And sometimes you can create the startup mentality within a large organization. These efforts often have names like “Skunk Works” or “xxx labs” or “research center.” There are real challenges to leading such a group successfully – groups that don’t have direct ties to profits risk being starved during lean times, and even in the best of times major decisions are made without any consideration of the effects on that group. But all it takes is one successful product launch, and things change instantly – it’s very much like the startup process, where each obstacle is actually a step upwards, but immediately followed by another larger obstacle. You have to build momentum in the exact same way. That’s been my challenge at travelpod labs. We hope to take a step upwards very soon, but fully realize that if we do, there will be another hill to climb right behind it.

Oh, and Bob – you were a great teacher.

My friend Peter, whose integrity and honesty made up for a lot of the sliminess I encountered in California, has relaunched his website Housing.com, a source/aggregator for housing news and listings. I wish him well! All the rest of you go visit.

That was over ten years ago, and I’ve found 2 particular writers that I still feel deeply connected to (and in one case I was actually connected to, in a six degrees of separation kind of way).

The first one, and the one I have a slight connection to, is Michael Porter. If you’re talking about formulating strategy, I’ve always found his “five forces” model and the 3 generic strategies to be deeply resonant. I probably picked up my interest in him as part of my 2nd year MBA course in Strategy, but read all his books in the years thereafter. My connection to him is that he was actually on the board of the company I worked for in Barcelona. Unfortunately while I would have loved to meet him, I was just a coder, and thus not included in the schmoozing that happened when he came to visit.

The second big influence, and the one I’m really interested in pushing forward here, is Eliyahu M. Goldratt. I did a teaching apprenticeship as part of my doctoral studies, and in particular I taught a single section of “Production and Operations Management” under the supervision of Ron McLachlin. There was a bunch of material in that course, but I could tell that Professor McLachlin had a real love for Goldratt and the Theory of Constraints that is the centerpiece of his work. Essentially TOC says that CPM and PERT, so beloved by project managers worldwide, are not very good for project management because of the problems of “statistical fluctuations” and “dependent events.” Basically small variations in performance multiply together, resulting in large variability in schedules, and end up making schedules useless. Instead he proposes (in The Goal) a simple 5 step approach to scheduling and project management. Those steps are:

1. Identify the biggest constraint
2. Decide how to exploit the constraint (by exploit he means blow it away)
3. Subordinate and synchronize everything else to the above decisions
4. Elevate the performance of the constraint
5. If, in any of the above steps the constraint has shifted, go back to Step 1

I believe that the same approach can be used for software development, and that it fits well with the idea of “good agile” as expressed by Steve Yegge.

My version of this, for the management of the software development process goes something like this.

1. Identify your biggest risk
2. Put your best people on it. Leave them on it until its no longer your biggest risk, and then a little bit longer than it takes to just solve the problem, so that its absolutely never going to be your biggest risk again, and in fact becomes an asset. (this is equivalent to steps 2, 3 and 4 above)
3. Go to 1

Some people might object to this on the grounds that it doesn’t address overall system design, breaking stuff into parts, assigning work, etc. But, in fact, at some point, that’s going to become your biggest risk, and at that point you deal with it.

Anyway, Porter and Goldratt, my heroes.

So far, working at TripAdvisor/Travelpod/Expedia has been a lot of fun, although it does get intense at times. Perhaps thats part of keeping the startup mentality.

1. The Cult of Personality. It’s hard to summarize what his point is here, because it’s just completely unfocused. Something about “everything Kevin Rose touches turns to gold,” until Pownce. Which, uh, wasn’t ever true, except in the minds of the same twits that believe this article. And Pownce somehow proves that it wasn’t ever true, ever.
2. First Mover Advantage and Network Unportability. This can be summarized as “Twitter came first.” Doesn’t really work, because there are countless cases of “second-movers” winning. digg for example.
3. Evolution, not Revolution. Again this holds up digg as somehow revolutionary, and Pownce as just a small evolution over Twitter. Except that digg was really just an evolutionary step over sites that came before, like Kuro5hin and del.icio.us. Believe me, I was there.
4. Artificial Success. Here he says that the problem was that Kevin used digg to promote Pownce, and that that was somehow not right. He’s almost got it, but is also woefully wrong, since Kevin used the Screensavers (you know , that TV show) to promote digg.

The striking thing about this is the list of sponsors on the right side of the blog where this is posted. Making up stuff based on other made up stuff seems to be a thriving business.

Also please don’t take this as in any way an endorsement of Pownce, the site I still refer to as dontellowen.com. I’ll never use it or endorse it. But I try not to write really stupid shit about it, either.

Having worked in a few companies since then, and especially at startups, where the promise of influencing the direction of the company is so palpable (especially when you’re there from day 1, like at digg), I’ve become more aware of how important the design of an organization is. Not as a static chart dictated from the top, but as a living, progressing organism made up of people with goals and ambitions, trying to balance all the various aspects of their personal and work lives, that changes as those people change, and leave, and new people arrive. Certainly my disenchantment at digg began with an organizational decision communicated by someone I thought of as a friend previous to the decision (and the communication of the reasoning behind it) and a complete hypocrite after. I probably should have left immediately after that (this was November 2006), but I stayed, for nearly a year after, lured by the promise of wealth (and with what one commenter has called the “fiasco” of the Series B financing soon after, it became obvious that that was just as illusory and just as full of hypocrisy).

So now, in somewhat of a leadership position, and in the final stages of making the first of what I hope to be many hires, I’m cognizant of the value of OT, especially in a fast growing company, where people get parachuted in at higher levels than people who have demonstrated hard work, and loyalty, and invest much of their life, and more of their dreams. It wasn’t the course material that sucked, it was the professor (who I’ll leave nameless). It’s not a lifeless chart communicated top-down by a detached leader at the top, but something driven by the efforts of everyone in an organization, and the way it evolves should reflect their efforts, goals and dreams.

Incidentally I got an A in the course. Boring, tedious courses also tend to be easy.

Link

“… that many criminals are intelligent people with good heads for business and healthy appetites for risk, and that these traits can be put to productive use. She is particularly interested in people who have already demonstrated these skills—for example by running a successful drug business or achieving a high rank in a gang.”

The “Prison Entrepreneurship Program” has a website. I do have one caveat – if criminals make good entrepreneurs, than it’s reasonable to assume that the ones that don’t get caught are the cream of the crop, and are not served by this program. But presumably they can go to the standard places for financing, if they get by the due diligence.

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9896632-7.html