Process for the Enterprise » backstage pass

Chris Dixon asks: Who Should Learn How to Code?

Scott Francis — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 05:32:27 +0000

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.

Lean Startup vs. the Great Man

Scott Francis — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 03:47:58 +0000

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…

Mark Cuban Making Sense

Scott Francis — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 17:59:43 +0000

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:

“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.
“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.
“Hire people who you think will love working there.” Right. If they think BPM is boring, we don’t hire them!
“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.
“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.
“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.

A Year in Blogging, 2011

Scott Francis — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 00:34:19 +0000

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.

Another Take on the Talent Shortage

Scott Francis — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 23:41:21 +0000

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.

No related posts.

Retention Failures

Scott Francis — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 07:25:43 +0000

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.

No related posts.

Learning about the Startup Genome Compass

Scott Francis — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 05:46:42 +0000

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

Really Expensive Real Estate

Scott Francis — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 05:20:51 +0000

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.

No related posts.

Building a Business

Scott Francis — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 04:58:26 +0000

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.

No Excuses

Scott Francis — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 03:40:08 +0000

There’s a theme about management that has cropped up over the years regarding owning the outcomes, rather than the excuses (Steve Jobs’ definition of the Vice President versus the janitor comes to mind).

Ben Horowitz (of Andreesen Horowitz) captures this perfectly in his “Nobody Cares” post. It is both great advice, a great reminder of something you should already know if you run a startup, and an admonishment that you need to be tough if you’re going to go down that road:

That might be the best CEO advice ever. Because, you see, nobody cares. When things go wrong in your company, nobody cares. The press doesn’t care, your investors don’t care, your board doesn’t care, your employees don’t care, even your mama doesn’t care. Nobody cares.

And they are right not to care. A great reason for failing won’t preserve one dollar for your investors, won’t save one employee’s job, or get you one new customer. It especially won’t make you feel one bit better when you shut down your company and declare bankruptcy.

This is so true. As consultants we see this all the time – customers don’t care about our excuses, they just want their projects and processes delivered as promised. Sometimes there are really important mitigating circumstances but we’ve got to help them climb over those obstacles.

And at the end of the day – nobody cares about the excuses. You have to make payroll, pay bonuses, grow your firm, and make it happen. And if you don’t, no one will care about the excuses.