#Business

Really liked this post on whether employment contract are needed . (I can hear all my HR friends gasping now and sharpening their pitchforks/lighting their torches).

At least, it’d work for most small places I’d like to believe. I remember at my last place the minute detail we were adding to every job description in the default which made it impossible to separate out what a person actually did from the jargon-eze. I know I quipped at one point that we don’t put that we expect people to wear clothes to work in the JD at one point since I thought the convo had jumped the shark.

Fantastic presentation from Derek Silvers’ 3 minute TED talk.

The best way to start a movement is to be that first follower.

The fact that Apple does not reveal prototypes but shipping products is the fundamental difference between their entire business strategy and that of the rest of the industry.

Most astute thing I’ve heard about Apple’s success yet.

I’m moving to another organization with a more entrepreneurial and startup orientation to activism. Been thinking a lot about how this will change my job focus and have been really impressed with Eric Ries and the five things he thinks startups CTOs need to focus on and his canonical, “The CTO’s primary job is to make sure the company’s technology strategy serves its business strategy.”

• Platform selection and technical design
• Seeing the big picture (in graphic detail)
• Provide options
• Find the 80/20 (understand the objective and then give it for 20% of the cost)
• Grow technical leaders (and technical skills of the organization)
• Own the development methodology (it decides what we can do and what we need to do)

Fantastic post from the insightful guys over at 37Signals:

Hire a ton of people rapidly and a ‘strangers at a cocktail party’ problem is exactly what you end up with. There are always new faces around so everyone is unfailingly polite. Everyone tries to avoid any conflict or drama. No one says, ‘This idea sucks.’ People appease instead of challenge.

And that appeasement is what gets companies into trouble. You need to be able to tell people when they’re full of crap. If that doesn’t happen, you start churning out something that doesn’t offend anyone but also doesn’t make anyone fall in love.

Great post on Startup CTO mistakes I’d rather not repeat…

1. Not getting involved in “the business”
2. Keeping the technology vision in your head
3. Adopting bleeding-edge technology
4. Giving up control of the development process
5. Staying too hands-on and not getting hands-on enough

I actually found it interesting how these were still applicable to my current non-startup role.

The bleeding edge technology one is one I’ve managed to avoid (though my team would argue any open source and anything but java is bleeding edge), but I think more poignant is the one about giving up control of development since it makes it impossible to execute on a technology vision. And yeah, could probably be accused of keeping too much of the tech vision in my head (or not communicating it well enough). Sometimes what seems obvious and transparent when you’ve thought it up is pretty murky to other people (so add communicating it better as well).