Do you sometimes get the impression that, like the garage of “olden” times, the college dorm room is where most startups start? That founders are dominantly twenty-somethings, many who skipped or quit college, who got some friends together and grabbed the brass ring?
Even more hilariously, do you believe that startups are a by-product of the Internet, as has been frequently explained over the last 15 years to me by younger, more nimble minds?
You may if you go by the media, since even old media focuses obsessively on young entrepreneurs doing wild things on the Net from their dorm rooms.
Not so.
“…a new study by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and researchers at Duke and Harvard universities reveals most U.S.-born technology and engineering company founders are middle-aged, well-educated, and hold degrees from a wide assortment of universities.”
I found this information at Dobbs Code Talk where Jon Erickson’s great post highlights key points in the study (note that the focus is US-born founders of engineering and tech companies), the first two being that
twice as many U.S.-born tech entrepreneurs start ventures in their 50s as do those in their early 20s.
elite, highly ranked schools are over-represented in the ranks of these founders, and Ivy-League graduates achieve the greatest business success; however, 92 percent of U.S.-born founders graduate from other universities.
According to Vivek Wadhwa, the study’s lead researcher and a Wertheim fellow with the Harvard Law School and executive in residence at Duke University,
“While education clearly is an advantage for tech founders in the United States, experience also is a key factor.”
Click on over to read more and for a link to the actual report, you’ll find both interesting reading.
Do you think the media presents an accurate picture of entrepreneurs?
Don’t miss Robert Reiss’ interview with Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh.
Hsieh believes that Zappos incredible customer service is the number one driver for sales growth that skyrocketed from $1.6 million in 2000 to more than $1 billion in eight short years, while powering straight through the dot com bust.
Hsieh believes that to be successful you “need to be truly passionate about whatever you’re in the business of doing … it should not just be about making money.”
Zappos.com’s incredible customer service is embedded in its culture and Hsieh explains in depth that the culture is protected by a unique “two-step” hiring process that in its second-step concentrates on Zappos’ corporate culture and its core values. Hsieh says, “We make sure the people we hire have similar values. We won’t hire them if they are not a “culture-fit even if they are technically strong.”
The company focus is obvious—listening to its customers to hear their requests and understand their needs.
Hsieh’s says, “We place a lot of value on the interaction with customers. We want and take the time to talk to our customers.”
The man’s on to something. In an age when most customers are left with the feeling that the company is doing them a favor by taking their money for the product/service and their desire for decent (not even great) customer service is at best an annoyance listening to Hsieh is not only refreshing, but offers tangible proof that a focus on company culture and superb customer service pays.
You tell me—it great customer service common sense or rocket science?
I read an interesting conversation engendered by a post entitled You don’t create a culture over at Signal vs. Noise.
Jason posts, “You don’t create a culture. Culture happens. It’s the by-product of consistent behavior… Real cultures are built over time. They’re the result of action, reaction, and truth… Don’t think about how to create a culture, just do the right things for you, your customers, and your team and it’ll happen.”
He says, “Artificial cultures are instant. They’re big bangs made of mission statements, declarations, and rules.”
But in the comments, Dorai Thodla points our that, “Culture emerges initially from the synergy and shared values of the founding team. We need to articulate it so that you can look for similar values in people you hire or encourage it.”
Articulating it should include writing it down, so that it can be accurately shared with current employees, new hires and candidates, but that doesn’t mean it’s carved in stone. It needs to be flexible, breathe and grow, while staying true to the original core values.
Jason likens culture to patina because it takes time to develop, but patina stays on the surface whereas culture needs to be absorbed like stain.
Like many competent people, Jason seems unaware of his own role, but no kind of culture or cultural traits “just happens.” Whatever the culture becomes, it’s based on the top person’s MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) and what that person enables to happen—whether actively or through benign neglect.
Do great cultures “just happen?” What do you think?
More than 200 years ago Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe said, “Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.”
A hundred years later Napoleon Hill said, “Think, act, walk and talk like the person you want to become and you will become that person.”
