I'd say "No."

It's easy to get hung up on the romantic notion of founders dreaming up a killer idea and then making a successful company on the back of that idea.

But that is not how the above ideas worked out. Nor, it seems, is it the common practice of startups. Let's look at a few examples:

• Google
  First Product: Search Engine (new ranking algorithm)
  Successful Product: AdWords (they make their money on the back of this product)
• Microsoft
  First Product: BASIC for Altair
  Successful Product: MS-DOS (licensed to IBM and included with all PCs)
• Fog Creek
  First Product: "Content Management System"
  Successful Product: FogBugz (bug tracking software)
• PayPal
  First Product: "Beaming" money between Palm Pilots
  Successful Product: Sending money by Email, particularly to pay for eBay auctions

If startups don't succeed or fail based on the quality of the founding idea, what then makes the difference?

Agility: Changing Direction

From looking at various startups, it would appear that what happens after you have the initial idea is what sets apart most successes from failure. (That and some other factors such as timing and sales ability.)

"The core skill of innovators is error recovery not failure avoidance."
Randy Nelson, HR @ Pixar

Make no mistake, when you are launching a startup, you are creating something new and you have no idea where you are headed. That is, you have an idea, but it may turn out to be wrong. And that is OK. In fact, you should expect that and prepare for that shift.

Plan not just for the hockey-stick growth graphs, but also for the scenario where your core idea is not the right idea for the market and you try something else. And maybe something else after that.

People

If it's not ideas that predict success, it's how you react, how do you prepare for that? This really boils down to the people involved.

• Are they stuck on the initial idea?
• Are they able to change direction and find new ideas?
• Are they people who can execute?

As Jim Collins might put it in Good to Great: Are these the right people to have on the bus?

"[You] first get the right people on the bus ... before you figure out where to drive it."
p. 44

Summary

It's a nice thought of the genius having the "Eureka!" moment1 and then working hard to make it a success.

Leave that for the story books, and when working in reality, set aside the story book and approach your activity and planning according to what normally does happen: you'll shift focus and iterate on ideas. So you want people who can work with this, not just the "perfect people" to execute on the initial idea.

In the introduction to Founders at Work, Jessica Livingston makes the following summary2:

"People think startups grow out of some brilliant initial idea like a plant from a seed. But almost all the founders I interviewed changed their ideas as they developed them."

Links & Notes

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amt3ag2BaKc#t=9m29s
   A great lecture, but a particularly great line about Eureka moements:
   "How, if you want to be an inventor..., how does knowing about the bathtub [the 'Eureka story' of Archimedes] help you? It doesn't."
2. This is an excellent book. If you are interested in startups, go out and buy it and read it cover to cover. There are many more examples of startups changing their direction during the startup process.
   If you are really short on time, pick it up in a bookstore and just read Jessica's intro - it summarizes some key points.

I was totally jazzed to visit the museum. Here is this man who is a legend in inventing. He must surely epitomize ideas and creativity, no? Well, here we were going to find out as we spent a couple of hours walking through the museum.

His family history was into elocution and speech, his father was an elocutionist and created an innovative way to teach speech to deaf-mutes. His mother and his wife were both deaf. Not so great a stretch that he was interested and did great work in acoustics. Did you know that he invented the telephone at age 29?

So what did he do the following 46 years of life?

Hydrofoils

One of the topics that dominates the museum is the work that he did in hydrofoils. He experimented with many things, including kites, solar power, and genetics (breeding sheep, specifically).

Yeah, I hadn't heard of any of this work either. He got into this idea that hydrofoils were the way to go - like an airplane in the water2. That this was going to be a big breakthrough idea. He had several different prototypes, some setting new water speed records and even had the interest of the US Navy for awhile.

Two points I want to make:

1. Timing is everything
2. Sales, sales, sales

1. Timing is Everything

The above image is the famed "HD-4" (4th prototype hydrodrome). It is the one that set speed records. They built several more prototypes.

