I came across Taylor Davidson’s How to Fail post through John Wilken’s Our Start Up Story blog. Imitating John I’m going to add my tuppence to three of Taylor’s topics: Meet to discuss, Build prototypes, mock-ups and samples, and Focus on the long-term.

Meet to discuss

I have previous on this topic, having written here on effective meetings and ten ways to ruin a perfectly good one. We’re all experts on how to ruin meetings on a practical level but one of the biggest man-hour traps of all is a meeting-as-talking-shop. As Taylor says,

If you need meetings to “get everyone on the same page” then you have bigger problems the meeting will probably not address.

So many companies have meeting cultures with managers running between days scheduled back-to-back. Almost everyone could benefit from fewer meetings. I’ve found the best way to break a meeting-as-update culture is to force managers our of their offices to perch on the edge of someone’s desk, finding out how things are going, what roadblocks they’re having to deal with, and offering support and connections. Fifteen minutes of this can save man-days of meeting time.

All of my best manager/managed relationships (in either direction) have involved this style of management-by-arse-on-desk.

Meetings, when you have them, should really only be held for one reason – to make decisions. I confess to a secret secondary objective of team-bulding. Teams get built faster when they’re active (discussion with the purpose of making a decision) rather than passive (pretending to listen to John’s update when really worrying my own update that I’m about to give or have just given).

Meetings are certainly not to stroke anyone’s ego. Don’t go to meetings just because you have an opinion, are flattered to be asked, or just to be busy. Don’t call meetings to find out about things (go sit on desks). Don’t invite people simply so they won’t be offended.

If it’s your meeting, ask who you really need in order to make the decision? Invite them. Discuss with a purpose. Make the decision. Move on.

Build prototypes, mock-ups and samples

The thinking goes like this; don’t build the whole thing, but build something that looks like the whole thing, so we can see if the whole thing (kinda) works. It seems to make sense. But as Taylor points out,

“Nothing saps the spirit more than creating mockups and designs without making progress toward a completed product. Most often the product cannot be created exactly as it is designed, and thus it is important to learn through working on the product itself, not the design.”

Having wasted far too much time and money over the years on mock-ups, I have an idealistic two stage process in mind whenever I start something.

First, boil the idea down so you can explain it with one graphic and two sentences.

Second, when everyone gets it, build the simplest version that people will appreciate enough to get a definable benefit from, and iterate.

This is the launch early, launch often philosophy – which doesn’t mean launch buggy code, or a boat that leaks, or a pacemaker that can’t stand walking past a speaker magnet. Launch a simple version that works brilliantly, and then improve it every day.

Focus on the long term

This is probably the hardest one for a planner like me to do something about, and the one I struggle to overcome every day. I love change, I see “a rich landscape of opportunities” and my job has always involved working out how to get there. Vision is great, but what to do today? I’ve developed a system that seems to work for me called GOYA management.

Get Off Your Arse. (The name at least was inspired by my old hero Frederick Herzberg’s famous Harvard Business Review article which debunks KITA management, and everything else on the way). GOYA is what I tell myself to do after I’ve worked out what I want to achieve, how I propose to achieve it and what I won’t be able to do because I’m doing the other stuff (which all fits into my personal planning joy). So then I tell myself “GOYA and do it.” The planner in me prints out special note pages with sections headings. My inner manager lifts my chair and puts me to work.

So that’s my homage to Taylor Davidson’s How to Fail. Make sure you take a look at the original, what are your lessons learned?

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Neatly filed under Focus,Managing on July 30, 2009

I have a Jura coffee machine at home. I bought it because I love coffee and the Jura is a fantastic machine that makes GREAT coffee that is consistently, wonderfully, perfect.

When I turn the Jura on, it goes through a little routine that heats the water and cleans things out. It takes about 45 seconds. And then, it is … ready. I don’t have to guess. I didn’t have to read the manual to discover that readiness follows the heating-rinsing routine. The machine tells me. The little LED display goes from Heating, to Rinsing, to Ready.

And every morning I think – as I press the button and breathe deep – wouldn’t it be lovely if everything was so well behaved, and told you when it was ready for action. The idea, the plan, the presentation, the product, the team, the soufflé.

Sometimes it’s obvious. Most of the time, not.

Take the guesswork out. Test. Get out of the building, and test.

Put together your best version of the answer. Take it on the road. Talk and listen. Test.

What do you think? Is it ever too soon to test?

Image copyright: captainmcdan via Flickr

Neatly filed under Managing,Skippiness on June 18, 2009

“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”

Calvin Coolidge, 30th US President

Neatly filed under Managing on June 11, 2009

Image copyright: pipiwildhead! via Flickr

At its simplest, life comes down to a series of choices, or more often, a parallel of choices.

After deciding which new market or new product to go for, two types of choice dominate the day to day: how should we prioritise our time? and, should we go with option A or option B (or C, D, E, or F)?

This is no time to sway back and forth. You have to make decisions.

How do you decide what to do?

As I was looking in to this I came across a speech given by YCombinator founder Paul Graham at the StartupSchool2008 conference last year, he dealt specifically with the “how do you decide” question. His answer?

Do whatever is best for your users. You can hold on to that like a rope in a hurricane and it will save you if anything can. You can pull on that rope and it will guide you through everything you have to do. Figure out what they want, make them happy doing more of that.

Is he right? Absoloodle! Any choices that are best for customers tend to be pretty good for getting customers too. And customers make everything else possible.

If I could though, I’d add “in the long term” to the end of Mr Graham’s sentence. Running any kind of sustainable business, especially one that skips, is about winning in the long term. So doing whatever in the long term is best for your customers feels better to me.

Whether you’re prioritising time or choosing a fork in the road, put the customer front and centre, think long term, and swallow the results.

Neatly filed under Managing,Skippiness on June 5, 2009

Image copyright: Corscri-Daje tutti! via Flickr

Inside any kind of organisation bigger than the land of Me & My Mate, you’re probably surrounded by people who do a job that’s completely different to yours.

What do all those people do?

I’ve been thinking about the doing part of that question lately, rather than the people part. The way I see it, no matter what the job title or department, the doing falls in to one of only five categories:

Making Promises – easiest to think of as all the things that happen in sales or marketing, some customer services and board functions. Anything that makes any kind of commitment on behalf of the company is a making promises action.

Keeping Promises – everything that even vaguely fits into operations: all the tasks that make the product, perform the service, look after customers, pick up, package or deliver the thing.

Measure and control – all the things involving numbers or making sure nothing gets out of hand.

Support – what gets done in order to make everything else function; what normally happens under the headings of IT or HR for instance.

Leadership and innovation – without getting bogged down in book style definitions, leadership is about direction setting and steering to the compass whilst innovation is all the processes that aim to improve things.

These are not departments, they’re functions, and whilst every person spends most of their time in one kind of role, they probably undertake processes in others, if not all. For example, a production worker is mainly employed to keep promises, but they probably also try to innovate to improve things, keep an eye on production rates and quality, put their arm around colleagues when they need it, and continually make commitments within and for their department.

Ok. So what? Is this anything other than yet another way of thinking about organisational structure?

If every process is about making, keeping, ensuring and supporting promises, or improving the way the whole thing gets done, then every job is about the customer.

So what do all those people do? Let’s hope they’re not wasting any time discussing, deciding or doing anything that doesn’t draw a straight line to improving the life of the customer.

Neatly filed under Innovating,Keeping Promises,Leading,Making Promises,Managing on June 3, 2009