Business of Software Blog

BoS Digest - to mediocrity and beyond! How to teach better management

I'm a mean presenter. Mean as in average, that is. Put me in front of a crowd and, if I prepare hard and practice much, I can turn in a middling performance.

Which I'm pleased about.

I used to be an appalling presenter. The first time I did a presentation was at a sponsor's slot at VS Live in 2001. Six people turned up in a hall built for 200. They sat in a pattern carefully calculated to maximise the minimum space between any two people. Three people left during my talk.

In the few years following that, I stayed abysmal. I went to a few presentation skills courses and seminars. I'd get better for a week or two afterwards, but would then slide back to terrible.

But then, a bit over a year ago, something happened. I realised that I wanted to become a better presenter. Whenever I heard a great speaker, I analysed what made them great. I noticed that great speakers are great for different reasons. They all have different styles, and structure their talks in different ways. Guy Kawasaki has perfect timing and can play the audience as well as any stand-up. Seth Godin fires out ideas, rat-a-tat-tat. John Kotter talks quietly, conversationally, and meanders around the stage. Jennifer Aaker strides into the audience, asking questions and demanding answers.

Whenever I heard a dull speaker, I analysed them too. Was the problem their content? Was the material dull, or flabby? Did they rush, or mumble? If they had good content, what was wrong with the presentation? What would Seth Godin have done with the same content? How would Joel Spolsky have put the same point across?

I kept my eye out for relevant articles, blog posts and books and read them critically, absorbing ideas that I agreed with, rejecting ones that I didn't, taking people's insights and making them my own.

I practiced - part of my role at Red Gate involves speaking fairly regularly - saw what worked, saw what didn't, and iterated.

In my journey up the slope from dire, to mediocre, to average, there is precisely one moment that is interesting. That's the moment when I began to want to improve.

I think this holds for most learning. It follows that it holds for teaching too. At Red Gate, we're currently working on improving the skills of our managers. Most companies follow a sheep-dipping approach - you're a bad manager, we dip you in Maslow, Herzberg and McGregor, and you emerge, coated, a good manager. But this can't work - different people learn in different ways, they come from different places and they have different destinations.

So we're taking a different approach. We think the most important part is planting the seed of wanting to become a better manager. We plant it in fertile ground, and make sunshine and water available, in the form of books, courses, lectures, mentoring, management clinics and - most importantly - practice. But it's up to you to grab the opportunities, to nurture the seed, to make it blossom and flourish.

How do you train your people? Post on this forum post.

A related problem is how to get the best out of your people. Do you bribe them, or beat them, or is there a better way? Hopefully you can guess what my opinion is. Over on the forums, Andrew Butel asks "Do you have an employee incentive scheme?".

Got a question you want answering? Post it on the forums.

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BoS digest - why foosball is as important as source control

Richard Florida has written much about the importance of place. I think he’s on to something - despite the hype about virtual communities, social networking and off-shoring, physical geography is as important as it always has been. Although software developers could choose to live in Wyoming and work remotely with their colleagues in Montana, they don't. They cluster in cities and regions like Silicon Valley, Austin, Boston and Cambridge, UK. Facebook is never going to change that.

Place is important at another level too. Great software is built by great teams. To build a great team, you clearly need great people. But great people aren’t enough. You also need great interactions, and you can’t get those remotely. Getting people to interact is hard enough if they’re sat feet away in different rooms in the same building, let alone thousands of miles away in different continents.

Thomas Allen wrote about this forty years ago, and web 2.0 hasn’t changed it. The likelihood of two people communicating falls off in proportion to the square of the distance separating them. In fact, once two people are sat more than 25 metres apart, there is a vanishingly small chance that they'll interact. The ‘nuisance factor’ exacerbates this: throw in a couple of corners to navigate, a door to open or stairs to climb and Alice is even less likely to talk to Bob.

So you need to sit teams together. You can’t outsource QA to India, or even have the test team sat on a different floor to the developers. You lose all those tiny, daily interactions (“Hey Lionel, you’ve just broken the build”; “Jon, stop testing that bit of code - I know it doesn’t work”) that make teams productive.

But the importance of interactions is wider than that. You need to encourage interactions between people in different teams, even different parts of the company. This needs to go beyond formal, sit-down meetings. It’s the random interactions that are valuable - conversations overheard in the kitchen and throw-away comments made over lunch at the pub. That’s why - once you reach a certain size - a foosball table, and a foosball league, are just as important as source control.

Of course, foosball tables also make work a more enjoyable place to be. Over on the forums, Dan Nunan asks "what makes a great office environment for software companies?". If you’ve got an opinion, post it.

Not everybody agrees that place is important though. Jason Fried, for example, argues that working in the same city as somebody is just a distraction. When he and the other founders of 37signals get together, their productivity plummets. You can find out more about Jason’s philosophy - including why he thinks roadmaps, specifications and projections are evil - by watching the video of his BoS 2008 talk.

If you think that place is important, and think that no amount of virtual networking can replace pizza, beer and conversation, then take a look at the Business of Software events coming up. There are small groups meeting up in Boston, San Francisco and London. I hope you can make it.

Is place as important as I think it is? Or has technology eliminated geography? Post here …

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Video of Jason Fried's talk at Business of Software 2008

I've just posted Jason Fried's talk online.

Jason is the founder of 37signals. Jason talks about many things in this session, focussing on the philosophy of 37signals (for example, they pay for employees' hobbies) and how bigger isn't always better. Interesting stuff, even though I don't agree with everything he says. Are roadmaps, specifications and projections really as pointless as he claims?

You can see the video here.

I'll be posting more videos online in the next couple of weeks. To stay up to date, subscribe to my blog or join the Business of Software social networking group.