But what happened?

A placard in the museum summarizes the sad story:

"Encouraged by the initial success of the HD-4, [they] forged ahead with more designs for naval hydro foils. ... Anticipating orders for hydrofoil craft, Bell-Baldwin Hydrodromes Limited was formed. But the war was over. The moment had passed.
No orders came."

Bell-Baldwdin thought they had the timing just right. They were working on hydrodromes because World War I was on and they were building a better warship.

Unfortunately, by the time they had an interesting hydrodrome, the war was over. This failure to sell their invention had absolutely nothing to do with the technology or its success. It was just the wrong time in the market. Had they been 5 years early or 20 years later the outcome would likely have been different.

2. Sales, Sales, Sales

A third problem with the hydrodromes that Bell-Baldwin tried to sell was the Baldwin himself. Bear in mind that I pulled this off a placard, the words aren't mine.

"Over the years, Baldwin designed a number of small hydrofoil boats for various clients. Some were meant to race and were very fast. However, Casey [Baldwin] was not a businessman and commercial success eluded him."

Again, a problem having nothing to do with the technology.

Summary

Technologists often get caught up in the technology; the whiz-bang of a new idea.

But when it comes time to making a business out of that technology, it's often things that have nothing to do with the technology that will sink it3. Keep that in mind the next time you are looking at a business opportunity. The technology may be great, but does it have other problems?

Links & Notes

1. The maritime provinces of Canada are the East Coast of Canada, and primarily on the ocean. For you Americans, think our version of New England. They are just North and a bit East of Maine.
   We've been making a point of visiting more of Canada recently, knowing that we will not live here for our entire lives and want to see more of. We've now seen both coasts, and we also got Montreal into this visit (great city).
2. Bell & company actually called them "hydrodromes" - like "aerodromes" of the day. The foil itself, just being the "wing" that lifts the "ship" out of the water.
3. Sorry for the pun. This post has been littered with opportunities to make puns about getting businesses to "lift off" and how Baldwin was a "fish out of water" when it came to sales, I couldn't resist this one.
4. Wikipedia Links:
   1. Alexander Graham bell: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Graham_Bell
   2. Hydrofoils: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrofoil

A couple of great quotes I grabbed while at the museum:

"I can't bear to hear that even my friends should think that I stumbled upon an invention [, the telephone,] and that there is no more good in me."
-Alexander Graham Bell

"He exercised a great deal of constraint on our thinking and our ideas."
-J.A.D. McCurdy re: Alexander Graham Bell

If you're not aware, Better Place is Shai Agassi's brainchild for having cheap, functional electric cars.

The documentary focuses on answering the question of "Who killed the electric car?" It suggests consumers (for not wanting to buy electric cars), car companies (for not wanting to change the status quo of sales), government, oil companies... If I recall correctly, he didn't blame Elmo from Sesame Street - but Elmo was about the only one who went unscathed1.

The laying of blame wasn't completely without merit as it is part of what spurred me to think about Better Place again.

• If you are worried about car companies protecting their vested interest in the status quo...
  ...then a startup (car company in this case) is the way to go. Startups, by definition, have no status quo. So they are happy to challenge it2.
• If you are worried about the government not instituting the necessary mandates to get car companies to change...
  ...then you need an alternative that doesn't require government intervention: an alternative that is intrinsically interested in changing.
• If you are worried that big oil has too much pull with the government for the government to stand firm...
  ...then you need an alternative that has no vested interested with big oil and nothing to lose by ignoring the current state of affairs.
• If you are worried that consumers won't choose an alternative that is new, and more limited than the current option...
  ...then you need an alternative that isn't limited in any way that is important to consumers.

