To quote Chris Dixon: “Joining a startup is far less risky than most people seem to think. In fact, I don’t know if anyone has ever studied this systematically, but I would bet that people who join startups have greater job security than people who join large companies, and certainly have better risk-adjusted returns.”
Customarily the department responsible for all things employee related is referred to as “Department of Human Resources”.
I know of natural resources. Copper say, or ore, gold or oil. It’s a matter of digging them out of the ground. Well, to my limited knowledge you can’t dig out of mother earth a fully trained and ready to go software engineer.
Rather you have to invest years to excel at something. Some say to really excel at something you have to invest 10’000 hours at least. Your wealth of experience is what matters. So refer to this on similar terms as a piece of ore is in my view inappropriate. Why not change the name and simply call it “Department of Human Wealth”
First published in 1954, Peter Drucker’s book “The Practice of Management” is a great source of insights.
In chapter 12 “Managers Must Manage" he wrote: “The manager should be directed and controlled by the objectives of performance rather than by his boss," and "If the manager is, however, controlled by the objective requirements of his own job and measured by his results, there is no need for the kind of supervision that consists of telling a subordinate what to do and then making sure that he does it."
He further wrote: "If a one-word definition of this downward relationship [between a manager and a subordinate] be needed, 'assistance' would come closest," and "The vision of a manager should always be upward--toward the enterprise as a whole. But his responsibility runs downward as well--to the managers on his team. That his relationship toward them be clearly understood as a duty rather than as supervision is perhaps the central requirement for organizing the manager's job effectively."
How true at startups, too.
This Tuesday we had our "label presentation" in front of the CTI Coaching Board.
Thanks to our coach Michael Sidler we underwent a thorough CTI sponsored coaching programme over the last 12 months.
For quite the first time we were at the receiving end of the taxman: The CTI coaching programme for startups is simply first class. Event though - in my case - this is my third startup, there is always something new to learn and to improve. The CTI programme enabled us to get in touch with top notch experts, get exposure at a number of events, and profit from the wide network of personal relationships. Simply said: A programme worthwhile subscribing to.
Patrice Neff & Dorian Selz - co-founders; Michael Sidler - coach
Last week we were at the Internet World in Munich, where we received the 3rd prize of the startup competition "Business Idea 2010". For us a great fair to show to product and to listen to quite a number of valuable feedbacks.
(Picture by Yu-Cheng Chou)
Another good challenge of our application: The Business Chuchi is a gathering of folks here in Zurich talking about the business aspects of online applications. Tonight was our turn. Great feedback from the folks present. Thank you!
Heute Abend spreche ich bei Reto Hartinger's Internet Briefing über neue Technologien für ein interessantes Web-Erlebnis. Am konkreten Beispiel zeige ich, welche Erfahrung wir mit Friend Feeding, Remix the Web, skalierbaren Infrastrukturen, etc. gemacht habe.
Die Slides sind hier hinterlegt (PDF, 205kb), ein Memonic Set mit den wesentlichen Links und Erkenntnissen ist hier zu finden.
“When our first parents were driven out of Paradise, Adam is believed to have re-marked to Eve: ‘My dear, we live in an age of transition’.” (Inge 1929)
We started out a couple of months ago with this series on scalable startups with a reflection on organizations as lump of butter in a sea of milk. Organizations are social arrangements. Hence our next focus was the core constituent of any organization: Its people. A well-crafted strategy is worthless without a committed crew. The focus on people is core to what we do. Nonetheless, an organization is no end in itself. The fuel that drives the engine forward is customer needs. We cherish users like nothing else: They come first.
We argued forcefully for smaller organizations. Instead of large anonymous corporate monsters we made a case for smaller and nimbler units. We also outlined how to maximize involvement and reduce the useless part of management: Let people decide. To put these decisions into action we rely on a project methodology – Scrum – that finely aligns overall goals, immediate tasks, people and resources.
A particular issue we dealt with is how to get work done. Instead of word wilderness and excel wasteland we draw on the advantages of Wikis for documentation and a powerful task tracking tool. Both tool sets are completely web-based and accessible from everywhere.
In terms of actual setup and operation of an online platform we learned a lesson or two from our previous engagement at local.ch. A must is a shared nothing architecture plus automated building of the software application. To ensure consistency and reliability we made testing a daily priority.
The virtualization options available today are essential for a startup. We can cut down very considerably on our asset investment in servers and other bulky infrastructure items.
The outlined setup of a scalable startup is very much the realization of what Peter Drucker sketched out in his essay on The coming of the new organization over twenty years ago:
“The typical large business 20 years hence will have fewer than half the levels of management of its counterpart today, and no more than a third the managers. In its structure, and in its management problems and concerns, it will bear little resemblance to the typical manufacturing company, circa 1950, which our textbooks still consider the norm. Instead it is far more likely to resemble organizations that neither the practicing manager nor the management scholar pays much attention to today: the hospital, the university, the symphony orchestra. For like them, the typical business will be knowledge-based, an organization composed largely of specialists. … For this reason, it will be what I call an information-based organization.”
