The movie
Julie and Julia inspired this week’s title and I was pleasantly surprised to see
blogging so prevalent in a movie, but I wont’ ruin it for you. Creating,
managing and sustaining startup culture is all about selecting employees with
the right stuff and empowering them. I have been on both sides of the coin, two
successful startups and two failed and I can tell you that culture begins at
the top. Again, I will refer you to Lynda Gratton’s great book Hotspots
and her excellent research on how to build collaborative teams of people that
drive innovation. The Net/Net from her book and research is that you must
create the right mix of people in a team to facilitate collaboration that leads
to innovation. Too many thinkers vs. executers and the team quickly becomes
jello.
Organizations
globally would love to have the nirvana of a team-oriented collaborative
culture, where every employee treats the company’s business as if it were their
own. The reality for most companies is that this will never happen. Once a
culture is established in an organization it is baked, and as I always said,
you can’t make putanesca without anchovies.
The most effective
ingredients that drive startup collaboration and innovation in my experience
are:
- Strong and focused and
motivational leaders
- Entrepreneurial employee
personalities
- Organizational silo busting
- Destruction of politics
- Clearly defined and agreed upon
management business objectives (MBO) and their associated key performance
indicators (KPI).
- Empowerment of employees
Leadership
Abraham
Lincoln once said “the culture of a company takes on the personality and
characteristics of its leadership,” and if you look at companies like Apple,
and Intel in the early days, the leaders demonstrated great vision and
motivation. When many said Apple was dead, Steve Jobs re-invented the company
with brilliant thinking, strategy and amazingly innovative design. Focus, integrity and honesty are the hallmarks
of great leaders, see, The Daily Drucker. At my third startup,
Survey.com, I was nicknamed the Nutcracker because of my aggressive and walk
around leadership style. Everyone at Survey.com had a nickname and I described
this process in an earlier post this year, coined the “Sicilian naming
celebration.” My focus and passion was sales and everyone knew it because we
had to make payroll every two weeks. So I installed a ships bell in the office
and every time someone made a sale the bell was rung. Shortly after the bell
was installed, every time it rang the entire company started clapping and
yelling. Motivational leadership is also a major factor and making people
believe is not an easy task, this requires experience, depth of personal
character and continuous work. Those employees that don’t believe in a startup
company stick out like a sore thumb. I could write for days on this area,
however, the world’s recognized expert on this is Peter Drucker, he was so
smart that I don’t think he was from earth.
Employees
with the Right Ingredients
This may be
the most important factor in the success of your company and down the road its
ability to sustain profitable growth. Look for entrepreneurial people that are
not political and won’t live in a silo. One thing I have learned is that those
people that have worked together before in another company will flock together
in a startup and exclude others from their trust. This is good and bad, good if
you can get an entire marketing, sales and/or engineering team that have worked
together and trust each other. It doesn’t work when they exclude others and are
not transparent and play politics. That is when I would say if you want to play
politics then move to Washington
DC, there is no room for politics
in any startup and it is the kiss of death.
Recipe
for Success, Clearly Articulated MBOs and KPIs
In the
world of well run enterprises with strong management and accountability, we
live our MBOs and we deliver on our KPIs. Clearly defining the mission
statement of your company and ensuring that managers articulate your value
proposition to all employees is paramount to success. Accountability is king in
startup land and the minute that one person or one unit fails to deliver the
entire organization feels it. This is often difficult to do from a management
perspective in a startup because employees are often asked perform multiple
tasks and sometimes loose focus on their real job. I have learned that
recognition is a key factor here, and the ships bell is just one example of team
building and empowering of employees.