I think the Better Place concept delivers on these needs:

• They think they can make money at electric cars.
• They are interested in this idea regardless of what government or big oil wants.
• They have an alternative for consumers that isn't limited to a short range like most electric cars we've seen to date (side: they can replace an entire battery in < 2 minutes at their "charging" stations - so you can theoretically just keep driving and replacing batteries as needed).
• Their alternative is competitively priced.

Notes & Links

1. I don't think that pointing fingers at a responsible group is usually very useful activity. Let's just sit down and do the work of getting ourselves to a more environmentally sustainable future. I care more about getting there than who is to blame for why we aren't yet there.
2. Indeed, challenging the status quo is often the only way they can grow and make a profit since there is an incumbent who is entrenched in the status quo already taking that revenue stream.
   In this case, Better Place has no ties to existing government subsidies, no ties to oil companies, and forget about EPA fuel economy / mileage concerns - this vehicle is on a whole different scale (we do need to measure the pollution caused by the generation of electricity).
3. What brought this up?
   I saw some articles talking about the recent decision for GM chief, ZDNet suggested that Shai Agassi would be a better choice. I'd rather Agassi keep Better Place rolling forward and bring out an entirely new car from an entirely new company - as opposed to getting bogged down with legacy pension plans, designs, manufactoring plants, and lobby groups over at GM. http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=19476
4. Wired's recent listing of the 100 most creative people drops Agassi at 3: http://www.fastcompany.com/100/2009/shai-agassi
5. If you haven't seen Agassi's talk at this year's TED, you can find it here: http://www.ted.com/talks/shai_agassi_on_electric_cars.html

If it's that important, you want to make the best decision that you can. So, what makes a good business partner? Well, it depends on your situation. But it is worth thinking about what you want in a business partner before you make the leap.

In my experience, there are 3 mains things that you can look for in a business partner:

1. Skill Matching
2. Extra Hands
3. Vision & Leadership Partner

Skill Matching

This is one of the most common reasons for selecting a business partner. And it's common advice when selecting a business partner.

And for good reason: this is a good trait to have in a business partner.

If you are strong in technology but weak in sales, bring on someone who is great with people and selling-and don't worry about the fact that they can't code their way out of a "Hello World." in javascript. even if copying code from Google.

Having someone who offsets some of your weaknesses is a great idea. Whether they be marketing, product definition, or business planning. You want business partners, like vendors, to fill a gap in your skills.

This is a pretty natural fit. You find yourself working with people who help you complete your work better and you reach out to them because you need help.

Extra Hands

Sometimes, this one just happens. You know lots of people who are in the same line of work - some of these people are your friends. When it comes time to launch your startup, you naturally look towards your friends. And often, your friends really understand your startup idea for delivering custom-made bath soap to your door, while ordering using your mobile phone and an image of a QR code.

This can be a good thing. But the important part is not to confuse it with rounding out your skillset. Don't try to pretend that 2 programmers can just "focus on different areas"-areas where you have no skills. If these people do have other skills, then that is the above partner: someone with other skills. But don't kid yourself, that can lead you into trouble later.

The other dangerous part of doing this is that you can get a bit of an echo chamber. Suddenly every new feature sounds super cool-even if it's completely early adopter-only. Having a very pragmatic & grounded sales person can help solve this (or having less-techno-savvy business who has no ideas what twitter or plurk or RSS is).

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against getting "extra hands" business partners in a startup. Just recognize that you aren't rounding out your skills or offering and you sure aren't bringing in dissenting voices (at least not on the non-technical side). You're getting some much-needed extra hands&8212;and that can be useful.

Vision & Leadership partner

This one sounds simple: of course your business partner shares the visionary & emotional weight of the company. But some do better than others. Sometimes they just aren't that kind of person, sometimes they don't know the market as well.

Does it matter? It depends.

It matters if you want someone to help map out the future of the company. If you don't want that weight and responsibility all by yourself. It matters if you want someone to tell you that your plan is wrong - don't underestimate the importance of having someone who isn't afraid of saying: "you're retarded" when necessary. It beats the alternative of building a product that that market doesn't want. The market doesn't tell you that your idea is dumb as kindly (or as early) as a good business partner who understands the industry you are working in and is willing to trumpet their convictions (even when they are in contradiction with yours).

