Last Friday I cited HBS research that indicates that the best results are achieved when those in charge are both good managers and competent leaders and that the key factor is excellent communications.

Whether you think of yourself as a leader or a manager, communications is about more than talking clearly, it’s about providing all the background necessary for your people to understand why they are doing their jobs, as well as what jobs they are to do.

Think of it this way,

• operational communications provide people information on how to do their jobs, while
• management communications tell them what their jobs are and why they do them, giving form and purpose.

People need both.

Many of the problems that managers face daily stem from their own poor or inaccurate communications, often as a result of using jargon in an effort to sound sophisticated, knowledgeable and with it.

Jargon doesn’t work for several reasons.

• You may not totally understand or be comfortable with the jargon;
• your people may have their own individual understanding or be guided by their previous boss’ definitions that have nothing to do with your intended meaning. This happens often enough with words of one or two syllables, let alone multi-syllabic management-babble; or worse,
• your people may shut down when they hear jargon.

You can create a relatively jargon-less environment by

1. keeping it firmly in mind that your goal is to provide your people with all the information needed to understand how to perform their work as correctly, completely, simply, and efficiently as possible; and
2. providing clear, concise, and complete communications at all times.

Follow these two steps religiously and the results will amaze you,

• Productivity will skyrocket; which will
• make your company more successful;
• your employees happier; and
• you a more effective manager with better reviews and an enviable reputation.

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Be sure to check out this months Leadership Development Carnival; it’s been broken up to run over several days, so I can’t repost it here.

Flickr image credit: kevinspencer

Another gem from the archives. See all mY generation posts here.

It’s not that I actively dislike the holidays; it’s more a passive thing. More ‘here we go again’ than ‘bah humbug’. But I do early love the word ‘humbug’.

For those of you who don’t know, ‘humbug’ means

1. something intended to delude or deceive.
2. the quality of falseness or deception.
3. a person who is not what he or she claims or pretends to be; impostor.
4. something devoid of sense or meaning; nonsense: a humbug of technical jargon.

It’s an old fashioned word, but the ideas it represents with that in mind, here are some examples of usage and all of

Let’s start with Edmond de Goncourt, who offered this profound insight that’s as true now as it was when he said it more than a century ago, “People don’t like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug.”

Winston Churchill weighs in with a wonderfully irreverent (and accurate) comment on “democratic freedom” that really resonates as the 2012 Presidential race starts up, “I had no idea of the enormous and unquestionably helpful part that humbug plays in the social life of great peoples dwelling in a state of democratic freedom.”

Alfred Bernhard Nobel (as in Nobel Prize) said, “Second to agriculture, humbug is the biggest industry of our age,”—whereas these days humbug is second to none.

And now, I leave you with this provocative tidbit from Norton Juster, “’How can you see something that isn’t there?’ yawned the Humbug, who wasn’t fully awake yet.

‘Sometimes it’s much simpler than seeing things that are,’ he said. ‘For instance, if something is there, you can only see it with your eyes open, but if it isn’t there, you can just as easily see it with your eyes closed.’”

Flickr image credit: Dana Lookadoo

The only thing these posts have in common is irony and incredulity.

Outsourcing is a sore topic, whether it’s your job or your vendor’s customer service. Ironically, outsourcing is also a sore point in India.

Less well known is the extent to which Indian companies outsource their own jobs within their own country. … Manish Sabharwal runs TeamLease, a Bangalore-based agency that has created (60) thousands of jobs by fielding temporary workers for companies in India that want to expand their work force while skirting India’s stringent labor laws…

People are gearing up to travel for the holidays and beyond, but, as everyone knows, all travel is not created equal.

Carriers on international flights are offering private suites for first-class passengers, three-star meals and personal service once found only on corporate jets. They provide massages before takeoff, whisk passengers through special customs lanes and drive them in a private limousine right to the plane. Some have bars. One airline has installed showers onboard.

Do you love your e-reader? Do you rave about it and evangelize it to your friends? What about your kids? Not so much?

This is the case even with parents who themselves are die-hard downloaders of books onto Kindles, iPads, laptops and phones. They freely acknowledge their digital double standard, saying they want their children to be surrounded by print books, to experience turning physical pages as they learn about shapes, colors and animals.

Last but not least, is the first seriously authentic insider’s commentary on the News Corp hacking scandal. You may be horrified, but ya gotta love a guy who tells it like it is—hacking phones, paying police for tips, lurking in unmarked vans, stealing confidential documents, rifling through celebrity garbage cans and even pretending to be “Brad the teenage rent boy” when propositioning a priest (who fell for it)—and then claims it’s all OK.

Paul McMullan, who left his job in 2001, eagerly confessed to so much and on such a scale — no one else has done it quite this way — and that he maintained that none of it was wrong.

Enjoy!

Flickr image credit: pedroelcarvalho

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

It may sound like complete heresy, but entrepreneurs rarely build companies—they found them.

Founding a company requires a product vision and enough passion to draw a few others to the cause.

Building a company in the 21^st Century requires the ability to both lead and manage.

“Increasingly, the people who are the most effective are those who essentially are both managers and leaders.” –HBS professor David Thomas

Today’s knowledge workers, especially the type that gravitate to and succeed at startups, demand both leadership and management skills from those in charge.