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BoS weekly digest: correction, recession or depression, but there will be winners

On the day the first world war started, Du Pont - the US-based principle supplier of munitions to Great Britain - doubled the price of gunpowder. By 1916, DuPont were making profits of $82m / year (some $2bn in today's money), up from $5m from before the war. Similarly, the profits of British farmers more than trebled in the four years that the war lasted.

In the great depression of the 1930s, Bechtel, Kaiser and the other of the 'Six Companies' flourished as they built the infrastructure of the American West. Building the Hoover dam alone netted them profits of around $15m ($200m in today's money).

Whether recent financial events are a short-term correction, or herald the start of a recession or even a depression, two things are certain.

Firstly, there will be losers. The web 2.0 froth will evaporate with its funding, and vendors of big-ticket, enterprise software will struggle as purchases of big-ticket items are postponed.

Secondly, and less obviously, there will be some winners. Some individual companies will do well, but so will entire sectors. In the high street, cobblers' profits are up as people repair their shoes rather than replacing them; low-budget supermarkets such as Lidl and Aldi in the UK are doing well at the expense of the more upmarket Marks and Spencer; sales of lipstick and ties will go up as people look for cheap ways to feel good.

So where is the silver lining for software businesses in the current crisis? Post here.

Back in April, Dan Nunan wrote a guest post on my blog entitled "What the recession means for the software business: five things to think about". It's well worth reading, now more than ever.

On the forums, Keith Maurino asks "How much free support is too much?". On the one hand, giving free support is a powerful sales tool. On the other, it can be a burdensome drain on resources. Where to draw the line? If you've got an opinion then post here.

If you want something to take your mind off the gloomy financial news then I recommend pizza and beer. If you want to eat, drink and discuss building long-term, profitable and sustainable businesses then there are groups meeting up in San Francisco and London.

Interested in building long-term, profitable, sustainable software businesses? Join the BoS social network.

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Death by treacle, and how to avoid it

Here's something that scares me: one day I'll wake up and realise that Red Gate, the company I've helped create, has turned into a treacle-filled bureaucracy. One reason this scares me is the insidious nature of treacle. It doesn't burst through the levees in a single, predictable and defensible incident. It seeps in over the years, through the cracks in the walls and the gaps in the floors of the structures we build.

So, how to stop death by treacle?

First, don't create rules for the many based on the sins of the few:

Here, somebody has sinned. Maybe he stirred his tea with a spoon and then put it back with the clean cutlery. Rather than dealing with the individual ('excuse me - can you use a wooden stirrer please'), ignoring the transgression (is it really such a big deal?) or revisiting the underlying assumptions (maybe there's a reason he wants to stir his tea with a spoon), somebody decided to legislate and punish the many for the sins of the few.

There are a lot of signs in this particular cafeteria: 'Do not change diapers in this restaurant'; 'Do not let your children climb on the furniture'; ' No smoking'; 'Do not eat food brought in from elsewhere'. No individual rule is disastrous. But in their aggregate, the rules change the atmosphere - the culture - of the place.

Creating the rule was easy: a simple matter of scribbling a note on a piece of card. Solving the particular situation would have been harder. It would have meant talking to the customer, explaining the problem, understanding his point of view and risking a confrontation ('what do you mean, I can't stir my tea with a frigging spoon?'). Harder, but better.

You'd never have the equivalent of a 'do not stir your tea with a spoon' notice at your company, right?

I bet that you do. Have you really never created a general rule when you should have dealt with the difficult, specific problem instead? Have you never created an expenses policy, or a working hours policy, or an internet porn policy, slowly covering the ankles of the many in treacle, when you should have confronted the brutal facts and dealt with the problematic few?

Post here ...

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BoS social network digest - issue 1

A bit over a week ago I launched the Business of Software social network, aimed at people interested in building long-term, profitable, sustainable software businesses. It's got some 185 members now, which is a cracking start. I'm going to send out a semi-regular digest of activity on the forum (probably once a week) to members, e-mail it to members and cross-post it to my blog. This is the first issue.

In the eleventh century BC, after a battle with the Gileadites, the Ephraimites tried to retreat back to their homeland across the river Jordan. But the Gileadites had already taken the ford. The Gileadites needed a way to separate the two tribes, who were physically indistinguishable. However, the Ephraimites were unable to pronounce the sound 'sh', so the Gileadites asked each man crossing to say 'shibboleth' and slaughtered those who couldn't.

The success of the Business of Software social network will be determined not only by who we let in, but also by who we keep out. We need a Shibboleth - a statement that keeps the web 2.0, eyeballs-are-more-important-than-profits, let's-flip-to-Google, impostors out. Got any ideas? Post them here.

Dan Nunan posted up a question asking 'How many questions before it gets too personal?'. Dan asked how much information you should ask potential downloaders. The consensus was none. Don't even ask for their e-mail addresses. I think the consensus is wrong. Post your opinion on the forum.

In 'On being paid in trousers', Phil Factor asks if the current financial crisis could return the software industry to the barter economy.

Got a non-traditional business model? Jay Grieves would like to hear from you.

There's a London BoS dinner being held on November 12th. If you're in the area and want to eat pizza, drink beer and discuss building profitable, long term, sustainable software businesses, then sign up.

See you on the site, and please encourage other people to sign up. Assuming they pass the Shibboleth, of course.

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London Business of Software dinner - November 12th

If you're based near London and want to meet up for pizza, beer and discussion about building long term, sustainable and profitable software businesses then sign up here:

http://network.businessofsoftware.org/events/event/show?id=2352433:Event:1133

Thank you Ken for suggesting this.

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