Today is a new holiday and one that’s been a long time coming.
We already have a day dedicated to bosses and admin/secretaries and now Solar Winds has proposed making September IT Professional Day in honor of one of the most ignored, when things are working, and maligned, when things go wrong, departments. Bare i 2016 ble det lansert over 100 nye casinoer for det norske markedet https://www.casinonorske.com/spilleautomater-på-nett.
Steve Blank wrote a great post about changing culture in larger organizations. It’s a must-read for anyone in business, government or non-profit who is looking to juice innovation in their organization.
Blank agrees that there are four components to culture.
Two McKinsey consultants, Terry Deal and Arthur Kennedy wrote a book called Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life. In it they pointed that every company has a culture – and that culture was shorthand for “the way we do things at our company.” Company culture has four essential ingredients:
Values/beliefs – set the philosophy for everything a company does, essentially what it stands for
Stories/myths – stories are about how founders/employees get over obstacles, win new orders…
Heroes – what gets rewarded and celebrated, how do you become a hero in the organization?
Rituals – what and how does a company celebrate?
He goes on to explain what needs to be done for “innovation to happen by design not by exception.”
In reality it should be a subset of values/beliefs, but it is rarely thought about by bosses — they either do it or do the opposite automatically.
It can be summed up in four words, don’t kill the messenger—Pete Carroll, coach of the Seattle Seahawks, is a master of this mindset.
To be truly innovative means trying new stuff and a part of trying new stuff is accepting that it won’t always work.
Corporate culture in general and many bosses individually can’t seem to wrap their minds around the idea that some things will fail — it’s the dark side of the ‘but me mindset’ at work.
What they, and anybody setting out to change culture and encourage innovation, need to understand is that it only takes killing the messenger, i.e., responding negatively to the person who brings bad news, once to negate whatever progress had been made and put the effort back to square one.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here
Being a woman in tech can be a serious drawback in 2015; far more so than in the 1980s and 90s — Tinder even dumped a woman founder on the basis that the company wouldn’t be taken seriously by investors. Sadly, they may have been right.
Leave it to Slack, valued at $2.8 billion, to do things differently.
According to its diversity report released on Wednesday, 45% of all Slack managers are female, with 41% of the entire workforce having a woman as their manager. “This means that 41% of our people report to a woman who helps set their priorities, measure their performance, mentor them in their work, and who make recommendations that will impact their compensation and career growth.” In non-engineering positions, 51% of the workforce turned out to be female. Out of the roughly 250 employees worldwide, 39% are reported to be female.
Slack is considered the fastest growing software company in history and they certainly lead the tech pack In gender diversity.
And while their racial diversity stats are as dismal as the rest of tech they are far more actively working on changing that, too.
Here are the company’s four hiring guidelines,
Examining all decisions regarding hiring/recruiting, promotion, compensation, employee recognition and management structure to ensure that we are not inadvertently advantaging one group over another.
Working with expert advisors and employees to build fair and inclusive processes for employee retention, such as effective management education, company-wide unconscious bias training, ally skills coaching, and compensation review.
Helping to address the pipeline issue with financial contributions to organizations whose mission is to educate and equip underrepresented groups with relevant technical skills (like Hack the Hood and Grace Hopper), as well as supporting a variety of internship programs to broaden access to opportunity (like CODE2040).
Attempting to be conscious and deliberate in our decision-making and the principles and values by which we operate. Changing our industry starts by building a workplace that is welcoming to all so that a generation of role models, examples and mentors is created.
Slack is practicing what recent studies have proven; hiring women pays.
Give that some thought the next time your unconscious bias kicks in leading you to reject a candidate because she is a she.
In my eyes, personality always wins over book smarts. Company knowledge and job-specific skills can be learned, but you can’t train a personality.
Expert qualifications or skilled generalist?
Time and time again I’ve seen people with a background of broad-ranging employment and skills hired for a job where they don’t necessarily tick the specialist criteria boxes, but become incredibly successful by offering a new level of understanding to the role.
Do you hire what you know or what you don’t.
Spanx’s CEO Sara Blakely once said to me: “The smartest thing I ever did in the early days was to hire my weaknesses.” I couldn’t agree more. I can attribute a lot of my success in business to hiring people who had the skills I lacked.
Is their passion/purpose focused on your vision or to learn enough to focus on their own?
Purpose is no longer a buzzword. It’s a must-have. Passion and purpose will keep people focused on the job at hand, and ultimately separate the successful from the unsuccessful.
Do you grab available talent or hold out for the right person?
While it may seem like a desperate rush to get somebody through the door to help carry the load, it is worth being patient to find the right person, rather than unbalancing the team.
So the next time you find yourself salivating over a programmer who can crush Ruby, but thinks he is a god, think like Richard Branson, before doing “whatever it takes” to hire him.
A post I wrote after two researchers made headlines by hacking a Jeep and taking control of its vital functions focused on the idea that nothing would change until consumers voted with their wallets and demanded better security.
Until that hack, combined with several major data breeches in the last couple of years, the general public didn’t seem particularly concerned — and that nonchalance is especially prevalent in those who grew up wired.
In a comment on that post I wondered if consumers just didn’t care or didn’t understand, but there is another option.
I read a article about Conspire, a new site that helps find business emails and sent it to several people I thought could use it, including Ajo Fod, founder of QuantPrice and occasional contributor here.
