I found this video the other day in my travels along the interwebs and wanted to share with the class. For me, this was one of those videos I’m going to have to watch a few times to fully appreciate it. Seth says he is going to move fast through his material when he starts, and he isn’t kidding.
Seth explores marketing over the ages and how the game has changed from interruption marketing (TV) to the new world order. In the past, someone could force you to view their ads on TV (thank you, thank you, thank you TiVo), but now a days there are so many media outlets and products pushing for our attention that we are overwhelmed with stimulus and are never forced to view any marketing from anyone.
It is as if our attention is being attacked by a huge denial of service attack where so much marketing information is coming at us we decide to turn it all off and listen to none of it.
The game has changed, people need to be looking for you to find you, and most marketing and products are not designed this way. Seth hammers home several points:
Your software should have marketing built in
Your software should be able to self market
Your goal is to have people want to use your software, and spread the word about your software to others
::cough Apple, cough Google, cough, cough::
Seth’s best example of one company who gets it and one that doesn’t? Ford vs. BMW. When was the last time you saw an ad for a BMW? Can you go three minutes watching TV and not run into a Ford ad? BMW pours their marketing money into the product, making something people want, and given unlimited resources, something most people would likely buy given the chance.
::That is, of course, until you have to take it to the shop, but I digress::
This is a great video for anyone who makes anything, software or otherwise.
Please to enjoy Seth Godin at the Business of Software 2008.
::After watching this the first time through I thought to myself, ‘I need to add his blog to my daily reading list’. Little did I realize I’ve been reading his blog for some time, doh, http://sethgodin.typepad.com/::
I loved Stumbling on Happiness and thought about writing a full post dedicated to it, however after going through my notes,
::yeah, I was on a plane thumbing out notes about the book on my iPhone, I was pretty jazzed up about the book when I finished it, and couldn’t wait to get to a proper keyboard.::
...I realized I was recapping the whole book, and not as eloquently as the author. I highly suggest this book, pick it up for a fun summer read.
Check out my initial impressions of Scott Adam’s latest book here in my bookshelf:
Disclosure #2: I actually own stock in SiriusXM at the time of this writing.
Wise Ass Remark #1: I should have really held off on buying the new iPhone last week, I could have completed my hostile takeover of the company.
::As of this writing the stock is trading in the mid 40s, the mid 40 cents a share.::
Picture yourself as SiriusXM management. We’ll call you, Mel, for fun. Mel you have one of the greatest radio talents ever to grace the airwaves in your possession. Your company acquired exclusive rights to him and have him locked up for the next couple of years. Howard moved over to your company and brought a lot of his fans with him, almost instantly paying for his contract with all of the new subscribers.
Howard is still on top of his game. His audience still loves him and by all accounts, he is doing a bang up job. But the stock, oh the stock price! People could buy a share of your stock with the change they find in their couch…your subscribers might be happy, but Wall Street is not.
For the sake of this article let’s pretend there are not a million other economic, business, and social factors at play in determining the stock price of a company. Let’s assume that the more subscribers you can acquire the higher your stock price will rise, thus motivating you, Mel, to find a way to acquire more subscribers. Lastly, you being you, you know that there is a vast quantity of people out there willing to pay to listen to Howard Stern, they just need a little nudge to get them into the game.
Knowing all this, one might naturally approach Howard to do some promotion outside of his show; maybe do the late night talk show circuit, an interview in Rolling Stone, show up to a movie premiere…anything that would expand the reach of his voice past his own show, and remind the fence sitters who used to listen to Howard to pick up a satellite receiver.
Sounds reasonable to you…get your biggest star to make a media push, sit back and watch the subscribers roll in.
Howard, however, isn’t all that motivated to help out.
Sure he has a million and one reasons why he doesn’t want to do more press, the late shows, etc, but it really comes down to he feels he is doing a great job, as validated by the listeners, and the hell with everyone else who didn’t follow him and the stock price. Howard, in his mind, has fulfilled his end of the contact.
Mel, what do you do with a star employee who is performing at acceptable levels, but not working to his ‘all-star’ potential? You know Howard could step up and do more outside of his already excellent show, he could be doing things to bring in more subscribers, and grow the business. You have seen him do it in the past, however right now he just isn’t.
What do you do?
Back to software engineering…you’ve hired an all-star developer, named Johnson, from Microsoft. Johnson has years of experience with all the right technologies. You pay him a fair salary for his skills and his years of experience, and once he starts working for your company you find out he is only an average manager/mentor/team member/coding machine and not the all-star you expected to show up when you hired him.
What do you do?
How do you get your own personal Howard Stern to step up, take on new challenges, and work to their full potential?
What motivates people to work harder?
Money, Power, Respect, Whatchu’ need in life.
