From TechCrunch - aggregated data on some of the startups that made it to billion dollar valuations. And from VentureBeat: a compilation of post mortems of failed startups.
Related (TechCrunch): Good advice to consider when you're working to raise capital.
A somewhat related and hopeful, if tangential, article to the discussion of "safe zones" sheltering students from ideas (or White people) at institutions of learning (NationalPost) - resilience can be learned (WSJ):
He and Mr. Charney came up with 10 traits of people who survived war, assault and disasters, as well as less traumatic events, and ultimately thrived. These people tend to be optimistic—thinking things will work out—and are able to accept what can’t be changed and focus on what can be, he says. They recognize that even though they didn’t have a choice in their loss, they are responsible for their own happiness.Harvard researcher Angela Duckworth defines grit as being "the ability to persist and passionately pursue your goal of winning, whatever it takes." According to Ducksworth, when it comes to success, grit is more important than talent. (99u)
Although genetics plays a role in being resilient, it isn’t a huge one. Resilience can be learned and enhanced, he says. For example, people can develop a more optimistic view by cultivating friendships with positive people and challenging negative thoughts.
“When you change the way you are viewing things, it has a pretty big impact on all sorts of things,” Mr. Southwick says. It isn’t easy to do, he acknowledges.
...it's all in how you manage them and prevent them from becoming toxic (HBR):
The best managers recognize the psychological underpinnings of office politics and do two things in response: they manage the way they themselves behave, and they are careful about how they motivate others. People who are perceived as apolitical display high levels of congruence between what they say and what they do, and they are also good at rewarding others for what they were required to do, while holding them accountable for what they fail to deliver.
As such, good leaders focus on the bright-side personality characteristics associated with their ability to navigate office politics: social skills, emotional intelligence, and intuition. They recognize that the more secretive, selfish, hypocritical, hierarchical, and incompetent they appear in the eyes of employees, the more political the organization will become. So they are driven to come across as competent, transparent, approachable and altruistic.
And in motivating their employees to try harder, they avoid pitting employees against one another and instead focus on out-performing common adversaries: the company’s competitors. They do this through articulating a meaningful mission — a vision that resonates and motivates people to achieve a collective goal. This keeps the team focused on beating their competitors, rather than each other.
Inc has a quick blurb about generosity 'being good for business' riffing off of Adam Grant's Give and Take (Amazon) and for as much as all the warm and fuzzies this generates, I think I'd hypothesize this approach gets the most mileage taking two guidelines into account (above some of the positive publicity it generates):
It's an interesting idea - and not sure if the act of recording cognitive dissonance and other surprises will necessarily help in making better decisions but it makes sense (FastCompany):
Galef set out on a personal quest to identify her wrong assumptions. The outcome: the Surprise Journal. She keeps this journal with her at all times, writing down when something surprises her and why. For example, she noticed she was surprised that both older and younger people were attending her workshops, because she assumed people would self-segregate by age. She was surprised that her students would mention a concept from one of her colleague’s classes, because she didn’t expect that idea to be very memorable. “I started thinking about surprise as a cue that my expectations were wrong,” she says.
Many behavioral psychology and cognitive science studies demonstrate that humans find it difficult to change their opinions. In what is known as the “bias blind spot,” it is much easier for us to see other people’s biases than our own. The “confirmation bias” reveals that we seek out feedback from people who are likely to agree with us: We read newspapers and watch TV talk shows that are probably going to tells us things we already agree with. Galef says that there is much more research about how biased humans are than how to change these biases. “I really wanted to get better at changing my mind,” she tells me. “This is not a perfect solution, but it has gone a long way to making me more open and less defensive about when I’m wrong.”
Sometimes the surprises she stumbles upon are major shockers--a friend she thought was loyal betrays her, or a scientific belief is disproven. But the everyday moments of surprise are actually more exciting to Galef. It surprised her, for instance, that her teaching ratings were sometimes lower than the ratings of colleagues. This signaled to her that she had been over-confident about her teaching abilities and had perhaps not been open to feedback that could have improved her skills. Sometimes, it surprises her when audience members seem enthusiastic about one of her talks. Rather than just being flattered by the positive feedback, Galef takes this as an opportunity to assess her own understanding of what makes a topic useful or exciting: Perhaps her pre-suppositions about what other people find interesting is due for a change?
An interesting paper from HBR:
With remarkable consistency, the data confirmed that communication indeed plays a critical role in building successful teams. In fact, we’ve found patterns of communication to be the most important predictor of a team’s success. Not only that, but they are as significant as all the other factors—individual intelligence, personality, skill, and the substance of discussions—combined.
