@mhsutton

heart.head.work.life

Author: Mike

  • Why every business is a startup or soon will be.

    Why every business is a startup or soon will be.

    Every business – however large and however profitable – is a startup. Or is about to be. The big WTF is that they just don’t realise it yet.

    This epiphany struck me recently and life hasn’t been the same since. I am eternally grateful to Massimo Lucchina for stating the simple truth behind this and triggering the idea that follows.

    A Successful business model is a non-loss making one.

    Steve G Blank, in his book – “The Startup Owner’s Manual” – defines a startup as ‘ an organisation searching for a repeatable and sustainable business model’.

    When I first read this and applied Steve’s ideas to my own startups, I made the rookie mistake of thinking it was a one off search. I committed my time and resources to validating my idea and doing customer development, sure, I needed to do that – every startup does. The mistake is thinking is was a one off activity and this thinking can lead to unsustainable behavior.

    When you are going from zero customers and revenue to something enough to quit your day job for, it can seem like you only have to do this searching thing once and yes, it can take ages.

    Whilst searching, you might twist and turn as you try and find that seam of gold in a grotty old mine. If you take the right kind of risks, you might find enough of this seam to generate some revenue and gain early customers. You might even make enough to print some decent business cards, move out of your parents’ garage, hire some people and get into business.

    What you soon realise is that a business model is a relative thing. The model needs to generate at least as much – if not – more revenue than your costs – hence profit. The trouble is that as you grow revenue, gain new customers, expand your market share – possibly with the same products and services – your costs grow too.

    So a business model is about the relationship between revenue and costs and a successful one is where revenue trumps costs most of the time.

    You die because your heart stops

    Just as the heartbeat is proof of life, so it is that consistently not making a loss – in the case of successful non profits – and consistently turning a profit – in the case of for-profits – is the indicator of life in business. Many things can kill a business, but how it dies is that it becomes increasingly loss making and ultimately insolvent or euthanised before that point.

    What happens when revenues do not grow as fast as costs are rising?
    Or when costs remain constant or daresay, even drop, but so do your revenues?
    Quite simply, what does your business do when revenue does not  match or even outpace costs and your once successful model is losing steam?

    There is some value in understanding how this might happen because there may be some learning into what the next twist, turn or pivot that your business needs to take to regain its mojo. I’ll write another post that delves into the various ways this slow failing model can happen.

    Suffice to say, every business will encounter this problem and will continue to encounter it whilst they exist. In fact the reason they cease to exist will be singularly because their business model fails and they are unable to find another one quickly enough.

    Whilst the triggers for a previously successful business model starting its descent from profitability to oblivion can differ between business and industries, the symptoms are always the same – declining profits.

    Every business hitting a growth ceiling will either hover around it , drop from it or crash through it.

    So, let’s assume for a moment that you get from zero customers to current break even – hurray you are officially an unofficial non-profit. You might tick along for a while. What this looks like in real life might be that:
    You don’t gain any more customers,
    Or don’t charge your existing customers any more for the same offering.
    Or you charge them more for something new, but still only matching costs.
    Or you are gaining as many customers as you are losing

    Basically what you have is equilibrium. This business has found a ceiling and is hovering around it. It is not simply a revenue ceiling. It is a growth ceiling – honouring the relationship between costs and revenue.

    This situation is actually identical to a company that has grown from $100m to , say, $1bn revenues. Heck, some of that growth might even have resulted in profit. Though now they find themselves steadfastly unable to break through that revenue ceiling, often falling just below it or even accidentally crossing it momentarily.

    Both business are hovering, simultaneously trying to stop dropping away whilst unsuccessfully trying to break through. But only one of these is in a worse shape than the other.

    Can you work out which one and why?

    The only difference between these two examples is how far each has to fall and how much it has at its disposal to both prevent it from falling and propel it crashing through the ceiling.

    To break through a ceiling *always* requires a search for a new business model i.e becoming a startup.

    This sounds drastic – and it often is. Though in practice, the new business model is a variation of the previous one. Business models are merely versions of each other – each iteration a new version beyond the previous one.

    Businesses hovering beneath a growth ceiling must – quite simply – find a different way to make money. This may be new product or service offerings; or the same products in new markets or radically change the revenue vs costs relationship – usually by slashing costs, because revenues aren’t budging.

    I believe though that this last option is really one of the dumbest things a business in this situation can do – especially if it is not *yet* in dire straits. Ahem , Yahoo.

