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Attention and awareness are not the same things

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Yesterday, I remarked that is funny how the brain works.

I am that person who judges when I go to a hotel and the alarm clock next to the bed is off. Usually, because they suffered a power outage or we passed daylight saving. It makes me wonder when the last time the room was cleaned and how well.

Recently that happened when the car battery got changed in my car and the dealer forgot to set the time. It is not a big deal, but I do judge. I wonder what else did they not check before declaring the problem fixed?

I am also the person who adjusts your painting when it hangs crooked. I won’t judge, but I will adjust it. I’ll probably won’t even tell you, I just do it. I can’t help myself.

At the same time, I can’t write a piece of text without forgetting (in)definite articles or pronouns in various places. My brain works faster than I can type. Even when I proofread the text, I still miss some of them. I use Grammarly to help me.

One time someone wanted to prove to me that I am not as detail orientated as I think I am. He asked, “what is the color of the building you work at?”. I had no idea.

It is funny how the mind works.

Attention and awareness are not the same things and they do not work the same way for everybody.

The mind is a funny thing

Dealing with life

Dealing with life
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When you are doing something hard or dealing with major life events, you are trying to get through it. Often it feels impossible or insurmountable.

But when you are on the other side, you often forget. When hard things pass you forget about the struggle and you just remember the success (or failure). But success never comes easy. It takes skill, effort, patience, and perseverance.

Same when you fail. You remember how you felt when you failed but you forget about the struggles before.

The mind is a funny thing.

There are big and small disappointments and setbacks. They have come a similar set of emotions and you use the same skills to cope with them. They just differ in intensity.

Rarely bottom up

Culture starts at the top

Culture starts at the top
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I hear myself repeating this a lot lately so I’ll make my life easier to write it up in a post. If you are unhappy about the culture in a company, change can only come from the top. A team lead can (somewhat) influence the culture inside their team, a general manager can influence the culture at a location, but company culture as a whole starts at the top.

This one of the major reasons, you see major changes in executive teams when a new CEO comes on board. You cannot conclude that the existing executive team members are failing at their job. It is often because of a new culture the new CEO wants to instill in the company. It is his job drive down that culture and often this requires new people. New people are not encumbered with the old ways of doing. This is also the reason CEOs get replaced. It is often they are not incompetent at their job, but the board feels they have a hard time seeing other opportunities. Sometimes you need a reset.

People mimic the behavior of other people in the organization. The most effective way to change people’s behavior is to look at your own. One of my favorite books is on this topic is Louis Gerstner‘s “Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?“. He became CEO of IBM in 1993 when the company was near bankrupt and stuck in their old ways. In the book, he chronicles about what he found and the choices he had to make. It is a fascinating read.

If you are a leader and you are unhappy about your company’s culture, take a long hard look in the mirror and ask yourself what you can change yourself to improve. Next step is to instill in your executive team and ask them to take a hard look at their own and team behavior. It is only the way.

Amazon HQ2 failure

Take people on a journey

Take people on a journey
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There has been written a lot about Amazon’s HQ2 contest and their decision to go to New York and then pulling out again. I think it has been analyzed from every angle. The arguments from both sides have validity in their own right. I am not here to debate that.

It reminded me of something else. If you want to make a big change, you need to take people on a journey. If you go to quickly, people resist. Many people do not like change and their natural tendency is to resist big changes. This is exactly what happened here.

It is better to go slow. If Amazon decided to open up an office in LIC with a few thousand people without a contest, the level of resistance would have been much lower. They probably could have expanded that campus easily to 25,000 people in 5 years or more. Given the way incentives are given out by the city, I am also confident that they could’ve gotten those as well.

By coming in strong, Amazon lost a good portion of local support which bolstered local politicians to stand up. A David and Goliath fight resonates very well and granted Amazon does not need those incentives to run its business, but on the other hand, LIC can use the investment. It is a difficult discussion.

Seattle has many more Amazon workers and their campus is bigger, but they grew into it together. There is resistance now but they are already there and they keep expanding. Arguably, Seattle is a smaller city so the Amazon impact is even bigger in that city. Because they grew incrementally, they could take it much farther than if they would have said they were hiring 50,000 people in just a few years.

With Shapeways, I learned that if you need to increase pricing, you know where you want to be, but if the leap is big enough you take small incremental steps to get there. You need to take your customers by the hand and bring them along. The interesting thing is that you even learn a lot along the way and it allows you to mitigate any problems you did not think of.

Whenever I contemplate a big change, I try to think about how to break it down in smaller steps. It avoids change resistance and you can adapt along the way. Landlords know this game very well. If you increase the rent by 7% every year, you double it in a decade. 7% is not a lot to take year-over-year, but doubling the rent from one year to another because you passed the decade is going to make everyone upset.

