The occasional thought: Drucker on Management
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 
During the last weeks Memonic received a number of awards, closed a financing round, got a lot of new users, all in all a very successful period with positive energies flowing freely. A few weeks before it was all different: A few rejects at startup competitions, no-I-not-in from potential investors, user feedback they like the competition more, a negative commotion.
May be some of 
As soon as your website is live a ton of data is silently gatherd in countless log files across your application’s systems. Most often nobody ever pays those log files tribute, i.e. reads them. Normally the sys admin will delete the older files once disk space becomes scarce. We think this is a bad approach.
How to advertise your application? A national ad campaign is probably over your budget, so is the TV. Yet there many alternative and very cost effective methods.
No, this blog post is not about a child’s doll. They’re lovely and my daughter loves them very much. This post is about a software tool – better a framework – with the name 
Wit the launch days away most startups focus on getting it done. If achieving this goal requires a compromise quality is often the accidental victim.
All your mockups (previous post) will not protect you from completely and utterly misrepresent what users really want the application to behave.
The traditional waterfall methods for project management have much for them: Tested for centuries. That’s how big engineering feats have been delivered, or so they make us believe.
Any company needs a number of basic processes and applications such as Email, calendaring, time tracking, billing, version control, task tracking, etc. And quite a number of startups had in the past first to invest a couple of person weeks in installing your email server and all the rest (We know what we talk off… ;-(
And off you go. All set up, your product idea clearly spelled out (at least that’s what the founding team thinks), now it’s just a question of execution. Or so you think.
This is no call for cheating. Yet if you register that high speed Internet connection as a private individual you receive five times the speed at a third of the cost compared to a company registration. So go for the private plan and save big bucks.
“Yesterday all my backups seemed so far away…” Backups are important. Full stop. Or you may suffer a fate similar to 
As said in the last post, we bought a development server at CHF 7’000 for increased flexibility. The official price was way over CHF 10’000.
So, you bought your fat server; now what? Employ virtualization. The concept is long known: Emulate or “virtualize” on a fat server another computer.
Sounds like too good to be true… And actually it is a very sweet deal.
Our most expensive investment so far was a development server with a price tag of CHF 7’000.- Our second most expensive investment was our office furniture from IKEA. A chair, a desk, a conference desk, and some small furniture pieces. That’s it.