What these two great thinkers have in common is the positive use of assumption, but not assumption in a vacuum.
Assumptive management a la Goethe requires that you provide all the information necessary to attain the vision, coach as needed and be an active cheering section for accomplishments.
Personal growth a la Hill requires a clear vision of who/what you’re emulating. Yes, it’s easier with active support from those around you, but don’t let the lack of support hold you back—it’s achievable without it.
(Thanks to Phil Gerbyshak over at Slacker Manager for the Goethe quote.)
Do you use positive assumptive techniques at work or personally?
A manager I coach was concerned about one of his people. He said that although he knew it was none of his business he felt that one of his top producers was wasting her personal time working on an idea she had for a new product, but admitted that her actions had no impact on what was a stellar performance.
It wasn’t that she might leave to pursue the idea that bothered him, but rather that failing would be painful and he found it sad that she was setting herself up for so much disappointment if things didn’t pan out.
And before you write this off with the thought that he’s old and she’s young or that he’s jealous let me clarify a bit.
Both are in their early thirties—she’s actually two years older, they’re educational equals and both are highly innovative.
What they have is different MAP. While both take risks, he prefers being an intrapreneur while she likes the idea of entrepreneurism.
I told him that
they were more similar than he realized and that he shouldn’t evaluate her dreams using his MAP;
in return for her productivity and 110% efforts he owed it to her to support her dream;
the way dreams come true is by being willing to risk making a plan, setting goals and then going for it; and
the only real failure comes when you’re dead, since any time before that you can try again and that the only people who never “fail” are those who attempt nothing.
Dave Duffield is a very savvy guy. The serial entrepreneur with multiple successes under his belt is doing it again; Workday, his latest company is on a best places to work list.
You may remember Dave’s last company PeopleSoft (acquired by Oracle in a hostile takeover), which regularly made similar lists.
So what does Dave do that keeps his companies top rated? You can find the answers here,
“The Workday Experience is the combination of everything that’s unique about Workday: our culture, our core values, our company meetings, our Development “Show and Tell” happy hours, our soccer team, our recognition programs, but most importantly it’s our people. It’s everything that makes us different from your average employer, and everything that makes Workday a great place to spend a workday.”
I especially liked the list of cultural values to which they DON’T subscribe:
Bureaucracy
Top-down decision making
Corporate politics
Unnecessary organizational structure and hierarchy
“Kissing up” and “slapping down”
Boredom
Cutthroat, shark-like business dealings
Take a few minutes to read the Core Values and Culture info and see how many you already embrace at your company and how many you can add.
Friday I wrote that age-neutral, fear-related information control is the greatest barrier to the spread of social media tools.
Today I read an interesting post by Hutch Carpenter suggesting that companies create a new position, Social Media Manager, to shepherd, not ramrod, the adoption of SM tools.
Hutch says that “The successful social media manager will be someone who can engage a wide variety of personality types. Who can handle a variety of viewpoints.”
I would add that the person should also have strong shrink-type skills to deal with MAP-based resistance.
With that one addition I think Hutch has hit on good idea, one I hope companies will jump on—or at least cautiously climb aboard.
Do you think that a social media manager makes sense?
Yesterday, I wondered if the adoption of social media tools would parallel the spread, or lack thereof, of telecommuting and asked, “Is the problem truly generational? Age-related? A function of company size? Corporate culture?”
I believe that fear is the underlying, driving force behind not being willing to share, which, in turn, is the number one barrier to widespread use of social media tools.
People who fear often seek an antidote that doesn’t require them to change.
They see the antidote as power.
The source of power is control.
The only things worth controlling are money and information.
Money speaks for itself, whereas people at all levels, not just managers, alleviate their fear by finding ways to control the flow of information and they do this with little personal effort and at no perceived cost to themselves.
It may seem more difficult to make changes to your MAP, but the end result of changing it is far more valuable and lasting then the short-term fix offered by power—which is ethereal at best and imaginary at worst.