~Lil Kim from Money, Power, Respect by The LOX featuring Lil Kim & DMX
::I knew at some point I could work DMX into my blog. Mark another item off of my ‘Bucket List’::
Conventional wisdom says we are all working for these three items, money, power, and respect. Let’s break each one of these down.
Money
I believe we as managers have covered the money aspect, be it Howard Stern or our fictional software engineer Johnson. Hopefully, you and Johnson both did research and negotiated a fair salary. Johnson came on board, and one will assume he is satisfied with his pay. You could throw more money at him and see if that re-motivates him to work harder, but did you just create a negative feedback loop? Don’t work up to your all-star potential and make more money? If Johnson keeps this up, he will end up owning the company and only have to work a few hours a week.
In Howard’s case, his contract was well publicized, something to the tune of half a billion dollars for five years. Surely, that is enough money for almost anyone to live comfortably. Re-motivating Howard with more money would be difficult; we don’t have another half a billion sitting around to dangle in front of his face, plus there is an upper limit on how much money your company can throw at one person.
I have just finished reading Stumbling on Happiness, see my review at http://benjaminhysell.com/my-bookshelf/, once people rise above poverty acquiring more money rarely makes people any happier.
Since we don’t want to create a negative feedback loop, and don’t have any extra money laying around in this economy I’ll cross money off our list.
Power
What is power? Power to decide what to work on, how to work on something, when to complete a task?
Power who to hire, who to fire?
Power over your subordinates, power to decide what they need to accomplish, and when?
Power to mange every aspect of everyone’s lives around you?
Power is a nice thing to have in your daily job, its nice to have some freedom to decide what to do when, and to influence those around you.
Howard has plenty of power. He hires and fires his own staff, he chooses what to talk about every morning, and decides how and when to move his show along from topic to topic.
Will giving someone like Howard more power re-motivate him to excel?
What about Johnson? How much power is Johnson wielding in his current role? Is he allowed to set schedules, talk to the project stakeholders, and manage features? Assuming Johnson already has most of these upper management ‘base powers‘ will giving Johnson more power re-motivate him to excel?
Again, no, there is too much of a potential to create another negative feedback loop by rewarding less than stellar work ethic with more power. Plus, how much power do you want to give him? What new powers would you give him? For Howard and Johnson you could expand their powers over other departments, hiring and firing for the company, and long term strategy. Are these powers they would even want?
With great power there must also come - great responsibility.
~Stan Lee
::Ha, two items off the buck list in one night, a DMX song and a quote from Spider Man::
How much power is too much when someone can’t perform the basic functions of the job you hired them for and they become absorbed doing other tasks that are not vital to their core job? I’m going to mark power off our list as well.
Respect
Do you respect your employees? Do you hear their ideas, thoughtfully consider them, and then respond back to those ideas with a well worked out response? You do? Stop reading, start your own blog, and send me a link to the RSS feed. Why are you wasting your time reading my blog?
Listening to others and fully considering what they are saying before responding is a rare trait among most people. What is the quickest way to make an employee not care any more? Pay them lip service when they are talking to you about how to improve the company. Show me someone who feels upper management has ignored them and I’ll show you someone who has turned “it” off, and is coasting through their job doing just enough to get paid and not get fired.
The feeling of people above you not caring about what you bring to the table can be a huge de-motivator.
Howard has a lot of knowledge about the radio industry, however, rarely is his advice sought or his ideas given any respect with regards to expanding the company. Notice I’m not talking about giving him the direct power to implement his ideas, only a forum where his voice his heard and honestly responded to.
Have you been listening to Johnson and his ideas on how to streamline development? Did you check out his ideas for implementing a more secure source control system? How about that time he suggested improvements for the mentoring program?
Giving people respect is time consuming and difficult. One wants to make sure any respect given is not given falsely. People have keen ‘bullshit‘ detectors on a whole, so giving false respect is just as good as giving no respect.
Lastly, one wants to make sure they don’t give too much respect.
Give too much respect and one loses all ability to self-reflect; they become lazy, cocky, and all around, a general failure at their job. As a manger you have to find the right amount of respect to provide and ensure your employees don’t grow a head so large it won’t fit through the front doors of your office building.
So Mel, what techniques will you use to re-motivate your own personal Howard Stern? Will the right amount of respect appropriately given re-motivate an employee and help them re-discover their passion?
First, let me be clear, I own roughly five pairs of shoes; I am not a shoe aficionado. I have my sneakers, running shoes, brown shoes, black shoes, and my motorcycle boots…hardly a collection to make Imelda Marcos jealous.
However what I was missing was a pair of Nike Aqua Socks, (http://www.zappos.com/product/7525588/color/191561). I haven’t been able to find them since I was ten, and I used to love them. Sure, they never last a whole summer as the tops wear through, the soles have zero cushion, and provide almost zero traction, but I don’t care! My memories of using them in my youth compelled me to find a new pair that would fit my now grown adult foot.