A little over two decades later, the startling development of the Internet has driven much of the transformation from an industry-based economy to an information-based economy. Multilevel hierarchies have given way to clusters of business units coordinated by market mechanisms rather than by layers of middle management. The large enterprise structures designed for the business environment of the 1950s and 1960s – firms that typically sought economies of scale through central planning and control mechanisms – are quite likely not the most adroit forms at meeting the current competitive environment that demands both efficiency and effectiveness. Companies track opportunities and resources on a global scale. In an attempt to maximize return on assets, firms perform only those functions for which they possess or can develop expert skills. Activities that can be performed quicker, more effectively or at lower cost by others are outsourced. An intricate network of formal and informal relations ties the firm together. The momentum is paced by information technology.
Back in 1978 Hiltz and Turoff summarized this phenomenon as follows:
“We will become the Network Nation, exchanging vast amounts of both information and socio-emotional communications with colleagues, friends, and ‘strangers’ who share similar interests. ... we will become a ‘global village.’ ... An individual will, literally, be able to work, shop, or be educated by or with persons anywhere in the nation or in the world.”
True.
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Series Overview
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Drucker P.F., “The Coming of the New Organization”, Harvard Business Review, January - February 1988, pp. 45-53.
Hiltz S.R. and Turoff M., The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computer, London: Addison-Wesley, 1978.
Inge W.R., Dean of St.Paul’s London, Assessments and Anticipations, London, 1929.
Last Thursday and Friday Patrice and myself travelled to Munich. And if you travel, you have something to tell (Citation by Matthias Claudius, 1740 - 1815).
We were invited to present Nektoon at the 5th Venture Day of Swiss Technology. Around 6pm we gathered on platform 14 at the Zurich main station. Soon Jean-Pierre Vuilleumier, the managing director of CTI Invest, joined us.
We got ourselves a place in the restaurant coach. It’s a long journey: four and a half hours for roughly 300 km. Luckily the line is about to receive an upgrade after years of neglect. Then again, this would cut short our amiable and enjoyable trip by an hour...
After aperitifs, Dominik Tarolli from Procedural joined us in St.Gallen. I knew his blog – swissstartups.com – before, yet never met him so far. Another plus of our in person get together, I finally got it what their city engine does – amazing stuff!
After some E-Mail back and forth Matthias Sala from Gbanga joined us, too. Gbanga’s wants to create interactive mobile games. They had a first test run this summer with the Zoo Zurich.
Picture by dselz
Though an interesting crowd, hunger looming I couldn’t fully kick the habit and check my Twitter stream to discover Moritz Adler from Blogwerk tweeting that he sits in that same restaurant coach. Where? Meanwhile the coach became quite crowded with Oktoberfest goers.Ah, there he was.
The six of us represent quite an interesting mix of Swiss ICT startups: Gaming, publishing, 3D rendering, fluid information and Mr. Startup Network. A few startup cock-and-bull stories later (To Dominik: Will do what you requested) we arrived in Munich where some still hit the remains of that Oktoberfest evening.
In the morning we met at the Literaturhaus in the center of Munich. How fitting: The opening speech was by Quillp, a digital book publishing site. Next to the afore mentioned there were a number of other startups from the biotech and life science (BLS) sector present.
To listen to the BLS startups was particularly fascinating. Two things struck me: We in the ICT industry are used to short development cycles. They operate in an environment where time to market is measured in years rather than in months. We may start our next venture on a shoestring; they need heavy investment over consecutive years in people and infrastructure. Obvious if you think about it, but easily forgotten if you labor day in, day out with just your notebook on our Ikea desk.
In the contemporary world Michael Foucault, a French philosopher, thinks that organizations are places of controlled violence. Another tradition embodied by the American philosopher John Dewey, views organizations as edifying forums.
Whatever we think of organizations, either as incubators of new cultures, or as defined by the cultural milieu of our societies at large, most, including the cited philosophers, think they are artificial and therefore open to to being remade.
One area how we on purpose remade our organizational setup was the development process and issue tracking. Scrum, our preferred project methodology splits our entire project into stories and tasks assigned to two-week sprints.
Years ago we would handle project tasks with huge Excel sheets. Not a very amusing job, especially if you had to track a larger team. The burden was even greater on the team having to track their tasks.
During these celebratory days of 40 years Moon landing, I always wonder how the folks did it at the time without Wikis and without digital task tracking. 40 years later the problem is solved – digital distributed task tracking does the job. At Nektoon we use Jira.
Jira is a sister product of the Confluence, our Wiki software written by Atlassian. We simply got used to their product after our happy contact with their Wiki software. And additional benefit is, that both are tightly integrated.
Every issue, task, bug, improvement is recorded in our Jira. On a two week basis we assign these issues to individual members of the team. Once you start to work on an issue you register your work: We comment on the progress of our work and clock the time spent on each task.
With this we accumulate a body of data that allows us:
Furthermore the system allows:
For us the relevant part is the transparency of our issue tracking. We are able to manage hundreds of issues, assign accountability and ensure that things get done.
Next in the series how to build a scalable startup: Shared nothing architecture.
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