    Why reducing your search capacity during a search a dumb idea.

    If you buy into my assertion that breaking through the growth ceiling is a search problem, then it becomes clear that a search often benefits from having as many eyes involved in coordinated search effort as possible.

    Imagine a search for a chest full of pure gold doubloons in the Atlantic Ocean.
    Can you imagine starting with 100 people with skin in the search and then firing them , reducing the search effort down to 50 people. Clearly to search the Atlantic, you need as many people and vessels to search the space as possible. Why would you knowingly reduce that effort?

    Costs aside, the only reason I observe that this might be done is because those doing the reducing do not have the skills to effectively coordinate this many people in a search. This assumes they even recognise that searching is what they need to do.

    Once you have broken through a ceiling, the clock is reset and starts ticking again.

    Just when you thought it was safe to put away the search lights and whistles because your new business model has been found, you discover that you simply are now on a countdown to reaching the next ceiling. The most prudent thing you can possibly do is to recognise this and begin to explore and create options for the inevitable next growth ceiling.

    I am discovering a new passion and it is that beyond each growth ceiling is a new way of thinking and approach, to get momentum to make the next ceiling easier to crash through and to make the next hover as short as possible.

    Look around you and see if you can identify the ceilings in the companies you know. Can you observe how they are trying to crash through the ceiling?

    I would really love to hear your views and experiences around this idea – I’m still developing it. Tweet or comment and make my day!

    Featured Image By: Jan Fidler – CC BY 2.0

  • Take Back Sharing: Why #Uber , #Lyft and #AirBnB are not part of the sharing economy

    Take Back Sharing: Why #Uber , #Lyft and #AirBnB are not part of the sharing economy

    Sharing is… a babysitting circle

    When my wife was growing up, her parents  – like many young parents of the day – needed to organize childcare.

    They were far away from extended family and only had other young families around them. So they organised around shared needs – all the young families needed to have some respite from their kids once in a while.

    So they formed a babysitting circle. There was no money involved – they simply took turns looking after each others’ children and if someone needed to take multiple turns, they basically gave an IOU and paid back in additional sitting when required.

    Sharing is… esusu or a Voluntary Credit Union

    Growing up in Yorubaland, there was a credit structure where members contributed a fixed amount into a pot and each month, one of the members would take the entire pot.

    Example: if there are 12 friends and each contributes $1000 into the pot every month, then every month, one person could take $12,000. By taking the pot, they go to the end of the queue – they can’t take from the pot for another 11 months.

    This structure is great for large purchases or one-off large financial needs. There is no interest or APR nonsense. Simply pooling and sharing of resources. It gave each member the strength of 12, once a year.

    Sharing is…. a Lift Into Work

    At my very first programming job, I caught a ride with my friend Paul Green.

    He had a nice car, I didn’t have one – but more importantly he lived close enough to me and was happy to give me a ride to and from work.

    Paul never asked for any payment, though I did buy him a tank of fuel every week or occasionally I paid for his lunch.

    Sharing is… street Wi-Fi

    When I lived in the UK, I once asked my neighbors if they would like to share WiFi. It made no sense to me that we should each pay £20 a month, when for a single payment of £40 we could buy a router and share only one ADSL subscription.

    I was surprised when they declined. You cannot help some people.

    Sharing is… oranges and lemons

    Today I live in Spain. There are lots of orange and lemon trees and so much fruit is wasted because , often, it is more expensive to pick them and sell them than it is to leave them where they fall.

    Most times when we go into my local butcher, we are offered bags of oranges and lemons – for free. Sometimes my other neighbors with orange trees will happily brings us bags of oranges. Free.

    Sharing is good. It brings us together, reduces waste and helps us meet our shared needs in a very human way.

    And then there are Uber, Lyft and AirBnb

    The ‘sharing’ economy has been described as the economy where individuals with an asset – a car or housing – could rent out the asset when they weren’t using it.

    How is this sharing? How is this not the same as the Hilton group of hotels renting out its rooms or the Yellow Cab company renting out its spare seats to commuters?

    The only difference is that the owner of the asset is an individual, not a recognised business entity. This does not make it sharing. At least not the sharing that generates positive emotion and meeting shared needs.

    Calling what Uber, Lyft and AirBnB do ‘sharing’ is fraud. It is a misappropriation of a word. It is a hijacking of a noble intent for the purposes of marketing what are essentially platforms to create small sized businesses, whose motivation is to make money.