For the past few years I have searched high and low for the Aqua Socks to no avail. That was until I was driven to try Zappos.com after reading an article about them in Inc.
Sure enough, they had my beloved Aqua Socks and they were delivered promptly with a promise that if they didn’t fit I could return them with free shipping both ways. I was delighted; I finally owned my long lost Aqua Socks in a size I could now use! They arrived just in time for my recent trip to the Poconos for some whitewater rafting.
My foot needs aside, Zappos seems to be generating a lot of interesting press and buzz on the interwebs as of late. What sets them apart from all of the other Web 2.0 companies out there? As I, and others, have said in the past, all they do is sell shoes.
Primarily the focus of the Inc. article and other postings is the amazing customer service, the freedom phone reps have to meet your needs, and the free return shipping if something doesn’t fit. In my mind all of the customer service policies and practices that everyone is praising Zappos for are all necessary evils of selling shoes online. Zappos is attempting to fulfill a shoe need, a need filled by delaying actually acquiring of said shoes by a day or two since they need to be shipped. With this delayed gratification Zappos needs to step it up in terms of customer service over traditional brick and mortar stores to survive.
Let’s face it, if Dick’s Sporting Goods carried Aqua Socks I wouldn’t have thought twice about hopping in the car and driving the ten minutes to the mall to have them that day. I like the mailman and all, but I’d rather not be waiting by the door for him to arrive with a box full of shoes. Call me impatient, but when prices are about the same online vs picking up in the store I choose the store nine times out of ten.
What caught my eye in the Inc. article wasn’t, in my mind, the baseline customer service I believe a company like Zappos needs to thrive, but rather how they go about interviewing new hires,
Prospective hires must pass an hour long "culture interview" before being handed off to whatever department they are applying to. Questions include, "On a scale of 1 -- 10, how weird are you?" and "What was your last position called? Was that an appropriate title?" (The first question makes sure that employees are sufficiently weird; the second, in which the interviewer is trying to goad the applicant into grumbling about his or her title, tests for humility.)
Spending an hour or so interviewing for ‘culture fit’ is a very interesting angle to explore in job interviewing.
I’ve gone on at length about my interview process, (http://benjaminhysell.com/archive/2009/02/the-technical-interview/), however unlike Zappos, I’ve never placed so much emphasis directly on culture fit. I tend to focus on passion…does the interviewee have passion for our craft and life in general? Normally, while exploring someone’s passion we get a pretty good sense of who they are, what they are going to be like on a day-to-day basis, and we as an interview team can see if the prospective new hire is going to click with the team.
Lately I’ve been wondering if I should retool my interview to further explore ‘culture fit’ not only from a passion perspective, but by some other measure needed in our industry. What that measure is I’m not so sure.
I can think back through college and high school where group work was key to many projects’ success. Have you ever found yourself in a group of people where personalities just didn’t mesh? I have worked in a few bad groups from time to time, and compared to groups where I worked with friends the experience of working in a group where we didn’t have a great ‘cultural fit’ was not as much fun.
I took a class at SUNY Binghamton in artificial intelligence my senior year of high school with a group of college seniors. It was spring semester for both the college seniors and me, so we all had senioritis. However, while they were heading off to real world jobs at the end of the semester, I was heading off to Cornell to start my college career in the fall. Let’s just say being 18 years old and hanging out doing a group project with college seniors was an amazing way to spend the spring semester. I had a lot of fun, but that was only after we cleansed the group of “Rick”.
The class was split into groups of four, and our group happened to be a group of five. We were to implement a 100 node feed forward neural network as our final project, a task we were well prepared to code and implement. What we were not prepared for was Rick.
Rick terrorized the group. I’m not sure which was worse, Rick taking tasks and never completing them, or failing to show up to 95% of our group meetings. The four of us who were not named Rick had to spend a lot of calories doing Rick’s work, trying to track Rick down, and in general dealing with ‘The Rick Issue.’
It’s physically and emotionally draining always picking up dropped tasks and trying to chase someone down who doesn’t want to be found. Not like Rick couldn’t do the work, he was more than capable, however we didn’t share his work ethic nor he ours.
Now picture yourself today in your job and take a Rick, if you don’t have one already, and inject him into your normal daily working life. My Rick was gone two weeks after the project started, as he was removed by the professor from our group, however a real world Rick maybe impossible to remove from your daily life. Are you looking forward to Monday knowing Rick is going to be there now? I wouldn’t be.