You don't have to have this business partner. But you definitely need to know what resources (advisors, mentors, early testers) you have available to help you steer the course to startup success.

More

What other good kinds of business partner are there? What has your experience been with having partners in your startups?

Links & Further Reading

1. As Joel Spolsky puts it: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing3.html, if you had to code a GPL implementation of WATFIV in 7 days (in order to save a cruise ship full of tourists), your success would greatly hang on the quality of the people involved.
   
   You're probably doing something other than WATFIV and there is no hijacked Love Boat but the point is no less pertinent: the people involved - coders, designers, planners, and business partners - will, to a large extent, determine the success or failure of your startup.

• Tech Republic: Answer these five questions before choosing a business partner
  http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-1038993.html
  These are good questions. Especially the point about having a shared vision. I think that you need to expect change in the vision (many successful startups change course more than once), but you need to have some understandings & shared plans. Some areas that you probably want to have aligning vision:
  • Funding Approach (VC, angel, bootstrapped)
  • Equity Sharing - are you going to keep a larger portion of a smaller pie or a smaller portion of a larger pie?
  • Roles - who is responsible for making sure each business-critical thing works?
  • What is success for this startup? For you?
• The GlobeAndMail: ReportonBusiness: Wise Words
  http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060616.wwisewords0616/BNStory/specialSmallBusiness/home/?pageRequested=1
  I like his idea of getting someone loosened up with alcohol to see how they behave. You need to know how your potential business partners will react when chips are down or thing rattle them. Good tips here for selecting a business partner.
• TechBizMedia: Startup 101: Selecting your business partner(s)
  http://www.techbizmedia.com/entrepreneurship/2007/06/27/startup-101-selecting-your-business-partners/
  He echos some Paul Graham (you do read Paul Graham, don't you?) thoughts and suggests a role breakdown that is a reasonable template for some many startups.
  He has a previous article about some of the perils of solo startups: http://www.techbizmedia.com/entrepreneurship/2007/06/17/startup-101-never-start-alone/ - where he raises the problem of having someone to call your bad ideas on you. I think it is important to have this "service," but it's not automatically fixed by having business partners.
• Voices.com: Words of Wisdom: Choosing a business partner
  http://blogs.voices.com/voxdaily/2006/06/words_of_wisdom_choosing_a_bus.html
  I disagree that a business partner needs to be a friend. You do need to know them and be able to work with them well - but that does not equal friend. Although, I'd suggest that if a business partner that doesn't end up as a friend through the course of working on the startup then you're doing it wrong.

One of the "people" that I follow is a cafe in #yyc (Calgary) called @kawacalgary (I'm not sure what "Kawa" means, but it is a cool coffee shop). Looking at Kawa's twitter account, I noticed that it didn't really have that many followers: only 44.

But I know something about each of those followers:

• I know that those people like Kawa Coffee (why else would they follow it on twitter?)

For Kawa, this is a permission asset1. Certainly Kawa could continue the conversation they have with each of these people.

But what about me?

I'm not sure what the right system would be, but I think that it would be good if twitter allowed for some measure of interaction between "followers" of a business.

I don't want to spam them all and twitter's interaction is different from a comment board or Facebook-style "wall." (I'm also not advocating for spamming the followers.)

My point is that there must be some what to better organize the system (twitter) around the facts:

• There is a permission asset2 there: people have expressed interest in the product and having a conversation with it.
• There is a communal feeling around shared knowledge: meeting people (in person) who frequent my favorite coffee shops has a serendipitous effect. Why not create that feeling online?
• Any given person knows some of that community, but not most of it.
• Enabling relationships would increase the perception of the brand.