I can help if you or someone you know is dealing with fear and wants a lasting solution, feel free to call me at 866.265.7267
I was talking the old fashioned way (by phone) this morning with Scott Allen on the challenges, difficulties and plain old problems (another old fashioned term) of implementing social media tools in many companies. I said that it reminded me of the late 1970 - early 80s when the telecommunitg egg was trying its best to hatch—and still is in many places.
That was when the current crop of managers were still workers, most companies were hierarchal-but-in-the-process-of-flattening and management jobs were being eliminated left and right.
Those workers (today’s manager and execs) rallied and railed for the opportunity to work from home and the managers quaked in their collective boots because if workers were self-managing and productive from home then why did they need managers.
Nearly thirty years later, with telecommuting still only a dream to many, how fast can we expect social media tools to be adopted?
Is the problem truly generational? Age-related? A function of company size? Corporate culture?
We’re told that in the long run we all become our parents.
Do we also become our bosses?
Tomorrow I’ll offer my take on it, but first—what do you think?
Stephen Collins of acidlabs wrote a great guest post yesterday, explaining how he uses social media to expand his business and how many companies, large and small, are embracing social media tools to juice productivity and innovation.
Post from: MAPpingCompanySuccess Whether I’m socially disabled or just plain antisocial I’m the last person you want to ask about social media tools and whether/how to use them—but I keep getting asked. So when I accidentally fell into a dialog with Stephen Collins, Founder and Chief Troublemaker at acidlabs, during a thread on LinkedInBloggers (a yahoo e group) I asked him if he’d be willing to share some of his knowledge and he said yes.
According to Stephen, “he’s a frequently self-appointed tricky problem solver driven by a need to help people and organisations effect change in their capacity to retain, distribute and share knowledge.”
Without more ado, here’s Stephen.
Why you should be using social tools in your organisation
Just the other day, I read this comment from an accountant on a newspaper article about social networking in business:
“Interesting info about Twitter - yes I was in that group that thought it would never catch on! Maybe I could send riveting reminders about when [sales tax] is due :)”
The writer’s offhand comment is actually not too far off the mark. This type of use is actually appropriate for a tool like Twitter and matches fairly closely with other emerging business use of Twitter where smart, social network aware organisations are using it as a channel to keep their community abreast of current happenings.
With a growing number of major businesses such as IBM, SAP, Janssen- Cilag and Morgan Stanley using social tools inside and across the wall to manage collaboration efforts, networking and communications, any organisation that simply discounts social tools as an effective medium is doing themselves a disservice. The cries of “time wasting” and “not for business” are ever more clearly wrong and often made by those who are dismissing social tools without looking to understand.
Now, let it be very clearly said that open slather is not the way to go for most businesses. Letting people muck about all day, grooming their Facebook profile is, frankly, less an issue of time wasting and more a matter of good people management.
Appropriate use policies that are very clear on what is and isn’t allowed and careful steps towards use and understanding are the way to go. As an independent consultant this is advice I give to my clients as I speak to them about the opportunity social tools offer them in terms of staff attraction, engagement and retention, for knowledge and information management and for collaboration. A little research is all that’s needed to find a wealth of information to support this position.
My business uses social tools as a core part of the way I deal with clients and peers around the world. Using these tools has afforded me opportunities to become engaged in communities and work that might otherwise never have crossed my radar. In the last year, I’ve presented at a conference in the USA (I live in Australia) and met in real life in excess of 100 new and interesting people I might otherwise never have crossed paths with. Every one of those opportunities was as a direct result of the networking and information and knowledge sharing opportunities opened to me by using social networking tools.
I am a regular user of Twitter (probably one of the most prolific Aussies, actually), I use Facebook to track what my professional communities (and friends) are up to and are talking about, I use LinkedIn for strictly business networking and to ask and answer relevant questions, I use Upcoming to track and note my attendance at various events and I use several other social networks for their specific purposes - Flickr for photos, delicious and Magnolia for bookmarking, TripIt and Dopplr for travel and meeting coordination and BrightKite (a new network) for tracking location and arranging serendipitous connections with colleagues, peers and friends. I also blog and use tools like Google Calendar, BaseCamp and Google Docs to keep track and store information that is important to me and my clients.
