% a year”.  So they realize that to move up, they have to get some experience and then move out.  Possibly getting hired back in later on.   It isn’t that no one gets these fast-track promotions and assignments at big companies, but the percentages are vanishingly small.  The top 1% not the top 10 or 20 percent.

#3 : Poor Annual Performance Reviews.  “You would be amazed at how many companies do not do a very effective job at annual performance reviews.”  Actually, no one with a job would be amazed by this.   Performance reviews are a broken process at nearly every company I’ve heard of, let alone worked at.  There are companies trying to fix that, like Rypple (now part of SalesForce), but the fix isn’t actually about annual reviews.  The fix is more feedback.  Reviews are largely a waste of time, and condescending to the employee.  The employer or manager sits in judgment and the employee is judged and much good feedback throughout the year is saved for an annual review instead of happening spontaneously.  The Annual Review becomes a marker around which unrealistic expectations get set – employees expecting golden reviews and promotions, employers disappointing them with perhaps neither.   The review process can make employers look quite petty.

So what’s the fix?  When you have negative feedback for an employee, tell them right away.  Tell them what they’re screwing up.  While they can still do something about it.  When they’re doing something great, tell them quickly, while it is fresh on your (and their) minds.  Make sure other people hear about it so that good behavior becomes infectious.  We don’t do “reviews” at BP3, but our team communicates.  They can call to talk to me anytime, and I don’t hesitate to hit them up on Instant Messenger or the phone.  We don’t do raises on an annual schedule, we just do them when we think the timing is right.  We do regular bonuses which force us to acknowledge good or bad performance monetarily, in case our words – spoken and typed – aren’t getting the message across – good and bad.

#4 : No Career Development.  Well, this is actually nearly impossible in small companies to do in a structured way. The promise a small company can hold out is that as the company grows, opportunities for employees will grow as well.  A lot of the career development is personal growth and attacking ambiguous problems (filling in the white space).  At a large company, I’d recommend managers talk to their top talent about their own aspirations for those people.  What do you want to help them achieve?  Don’t expect them to come to the table with an answer when they may not have a sense of what is possible.  But experienced executives and managers do know – and can help lay out a path or ladder that actually motivates talented people. But keep in mind, there are always some people who aren’t motivated by a ladder, or competition.  They’re good at what they do, and they know it, but they don’t care about your external validation of that performance.  These are the toughest people to keep happy on a purely professional basis.  If you have one of these high performers on your team, make friends.  Friendship and loyalty may be the only thing that keeps you two working together. And someday you may want to get a job working for them instead of the other way around!

#5 :  Shifting Whims.  “The challenge for most organizations is not setting up a strategic prioirty, like establishing an incubator, but sticking with it a year or two from now.  Top talent hates being ‘jerked around.’”  Well, this one is spot on.  What’s worse than not having a good recruiting program?  Setting one up and then stopping it 3 months in.  It takes time to recruit the right talent, develop a talent pipeline that works.  When you shut it down for more than a week or two, starting up again takes another 3 months or more for the pipeline to pan out.  You’ve lost all the momentum.  Having the rug pulled out from under something you’re excited about sucks.

#8 :  The Missing Vision Thing.  This one can be hard when you’re smaller.  It is helpful to have a humble or modest bearing in general.  Under-promise, over-deliver.  But as you grow, as things start to fall into place, you can share the vision with your early conspirators (your team!).  Eventually you step out and communicate with the world at large.  The same approach works well for team-level vision at a company.  But big companies can have bigger visions of how they’ll change the world or the landscape.  Then the real trouble coming up with something that is expansive without sounding too trite or generic (I don’t have to name names, we can all think of a few in this category).

It is just a matter of using your size to your benefit, and to the benefit of your top talent.

We’re approaching one of my favorite holidays in the United States, Thanksgiving.  Of course it is a great holiday because of the family traditions of getting together, the road trips, the airplane flights, the reacquainting with family near and far.  But I also love this holiday for the food – sometimes in Texas a turkey just isn’t good enough.  You have your fried turkey.  Your turducken.  And sometimes, if you’re lucky, you get your BBQ Thanksgiving (turkey, brisket, sausage, what’s not to like?).

But mostly I like Thanksgiving because it is a good time to remember how fortunate we all are to be in this business and to have the opportunity to work with our team and our customers.   I’m often impressed by how much people in the BPM community help each other – to find work, leads, jobs, customers, projects, business cases, studies, training.  This is a community that believes in paying it forward, and we’re glad to be part of it.

Really interesting progress on the state of the art for startup process.  It recently got some coverage at Austin Startup, with a great infographic included. But it has previously been discussed on Steve Blank’s blog.