    Please don’t misunderstand me – I support Uber, Lyft and AirBnb, if only because they are disrupting the established order of things – but I disagree deeply with the use of the word ‘sharing’ to describe what they do. It is nothing more than marketing bullshit.

    So I have a really small ask. Uber, Lyft , AirBnB and others in the same mould of creating platforms that enable mass supplier markets; the press that reports on these kind of businesses and everyone involved in them – please stop calling what you do ‘The Sharing Economy’.

    Thank you.

    Why This Matters

    This matters because there is a real sharing economy and it is not driven by profit. Its participants are the kinds I have described above. They are  individuals and businesses who are trading non-financial assets for their own mutual benefits and usually shared need – not profit.

    It matters because a sharing economy focuses on shared needs and trust to work together to meet them. It takes deep trust and the skills and emotional investment to establish such trust to make a sharing economy successful. The participants of a sharing economy are not relying on a Terms of Service or the threat of litigation to police their trust based agreement.

    It matters because admitting purely transactional, profit driven participants into this economy diminishes everyone else and reduces the power of the idea of sharing. It confers an undeserved legitimacy to such participants like Uber and AirBnb. It is putting the wolves dressed like sheep amongst the sheep.

    Do you agree with how ‘sharing’ is being used? What have been your experiences of participating in the sharing economy?

    I’d love to talk more about this. Consider leaving a comment below or tweeting @mhsutton.

    Featured Image By: vishwaant avk – CC BY 2.0

  • NSFW: Why bad meetings are like drinking piss from a golden goblet.

    NSFW: Why bad meetings are like drinking piss from a golden goblet.

    Actually this post is very suitable for work.

    I would suggest you organise a meeting and read this together, then decide how you might stop your meetings from being things that suck your soul and will to live. How might you explore the unique opportunity of having so many interesting, talented and passionate people in the same space for some uninterrupted time?

    Part of my work as an improvement partner involves facilitating conversations with many people about many different things and I see firsthand how turned off people are when the word ‘meeting’ is even whispered. I have devised an approach that works for me to help my clients be more effective with their use of meetings.

    The Big Why?

    So imagine for a minute that drinking piss is not your thing – instead perhaps an ice cold lager or a chilled Pinot Grigio is. Would that make the container it is served in any more or less valuable?

    The wholesale condemnation of meetings as ineffective is the equivalent of throwing the golden goblet away because you got served a pint of piss.

    You can be better than this – you can recognise that the container is not the problem. The problem lies with what it contained – and you can change that!

    Meetings don’t kill, poorly designed meetings do.

    A meeting is a container. It promises nothing more than that a group of people will get together for a specified period of time. It is an invitation to something that needs to be designed. It is up to the designer whether it is to a party, a wake or a hanging!

    That problem with meetings is that they are open to design, yet most people who schedule them don’t recognise that they need to be designed to be effective.

    Think about how you or anyone you know learnt how to create a meeting – if you even actually learned it. Who did you learn to invite, how did you learn to frame the conversation, did you learn how to facilitate or even learn what to do to bring it to a successful conclusion. What did you learn about following up?

    I would hate meetings too if it was just getting a bunch of people whose expected contributions are unknown together to talk incessantly and without purpose – generating lots of volume and no substance and then leaving more dissatisfied than they arrived.

    Improve your next meeting, now!

    The first thing I need you to do is memorise this:

    A meeting is a gathering of passionate people contributing meaningfully to a purposeful conversation about something valuable

    Go on, say it a couple more times, perhaps cut and paste it into a big poster, print it and stick it up all around your office, email it to your friends and colleagues.

    This is all you need to remember in order to design a better meeting.

    Once you’ve memorised this, then break it down:

    Purposeful

    What is the aim of the conversation. If you don’t have one consider not having a meeting until you get one.

    If you do have one- it helps to frame it as a question. Especially because it’s easier to know when you have answered it or what else you need to do in order to answer it.

    Example:  “What can we do to avoid service disruption over the summer” vs “Summer Holiday cover”

    Start the conversation by sharing the purpose and close it by exploring whether it has been answered and agreeing what happens next, when and by whom. Without the purpose, the next related conversations have no reference.

    Conversation

    Remember the best conversation you ever participated in – what was that like?

    Did you feel heard and understood? Perhaps you felt like you fully understood what the other people were saying and you listened to understand rather than simply hearing in order to formulate a reply?