It seems to me that if companies spend lots of money on "micro-sites" for various brands, they'd be willing to engage people in a similar, but different, fashion via twitter.

Links & Notes

Links: @kawacalgary on Twitter. Kawa Calgary's website (currently under construction, recently was online).

1. It's a permission asset in the sense that Kawa's followers are saying: "I want to know more about your service, you have permission to tell me more." This bodes well for the rumor that Twitter would charge businesses to use the service: if it means that customers can express interest in and give some permission to a business, that has some value.
2. The current "permission asset" in twitter is hard to gauge: a "follow" means different levels of engagement to different people (arguably Facebook friends and LinkedIn connections are also vague in a similar way). But there is a definite permission asset there.

To some extent, this is true. But, as I wander through my delicious.com links looking for a previously bookmarked gem, I notice that lots of my links are actually not well known. Sure there are some that another 8,000 or 10,000 people have bookmarked. But some have fewer than 10 or 20 duplicates.

Here then, is a selection of some of my obscure bookmarks. Things that I think are interesting and worth reading, but have clearly not been found my many people yet (taking delicious users as a representative sampling).

The number in parentheses is the number of people, besides me, who have bookmarked the link.

1. (23) Technology & Internet: Nick Carr (author of The Big Switch & Does IT Matter?) summarizes an algorithm written by Carnegie-Mellon researchers that gives you which 100 blogs to read if you want to get the most bang for your reading. They do this by comparing the internet to a water distribution network.
   http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/10/the_science_of.php
2. (6) Economics, Startups, & Venture Capital: Fred Wilson (venture capitalist at Union Square Ventures) gives some graphs & background information on the returns of VC investment from 1969-1997.
   VC Fund Performance - Some History: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2007/11/vc-fund-perform.html
3. (4) Internet & Marketing: Darren Barefoot (Vancouver-based technologist & social media consultant) summarizes 14 trends of marketing that he got from a Seth Godin webinar.
   Notes from a Seth Godin Webinar: http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2007/11/notes-from-a-seth-godin-webinar.html
4. (1) Design: Slideshow in Wired Magazine shows some industrial design from concept to prototype.
   Birth of a Gadget: Inside the Industrial Design Process: http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/multimedia/2007/11/gallery_gadget_birth?slide=1&slideView=2
5. (4) Animation: A clock comprised of hand-written numbers. (I've had to track this down over the years as the URL has changed.)
   http://fun.drno.de/flash/hand.swf
6. (12) Design & Color: Some took the time to reproduce the 2007 IKEA catalog: but with no images, just the overall color.
   Color averaged IKEA catalogue: http://infosthetics.com/archives/2007/11/salavon_color_averaging_ikea_catalogue.html
7. (5) Innovation & Creativity: Bob Sutton quotes his book "Weird Ideas that Work" about how difficult it can be to live with innovation.
   "The terms creativity, innovation, and fun are often used in the same breath. But before you rush ahead to build or join an innovative company, I feel obliged to warn you about the hazards. Working in an innovative place can be annoying and frustrating, or worse."
   Why Creativity and Innovation Suck: http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/12/why-creativity.html
8. (19) Unusual Computers: Lifehacker shows us a tiny computer that is completely solar-powered.
   "E1 runs on 8 watts of power, has no moving parts and is completely silent. E1 looks like the James Bond of low priced Linux computers. It runs Puppy Linux, comes with an optional solar panel and an optional 10.4 inch monitor."
   Tiny Solar-Powered Linux Computer: http://lifehacker.com/software/stuff-we-like/tiny-solar-powered-linux-computer-328777.php
9. (11) Design: 37signals talks about where their designs have gotten ugly around the edges and why they think so.
   "Software can get crufty quick - especially around the edges. We work hard to keep the cruft out, but we can't win 'em all.
   "We're currently digging through Basecamp looking for those dusty corners so we can clean them up."
   When cruft creeps in: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/730-when-cruft-creeps-in
10. (4) Food: Wired Magazine talks about Louis Rossetto launching a new line of Chocolate:
    "Rossetto and his business partner, Timothy Childs, have launched Tcho, a startup that aims to do for cacao beans what Starbucks did for those other beans. To them, chocolate isn't just a processed food; it's an agricultural product with its own terroir."
    http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/16-02/st_15rossetto

