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.

Every time a small company grows by three times in a significant dimension of employees, customers or revenue, the existing management systems are usually broken.   The corollary is also true.  Using a management system that works for 30 people can easily over constrain a 10 person team resulting in a decision process that is too slow and stifling. It is important to evolve the appropriate management systems to match the current size and activities of the organization.

Startup companies have a distinct advantage over large established organizations in being able to dramatically change the world.  This post clarifies some of these advantages.

One Mission
This is the clear visionary statement of how the world is going to be changed by the success of this endeavor.  Everything else for the company is derived from this simple statement.  The startup advantage is that the mission statement evolves rapidly by the founding team without the bland, bureaucratic constraints usually imposed by large organizations.

My present favorite for a current and clearly audacious mission statement is that for Greg Wyler’s o3bnetworks:

“At O3b Networks, our mission is to make the Internet accessible and affordable to everyone on the planet. We will enrich lives and ensure equal and fair access to information through ubiquitous, high-speed connectivity to the world’s content and applications.”  http:\\o3bnetworks.com

One Leader
One strong leader really shortens the decision process and insures that all activities are clearly focused only on the mission.  I believe that outstanding leadership is the most precious resource in business.  Startups have an advantage of being able to attract excellent leaders.

One Team
A new organization has the distinct opportunity to establish a hiring process that selects team members that exactly match the company culture and implementation requirements of the mission.

One Facility
The use of a single facility can create a resonant communications process that inspires creativity and shortens the decision processes.  I am from the old school that believes that face to face contact with a white board consistently beats online methods as the web has not replaced the creativity available at random water cooler conversations.