    Meetings are about conversation – even if your experience to date has not been that – and great conversations are about bringing your whole person to the experience. So put away your laptop, your mobile phone and engage your ears and everything in between.

    Valuable

    Why should anyone come to this? What is in it for them?

    If your answers are “because I told them to” and  “nothing”, then consider not having a meeting.

    People can accept your invitation because of who you are, but they stay and participate because it is of value to them.

    As the organiser of a meeting, think through what the value is for each person – what will they learn, what can they share. If you struggle to identify these for anyone, don’t invite them. You are competing for their time against everything else they could be doing, so make it worthwhile.

    As a recipient of an invitation – don’t simply attend because you were invited, consider what you want to learn and what you can share that would make it valuable for you. Remember this is your time too.

    I tend to make a list of my invitees and write one thing each for what they will learn and share from this meeting. If the meeting is a while in the future, I might actually test those assumptions by asking them directly.

    Passionate people contributing meaningfully

    You might argue that passion has no place in meetings, or even that meetings kill passion. This may be evidenced from your experience – but I promise you, it could be so much better.

    Starting from the default position that the people invited to join in this purposeful conversation are passionate invites you and everyone else to collaborate on not wasting that passion.

    If that means holding it in a bar or stood up around whiteboards or role play to get participants contributing as meaningfully as they possibly can , then that’s what you do.

    If you are meeting the same group regularly – ask what helps them contribute more and what impairs their ability to fully participate and then design your meetings to do more of what works and less/none of what impairs.

    Hey you didn’t say anything about timing

    Everyone who talks about meetings talks about how they should be short because long meetings are boring. I don’t buy this.

    I don’t buy it because I have been in meetings that have been 30 minutes long and I have deeply resented every moment I wasted. Conversely I have been in meetings that were 6 hours long and loved every minute of it.

    If you design your meeting to be valuable to everyone who is invited, work in breaks every 10 minutes roughly, add in whatever you can to maximise the way people can contribute, focus on having a great conversation, be clear about the purpose and facilitate to realise it – then you really don’t need to be too fussed about time.

    I generally like to use my learning from Open Space Technology – things are over when they are no longer useful. They are no longer useful personally when I stop learning or sharing, and they are no longer useful for a group when no one is learning or sharing. Then close it.

    What do you think of meetings?

    How do you make them more effective and enjoyable? I’d love to hear and share.

    Please consider sharing this, you might just save a life!

    Disclaimer: I have never knowingly drank piss.

    Featured image by: Katie Lips – CC BY 2.0

  • Try These 3 Ideas For More Successful Employment Interviews

    Try These 3 Ideas For More Successful Employment Interviews

    Over the last 20 years I have participated in countless interviews – even conducted a few myself. But recently I have been thinking more deeply about what an interview really is about.

    Disclaimer:

    I think if you hire solely based on an interview, you deserve the inevitably painful experience you will get. I also think if you do not recognise that interviews are simply one part of a relationship that needs to have started before you sit with the interviewee, then you really should not be hiring anyone. For anything.

    Also – if you use the words ‘resource’, ‘candidates’, ‘work for’ on a regular basis to seriously describe the invitation of people to help you with your need, then please consider getting someone else who doesn’t think this way to do your hiring on your behalf.

    Mike’s advice: Use interviews only as part of a balanced approach to evaluating whether you want to start working with someone – not if they will be great forever. Consider try out periods as part of your approach and taking candidates to lunch to better understand them as people.

    #1 Engage Before

    If you have a person who – on paper at least – seems interesting enough to want to talk to further, then reach out to them. Don’t invite them to an interview. Invite them to lunch, if it is convenient. Or a phone call that is about their day. Invest some time to understand them , discover your shared interests and make that the subject of the conversation. Or simply ask them for help on a challenge you are facing right now – how might they advise you to proceed. Engage.

    Why do this?

    Because you are building a relationship – not buying a spanner.

    Because interviews can be daunting and they really shouldn’t be and this anxiety rarely brings the best out of people.

    Finally, because your goal isn’t only to fill a role but to find a collaborator.

    #2 Collaborate During

    When you see someone sitting opposite you, perhaps dressed in their sunday best, trying to be acceptable to you enough for you to give them a job, what actually is going through your mind? What is going through theirs?

    What is often going to mine – when I have sat on both sides of the table is – “I wonder how we can figure out stuff together – stuff they need and I need and how we can be awesome together”.