The Genome Report is 68 pages of great reading.  Lots of details go into the general conclusions that you see in the info graphic.  It is included at the bottom of this post as well.  Interestingly, they go even farther than just producing a report. There’s an a survey you can fill out, the startup compass, which will help determine how your startup compares to other startups they did their research on for the Genome project.  I went partway through this survey myself, but at some point it becomes apparent that it is not really a good match for services businesses, it is really about product businesses.  And that’s fine – it is still far and away the most interesting pattern-matching tool I’ve seen for startups.

And the key finding seems to be exactly what Austin Startup focused on:

One of the big findings amongst the data was that almost 7 out of 10 companies failed due to premature scaling or inconsistency. Peeling back the data, the lessons seem really simple: don’t act like a big company.

Fascinating stuff… or scary stuff, if you’re running against the statistics they’ve collected… The statistics definitely back the idea of the lean startup.

(Side note for BPM practitioners… how can we apply this kind of data and thinking to our own BPM efforts as we grow them from projects to programs and beyond?)

Startup Genome Report 01

Alberto Manuel’s End to End BPM blog lists BPM Blogs worth reading in 2011 – linked here in case you don’t follow his blog directly or haven’t seen his posts on twitter.  He lists some of our favorite blogs, including Sandy Kemsley’s and Anatoly Belychook’s blogs.

There are a couple on the list I haven’t been following which I’ll now be checking out.  Thanks to Alberto for putting this list together!

I love the Graphing Calculator Story.  It is an oldie but a goodie.

When I hear people (you know who you are!) lament a lack of corporate sponsorship as dooming a project to failure, I want to send them this blog post.  Ron Avitzur didn’t even have a *job* and he got his project done and shipped.  He lists out a litany of roadblocks in front of them – and yet he managed to cajole others into helping him.  To get others excited about his vision for the graphing calculator.

It is a classic example of leadership from below, or leadership from outside.  No one reports to him, so he can’t command a change.  He has no official status.  And yet he is able to mobilize resources by creating a buzz, by being honest, by having passion about his work.

I’ve often been a proponent of leading from below.  If you’re successful, the executive sponsorship will come.  Typically it doesn’t happen the other way around.  So quit making excuses and be the change you want to see in your organization.  Read Ron’s story for inspiration.  No excuses now – we’re getting paid after all! (Unlike Ron!)

One anecdote from Isaacston’s Steve Jobs that really resonated for me was this amusing exchange between he and Ellison:

At this point Jobs got real close to Ellison and said, “Larry, this is why it’s really important that I’m your friend. You don’t need any more money.”

Ellison agreed with that general sentiment, but thought it was stupid that some “fund manager at Fidelity” would make more money on Apple’s success than he or Jobs.

Jobs responded by saying, “I think if I went back to Apple and didn’t own any of Apple, and you didn’t own any of Apple, I’d have the moral high ground.”

Ellison’s response: “Steve, that’s really expensive real estate, this moral high ground.”

Ellison is so right. That moral high ground is really expensive real estate.  And it is much more expensive real estate for people like Larry and Steve than it has ever been for someone like me.

So the question: is that expensive real estate really worth it?

We know the answer is supposed to be yes, but so often we see people make decisions that yield that moral high ground.  We might face that temptation ourselves. Just remember that holding the moral high ground isn’t something you start doing after you’ve made your millions (because, for most people who do this, there are always more millions to chase… and then billions).  The moral high ground is something you start doing today, if you weren’t doing it yesterday.  It is something you build up piece by piece, day by day, until it has real value. That value is in reputation, trust, personal relationships, business relationships.

In my experience, in the long run, the moral high ground is worth it.  If you stick to it, you’ll find that while some of your friends and colleagues end up with more money in the short term, or even in the long term, you’ll end up with the friends.  The lifelong friends.  And if you’re in Steve’s rarefied air you end up with not only friends and loyal executives, but admirers far and wide.

That moral high ground gives you the moral authority to lead more effectively.  In an information economy, that’s important.  Your talent can walk out the door any time.  And while the economy may not be good, the job market for high tech workers is quite good.

I’ve never regretted holding that expensive real estate.  No question, the really expensive real estate is still worth it. I hope Larry went ahead and bought a few Apple shares while he was at it, though.

Fred Wilson has one of the best blogs on the subject of startups and investing.  Which is really no surprise given his cat-bird seat on the whole industry.  As a services startup, I occasionally find passages in his writing that really resonate, like this one:

Roelof Botha, a leading VC with Sequoia, once gave me a great piece of advice in helping founders start to focus on company building. He said founders should think of their company as a product and build it and shape it with the same passion and care. I’ve taken that to heart and passed it on a few times.

No matter how or when you do it, building a company is a required step to sustainability. Positive cash flow is not enough to keep the company independent and solvent. You need a culture, systems, and processes to keep everyone happy and functioning well.

This is so true.  We’re still a work-in-progress at BP3.  We’ve been building our culture, and our team of amazing individuals. But we’re still learning the right processes for the new situations we’re finding ourselves in as we get bigger and are tackling more projects simultaneously.