Bob Sutton talks about this story and points out that often people want to hang it up before they make something work:

"It is an interesting case because it shows how difficult it is to make rational decisions in the innovation process.  Certainly, say 4000 prototypes and 4 years into the adventure, any reasonable person would have assumed that this was a failure, an extreme case of escalating commitment to a failed course of action."

And, while I love the story of someone who didn't give up and eventually succeeded, I think giving up after 4000 prototypes would have been a good action.

In fact, maybe he should have given up after 2000 prototypes. About the only bad place to stop is 5127 (since 5128 was the magic number in this case).

And this is Sutton's point: you don't know the cost of the innovation that you are undertaking. Just as Dyson didn't know that 5128 was the number.

It's easy, with the successful product complete and money in the bank, to look back and think Dyson made the right choice. But I wonder if quitting faster isn't another right choice.

What would Dyson have invented had he thrown in the towel on vacuum cleaners after 2000 attempts? What's the opportunity cost of the Dyson vacuum cleaner? None of these had been invented when he invented his first vacuum cleaner:

This is an exercise in thought, not a comment on what Dyson might have done instead (since his invention biography shows a tendency towards mechanical improvements and finding better, not new, ways to do things). But what might you invent if you give up after 2000 attempts instead of finding a better vacuum cleaner?

Links

1. I'm mashing-up the quote attributed to Thomas Edison: "I haven't failed, I've found 10,000 ways that don't work." Concerning inventing his version of the lightbulb (before succeeding).
   Other fun innovation / invention quotes:
   • "To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk."
     -Thomas A. Edison
   • "No fine work can be done without concentration and self-sacrifice and toil and doubt."
     -Max Beerbohm
   • "The core skill of innovators is error recovery not failure avoidance."
     -Randy Nelson, HR @ Pixar
2. Bob Sutton Blog Post: http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/02/5127-failed-prototypes-james-dyson-and-his-vacuum-cleaner.html

He gave an overview some of the history of copyright (including its original purpose) as well as outlining his position on copyright. My write-up here a roundup of some points that I found interesting (not much in the way of a synthesized point).

Free: when speaking about beer

First off, I'll start at the same place that he did: free as in speech vs. free as in beer. He's talking about free (as in speech) software.

Free as in speech, refers to the public's right to do something without being hindered to do so.

Free as in beer, simply refers to the price: as in, you give me beer without charge.

Despite this explanation, some people at the lecture, still managed to fuddle the two (as have I also done in my previous post on copyleft: Copyleft: Why GPL isn't Free). It's confusing when we are bound by the language that we speak. Stallman also noted the language problem, wishing we have 2 words for "free" as they do in latin1. One = "no cost" and the other = "freedom."

Copyright for the public good

One of his main arguments for copyright reform is that copyright was brought in to promote progress. That is, if you can be assured that you can own something you make (& then be the only seller) you are more likely to make something (I'm simplifying here).

But this suggestions was made in a day when copying was rather limited: you had to copy by hand. So the public wasn't really trading in much value - since they weren't going to go out and copy it themselves. In today's world, particularly with the advent of computers, copying is trivial. Because of this, the public is giving up value in not being allowed to copy something.

And his argument is that maybe we aren't promoting progress any more by having copyright.

Examples: Copy-free and working

The real-world examples of things that weren't copyrighted and still worked (both those specifically mentioned, and those that simply came to my mind) is interesting.

He mentioned Radiohead & Nine Inch Nails - both musical groups with recently albums that were released using non-standard distribution mechanisms that were more free2.

