Chronic Enthusiasm

In my experience there are roughly three categories of technology consultants.  At the top are highly skilled scientists and engineers who possess excellent technical and communications skills.  They often have prior management experience and have become consultants because they want to work as an individual technical contributor rather than as a manager.  These experts spend the time up front to understand your business goals and are able to give you what you really need which may be substantially different from what you thought you needed.  The right consultant can add tremendous value to your project.

The bottom tier of consultants are the incompetents who cannot keep a job.  They should be avoided like the swine flu.

Mid tier consultants are technically competent and can usually get the job done to your original requirements.  However,  some tend to milk a project by introducing or delaying the soution to problems that only they can easily fix.  This causes  the duration and fees of the consulting contract to miss both the time and budget goals.   Once I hired a consultant for some “temporary” work and I changed jobs before the contract was complete .  When I returned to the organization almost a decade later I was really surprised to see that this consultant was still milking the evolving original project.  Watch out for the milkmen!

Each team member in a startup company is like a link in a heavily loaded chain hoist.  For the the hoist to succeed no link can fail. Similarly, the contributions of all of startup’s team members are required for company success.

Last week I attended the NOSQL meeting in San Francisco.  Eight open source non-relational database projects were presented and several proprietary systems were discussed.  This is the technology specialty that I have been focused on for most of this decade.

Meeting slides 

In large organizations employees often work to make their boss smile. In successful small organizations employees make their customers smile.

“If you don’t reward your stars you will have no one left to reward”. - David Brown, Quantum Cofounder

Mediocre large companies often try to replace the need for excellent people with ‘process’.  In successful startups excellent people are the ‘process’.

I found this while stumbling the web.  Over the years I have personally struggled with “LEARN TO SAY ‘NO’” and to a lesser extent “LEARN TO MONETIZE”.  Getting to “HOORAY” can be very difficult.

When hard disk drive Quantum Corp. was founded early in 1980 by myself and five colleagues, we had four or five months of virtually unfunded activities while we were raising venture capital. Our plan was to deliver prototype drives to customers six months after startup. To achieve this goal we had to quickly order the critical long lead time components. The disk drive recording heads and disks were the most critical components. Since we had no money or capital equipment for experimentation, the initial head and disk specifications were designed by a white board dart throwing session by several of us over in about two days. The disks and heads procured from this crude specification successfully enabled us to ship prototypes on schedule and changed only slightly for the several year product life span. The founding Quantum engineers were generalists focused as either mechanical or electronic disk drive engineers.

I returned to Quantum in 1995 after a seven year absence. Quantum had experienced explosive growth with disk drive sales of about $5 billion per year with growth to about 10,000 employees. Quantum still purchased heads and disks from outside vendors but had a staff of almost 500 scientists, engineers and technicians whose only focus was on the laboratory activities required for the procurement and quality of heads and disks. Clearly the generalists had been replaced by vertical specialists.

This observation has evolved into a concept I call the “Woz-Pattern”. Apple is the original example as Steve Wozniak single handedly designed and implemented most of the Apple II computer hardware and software. Apple has evolved such that hundreds of engineering specialists collectively have replaced the activities initially performed by Woz. Many high technology startups have experienced the same phenomenon.

The Woz-Pattern also applies to most high technology skills beyond engineering. A person with sales, marketing or finance skills is easily classified by their experience as a horizontally focused generalist or vertically focused specialist. The career paths of generalists are often quite different and varied from those of specialists. Generalists often have job descriptions that never existed before while many specialists continue in their focused direction for as long as there is a business need for the specialty.

The consequences of becoming a generalist or specialist is an important personal career decision that is too often made by default.