Conspire uses your email account as the basis for a game of Six Degrees of Separation. Sign up, and it analyzes your email. Then enter the name of the person you want to search and it finds someone in your contact list to introduce you, examining that person’s social-media connections. It may even find multiple people to help introduce you. Then it will recommend the best choice.
Ajo joined and sent me an invitation. I haven’t accepted yet, because Conspire requires your email account information and password (plus my email uses POP3, not IMAP).
I asked Ajo if he was concerned about security and here is his answer.
Security is a concern,
… but benefits are a bigger.
… I’ve been hit before by a bad egg that decided to spam all my contacts.
… so, yes, I was worried when I gave out my email/password.
… In this case. I did some research and thinking and the potential seemed big.
I do worry about credit card numbers and identity.
… In my mind, the benefits outweigh costs.
People still send me phishing emails.
Perhaps, being an Indian security is a lesser concern to me than other people my age in the US.
Actually, Ajo gave it more thought than most people I ask no matter their age.
There is one more thing you should think about when doing a cost/benefit analysis.
Time.
What is the ROI for the time you will spend?
Is the new app a time saver or time waster?
Money can be replaced, but once time is spent it’s gone forever.
“Football has an old-school mentality: We’re going to grind you into the ground, we’re going to make men out of boys, and when you do something bad, we’re going to demean you. But here, they feel like you guys are already men and we’re going to treat you like men. It’s literally all positive reinforcement.” — Jimmy Graham, all-star tight end
And it’s not a when-times-are-good attitude that falls by the wayside when adversity hits — as it always will.
Even the intercepted pass that cost the Seahawks the Super Bowl last year didn’t rattle or change Carroll’s approach.
In his five years leading the Seahawks, he has made a mark not just by winning games but by reshaping the role of N.F.L. coach. Carroll, 63, has embraced diversity, encouraged free expression, promoted self-discovery and remained relentlessly positive.
Just think what your team could accomplish if you choose to emulate Carroll, instead of the more typical coaches.
It’s funny how things we read decades after a minor happening will bring that memory to the fore.
In the 1990s, when I was a tech recruiter and the original net was booming with startups, a young man asked me if I worked with startups, because he wanted to join one. I told him that startups had been my main market since the late Seventies (when I went to work for MRI).
He scornfully informed me that was impossible, since there weren’t any startups before the Internet and he wanted a recruiter who understood what he was looking for.
I was grateful, since I didn’t have any clients interested in his combination of arrogance and ignorance.
That memory was triggered when I read The VCs of BC and learned just how wrong he was — entrepreneurs were alive and well 4000 years ago; I think anyone who toils anywhere in the startup ecosystem will also enjoy reading it.
These letters survive as part of a stunning, nearly miraculous window into ancient economics. (…) during one 30-year period — between 1890 and 1860 B.C. — for one community in the town of Kanesh, we know a great deal.
And the parallels of today, including a vibrant entrepreneurial approach complete with venture capital, Wall Street-style players, esoteric financial instruments and risky deals.
The traders of Kanesh used financial tools that were remarkably similar to checks, bonds and joint-stock companies. They had something like venture-capital firms that created diversified portfolios of risky trades. And they even had structured financial products: People would buy outstanding debt, sell it to others and use it as collateral to finance new businesses.
There are a lot more fun details and interesting stories — the kind that are great to share over a few beers or a bottle of wine.
Hopefully it will encourage you to enjoy a bit of downtime — you’ll be more creative and productive for doing it.
I often say that I’m successful now because I’ve made every mistake in the book. The key is I’ve learned from those mistakes and it’s rare — if ever — that I make the same one twice. –Robert Herjavec
Herjavec wrote a good post on hiring that covers many bases, but ignores two critically important factors.
Gallup regularly polls workers around the world to find out. Its survey last year found that almost 90 percent of workers were either “not engaged” with or “actively disengaged” from their jobs. Think about that: Nine out of 10 workers spend half their waking lives doing things they don’t really want to do in places they don’t particularly want to be.
Pretty sad, but what happened to bring us to this sorry state?
Not what, but who.
Disengagement was born in 1776 with Adam Smith wrote Wealth of Nations, became the father of industrial capitalism, and gave birth to the belief that “people were naturally lazy and would work only for pay.”
When money is made the measure of all things, it becomes the measure of all things.
To be sure, people should be adequately compensated for their work. (…) But in securing such victories for working people, we should not lose sight of the aspiration to make work the kind of activity people embrace, rather than the kind of activity they shun.
For decades, study after study and survey after survey have placed money (assuming a living wage) around number five on what’s important to workers.
How can we do this? By giving employees more of a say in how they do their jobs. By making sure we offer them opportunities to learn and grow. And by encouraging them to suggest improvements to the work process and listening to what they say.
Work that is adequately compensated is an important social good. But so is work that is worth doing. Half of our waking lives is a terrible thing to waste.
Autonomy. Challenge. Learning and growth. The chance to make a difference. Compensation.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
Being a woman in tech can be a serious drawback in 2015; far more so than in the 1980s and 90s — Tinder even dumped a woman founder on the basis that the company wouldn’t be taken seriously by investors. Sadly, they may have been right.
Did you know that yesterday was New Year’s — or so it seems to me.
Gallup regularly polls workers around the world to find out. Its survey last year found that almost 90 percent of workers were either “not engaged” with or “actively disengaged” from their jobs. Think about that: Nine out of 10 workers spend half their waking lives doing things they don’t really want to do in places they don’t particularly want to be.
