#Strategy

The always enlightening Umair Haque has a great HBR article on focusing on worst practices . Some good ideas. I notice how companies like Zappos (and even Google) avoid this by internalizing some of these ideas intuitively.

1. Ask your critics
2. Spend a day in the trenches
3. Examine your past
4. Diet on your own dogfood

Really like it. Can think of a number of places I’ve worked at that would do well to take the advice on a strategy day or day out (and myself for that matter in reflection and repose.).

Are company culture acquisitions the new black? Following hard on the heels of the Zappos acquisition, Amazon acquired woot.com.

Absolutely love the letter from the CEO on the acquisition which I think is a perfect reflection of the company’s style. Read the whole thing . Seriously.

Plus check out the video :

Seth’s most recent post perfectly outlines one current predicament I’ve seen a lot lately: Pretty tactics; absolutely no strategy.

New media creates a blizzard of tactical opportunities for marketers, and many of them cost nothing but time, which means you don’t need as much approval and support to launch them.

As a result, marketers are like kids at Rita’s candy shoppe, gazing at all the pretty opportunities.

Most of us are afraid of strategy, because we don’t feel confident outlining one unless we’re sure it’s going to work. And the ‘work’ part is all tactical, so we focus on that. (Tactics are easy to outline, because we say, ‘I’m going to post this.’ If we post it, we succeed. Strategy is scary to outline, because we describe results, not actions, and that means opportunity for failure.)

Gene Kranz was Flight Director during the Apollo missions and the guy immortalized as the get it done person who helped get the Apollo 13 astronauts home when everyone else thought they were done for and famously attributed to the quotation “Failure is not an option.” This is what he said after the death of three astronauts in a training exercise in 1967 which became known as the Kranz Dictum:

Love this diagram from Bud Caddell on getting yourself into the Hooray zone for optimum business happiness. Not just for startups, I want this for my department. Love the underdog kung fu ideas this encapsulates.

Really useful article on how to start implementing continuous deployment in your organization. It encapsulates a lot of the stuff I just posted on the Five Whys and Lean Startups.

I can imagine a few other things you need here, like a complete sandbox for for each dev, as well as the continuous integration server to keep testing every commit, and the cultural change is enormous but not onerous.

I think the other important thing is that this is scary. Even me at my most crazy would be a bit concerned about this. People will be worried, especially if this is something you haven’t done from the very start. You also need a culture that doesn’t punish honest mistakes. Otherwise, people will fear to deploy something in short cycles from idea to production in nothing time.

I love it when entrepreneurs discuss what went well and what didn’t with their startup. 10 lessons from a failed startup is a public service to everyone who is thinking of going out there on their own, so kudos to the guys from PlayCafe for being open, transparent and honest. I disagree with those people who think there is nothing to learn from failure, and anyone telling you about mistakes you can avoid is helping you out.

Another great HBR article by P&Gs CEO on what the four essential tasks of the CEO are. Kind of interesting as I agree there are specific things which only the CEO is in a unique position to do, much the same way that corporate headquarters end up being uniquely positioned to do things the individual offices can’t.

1. Defining the Meaningful Outside
2. Deciding What Business You Are In
3. Balancing the Present and Future
4. Shaping Values and Standards

In a sense, I’d almost paraphrase them as dividing into

Silicon Valley VC firm Sequoia Capital has a fabulous presentation to scare the bejesus out of their startups on what the current financial crisis means for their fledglings.

While I don’t agree with all of it, it’s got some excellent economic analysis in it of the real reasons there is a very real and serious problem at the moment and why it’s going to be hard for new companies to borrow and in general why we’ve all had perverse economic incentives to take on debt rather than save (I notice it missed deregulation in there, but hey, no one’s perfect).

From former colleague, Corey: post on the third approach to attracting the best talent you possibly can.

He’s got a point. It certainly is the number one thing that’s driven me to work at the places I’ve worked at. Those I’ve enjoyed the most, sweated the most for, and contributed the greatest to…

Oh, and I should mention, Core tells me they’re hiring , and well, if he’s working there, you do get to deal with atomic monster wrangler number one, which is kinda cool (not to mention, their obvious lack of criminal record background checks… ;-) ).