Incentives matter - particularly the right incentives. From Amy Wrzesniewski and Barry Schwartz (NYT):
Whenever a person performs a task well, there are typically both internal and instrumental consequences. A conscientious student learns (internal) and gets good grades (instrumental). A skilled doctor cures patients (internal) and makes a good living (instrumental). But just because activities can have both internal and instrumental consequences does not mean that the people who thrive in these activities have both internal and instrumental motives.Personally, I'm of the view that in an ideal world, instrumental consequences reinforce internal consequences. Instrumental consequences can and should, however, guide how you effect internal motivations.
Our study suggests that efforts should be made to structure activities so that instrumental consequences do not become motives.
Scott Adams of Dilbert fame, but recent co-founder of startup CalendarTree.com explains what it means to pivot and why it matters:
So imagine if you will, some of the smartest, most rational humans the world has ever created, wallowing around in the absurdity of Silicon Valley, where success is mostly based on luck. How does one feel good about that? And what is the solution?Update: More here: Five successful tech pivots (TechCrunch)
Answer: You institutionalize the pivot.
In other words, you move from a goal-oriented approach to a systems-oriented approach. The system involves assembling a team around a starting idea and then pivoting until something lucky happens. No one pretends to know where it will all end up.
Here's the system:
1. Form a team
2. Slap together an idea and put it on the Internet.
3. Collect data on user behavior.
4. Adjust, pivot, and try again.
Thanks to Google Analytics, Optimizely, Bitly, and other tools for measuring customer behavior in real time, a smart team can try different approaches and different products until something works out. A start-up in 2014 is a guess- testing machine.
An interesting look inside Bridgewater and its founder Ray Dalio - particularly as I've been doing a lot of research lately about systematization and processes (WSJ):
How do you build the world's largest hedge fund? Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio says he did it by creating a culture of "radical truth and radical transparency." Mr. Dalio's perhaps radical belief is that "everything is a machine"—including organizations and even the individual people within them. At his firm's Westport, Conn., headquarters, we are discussing the human machines at Bridgewater and the equally fascinating machine known as the U.S. economy.
As for the people at his firm, the idea is to encourage everyone to accept unvarnished criticism as a treasured opportunity to learn and to solve problems. This is intended to allow constant refinement of business processes—also known as machines within the firm—from how Bridgewater buys office furniture to how it evaluates the world oil market.
But human machines don't always welcome complete candor. And at Bridgewater they have to get used to internal software that conducts a non-stop evaluation of their performance based on daily entries from colleagues and even rates their credibility on particular issues. This doesn't mean the software makes all decisions. When the system recently reported that the company's head receptionist was underperforming, executives decided that it was a case of the software not being calibrated to effectively measure her work.
According to Andreessen Horowitz (Ben Horowitz via David Jaxon):
What makes people want to follow a leader? We [Andreessen Horowitz] look for 3 key traits:
The ability to articulate the vision. Can the leader articulate a vision that’s interesting, dynamic, and compelling? More importantly, can the leader do this when things fall apart? More specifically, when the company gets to a point when it does not make objective financial sense for any employee to continue working there, will the leader be able to articulate a vision that’s compelling enough that the people stay out of curiosity?
The right kind of ambition. Truly great leaders create an environment where the employees feel that the CEO cares much more about the employees than she cares about herself. In this kind of environment, an amazing thing happens: a huge number of the employees believe that it’s their company and behave accordingly.
The ability to achieve the vision. The final leg of our leadership stool is competence, pure and simple. If I buy into the vision and believe that the leader cares about me, do I think she can actually achieve the vision? Will I follow her into the jungle with no map forward or back and trust that she will get me out of there?
Apparently his tweets were controversial - but I'd agree... plus it helps to actually love doing something that contributes (BusinessInsider):
Better career advice may be "Do what contributes" -- focus on the beneficial value created for other people vs just one's own ego. People who contribute the most are often the most satisfied with what they do -- and in fields with high renumeration, make the most $. Perhaps difficult advice since requires focus on others vs oneself -- perhaps bad fit with endemic narcissism in modern culture? Requires delayed gratification -- may toil for many years to get the payoff of contributing value to the world, vs short-term happiness.
According to Hunter Thurman (FastCompany):
Beginning your sentence with “so” orients your message and subconsciously alerts your audience that what you’re about to say is different than what you’ve been talking about up until this point.
Starting with the advice to one startup from Peter Thiel: Don't f*** up the culture (HN).