My love affair with unstructured notes and documents

A second brain

A second brain
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I am a simpleton with regard to productivity software. I just use notes and documents. I have tried many smart todo lists apps, CRMs, and fancy note-taking apps, but I always stay with plain note taking. Over the years, everything moved to the cloud and I love the ability to jot something down on my phone and look it up later on my laptop. I jumped on the Evernote bandwagon early on. I still got thousands of notes in Evernote even though I have moved on to Simplenote and Notes on MacOS.

I got reminded of this when I was doing some research in past meetings and people I met on a particular project I was working on a while ago. I typically use spreadsheets for CRM type of activities and I got the names and companies I was looking for very quickly. A search on their names or company names revealed the notes I made during or after the meeting. In a couple of hours, I had a great overview of what I needed.

It is in these times, I am grateful for my habit of making notes of everything. I literally can tell you which meetings I had and what was decided on let us say Thursday, June 14th, 2012. I can even tell you what I did that day. I keep a rolling to-do list with a log for a long time. I wrap over the todo list every year or so to keep the document manageable in length.

I call it my second brain. My second brain does not live in one particular place. It is scattered around Simplenote, Notes on MacOS, Evernote and Google Docs. A quick search reveals literally the thing I am looking for. Larger documents go into Dropbox and are easy to find back too. Nowadays I don’t even bother with complex folder structures. I do not like endless clicking through folders too much work, but I do make sure every document has a sane filename containing all the keywords I need to recognize it for what it is.

Many companies have tried to organize the way we work, create and distribute information across an organization. When you work in a team, it is often useful to structure information to facilitate the proper flow of information and decision making. But it also comes at a cost. If I got a dollar every time someone complained to me about some information organization system, I would be rich by now. I always tread carefully when deciding to try something like that in a company. It becomes worse when the tool becomes an excuse and that is accepted. I have seen that too – especially in larger companies.

Unstructured information systems allow me to mold them to my way of working. It is never in my way. The only thing you need to let go is structure.

When I talk about this, people often push back and give a slew of good reasons why structured information is more useful. The one thing I always ask them is if they organize their email in folders or do they just archive or delete. Often a light bulb goes off at that moment.

It is a marathon and not a sprint

Critics and your startup

Critics and your startup
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Seth Godin is one of my favorite bloggers. I read his posts daily. His writing is very concise and eloquently. I wish I could be as good as him in writing down my own thoughts and thinking. Today, he wrote about the trap of early feedback.

He writes:

“If you’ve created something that will delight and astound 10% of the marketplace, there’s a 90% chance that the first person who encounters your work will dislike it. He might even hate it. In fact, if you do the math, you’ll see that there’s more than a 70% chance that the first THREE people will hate it. And if you give up then, you’ve just walked away from serving the people you set out to serve.”

There is a lot of truth in that.

If you are fundraising or trying to sell your product (idea) and talking to your first investors or prospective customers, there is a good chance they will not receptive to your idea. They might even tell you it is the worst idea ever and that it will never work.

You need a thick skin and perseverance to keep going and make your dream come alive. It is good to remember that is normal and it is out of the ordinary when the first people you speak to love your idea. You might have struck gold or it is just an anomaly.

At the same time you ask yourself all the time am I beating a dead horse or is this truly a good idea?

There is no easy answer to this question. The one thing I keep in mind is to set realistic goals on how many people you need to approach before you can get someone to invest or buy your product. Setting realistic and maybe even somewhat ambitious goals early on helps you to manage the expectations.

At the end of the day, you want to be able to look at yourself in the mirror and tell yourself you did everything you could to make it come life. It requires perseverance and it is exhausting, you need to set an ambitious pole into the ground to motivate yourself to try again.

It is often a marathon and not a sprint. And remember, first they ignore you.

Never too early to start

Compensation structure in a startup

Compensation structure in a startup
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Wages are the primary compensation for work and have a major impact on job satisfaction. Together with culture, opportunity (to grow) and work itself, they are the internal job satisfaction drivers in your organization. There are the drivers you can control. Many external drivers you cannot control and you can only compensate with internal drivers.

You should always assume that everyone talks about their wages inside the company, but at the same time, it is not transparent. Some people talk to some other people about their compensation. Because the sample sizes are small and you do not have your wage structure in perfect order, it can cause major hits to job satisfaction.

Very early in the startups, compensation is often driven more by share options and potential to build something great than anything else. This keeps the burn rate low and allows the company to be build and proof itself in the market. But then things start to change rapidly when a large round of investment is coming in and a lot of people are hired. This is also the time that hiring decisions become distributed and the sheer speed of hiring makes it hard to keep track of compensation offers made to individual employees.

Another aspect is that market-conform compensation for different roles is different. A data scientist with 5 years of experience is in higher demand than a customer service director with the same level of experience.

