When I was first promoted to managing people, I was fortunate to work for a big bank. Fortunate because they had a leadership training program. There we learned how to deal with both project and people problems – and how often they are intertwined.
Most of the startups I’ve worked for since don’t offer very
much training. Leadership is admired and promoted. However, no matter how cute,
funny, or cleverly worded the emails, “leaders” who ping people Friday asking
about project status are signaling a red flag of poor management skills.
This is so because project management is far more than
leadership. It requires organizing the people and the work. It also requires
controlling for progress. No amount of emails (or task management software) can
make up for disorganized people and/or lack of resources. If someone wants to
be a leader, then they must own the fact that it’s their job to get people and
resources organized. If someone else does that, they are not the leader (regardless
of title).
Note: Misusing task management tools such as Wrike, Asana,
or monday.com is not leadership, either. One can create to-do lists and assign
people all they want, but if there is no clear agreement on roles and
responsibilities, they are missing the all-important aspect of organizing for
success.
I once heard the phrase “heat seekers” used to describe the people who are always first to adopt new technology. I like it. This is just my opinion, but I’ve seen this at 5 out of the 5 startups. During the early days, the first customers are organizations that have ample in-house technical resources; they have “heat seekers.” These in-house engineers can evaluate different solutions using their own fairly objective proof-of-concept criteria. They quickly learn the technology and conduct the trial on their own. For these organizations, the superior technology wins the deal every time.
A Totally Badass Steam Punk Watch, No?
However, I suspect most companies do not have this in-house expertise. They rely heavily on analyst reports (such as Gartner Magic Quadrant) and references. They may struggle with developing criteria for a proof-of-concept trial. They may also give more weight to ease of use and low admin overhead than technical superiority. These potential customers vastly outnumber the early adopters. In order to grow revenue, you have to sell to ordinary companies — mere mortals.
Advice: Use the experience of early adopters to repurpose/reuse POC plans and create ease-of-use features. Makes sure your product benefits companies that do not have large in-house technical resources (use “wizards” and automation to streamline processes).
Better Advice: One of the great sales execs I’ve met taught the team: “When a customer asks for a POC trial, ask him if they’ll share the POC plan with you. They may well say, ‘I don’t have one, yet.’ That’s when you say: ‘Well, here’s one you can start with.’ That’s when you give them our POC plan. Of course our plan will highlight our strengths – the ones in which we’ve invested the most engineering resources and meet the most customer feature requests. Just be upfront about it.”
AI for Your Business — Not Just Your Product
I find it baffling how many starts up bloviate about machine learning and artificial intelligence in their product offering, but completely fail to use any of it in their own business processes. A classic example is RFP/RFIs. These start out as handcrafted, bespoke documents. But when a company becomes successful, they often receive more RFP/RFI requests than they can handle. Why aren’t automated tools for this standard best practices? We’ve had latent semantic analysis (LSA)* of unstructured text for more than 20 years. However, it seems mostly limited to advertising that is supposed to be “more relevant.” This automation could be a powerful force for streamlining proposals and quotes. This is especially true when it comes to answer GDPR and other questionnaires.
Advice: Start using ML/AI tools for proposals and quotes immediately. Don’t wait until you’re overtaxed and deals are falling through the cracks.
* Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) is a theory and method for extracting and representing the contextual-usage meaning of words by statistical computations. It could be used to take a body of RFP/RFIs and then generate reusable content for completing new RFP/RFIs. While Wikipedia has an excellent overview article on LSA, the main point of this blog post is we can use natural language processing to eliminate the tedious handcrafted approach to a document that is almost universal in technology sales.
“TunnelBear” is a cool, free VPN app you can use to protect your laptop or phone. People need this protection when using public WiFi (such as when you’re at the airport, coffee place, or on airplanes).
Ever since that reporter got hacked on an airplane while using an in-flight WiFi service, it seems many people are telling us to use a VPN. However, they do NOT say how to get one.
For personal use, a VPN app like TunnelBear does the trick. Just search for TunnelBear on your favorite app store or browser search engine.
Search for Tunnel Bear on your favorite app store or search engine
Q: Is the VPN client my company put on my laptop enough? A: The VPN client that is put on your laptop is used to “tunnel into” the internal network of that company. ALWAYS use that when in a public place and you are working on company business. However, your personal laptop or phone also needs a VPN. That’s where an app like Tunnel Bear comes in.
Q: What’s the catch? A: Glad you asked. The free version of TunnelBear is limited to 500MB per month. That’s plenty for email and web surfing. Not enough for streaming movies or music. If you need more data, you can buy it. (You can pay by credit card, PayPal, or jars of honey.)
