Well ok that’s my juicy headline, but watch the whole of this theRSA video and I’m pretty confident you’ll agree with me that that is in fact the essence of what he’s saying. My six-year old daughter has already figured out that failing at something is the point where you learn the most. Trial-and-error is what improves things, so if you don’t fail at something you wouldn’t be able to improve! So please, fail early and fail often! (and the Upstarta-way: cheaply)
I received an unsolicited email from an Australian company, which is illegal as per the Australian 2003 Spam Act legislation. So I notified ACMA with the raw email details as they request, as well as notifying the sender. What happened next is unfortunately typical. Rough flow below…
The person who initially received my reply forwarded it to their business associate, who then emailed me telling more about his company’s products and asking to connect with me on LinkedIn to establish a business relationship.
I responded, noting it was a pity he didn’t actually read the email that was forwarded to him, and that I was not in the least bit interested in connecting with a company that neither listens nor respects others (or local laws), and merely pushes its wares.
He replied again, saying that he did listen but at the same time still plugging his goods. He told how he had acquired a database of email addresses. In addition he merely expressed sorrow that the initial mail offended me somehow, apparently not at all getting the point that it wasn’t about offense but about invalid business practices and breaching local laws.
I left it there as further correspondence was clearly futile. I believe the *only* valid reply would have been to unequivocally apologise, appreciate that using purchased email lists tends to put you on the wrong side of the law in Australia, and to not mention/plug his products anywhere in that email.
But, I suppose some people regard any communication as a sales lead. From my perspective, it’s a typical profile of the worst type of sales people, not the type I ever want to do business with. Clearly all they care for is the sale, not the client.
Loosely related to Upstarta principle#4 is the unfortunate tendency people often develop when developing something new: secrecy. For all the perceived disadvantages of talking with others, it’s a fact that talking about a topic focuses your own mind; even without the other person providing feedback or comments, you’ll often find logic flaws or other relevant insights just by having to verbalise.
Brian Kernighan & Rob Pike wrote in The Practice of Programming (1999, p123):
Another effective technique is to explain your code to someone else. This will often cause you to explain the bug to yourself. Sometimes it takes no more than a few sentences, followed by an embarrassed “Never mind, I see what’s wrong. Sorry to bother you.” This works remarkably well; you can even use non-programmers as listeners. One university computer center kept a teddy bear near the help desk. Students with mysterious bugs were required to explain them to the bear before they could speak to a human counselor.
That’s about computer programming, but I reckon it works for anything. And my own (non-scientific) experience is that writing it down doesn’t appear to have quite the same effect, it’s the verbalising that does the trick. I do prefer a person over a teddy bear as I take it a bit further than just discussing a code bug or problem.
I sometimes discuss something with a friend, and while I’m telling my story, conclusions dawn on me and in some cases even make me change my mind on some aspects. Perhaps that’s scary to some. It might appear to make more sense to mull things over for a while before discussing with anyone else, so you have things more developed and won’t be seen to change you mind “mid flight”. But so what? The longer you walk around with something, the more stuck it becomes and that includes possible flaws. You want to remain flexible enough to adjust your course and potentially even ditch an idea completely. The more you’ve invested (often mainly time), the more difficult that would become! Talking with someone, from very early on, is valuable. The results will be better, quicker.
This is just beautiful.
(it is an ad for an online content company, but very classy – so well done)
We’d been using pmWiki, and this proved problematic in both user management with the subscriptions, as well as member contributions in terms of blog posts and the resource wiki. Our idea was that a wiki would most encourage participation, but of course the infra as a whole needs to work well for that to be the case.
We’re moving to WordPress which is of course well known and popular, with some plugins for the subscriptions, wiki and other aspects. We reckon this will do the job much better. Of course, some of the key plugins (such as wiki) were not available or mature enough when we first set up the site. We’ll critically assess how the new setup works out in practice, I think websites are by nature works in progress.
Evolving operational technology as an organisation (and available tech) develops – not for its own sake – is generally quite a lot of work with migrations and training, but if it truly helps with what the organisation needs to do now (and that can and does change over time!) it can make good sense and even be regarded as a necessity.
Arjen’s own company Open Query moved from Eventum and pmWiki to Redmine, as it better deals with what the business is doing – it supports the business process rather than warping or hindering it. Win.