Life with a Rick is miserable, and from the article it appears Zappos makes a huge effort to ensure Rick never gets through the interview process:
If there is a disagreement between HR and the manager doing the hiring, Hsieh personally interviews the candidate and makes the final call. His strategy is to get the applicant into a social situation to see if they can connect emotionally. Alcohol often figures in the hiring process. "I had three vodka shots with Tony during my interview," says Rebecca Ratner, Zappos's head of human resources. "And I'm not atypical.” I asked Hsieh if this wasn't exposing the company to unnecessary risks. "It's a risk," he says. "But if we're building a culture where everyone is friends with everyone else, it's worth the risk."
For my college project we never had a chance to conduct an interview. Could we have figured out Rick would be a problem with a bottle of Jack and a couple of shot glasses? Should a social situation with a few drinks and attempting to identify an ‘emotional connection’ be the tie breaker in an interview? Can you scale this process as your company grows? Could this be implemented at Apple or IBM? How different would corporate America be if most job interviews started and ended in a pub?
For now I’m going to sit back and watch the Zappos story unfold. We already know for most of the working world the non-alcoholic approach to hiring works pretty darn good. We’ll see how Zappos fares in the long run, and what side effects hiring for culture will have as the company ages and their core culture changes.
I’m hoping for the best, I wouldn’t mind sitting down and relaxing with a nice tasty beverage the next time I conduct job interviews…a taste beverage and maybe a plate full of nachos.
The phrase ‘reinventing the wheel’ is tossed around in software development, as it likely is in other professions, to signify you are probably doing something someone else has already done. Moreover, others who have solved your problem have hopefully had a chance to iterate on the solution several times to find an optimal answer.
With all this time and effort invested by others why bother trying to duplicate all that effort? After all, others have already solved your issue, no sense trying to out do them, is there?
Like all issues, reinventing the wheel in software development is not so black and white.
It is these two key points that will hopefully dictate when you as a software developer decide to break out the case of Mountain Dew and start coding your problem from scratch or to pull a code snippet off of http://stackoverflow.com/ and plug it into your production code.
I am a huge proponent of not reinventing the wheel. I used to expound to my developers constantly that I am a very lazy programmer. Why should I spend the time and effort to code something up from scratch if someone has already done all of the legwork?
What isn’t normally fully communicated to someone when I say, “be lazy and don’t reinvent the wheel,” is you have to understand the wheel to know that you are reinventing it. This is the point Jeff makes at the very bottom of his article, http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001145.html:
If anything, “Don’t Reinvent The Wheel” should be used as a call to arms for deeply educating yourself about all the existing solutions – not as a bludgeoning tool to undermine those who legitimately want to build something better or improve on what’s already out there. In my experience, sadly, it’s much more the latter than the former.
I get to be lazy, reuse my old code, and not reinvent the wheel because I understand the wheel I am about to not reinvent.
I have done a bit of legwork myself to understand the piece of code I am about to plug into my system before choosing to plug it in. I have done some research on the forms to see how others are tackling the same problems I have, and I have done some testing to ensure what I am about to use is going to work. With all of this legwork under my belt hopefully the next time I encounter a similar problem I won’t have to work so hard for a solution, in effect be a little lazy and modify or tweak an already existing solution to use in a new problem.
It is with this experience that one can become truly effective at producing robust software, learn from the past, and not treat every problem by starting with a blank sheet of paper.
However, one also needs to be smart enough to know when to break out a blank project in your IDE and start from scratch. As Joel points out in his article, if the piece of code you are about to borrow is a key piece of your product, and this code is going to differentiate your product from your competition you might want to get to know the ins and outs of that code yourself.
What do you do in your software or business that sets you apart from everyone else? Whatever that is, don’t outsource it or borrow it from others! If you do you are at the mercy of others for what you are claiming is your advantage.
Joel gives several examples in his article of items not to outsource those items are the cornerstone of your business. One more recent example Joel did not reference was Zappos.
Zappos sells shoes online. That is their whole business, online shoes. Not special fancy shoes you couldn’t buy a hundred different places, just normal run of the mill shoes.
Yet, they are one of the more successful companies operating today on the Internet.
Zappos prides themselves on their customer service and quick and speedy order fulfillment. Guess what are the two things they don’t outsource? The one part they can’t outsource, the actual delivery of the shoes to your door, they compensate by paying out of their pocket for overnight delivery on most orders to give the end user the allusion of faster than normal service and fulfillment. Zappos has taken to heart the idea of what sets them apart from everyone else is customer service, and they do everything in their power to ‘reinvent the wheel’ when it comes to that. They are reinventing the wheel to make a better wheel, a wheel more and more people are starting to use.
I leave you with these thoughts:
Don’t reinvent the wheel.
Understand the wheel well enough before making a judgment call to reinvent it or not.
If the wheel is the corner stone of your software/application/business, you had better be reinventing the heck out of that wheel.
and have moved on to 
by Scott Adams the creator of Dilbert.