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Entrepreneur: Solving People Problems

Thursday, August 4th, 2011

3085491268_9b8b16bbcf_mIt has always amazed me how many entrepreneurs honestly believe that the people they hire will morph into a creative, productive team with no management effort.

They class themselves as “leaders,” but see “management” as a need and function of large/old companies—not startups.

They say they hire self-starters and these people don’t need to be managed; as long as they understand the vision they are self-propelled.

They talk about connecting their people through social networks, Twitter, texting and other modern tools.

And if (when) that doesn’t work they term them fools and dump them.

But the old adage “give a fool a tool and you still have a fool” still applies.

First, for them to actually be fools means you hired fools.

If you don’t believe that you are guilty of hiring fools then what you have are talented lost souls looking for a path to productivity and personal satisfaction.

People want to do their work well and they want to feel good about what they do; they care about their company’s success.

It’s not simple or easy or even much fun, but your real job as a founder is guiding your people out of fooldom and into becoming a powerful team.

Not every startup succeeds, but no startup succeeds sans management—whether you call it that or not.

Flickr image credit: PUBLISYST Comunicaciones

Changing corporate culture

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

Image credit: bob923

In April David Kirkpatrick, a Fortune senior editor, wrote about what it takes for adults to find value in Facebook; less than two months later comes a story about how recently hired Serena Software CEO Jeremy Burton is using Facebook to change the company’s corporate culture.

Serena isn’t a hot growth company, but a profitable 25-year-old company building mainframe software and Burton isn’t a kick-ass Millennial, but rather a 40-year-old veteran of Oracle and Veritas, who says “We’ve got to be relevant to the future. So we instituted Facebook Friday,” and dared his people to participate and learn about each other—to date all 800 of Serena’s 900 employees have accounts. But the real message was “Guys – the world is a different place and if we’re going to stay relevant we’re going to have to wake up.”

He’s also using it to evangelize the software-as-a-service business model he believes is necessary for the company to thrive in the future.

Burton says, “I think we gain rather than lose productivity this way. We have a theme, but I leave it up to them to choose what to do.”

Millennials and many Web 2.0 proponents believe that the most important thing is to incorporate the technology because it’s there, but, as Burton shows, it works better to bring it in with a specific goal in mind. He understands that people worry about, and often fear, change, so wrapping change in a palatable way works faster.

The great lesson to take away from this isn’t about Facebook; it’s a reminder that “a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.”

Do you think that sugar-coating change is good or bad?

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