“Today, all around the world, people are not just more empowered and informed but they also are far less trusting of business and political organizations, leaders of all sorts and flatulence filled, florid, fancy marketing. They are looking for authenticity, community, value, relevance and simplicity. There is a gaping divide between the rulers and the ruled, between marketers, and customers and between the senior leaders and the rank and file. It is going to be critical to get real and stop repeating old shibboleths or behaving in ways that make so many leaders caricatures of themselves. Get real. Get great. Or you may be forced to get out. Personal re-invention is critical.”
Doesn’t matter if you fail in your life when following your dream. It is all about trying new things and figuring ways to get where you want. Great analogy was presented by Seth when he described how programmers work – they just keep tweaking code until it works. The same with your life, your business or a job – you are the coder. A keyboard is in front of you – start typing.
There is so much potential in people working for big companies – they keep great ideas in their heads instead of just trying new ways to improve their businesses. “It’s better to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission” – tell this to your employees if you are a manager and show them that it is OK to try…
Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people. George Bernard Shaw
“When I was a little kid I loved playing with LEGOs. You’ve got to build whatever your mind can
create. And entrepreneurship is the same thing. You build what you want to build and through this process of building all these amazing ideas you change the world.” The Entrepreneurial Spirit – a film by Justing Gutwein
There is a lot of buzz around startups and sometimes you can see too many young people spending too much money on something that brings little value. But if you look globally, there are thousands of great entrepreneurs around the world bringing change through making ideas happen.
Getting an idea is an intangible impulse. After that you bring the right people and resources into one place to make it happen. To make it tangible. And it is easier than ever before because the entry level is so low these days. You invest the time of a small group of geeks and after a few months you’ve got a product out on the market.
A documentary film that was shot during StartUp Weekend Baltimore gives you a flavour of 4 groups of people that want to bring idea into life. Delivery is the hardest parts. There are many passionate dreamers but persistency is the hardest part.
“Every company is a Startup, at some point it started up”
Remember, when you were made a leader you weren’t given a crown, you were given a responsibility to bring out the best in others. For that, your people need to trust you. And they will, as long as you demonstrate candor, give credit, and stay real. “Winning”, Jack Welch with Suzy Welch (page 72)
Yesterday Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple. He made his company to hit the top as the highest market value business in the US surpassing ExxonMobil. I’ve been watching Steve closely since 1997 as he started again with his new iMac and wished him all the best (I was even wondering if it was a good time to buy Apple shares!). I admired his presentations, his vision and clarity when it comes to the future of the tech world. He showed his great potential with every new product as he dominated so many markets from music to the tablets industry. He created an unbelievable culture in Apple so they could built one of the greatest tech products in the world when other just managed to produce mediocre mobile phones or less than average tablets. It must be a great feeling to influence so many peoples’ lifestyle and build such a strong company. Of course he was just a leader with so many people working for the success but we can see many examples like Nokia or Yahoo where lack of proper leadership makes a company loose their value and fade away.
Sometime ago I watched his Stanford Commencement speech from 2005 and I really liked it. Today, when reading about his resignation I stumbled upon his best quotes and read again this fine part:
“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
Marc Andreessen wrote an outstanding piece for the Wall Street Journal about how software companies are taking over the world. There are so many facts and figures in this article as well as great thoughts about the changing tech industry, that you need to read it a few times.
My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy.
More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services – from movies to agriculture to national defense. Many of the winners are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not.
If you run a web agency you may have a dilemma – keep clients or focus on your own projects. More ane more web companies are going towards the second model where they develop their own products. 37signals and Coudal Partners are the examples.
Jim Coudal always dreamt about becoming a Creative Director and getting awards as an acknowledgment for his hard work but when he got it he felt miserable. The same happened when he worked for clients in his own web agency. Then he realised there must be the other way.
Jim gave an informative and funny presentation at Chicago Creative Mornings where he share his experience and knowledge. I listed down a few quotes and thoughts that caught my attention.
Jim Coudal at Chicago Creative Mornings – Quotes
“We are a pretty traditional ad agency design firm except we have no clients”
“For us the disadvantages of working with clients became bigger than the advantages.”
About working for clients: “If somebody somewhere can make a decision about whether you are going to be in businness next year that’s a bad thing to carry around with you all the time. At least with our experience.”
“That very thing that we always loved about the creative work is that idea of a variety of satisfying our curiousity by working on a lot of different things.”
Advices for building your own products
They carry their own in-house projects in the same way they treated external clients.
Three golden rules they share:
1. Don’t do it in your spear time.
2. Don’t do it in 6 months, do it tomorrow.
3. Find the way to work it into the regular workflow of your system if you are interested in experimenting and fail spectacularly.
Everytime John asks agency owners about how they made the switch from client business to entrepreneurial business they always say “I should have done it sooner”.
Your own stuff is potentially more lucrative
This is the philoshophy that John Coudal has been following since the difficult 2001 – you have great talents in your agency and they should benefit the agency, not the clients.
“After 9/11, we lost a lot of business. And we were in trouble. It wasn’t any problem of ours. One company got bought and other people cut back on their spending,” he explains. “It’s the best thing that ever happened to us because we pulled back and said, “Well, do we wanna build up this whole thing again and go chase business that we don’t want and get into pitches and win or not win business based on the whims of people who are stupider than we are? Or is there another way?”"
“We never really maximized our creative potential by, I can say it, whoring ourselves out to people who knew less than we did” he says. “If you have the skills to do client work, you have the skills to make your own product. You’re selling yourself short by selling that on a work for hire basis.”
When I first found out about Quora I thought that the concept was nothing new – there were plenty of Q&A sites like Yahoo Answers. But when I started exploring the topic and use Quora I quickly changed my mind.
There was no Q&A site for new technology professionals before Quora. Or maybe not the site that brought so many specialists and experts into one place. From Sillicon Valley companies CEOs to small business entrepreneurs from all around the world. The target audience has one thing in common - hungry for expertise and eager to share their knowledge with others.
Daniel Pink during his TED talk asks indirectly a fundamental question about why business demotivates creative people with externals rewards. Researches that were conducted for many years showed that innovative people rely on intrinsic motivation. By offering them financial bonuses we produce opposite results.
I always knew that internally driven people need to feel they are changing the world around them, that they are focused on growing and creating value as well as giving something to the society. But I never thought that by adding external rewards we are not only helping but even making things work.
Why does it happen so often nowadays in companies and public sector? One of the reasons is that building an exceptional work environment and culture like in Zappos is a hard work and only few can do it. Giving pay rises and bonuses is much easier.
It looks like we still use motivational mechanisms back from industrial age. Daniel Pink speaks out to help us all change the situation.
In order to enhance your creativity, to prevent being “a puppet of circumstances”, and to live up to your full potential, you need to take your focus away from extrinsic rewards – such as money, prestige, and so on – and, instead, place your focus on intrinsic rewards. That is, your main reason for performing your work should be your enjoyment of the task itself, the feeling of satisfaction you get from being involved in a given project, and the sense of meaning you derive from carrying out your work.
Paul Montwill specializes in Digital and E-commerce Strategies, Online Marketing and industry analysis. He is an E-commerce Sales Director in one of the European IT companies, a blogger and he offers consultancy.
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