    When I go into interviews now, I’ve recently started using a variation of the Lean Coffee format,  I say:

    We have limited time and to help us each get what we really want from this conversation, I’d like to invite you to share what your top 3 things you want to have learnt about me before this time ends. I also have my top 3 things I would like to know and I’ll add them to the list and we work from the top down on the most valuable things. Are you willing to do this with me?

    Mostly they say “yes’ and that is what we do. When I’m providing information to them to answer their need, I regularly ask if I am helping them meet it or simply talking too much!

    This is a form of collaboration and facilitation of a valuable time. It is valuable because it is short and each person wants to get some key assumptions validated. It doesn’t matter who does the facilitation but it is a great idea that it is the interviewer and much more important that it happens versus who does it.

    Collaboration also means not making anyone look bad. So questions designed to ‘catch’ the other person out are simply ineffective as a means to test knowledge, much less passion.

    #3 Engage After

    This is probably the most under appreciated idea ever!

    It seems everyone is so caught up in the interview, they throw everything they have at it and don’t think about what happens beyond the interview.

    Yet many people – yes even very smart and passionate ones, need time to consider how something went and form opinions after the fact. Unless you are hiring for split second decision making like a fighter pilot – who ,incidentally, are mostly trained, not born – then make it easier for the interviewee to come back later. As an employer, learn to value that quality – contemplation – as a beautiful skill.

    Many career advisers suggest that interviewees do the ‘polite’ thing and write an appreciation to the interviewer. This is a good idea too – but it persists the ‘work for’ culture that encourages people looking for employment to do all the gratitude.

    So, however the interview went, engage after it with a simple email:

    hi Mike, thanks for coming to our offices and chatting through your experiences and how you can help us with our current challenges and contribute to our growth plans. I hope we answered your questions, you certainly helped us with our assumptions.

    Engaging after is wonderful because it achieves a number of great things.

    First, it invites the interviewee to come back with ideas and insights that have come from contemplation and greater learning.

    Secondly, it communicates that you are different sort of employer – one that cares about relationships and the wellbeing of the person.

    Finally, it also provides a great opportunity to offer some feedback and invite some too. Remember this interviewee is a valuable and objective user of your organisation and will have experiences that can help you improve – at least on how you hire.

    So always offer feedback:

    Mike, I enjoyed the conversation, though for it to have been really valuable for me, I would have liked that you listened more and talked less.

    And always invite feedback:

    Mike,  as a personal favor, I wonder if you could share one thing that I could have improved to make our time more valuable and enjoyable for you.

    This is often enough – if you have an idea of what happens next then share that. If nothing happens next because you have decided not to offer them a role, then say that also. But the relationship has been built and is healthy for where it is at.

    Whatever you do. DO NOT SIMPLY GO SILENT.

    Bonus: 3 Things That Might Happen If You Try These 3 Things

    1. You might have to spend more time than you are doing now to find the people you need. I haven’t done any deep research into this, but my circumstantial exploration says it isn’t actually that much more. But you will use that time differently. If you are too ‘busy’, then ask yourself whether you need to do less or get help to do it.
    2. You might have to think more deeply about what kind of people you want to work with – collectively as a group – before you venture out to find them.
      If you do not particularly know or care about collaboration then you might want to start there.
    3. You might, very likely,  do fewer interviews and be more successful with each one that you do. Now wouldn’t that be lovely. So in the end, the marginally higher investment in time delivers higher success rate, better quality of collaborators and stronger relationships.

    What ideas do you find useful in improving the hiring experience. I would love to learn and share.  If you try these 3 ideas, I would be really happy to hear how they worked for you.

    Please share this with others.

    Featured image by: dennis crowley – CC BY 2.0

  • 3 Things Recruiters Could Do to Deliver A More Valuable Service

    3 Things Recruiters Could Do to Deliver A More Valuable Service

    Recently I have been looking for some paid work. Things are quiet on my own ventures, with my partners and previous clients and so, as part of my strategy, I hit my last resort – the open market.

    And what I discovered scared me.

    Before I carry on , this is where I’m coming from:

    A recruiter has ONE job to do  – of all the things they think they are doing, only one really counts – building and nurturing relationships – all kinds of relationships but especially with hirers and with candidates. To help this relationship thrive they might specialise in a space and learn the lingo, join communities etc. But fundamentally when it comes to making the ‘sale’, it is the relationship above all else.