There’s no reason your organization couldn’t be doing the same. If it’s good enough for Downing Street, who are officially blogging, using Twitter, YouTube and Flickr and significantly opening up the British government to constituent participation, it’s probably good enough for your organisation. As an Australian, I only hope that our Prime Minister sees what’s happening in Britain and does something similar.
I would be more than happy to have a conversation with you or anyone else reading this post about how social tools can help you build brand and community for you and your organisation. My contact details are very public - you can find them at http://www.acidlabs.org/
Corporate culture is the darling of today’s pundits, toasted and blamed for enhancing, allowing, enabling or contributing to every success and failure when it hits the media—and for good reason.
But is corporate culture also at the bottom of the amazing number of ethical lapses that have come to light over the last decade or so?
In a talk on ethics Bradley Preber, Grant Thornton’s partner-in-charge of its Forensic Accounting and Investigative Services practice commented that “Any company that continues having pervasive and systematic behavior problems with its employees must look at its culture to see if it could be partly what drives that unethical behavior. And if the recurring problem stems from upper management then this will have repercussions for the rest of the company. He added that culture is a factor that can be used to predict fraud and evaluate a company’s ethics.”
Moreover, the ethical breaches that surface shouldn’t come as a surprise.
According to Marianne Jennings, author of The Seven Signs of Ethical Collapse and professor of legal and ethical studies in business at W. P. Carey School of Business, “All unethical organizations are alike; their cultures are identical and their collapses become predictable.” Moreover, there are seven warning signs for which you can watch,
“pressure to maintain numbers;
fear and silence in the ranks and leadership;
young and inexperienced executives and a bigger-than-life CEO;
a weak board;
conflict;
pressure to produce constant innovation; and
a penchant for philanthropy that assuages guilt for questionable decisions.”
Just don’t expect this checklist to be posted in neon in your office or offered up on the company wiki.
Plus, there’s an entire gray area that although the actions may not be illegal they are unethical. It’s your responsibility to keep your head out of the sand, your eyes open and to recognize when you’re in that gray zone.
Just as you know that when something is too good to be true it probably is, know that if you’re wondering if something is unethical it probably is.
Do you see any of the seven signs in your company’s culture?
Few people put much thought into organizing meetings, whether company-wide, department or team. The best create an agenda, but little beyond that.
If this sounds familiar, you need to think again.
The idea that meetings need to be consciously designed as does any successful, productive business process is addressed by Business Week Innovation.
More new age voodoo?
According to Debra Dunn, a 22-year veteran of Hewlett-Packard, “Meetings have tremendous symbolic power.”
Robert Sutton, an expert in organizational behavior and author of, most recently, The No Asshole Rule, says, “If you destroy the culture, then you destroy the company.” (Both teach at Standford University.)
Read the story and the Playbook and compare your attitude, approach and most importantly results to the case study presented.
Yet another article on Wal-Mart’s commitment to sustainability. Now, I’m not knocking what they’re doing, but I do wonder if Wal-Mart’s sustainability efforts will ever be extended to their workforce.
Of course, according to Northeast corporate affairs representative Steve Restivo it is, “”Another component, and the one, frankly, that I’m most proud of, is the Personal Sustainability Program for our associates.”At the Portsmouth store, employees are taking part in three programs — stopping smoking, losing weight and changing to CFL bulbs in their homes.”
It really is too bad that sustainability doesn’t extend to equality in the workplace, health insurance, full-time employment and decent wages, but maybe the shopping public won’t support that.
What do you think? Are Wal-Mart’s efforts ground-breaking or damage control?
Be sure to read yesterday’s post for background on ‘fair’.
When setting compensation, never forget that credentials are well known, promotions are public and salary news travels faster than naughty gossip, so secret is not an option.
Problems start when a person doing the same work and with a similar background as the person in the next cube gets X more dollars or a promotion for reasons that have nothing to do with skill, experience, attitude or actual work, but rather for charm, politics, or managerial whim.