Key
Recipes for Managing and Empowering Employees
Believe it
or not many companies do not understand this concept and it is one I have
leveraged for many years. When I first joined SAP, one of my employees called me
the sink or swim boss. At first the person did not get it but before long what
they realized is that I had hired them because they did not have to be
micro-managed. And I wanted to give them the freedom to do their job in their
way as long at it aligned with our MBOs and delivered on the KPIs. This is
called empowerment, and this gives the manger the opportunity to focus more on
strategy, vision and execution. Remember, “There is no strategy without
execution,” Peter Drucker again. Key to this is hiring the right employee and
providing them with the resources and advice when they need it. This instills trust,
not the false sense of family that many companies and organizations tend to
foster. Employees realize that you trust them, and this is huge because they
begin to treat their job as if it were their personal business. They will come to you when then need
direction, there is conflict, and need advice because they trust you!
The real
hard work is in managing for success, and that is making sure managers keep
employees focused on their job, reward them accordingly and identify signs of
burn out. If you have ever done a startup, you know how stressful it can be not
only on employees but on their friends and family. As a manager it is your job
to know your employees and know when they hit the wall, and respect their
private lives. Startups are a marathon that never ends, so when an employee is
burned tell them to take a breather. Recognize your employee’s success, keep
them focused on their real job and manage them when they begin to burn out. At
Zona Research and at Survey.com we always had award ceremonies that included
analyst, salesperson and researcher of the year.
The
Personality of Fish: Ancho Chile
Salmon with Mushrooms
Enough
about sharks, they are in the news and if you watched 60 minutes this week you know
that everything I wrote about them last week was true, they are over used, abused
and under studied. We know more about the moon than we know about sharks,
however, I disagree with the egalitarian group that thinks shark tourism is
stimulating shark appetite for human flesh. Sharks have been eating man since
we emerged 4.5 million years ago; there are just more of us in the water now.
This week its salmon and I am including a new recipe that I created after
watching the movie Ratatouille. Science this week will be the science of
cooking and next week we will dive into the complicated life history of salmon.
Ingredients
- One
cup whole chantrelle mushrooms
- One
cup whole baby shitake mushrooms.
- 1/4
cup white vermouth
- Two
cloves finely chopped garlic
- Two
skin on salmon filets about 8 oz each (try to get the thick filets closer
to the head, preferably ¾-1 inch in thickness.
- ¼
cup extra virgin olive oil
- Juice
of one medium lemon
- Half
stick salted butter
- Two
tablespoons freshly grated ancho chile pepper
- Tablespoon
salt
- Table
spoon black pepper
- Ttable
spoon cumin
Prepare the
fish by washing and drying it and removing and interstitial bones with a pair
of needle nose pliers. Let fish sit at room temperature for 15 minutes. In one
large non stick skillet (12” or more that can be placed under a broiler) pour
in olive oil and cook at medium heat, once the oil is hot add butter and
mushrooms whole, (don’t cut mushrooms up) fry until mushrooms are about half
cooked, three to five minutes depending on your cook surface.
Remove
mushrooms from the pan, but be sure to keep the oil and butter in the pan.
Add fish
skin down, (note that you will not be turning the fish over).
As soon as
you put the fish in the pan, add vermouth, lemon juice by pouring it over the
top surface of the fish.
Then evenly
sprinkle over the top of the filets the black pepper, salt and cumin, ancho
chile and chopped garlic.
Cook fish
five to six minutes or until you can see on the sides that it is cooked half
way up the filet.
Start
broiler in oven and adjust to high.
Remove
skillet from burner and add some of the mushrooms to the top of the fish evenly
distributing them over the surface and on the side of the fish.
Put skillet
directly under the broiler and broil for five to eight minutes or until the
fish reaches your level of cooking, some people like it rare on the inside.
Test fish
with fork to see if it is cooked to your liking.
Remove from
pan and place on plates pouring remaining sauce and mushrooms from the pan over
the fish.
Enjoy this
recipe, you may over cook it the first time but it is a great way to cook one
of our favorite fishes. Until next time great marketing and selling in the
millennium.
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Posted by: Dinktync | 02/13/2012 at 01:22 AM