    Anyway, the last time I had to resort to the open-market option was at least 5 years ago. So much has changed , and much of it for the worse.

    I considered what the pain points of my experience were and I would like to share those in a positive way to help recruiters who care to improve. Also I want to help employers who use recruiters to get more value from the services they use.

    Frankly the alternative would take me away from things I care more about – but if it didn’t I would build it and put every recruitment agency out of business, at least in the UK and at least in the tech sector.

    FYI Employers –  you are possibly missing out on fantastic employees because the recruiters you engaged don’t know their ass from their elbows and don’t reply emails or pick up the phone to talk with them.

    Rant over, here are the 3 top things recruiters could do differently.

    #1 – Use Better Job Boards

    Side rant:

    I mean seriously, we have the internet and computing power that lets us unravel the secret of DNA and we have commercial space travel but we all mostly still find work via job boards? What the hell??

    There are so many job boards out there. There are even job boards of job boards – that scrape or otherwise aggregate the jobs from other job boards into their platform.

    It seems someone decided that blanketing the world with 3139 copies of each of the 9 jobs available was the way for reach. Really what it ends up doing is cluttering up the internet and increasing the amount of false positive emails recruiters get.

    So, for goodness sake pick a job board that doesn’t scrape but has brilliant SEO so you can be found. Oh and pick one that shows how long the job ad has been active for – I wasted so much time on jobs that weren’t live anymore.

    Whilst you are at it – don’t make me submit my CV and an application form through some weird site that I don’t really know who gets my details or makes me have to sign up to get to you. Simply show me your email and a phone number and lets get the relationship started.

    #2 – Reply every email from an interested candidate within a day.Every one!

    Remember the ONE job recruiters have to do? Well, imagine my horror when I emailed 5 recruiters in response to their job ads and not a single one replied me. Not a single one.

    An email  – even a super short one – that said “I read your profile but …, sorry…” or “I read your profile, I think you’d be perfect, can we speak more between 3pm and 5pm tomorrow” – would suffice. No comms is bad comms.

    Recruitment is a funny game. Recruiters are not paid for the search but for filling the roles. Recruiters are not paid by the person filling the role. So they essentially have two customers. The person who has the money and the person who has to be happy to take the role. In my experience of being the latter, the relationship is what swings it.

    So if your customer sends you an email – do you simply refuse to acknowledge or respond to it – especially one that requests a reply or a phone call. What business runs like this? How might that work in a store? Would the store salesperson simply remain mute to every question you asked until you walked out of the store in exasperation? Hell no.

    So every email that comes from a customer – you answer. In a timely and respectful way. If you are doing other things that prevent you from do this – do less.

    #3 – Organise your day better so that you are available for a conversation

    The number of recruiters that never seem to be at their desks to take a call is astounding – even at multiple times of the working day.

    Again, actual communication is essential for the relationships on which recruitment is fundamentally based. Remember – you have ONE job to do.

    If you won’t engage via email or take and return phone calls, how on earth are you building this relationship.

    At least 3 recruiters seemed to be in meetings all day. If this were unavoidable, then return the calls later or pass the job on to a colleague to stop either the candidate of the employer from wasting their time.

    It turns out lots of other people have the same frustrations with recruitment agents. At least in the UK and at least in the software sector.

    I spoke with 18 people – both candidates and employers – who all have similar tales of their recent experiences. They have a lot more complaints including those that inspired the above.  Frustrations including very poor domain knowledge, misinformation, poor support in prepping for interviews, high commissions/fees, uncrupulous practices like luring people to submit CVs for phantom jobs.

    Special Thanks

    To Testing Circle, Aston Carter, Mortimer Spinks and MA Worldwide for inspiring the improvements in this post and for saving me and anyone I influence, the time of ever doing business with them.

    Very special thanks to Thomas Walding at SquareOne for being the single black swan that saved the entire industry from being total crap.

    Tip:

    If you are in the UK or use a UK based recruitment agency and you are not impressed with their conduct – you can request that they completely delete you from their systems so that no one can contact you or pimp your CV and they are obliged to comply under the Data Protection Act. Ask them to confirm they have done this.

    I’d love to hear your tips for recruiters or even employers to improve how they recruit for their roles. It is time this whole experience was better. Help me.

    Featured image By: aussiegall – CC BY 2.0

  • 'For' vs 'With' – usage on the web!

