Entries Tagged 'entrepreneurial' ↓

When an organization is still in the small, startup phase, it’s not hard to have employees that each feel like they have a stake in the company and are willing to rally behind it. As the company grows, however, subsequent employees get distanced from management and from company success, so it is easier for them to treat the job less like their own undertaking, and more like a paycheck. Too many employees treating their work as just a job will end up affecting company culture and ultimately, product. Identifying and rewarding torchbearers helps to ensure that the cultural message is effectively conveyed and carried out at all ranks.

Jotted down in a file I keep called “life rules”, I have a simple phrase. Create, don’t destroy. It sounds trite, and perhaps it is. But I firmly believe that the most successful people in the world follow this principle every day, whether or not they have specifically written it anywhere. While it may not make you rich and famous, if you spend your time creating instead of destroying, it will undoubtedly make your life far better.

What does it mean, “create, don’t destroy”? There are countless opportunities every day where we make decisions to add to or subtract from something. Projects at work started by an adversary that you’d rather see fail, cynical observations that don’t have any constructive benefit, favors that you could easily do for someone, but choose not to — these are all chances that we have to build on something, but instead choose to detract from it. There are all sorts of underlying roots — jealousy, political gain, personal grudges — but in each case the effort in the task is designed to undermine.

Instead, spend your time improving anything and everything you can. Even if you secretly want a project to fail, put that aside and contribute earnestly. It might feel good or be easy to criticize or be cynical, and often it is. Far more difficult is actually helping out and building. You’ll find, however, that those that build are far better rewarded and end up far happier than those that destroy. Creation itself is an additive process — the more you create, the more you’ll be able to create. Why waste effort in making something fail when you could have a hand in making it succeed?

The most successful companies are the ones that work every day toward building what I call a “culture of ideas”. Google is the prime example of this — if you work at Google, you’re encouraged to spend 20% of your work time on ideas that interest you. Think about this — Google “loses” one day a week of productivity from their workers while they pursue projects that they find interesting!

Dig a little deeper, however, and you’ll find that it is anything but losing for Google. In fact,

As legend has it, the humanities program at MIT was started by an MIT president who quipped “too many MIT graduates end up working for Harvard and Yale graduates”. The thinking then, which remains to this day, is
that engineering classes make a person narrowly focused whereas humanities classes help a student to see the full picture. Although I can see some truth in this, I would argue that a person is far better equipped to be a great manager having taken engineering than its “softer” alternatives.

Of all the recent trends in online computing, the one most game-changing is the trend toward developing platforms and allowing users to build applications on top of them. The greatest example of a platform on the web is Facebook, which started as a simple social network, but by opening up to third party apps, has become the most important web development since Google. Platforms allow downstream developers to wield the entire power of the “parent” to create interesting and valuable applications without requiring massive resources to lay the groundwork for the basic functionality.

The reason platforms are so important is that they allow developers to use massive technological leverage. To illustrate this point, lets use the example of Dropbox, an outstanding online backup application.

Any site on the internet requires visitors to be successful. For social networks, this is even more important, because the quality of the site is defined largely by the quality of user interactions and contributions on that site. About 6 weeks ago, I started up a site, The Free Agents which caters to people between jobs. Its a social network where people can share their experiences and meet others in the same situation.

Over the last several weeks, I’ve been working hard to promote the site. I have no formal training in marketing, so my efforts have come mainly from trial and error and also from advice from marketing professionals, both through their blogs and from actually speaking with them. There are other guides on the internet about generating buzz for your website, but most of them are long on generalities (“Know your goals”) and short on details. This guide is an attempt to nail down some of the strategies that have worked for me, and help others that are getting involved in the social marketing landscape.

Disclaimer: this is a work in progress, so I have inevitable missed some key points or approached some things in an unusual way. I welcome your comments below!