This approach also works for companies with flat organizations, such as the one Phil Gerbyshak described over at Slacker Manager, where most people have the same title.
For convenience we’ll call them knowledge workers.
1. Department heads are responsible for establishing title categories, including the parameters for education, experience, skills, etc. The fineness is dependent on the size of your organization and the difference experience-wise between entry level and senior. For example,
Knowledge worker I
Knowledge worker ll
Knowledge workers lll
Senior knowledge worker
Principle
Fellow
2. Each category carries its own salary range, ideally a spread around $20K. Again, depending on your business it can be less, but rarely more.
3. Each category has different responsibilities with the actual work structured so your people enjoy solid challenges and opportunities to grow.
4. Working together, department heads and their managerial reports (if any) assign all current employees to the correct level.
5. The department head then meets with the entire department and explains the new system.
6. The department head and any other managers involved meet with their direct reports to explain to what category they’ve been assigned and why.
Here’s an example to help you visualize it.
Let’s say that you decide on a three-level structure in your department because the senior title is given only rarely.
You currently have two people who are Analyst l, range $40K-$60K,
Craig, who just graduated was hired at $48K; and
Julie at $55K, who has three years, two of them with you.
You have five people who are Analyst II, range $60K-$80K,
Trudy was recently promoted and is at $62K;
Jason, $68K, and Craig, $72K, both have been working for six years. Although Jim has an MBA, he started in sales, while Craig had three years’ experience in a specifically needed skill when he was hired;
Terry is making mid-seventies with five years of direct experience; and
Kim, at $80K and due for promotion to Analyst lll, has a Masters’ and 17 years of experience, 5 of them in directly in your field.
Along with keeping the structure transparent and honest, it’s imperative to be sure that every new hire clearly understands the structure and the career path it offers.
Speaking (Tuesday) of corporate culture, one of the most important fundamentals of good corporate culture is fairness—especially in compensation.
Salary differences should be based on factual points, not charm, politics, or managerial whim.
So, how do you draw the lines to achieve fairness?
Number one with most people is peer relativity.
The people working in a small local company don’t compare their compensation to those working in a Fortune 500, nor to their bosses. They compare it to their peers, i.e., people with a similar job, background, title, company, industry and location.
Further, smart compensation policy recognizes that not everyone with the same title deserves the same compensation.
Fairness is also dependent on honesty. Over the years companies have adopted policies saying that compensation was confidential and not to be discussed; managers make candidates offers and tell them not to share it with their new colleagues—amazingly, they not only believe that it will stay private, but they’re shocked when it doesn’t.
They shouldn’t be—telling people ‘not to tell’ is like waving a red flag at a bull, it sets up the assumption that ‘there’s something going on’.
Want practical advice on structuring a fair compensation plan? We’ll do that tomorrow.
Have a quick question or just want to chat? Feel free to write or call me at 866.265.7267. Up to a point it's free, beyond that point it's business. Not sure? No problem:) I'll say something if the line's crossed.
Do you sometimes get the impression that, like the garage of “olden” times, the college dorm room is where most startups start? That founders are dominantly twenty-somethings, many who skipped or quit college, who got some friends together and grabbed the brass ring?
Don’t miss Robert Reiss’ 
I read an interesting conversation engendered by a post entitled 
A manager I coach was concerned about one of his people. He said that although he knew it was none of his business he felt that one of his top producers was wasting her personal time working on an idea she had for a new product, but admitted that her actions had no impact on what was a stellar performance.
But fear is like a cancer in 
Corporate culture is the darling of today’s pundits, toasted and blamed for enhancing, allowing, enabling or contributing to every success and failure when it hits the media—and for good reason.
and professor of legal and ethical studies in business at W. P. Carey School of Business, “All unethical organizations are alike; their cultures are identical and their collapses become predictable.” Moreover, there are seven warning signs for which you can watch,
Few people put much thought into organizing meetings, whether company-wide, department or team. The best create an agenda, but little beyond that.
Yet another 
Salary differences should be based on factual points, not charm, politics, or managerial whim.
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