    As I searched the web for images to use for my recent post on “I want to work with you, not for you”, I search google for “work for us” and for the term “work with us”.

    In the end I chose to use a montage of website navigation text from the websites from the results of the respective searches:

    Work For

    workforus

    I was not surprised by how many companies use this phrase. I do not know for sure how they think about work or whether they recognise that a ‘work for us’ mindset might inherently imply less empowerment. Clearly they get the candidates that are comfortable enough with that language and perhaps are suitably productive. I cannot help but wonder what would happen if they hired using differently.

    Work With

    workwithus

    From churches to bus companies, restaurants to emergency humanitarian organisations – I found many organisations using ‘work with’ to invite collaboration. I also found the language to be more collaborative than the ‘work for’ folk. Again I have no way of know if these organisations have pervasive cultures that are inherently more collaborative, less bureaucratic than the ‘work for’ folk.

    A special mention

    One of the most beautiful examples of ‘work with’ that I found was Equal Experts. Their message resonates with me so deeply, I thought I would give them a shout here. They seem to be a network of experts kind of business and perhaps that is why their message must be just so. I hope to have an interview with some of their experts and their CEO to get some insight into the culture to see how congruent it is with the messaging of ‘work with’.

    Equal_Experts

    Why I love this.

    It is collaborative – ‘work with us’

    It focuses on the relationship not the transaction – the job.

    It is human – “let’s make time for a chat” – not ‘click this button to apply’ or ‘send your CV to:’

    What is your organisation’s messaging on this? Is the internal culture congruent with its messaging?

  • I want to work with you, not for you.

    I want to work with you, not for you.

    What does ‘working for someone’ mean to me.

    To me, it means a transaction of employment – between an employer, who pays you for X – and the employee who provides the X.

    To me , it means almost all the power in the hands of the employer and almost none in the hands of the employee.

    To me, it means employment as a gift to the employee – and seen by the employee as such. An idea that has been seeded by successive generations of parents into their children and nurtured by governments – keen to shift numbers off lists

    To me, ‘working for someone’  is littered with double standards. When things work, it was the ‘someone’s’ idea and their process that succeeded, but when they don’t it was the employee that screwed up.

    It is the reason – I believe – that so many people hate work and see it simply as a means to an economic end.

    To me, it is top down and chain of command structures and hierarchy, everyone having a boss and a pyramid of egos and arses trying to cover themselves.

    “Working for someone” is about stuff that makes no sense but has sensible people accepting it as ‘that’s how things are done around here’.
    It is ‘keep your head down and you might just make it through’.

    To me, ‘working for someone’ is much more than a contractual transaction, it is a mindset of many employers and ’employees’. So much so that even when open collaboration and flatter structures are offered, employees – like Seligman’s dog – continue their learned helplessness.

    Why I prefer “working with someone”

    Because it is centered on mutual respect and shared destiny – we recognise we are in this together.

    Because risk is shared and so is reward.

    Because ‘working with someone’ recognises that all work and all economic activity involving more than one person is fundamentally a partnership.

    Because we give ourselves the best chance to create something so amazing, neither of us could have individually created it by ourselves.

    Because it is flat even as our contract means you pay my wages.

    Because people who love ‘working with’ other people are actually pretty awesome to work with (and even work for!)

    So, what do these terms mean to you and which do you prefer?

     

     

  • Despair – the place between death and defiance

    Despair – the place between death and defiance

    Imagine you couldn’t swim and you fell into a deep pool.

    As you sped down to the bottom — sinking lower and lower, confused and afraid.

    Your only hope. To reach the rocky bottom and push back up with everything you’ve got.
    To focus all that you are into a single powerful purpose — re-emergence. Your hope is to use the support of the floor to fight against an otherwise sealed fate.

    Defiance is the point at which you fight back and rage — with all your might — against death.

    If you don’t make it to the bottom, to the your salvation and hope. There is no force to keep you alive. There is only Death.

    Death. The end of your dreams and the dreams of others to whom you matter.

    Now imagine that this pool is deeper than you somehow expected in your confusion.

    You begin to slow down as you reach the bottom.

    This place is Despair. It is a place where your fears and worries are at their most terrifying and where you are least capable to do anything about them.

    Despair is also a moment in time. It is when you do not know if you will make it to the bottom — to your point of Defiance.

    Despair is when Defiance is just as likely to be the next line of your life story as Death.

    Featured Image By: db_in_uk – CC BY 2.0

  • Why #Medium is not for me right now

    Why #Medium is not for me right now

    I love the wide group of writers on Medium.