How you handle these situations has a big effect on how the company performs for its customers.  When we have a “process failure”, if all we do is firefight in a one-off fashion, that will help the customer and solve the short-term problem.  But we are trying to build a lasting company.  We need to not only put out the fire but adjust our operating guidelines so that we identify these issues and situations early – and have an organization and response in place to resolve the issue without firefighting.

Every time we put out a fire we’re also taking a step back and trying to think about whether this is something we need to address systemically or organizationally, or whether this is a one-off event.  And even for the one-off events- what’s the best escalation path for dealing with those without derailing core business functions?

Great comment down below the main article by Charlie Crystal:

That’s one of the most enjoyable parts of building a company–defining what kind of people you want to be, the impact you want to have on the world, your employees, your community; and then cheerfully getting it done and evangelizing what you do, why you do it, and how you do it.

This is company building, and it is good stuff.

Jacob Ukelson posted about preventing failure vs. fixing failure.  He make a few good points and along the way once again compares ACM / BPM by implication.  In a sense, many will argue, ACM is about learning from failure, and BPM about preventing failure:

One of the key reasons companies deploy a BPM suite is to prevent failure. This is a major selling point for many BPM solutions. A key goal of a BPM suite is to enable the deployment of process driven solutions that prevent a deployed process from failing.

But of course, as he points out later, it isn’t always cheaper to prevent failure rather than fix it. ( Not to mention, in some businesses, fixing it is an opportunity to delight the customer. ) This  is the crux of it:  the arguments about failure are talking past each other.  Process Improvement (BPM) should aim to reduce preventable failures of a fairly routine nature.  Data entry errors, for example.  Logical inconsistencies. This isn’t the primary or only goal, but it certainly is one important form of process improvement for many processes out there. But the idea that we should learn from failure isn’t exactly a new one either… Max Pucher’s blog is an excellent example of this concept in the 70′s and 80′s.  The Lean Startup is an excellent example from the startup world.

If you’re familiar with six sigma technique (a fairly mature method that predates my professional career), then you’re likely familiar with the Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA).  In it, you rate possible or anticipated failures by:

• Severity – how bad will it be if it happens?
• Frequency – how likely or how often is it to happen?
• Detectability – how easy and reliable is the detection of the failure (or pre-detection).

Different remedies apply to the failures depending on their characteristics.  Often this is applied at a pretty tactical level.  But conceptually you can apply it at a macro or management level.  Such aphorisms as “worry about what you can control, not what you can’t” and “prepare for the worst hope for the best” are perhaps simplified examples of this kind of thinking.  Much business advice could be reduced to focusing on what matters and letting go of what doesn’t.  Some failures don’t warrant preventative treatment, and some do.  This isn’t exactly a new idea.

The kind of “preventing failure” behaviors that ACM folks are pushing against are mostly organizational or cultural in nature rather than procedural. It isn’t like BPM proponents are advocating that businesses circle the wagons and just focus on preventing failures.

So in summary -  where you want to play it safe deploy a process solution focused on managing structured processes, if you need agility (and are willing to accept its associated risk) then you should focus on “first fault problem resolution” for your unstructured processes – rather than try to structure them to prevent failure.

This isn’t as easy as it sounds for some businesses.  Let’s talk the First Horizon oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.  Did they need agility or preventing failure out there on the platform?  And which situation did their decision-making process most resemble?  (Given that individual operators could and would override long-established safety protocol, I think we can infer that they were on the side of more agility vs. more preventative).  Other businesses, and other situations, would have a different profile and tolerance for various kinds of failure.

If you’re going to have agility and learn from failure, don’t forget one other thing.  You need really good leadership.  If you don’t have that, the results of failure might surprise you.

John Reynolds writes about the curious case of the disappearing BPM Programmer:

So where does this distinction between Case and Process leave the BPM Programmer?  Are BPM skills irrelevant in the new world of Dynamic Case Management and Social Process?  Are the BPM Programmer’s skills doomed for irrelevance every few years just as the skills of System Programmers (C begat C++ begat Java begat Ruby etc.)?

Will BPM Programmers disappear into the mists of interesting but irrelevant oddities of the past?

The question arises simply because a small but vocal chorus has been calling BPM a subset of Case Management, or predicting the end is near for BPM. Does that mean BPM skills and jobs are thus in decline?

Not to worry.  BPM was always the tool not the goal.  The goal is managing business better.  As the Navy Seals would say, equip the man, don’t man the equipment. BPM is a means to an end.

Processes aren’t going away anytime soon.  Besides, as John says: “Your job has always been about writing software the Manage Business. Process is at the core of Business Management, but you always had to deal with Objects, Rules, and Events.”

Well said.  BPM is here to stay.  It didn’t burn brightly and fade away, it is a slower, steadier progression.  As you would expect it to be, if you understand what it is.  And the momentum is still building, rather than fading.  The name may change, the tools may evolve, but the goal of running businesses better isn’t going away.