Not exactly surprising. But the benefits for getting it right, are substantial (HBR via HN):
If great managers seem scarce, it’s because the talent required to be one is rare. Gallup finds that great managers have the following talents:
Gallup’s research reveals that about one in ten people possess all these necessary traits. While many people are endowed with some of them, few have the unique combination of talent needed to help a team achieve excellence in a way that significantly improves a company’s performance. These 10%, when put in manager roles, naturally engage team members and customers, retain top performers, and sustain a culture of high productivity. Combined, they contribute about 48% higher profit to their companies than average managers.
- They motivate every single employee to take action and engage them with a compelling mission and vision.
- They have the assertiveness to drive outcomes and the ability to overcome adversity and resistance.
- They create a culture of clear accountability.
- They build relationships that create trust, open dialogue, and full transparency.
- They make decisions that are based on productivity, not politics.
There's something beautiful and elegant about a great strategy when it comes together. I came across this article on the founder of Restaurant Depot, Nathan Kirsch (BusinessWeek):
“When we arrived here, everybody just frowned on cash and carry as a meaningless form of distribution,” said Stanley Fleishman, Jetro Holdings CEO, who worked for Kirsh’s wholesale operation in South Africa and has been running the U.S. company since 1986. “The competition just blew us off as those guys selling second-tier product. That was the secret of our success.”It's an idea that can't have been easy - focusing on a small minority of undersserviced customers, he reeducated and fundamentally changed a highly fragmented low margin business. Too bad it's not a public company.
By the early 1990s, Jetro had grown to 10 outlets across the U.S. and was generating more than $400 million in revenue. Looking to modernize his management systems and fund expansion, Kirsh sold 80 percent of the business to Metro Holding AG, a Swiss supermarket business that was also a shareholder in Metro AG, one of Germany’s largest grocery conglomerates.
Jetro’s sales growth leveled off. Kirsh noticed that the restaurateurs shopping at his warehouses didn’t like jostling with bodega owners, who would shop less often and enter the checkout lines with ten-times the amount of goods.
While it's sometimes funny how out of touch managers seem around Christmas... this is probably the best approach to take - even if your budget isn't zero (WSJ):
Oh, and don't complain to them that you're not getting anything either. You're making enough to live on. They have three roommates, one bathroom and nothing but beer, Chinese takeout and half a jar of capers in the fridge.
So what can you do if your budget is zero?
Unless you're the CEO, spring for some nice blank cards and write a personal note of appreciation to your employees. I said personal. To each of them.
Yeah, it'll take more than 10 minutes. But recognizing something they've accomplished will be appreciated more than you know.
Don't even think about getting your assistant to do it for you. They know your handwriting.
Not sure I agree with this entirely as learning to code is also developing a framework for problem solving, but I can't fault their approach (99u via Lifehacker):
If becoming a programmer is appealing to you, great. But seeking employment based on any one "hard skill" is an outdated way of thinking. The rapid evolution of technology forces us to constantly reconsider which hard skills are in demand. (And we should). Staying on top of the hard skills needed is a necessity in the short term, but one of the best ways to position yourself for success in the long term is to focus on the soft skills needed no matter what technology you are working with.
HBR interviews Tyler Cowen, author of Average is Over and co-author of Marginal Revolution:
Workers more and more will come to be classified into two categories. The key questions will be: Are you good at working with intelligent machines or not? Are your skills a complement to the skills of the computer, or is the computer doing better without you? … If you and your skills are a complement to the computer, your wage and labor market prospects are likely to be cheery. If your skills do not complement the computer, you may want to address that mismatch. Ever more people are starting to fall on one side of the divide or the other. That’s why average is over.
One thing the book suggests is that only being technically skilled may not be that useful, because those jobs can be outsourced or even turned over to smart machines. But people who can bridge that gap between technical skills and knowing some sector in a way that’s more creative or more intuitive, that’s where the large payoffs will come.
A classic example is Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook. Obviously a great programmer, but had he just gone out to be paid as a programmer he wouldn’t be that well off. He was a psychology major — he understood how to appeal to users, to get them to come back to the site. So he had that integrative knowledge.
For people who are not technically skilled, marketing, persuasion, cooperation, management, and setting expectations are all things that computers are very far from being good at. It comes down to just communicating with other human beings.
Apparently it's punctuality (Entrepreneur). It's difficult to argue with its importance but I don't know I've ever thought of it as the most important habit. From Entrepreneur:
being punctual gives you the right—the positioning—to expect and demand that others treat your time with the utmost respect. You cannot reasonably hope to have others treat your time with respect if you show little or no respect for theirs. So if you're not punctual, you have no leverage, no moral authority. But the punctual person gains that advantage over staff, associates, vendors, clients, everybody.
Tips from Bakadesuyo. Summary of some available research - sometimes counterintuitive tips.