Q: I’ve been using free hotspots for years without any problem. Why do I need a VPN now? A: Unfortunately, the technology for hacking WiFi has become more widespread and easier to obtain than in the past. Consequently, the risk has been increasing.
Q: What do bears have to do with it? A: The Tunnel Bear company is located in Canada. The bear motif strikes me as an expression of True North’s freedom.
Q: Are there other VPN apps? A: Yes, but I have not used them.
Q: Do you get anything out of it? A: No. Although there is a referral program that issues a custom link, I’m not using it. Just search for tunnel bear on your favorite app store or Google it.
Q: What does VPN stand for? A: Virtual Private Network
Q: What does “virtual private network” mean? A: Let’s break that down. “Virtual” means “pretend.” “Private network” means it’s separate from the public network. A VPN secures data through encryption (so outsiders cannot intercept it). It’s not really a private network, but because of the encryption it acts like it.
Q: What do tunnels have to do with it? A: It’s a metaphor. It might not be a perfect metaphor, but it’s good. When we send and receive data over the Internet, it’s broken into smaller units of data called packets. Metaphorically, each packet is surrounded by the encryption. All the packets lined up are encased by the shell that forms a metaphorical tunnel that protects the data. All metaphors break down. In this case, the encryption shell acts like a tunnel, but packets can still be intercepted. However, because the packets are encrypted, no one can read/understand the data.
Q: I’ve heard people from my company’s I.T. department use “VPN” as a verb; as in: “You’ll need to VPN into the network to access the Wiki.” Is VPN a verb? A: I have been told that any word can be verbed. However, when you read technical documentation, they will usually use the verb “to tunnel” as in, “Start your VPN client in order to tunnel into the secure network.”
Q: Seriously, can you pay with jars of honey? A: Yes, according to the pix on their web. It’s probable, however, that this is more for publicity. Not easy to pack up jars of honey and ship them.
Every semester when we got to textbook chapter on “Understanding Groups and Teams,” I would ask the class: “What does teamwork look like?”
People really struggled with that. Participants in the class started with words like “cooperation” and “friendly.” My job as the instructor was to press the point, so I’d rephrase the question: “If you were an anthropologist from another planet and you were studying humans, how would you describe teamwork in your field notes? What does teamwork look like to an outsider?”
Again, every semester, every class would struggle with this question. And, again, as the instructor I would offer a prompt: “I think people who work in a hospital emergency room are a great example of teamwork.” Then the proverbial lightbulb would go on. Then the class members would start saying things like: Emergency rooms are made up of people who are
well-trained
execute distinct roles
help each other as needed
communicate using well-understood terms and procedures
Members of an emergency room team also share some very deep values about saving lives, treating the injured and sick, and “covering” for a co-worker who might be overwhelmed.
Then, I would add: “Emergency room teams even practice how to handle situations before they occur. Can you imagine working for a company where teams actually practiced how to do a better job together?” After that, we’d have a good discussion about how to foster genuine teamwork in the workplace.
Also, in class, we’d have to circle back to the comments about “friendliness” or, as psychologists like to call it “cohesion.” One of the things that has been well-researched is that cohesion does not by itself improve productivity. “Let’s go bowling!” “Let’s do a group activity off-site!” “Let’s get t-shirts printed up!” These are almost a cliché in organizations, but they do nothing to improve productivity in and of itself. When a group has a high level of cohesion, they are more likely to achieve the group’s goals — regardless of how well the group aligns with the organization’s goals.
In other words, increasing affinity and cohesion can actually hurt productivity when the group is unhappy, misaligned with an organization’s goals, or the front-line manager “bad mouths” upper management.
Perhaps a simpler way of looking at it is this: Teaching a group to play together well doesn’t usually help them work together well. Any manager who has a lack-luster team should strongly consider these other ways of improving morale and productivity:
Clarifying roles (who does what)
Training in job skills (how can we do it better)
Uplifting and rewarding values such as customer satisfaction and service (aligning the group’s goals with the organization’s goals)
It should almost go without saying that any front-line leader who finds the above daunting has exactly the kind of challenge that a bowling event cannot help.
A final satirical comment: Sometimes managers will ask the team to propose a “team building” event. While indoor “skydiving” in a wind tunnel is fun, few teams are ready to try the following:
Research notes: C.R. Evans and K.L. Dion, “Group Cohesion and Performance” as published in the journal Small Group Research. B. Mullen and C. Copper, “The Relationship between Group Cohesiveness and Performance” as published in Psychological Bulletin. And, P. M. Podsakoff, S. B. MacKenzie, and M. Ahearne, “Moderating the Effects of Goal Acceptance on the Relationship between Group Cohesiveness bad Productivity” as published in the Journal of Applied Psychology.