One thing I picked up at school and I still use and talk about a lot today is what we call in Dutch “house of compensation”. It is the structure on how to compensate people in different roles with different levels of experience.

It is important to apply to this from day one and keep updating it when you grow your organization. It helps assess compensation for new prospective hires plus it forces you and your team to have the conversation about compensation in case you are missing out on hires.
Also, it avoids the problem where particular people or teams are over-compensated while others are under-compensated. It can also help avoid gender and race bias.

You can organize the structure for compensation in any way you like, but this, in general, the rule of thumb I use:

– Level: employee, team lead, manager, director up to c-level executive
– Area: engineering, operations, sales, etc
– Seniority: typical a point scale from junior to senior

Level and area have compensation bandwidths from start to end. Seniority moves you through the salary bandwidth.

Every employee is scored based on those three attributes and the result is appropriate compensation.

It is a very effective way to keep track of wages and make sure your house in order. It also forces to have a conversation in case it does not fit without having to monitor employment offers.

Will it always fit? No, I can guarantee it will not. There will be always exceptions to the rule, but at least you can have the conversation when that happens and decide. You change the model or refit that person on the scale. Your model can be wrong. At the same time, you can up the seniority or level for that person, but that also increases the output expectations and that might actually be a good thing.

If you deploy this model later on or adjust it based on market circumstances, you should adjust the wages of existing people to make them whole.

One of the little things I like to aim for is giving a small increase twice a year instead of a bigger one once a year. It is common knowledge that people are happy with wage increases, but the impact on their job satisfaction fades quite quickly.

It’s not just you

Collateral data collection

Collateral data collection
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Let me first state that I would never have my DNA tested by companies like 23andme and Ancestry. It is not that I would not want to know what is in my genes, but I simply do not trust these companies to do the right thing with that data. A couple of weeks ago, it became clear that 23andme is selling their data to pharmaceutical companies to help them identify potential candidates for testing of new medicines. Given the response, it was not really clear to people that by opting in for finding relatives you also opt-in for data sharing beyond finding those relatives.

Ultimately though, I am not 100% convinced they are capable of keeping my data secure and not get hacked.

But me not testing myself does not preclude me for not being in their database in the first place. When a close family member does a DNA test, they have my data by proxy. Our DNA is closely related. I have no say in this and it is part of how DNA works. But it is fair to say that I do not have a say in this case.

I got reminded of this when I was thinking about the Facebook and Google “market research” apps which got disabled by Apple. The participants chose to share their information with these companies in return for a small fee. They willingly chose to open up their data and share it. You could argue if they fully understood what was happening, but I digress.

While these people chose to share data, my data could have been shared as well. I could have been in a conversation with them or have my contact details in their phonebook. By proxy, my data gets collected as well even though I never gave my consent nor was I made aware.

This is a real problem. Choices of others affect your own privacy and collection on data of you extends beyond yourself. A good example is where Facebook started recommending to “friend” my cleaning lady because she had shared her text messages with Facebook and our conversations were in there.

We really need regulation around data ownership. GPDR in Europe does a nice try but has too much focus on data collection and transfer. It prohibits some propagation of data, but it does not preclude companies from collecting it in the first place. In actuality, this plays in favor of large data collectors like Facebook and Google but gives me little to none rights to have my data not collected at all – especially when you think about collateral data collection like in this post.

You cannot take my car or house because I own those things, but my data is free for all.

The new normal for generation Z

Virtual money

Virtual money
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My 9-year old son asked me this weekend if we could go to the toy store. I asked him why. He told me that he wanted to exchange some gift cards he had for this store. I asked, “what do you want to buy?”. He said, “buy? I want to exchange them for Playstation gift cards.” “Oh”, I said, “what do you want to do with those?”. He said, “I want to load up my Playstation account so I can buy some V-Bucks and get some gear on Fortnite.”

He figured this out on his own. I was impressed.

I tried explaining this to my 72-year old parents and  I lost them at “V-Bucks”. They’ve no idea and they’ll never grasp how a free game like Fornite can earn billions of dollars with selling virtual goods. And that’s ok.

A short film about a world dominated by computers

Merger

Merger
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Recently, Keiichi Matsuda released another short film on a future dominated by computers and algorithms. Like in his movie HYPER-REALITY, the main character lives in a world dominated by computers. In the movie, she talks to computer therapist about her life being controlled by computers and software. She complains she has no longer control over her own life and she wants to transcends that.
 
The movie leaves it up to the viewer to imagine what the transcendence means, but it feels much like she is uploading herself into the cloud. I have written about that before. It is a possible end-state for humankind.

I am a big fan of his work. You can view it at dystopian or not. I like to take a more optimistic attitude, but the choice is your own.