And the key attribute is communication.

“Communication is the real work of leadership. Great leaders spend the bulk of their time communicating, and they know how to employ all three of Aristotle’s rhetorical elements.” –Nitin Nohria, Dean, Harvard Business School.

The best communicators are also the best listeners; moreover, they listen to everyone not just those in certain positions or at X level and above.

But listening and communicating require time and energy and many entrepreneurs are too busy.

They are company founders, not company builders.

Which are you?

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Flickr image credit: HikingArtist

Today’s guest post is from Igor Sill, founder of Geneva Venture Partners in Silicon Valley and an active angel investor.

The Start-Up Venture Pitch That Gets Funded

Virtually all of the start-up funding presentations I see by newly minted, bright eyed MBA entrepreneurs are certainly well presented, but are nothing more than just another “idea”.

An innovative technology with a new business model disrupting a huge and growing market idea is great, however, a fundable company it does not make. Evangelistically presenting a slide deck borne out of a great idea is, essentially just that, an idea. It may be your “baby” but it’s just one piece of the overall entrepreneurial pitch.  Unless the other start-up propositions are addressed it rarely finds funding.
There are several risk factors associated with funding early stage startup ventures, as evidenced by the 9 out of 10 failures. There’s:

• the founder risk,
• the technology risk,
• the consumer adoption risk,
• the market size risk,
• the future capitalization needs risk,
• and, most importantly for me, the execution risk.

Let’s look at the technological risk first.  If the technology doesn’t work, generally there’s no money left to start over or re-engineer it.  It may take years to solve the technical issues, and generally some other entrepreneur working on it will inevitably get it done.  Generally, it’s not about technology, as a competent group of engineers can usually program web-based projects, or find portions of the code that have already been developed and then quickly “put together” a working prototype via royalty sharing deals. So, essentially, the technology risk tends to be minimal.

Of all the failed internet businesses that I have invested, the culprit is usually a result of the lack of customers, or as some may tell you “it’s the inability to quickly penetrate the addressable market”.  Business success is all about gaining customer traction, rapid market adoption and offering a compelling business model.  Simply put, internet businesses fail due to lack of customers.

When I reflect on one of the biggest internet successes I funded, from zero revenues to IPO, then growing to $16B in market capitalization within 6 years, I recall that their first product offering was absolutely horrible and the beta customers were less than enthused.  Lots of technical assumptions proved false in the real world.  However, those customers offered key insights into their businesses and the improvements they truly needed—essentially taking a pretty good idea and turning it into an industry changing stellar solution.  The start-up team learned the real value proposition to the customer’s pain.  So, the second iteration grew from a dozen or so customers to hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands.  More insight was gained, more customer satisfaction was earned, much greater value was delivered which evolved into higher product prices, more attractive business terms, bigger margins and an acceleration of both, customers and revenues, then profits.

The key lesson: all start-up ideas evolve based on customer usage and feedback.  Generally, your business will evolve into something much more compelling, much more disruptive and industry changing—all of the great internet successes went through a very similar process.

During this stage of the growth process, the entrepreneurial founder’s leadership and company-wide execution was the key to overcoming the early risks, “crossing that chasm” and scaling that business successfully.  The returns to investors proved phenomenal.
So, back to that slide presentation.  Show your prospective investors that your idea was refined via actual customer usage, that you learned great insights and evolved them into a meaningful value proposition for your customers.  That your customers benefitted geometrically and that you can now scale that into hundreds of new paying customers, increasing the profit margin as you grow, and your company’s market valuation.  That you know the sort of talent you’ll need to grow the business to a leadership role and that you’re capable of recruiting and leading that talent.

Essentially, an investor needs to grasp how rapidly you can validate, learn, deploy, evolve and scale that business into the leader of a large, growing market. Investors typically extract that from how committed smart founders are about learning their customer needs and the correlation of market trends and dynamics.  It’s not solely about a brilliant idea and a smart entrepreneur.  It’s not about how great you are, what school you graduated from or that “J” curve chart you displayed in your slides.  It’s about how prepared you are to attack a huge market, your ability to learn from your customers, evolve and design new solutions, and, it’s about people.  Think Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff, Tom Siebel, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Bernard Liautaud, Marten Mickos, Peter Thiel, Evan Goldberg, Reid Hoffman, Mark Zuckerberg to name but a few.  A clear pattern starts to emerge.

Remember that 9 out of 10 startups will fail.  So the real question is how are you going to continually learn to solve your customer’s biggest problems while minimizing the market risk and scaling your business?  Now, go put those ideas on your slides.

Igor Sill, is a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and founder of Geneva Venture Partners. He is an Angel investor, and Limited Partner in Goldman Sachs Investment Partners, Benchmark Capital, Norwest Ventures, Brentwood Associates, SV Angels, ICO Funds, The Endowment Fund and Granite Ventures. Sill was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, received his MBA from the Said Business School, University of Oxford and is a member of Merton College, Oxford University. He also attended Harvard Business School’s Venture Capital Program, Stanford Graduate School of Business Advanced Management College and Stanford Law School Directors College.

Image credit: Geneva Venture Partners