    I love the writing experience.

    I love the reading experience.

    I hate the inflexibility of publishing. – No scheduling, no on-publish triggers to share on social media!

    I hate the curation limitations  – collections that take months for someone to read something and decide to add it to their collection.

    I hate the SEO-unfriendliness – what’s with the crazy urls that only machines can read. Friendlier names are easy enough to do, why are they missing on a ‘premium’ platform?

    I hate that it is closed and unextendable – maybe this is in the pipeline and maybe simplicity is the goal, but still I want to do things with the platform that it doesn’t currently do and I feel frustrated that I have to wait on who-knows-who to build it.

    For those reasons, I’m out.

  • What the Croods taught me about #Startups.

    What the Croods taught me about #Startups.

    Know when to use a search party and when to form a kill circle.

    There is a great scene in the movie The Croods where the following exchange took place between Grug — the father of the neandertal Croods family — and Guy — their homosapien travelling companion, as they are confronted by a huge maze of tunnels that lay between them and their destination.

    Grug: Are you saying we should split up?

    Guy: We can try more paths at once, it’s the fastest way through!

    Grug: We stick together, your way isn’t safe!

    The challenge selects the strategy

    What has an animation got to do with startups?

    Well, as I watched this movie a few times over — my kids made me do it — I really appreciated the lesson this scene was teaching me.

    This maze was a new challenge — a search through a bunch of potential options for a sustainable route to their goal. Everything that had gone before was business as usual — avoiding falling rock and a menagerie of exotic beasts with really sharp teeth. For those challenges, the existing Croods family strategy of a ‘kill circle’ — where they form a circle and basically kill whatever threatens them — worked reasonably well.

    But the new challenge of the maze requires a different strategy — something that was pretty foreign to what the Croods had experienced thus far.

    To Guy it was clear — to get through this maze we need to spread out and ‘try more paths at once’.

    This is just the same with startups. It is a maze with many tunnels — some are dead ends, but there are a few ways that lead you out of the maze to the goal. In the case of startups — the goal is product-market fit and repeatable/scalable business model.

    For this maze you need a search party, not a kill circle.

    Why is this important?

    Knowing this can save your startup huge amounts of wasted time, effort and opportunity and can avoid prematurely forming set piece company structures.

    Knowing and accepting this idea of what a startup is can help you focus and it guides where investment — what little there might be — is directed.

    It also helps direct the energy of everyone to a single purpose — not building stuff or hiring specialists or getting fancy addresses and furniture — but doing whatever you need to do to search for product-market fit and repeatable business model.

    Knowing this also makes the job of leadership in any startup much clearer and simpler — recognise the challenge and mobilise the strategy. Both these things clearly take a particular set of skills that startup founders would be well advised to develop — perhaps before they rush into product making!

    Searching. Execution considered harmful

    If you lost something really valuable in a field, how might you find it?

    Consider if you could invite all your various specialist friends to come help you search for it, how might they do that. What special skills would the doctor bring? Or the plumber? Would it be out of place for your friend — who is a butcher — to set up shop selling sausages while you search for your missing treasure?

    The point is when you are searching you need 3 things.

    1. Tactics and leads about where to search and how to conduct the search. Diversity is key here, how do you use the unique skills and talents of your team to devise tactics and leads? Do you even know what they unique skills and talents the individuals on your team have?
    2. People actually doing the search — the more the better — remember “we can try more paths at once”. Everyone should be involved in this — it doesn’t make much sense for them not to be.
    3. Finally you need an effective and, preferably inexpensive, way to keep the search coordinated and information flowing. In the Croods, Guy gives everyone a seashell which they must blow to attract attention if they find a way out or get stuck. Simple but effective.

    If you are focusing on anything other than this — in my opinion — you are wasting time, money and opportunity.

    I see so many startups with their engineers busy looking at building stuff, creating coding standards, scaling infrastructure and impressive, resilient frameworks and they delegate the search to their marketing person or growth hackers.

    What does ‘searching’ look like in startups

    The trouble with any metaphor is that it has its limits.

    So the key message I learned from the Croods is that to explore a maze, split up to explore more paths and options faster and do it in a coordinated way.

    But how does that apply, in practice, to startups?

    That will be the subject of my next blog post on the subject.

    The still from The Croods is copyright of Dreamworks Animation 2013. All Rights Reserved.