This issue is particularly interesting to me, as a good friend is a professional musician: Keith Kitchen. While bands with large followings have shown new methods of distribution to be commercially-viable, I wonder if it is possible for small and upcoming bands.

SaaS = bad

Stallman also took a shot at Software-as-a-Service (things like Basecamp & Salesforce.com): alleging it to be worse than non-free software. With SaaS, you don't even get the source code to run, never mind being able to share it. (Update: witness all the current uproar about Facebook ToS: http://scobleizer.com/2009/02/17/ownership_facebook/ - it isn't only Stallman that wants control over how software works to ensure they can use it in the future just as they do in the present.)

The fun preachy bits

As someone who is trying to persuade people, Stallman makes a point of using language to his advantage. His choice of words can be a bit slanted at times (but, of course, his opponents are also using loaded & slanted words).

• DRM = Digital Restrictions Management
  As opposed to the more common "Digital Rights Management" - Stallman used the "restrictions" which, IMO, is a more accurate description of such technology.
• "Defective by design"
  This is a reference to things that have DRM. They are "defective" by design. There is also a website: defectivebydesign.org. And fun stickers that he gave out freely (as in beer).
• "Non-free users are 'subjugated users'."

Notes & Links

1. He is referring to the distinction mentioned here: http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Libre
   Unfortunately, my second language is Spanish which also only has 1 word for "free," so a second language in this case, doesn't help me.
2. Nine Inch Nails release their work under a Creative Commons non-commercial, share alike license and also had a portion of it as a free digital download. There also HD videos available via Torrent download & multi-track downloads for easier remixing.
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Inch_Nails#Ghosts_I.E2.80.93IV_and_The_Slip_.282008.E2.80.93present.29
   Radiohead had a digital download that allowed fans to pay whatever price they saw fit: $0+
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiohead#In_Rainbows_and_independent_work_.282005.E2.80.93present.29
   Stallman also specifically mentioned Jane Sibbery. While previously known as Jane Siberry and now known as Issa, albums are available at a "pay what 'your gut' says" price via digital download: http://www.sheeba.ca/store/help.php#sdp
3. For more on Richard Stallman's thoughts on copyleft: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/x.html
4. Note: I wanted to change the license on the image to CC-PublicDomain (from my default CC-BY), alas, that option is not present in Flickr.

They then did a blog post on how they did the video. It's a great explanation of how to do a demo. For me, it is interesting from a video perspective, but I think it can work for other demos as well. Particularly useful: that they didn't just tell the story, but they included the video as well - to see the points in action.

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1554-how-to-film-customer-case-study-videos

Today, I read an HBR article: "How to Manage People in 15 Minutes a Day" ( http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/cs/2009/02/the_31_coach.html).

I found it helpful. I zipped off 2 activities that it brought to my mind and I think will make a difference in work this week. Nice quick tips.

That was reading it in my RSS reader - just reading the article alone. I clicked over to the link above to leave some thankful feedback: "Thanks. Inspired me to do a few helpful things today." I was unprepared for the deluge of comments already there.

Their content particular surprised me. Several people complaining about the ideas, others, like me, completely on board.

It's great. It's not good.

Why the discrepancy?

It's about people. I think any management advice can be dangerous since all people - the people managing & those "being managed" are different.

I don't necessarily agree with the specifics of her tips, but the general concept made a lot of sense:

Take little snippets of time to build into employees. That is at least as effective as a comprehensive "Development Methodology."

Again, this is a generic concept and I think that is why it is applicable - you have to create the final 40% of the idea by relevantly applying it to your specific situation.

It is up to you to understand your people. What does/doesn't work for them. For example, I'd agree that it's not a good idea to continually interrupt knowledge workers - you sap productivity. You have to find a balance. But there is truth in the general principal outlined: you need to have face-to-face contact with people and give direct feedback.

Everybody's different and business & work are about the people.