RSS

Tag Archives: strategy

Stay Away from Workaholics

17 May

workaholicI find writing this post a bit ironic and I am, without a doubt, a workaholic. Between the rapid growth of KidoZen, leading the strategy side of TelIago and some third-party projects I work around 16 hours during weekdays and another 8-10 hours during the weekend. I don’t complain about it. I have the privilege to be at a point in my life on which I enjoy what I am doing more than at any other time in my career and I am convinced that it takes that kind of effort to make a difference in this highly competitive market.

Having said that, I tried very hard to not encourage that type of behavior within our team. At KidoZen, our teams work fairly regular 8-10 hour days and although, occasionally, we end up putting insane hours at the end of each release cycle, we never encourage or reward that type of behavior. At this point in my career, as I am convinced most workaholics are damaging to the team dynamics.

My reasoning here is very simple: If you are going to regularly work insane hours you need a structure to sustain that rhythm and most people don’t even think about. I can work long hours because I meticulously divide my focus during the day on different aspects that help keep me fresh. Contrary to that thinking, I found that most workaholic behaviors are completely triggered as a continuous and disproportioned response to short-term needs with little strategy or structure around it.

Here are some of the reasons why, I think, you should stay away from workaholics:

  • Workaholism is contagious: When someone regularly work insane hours to accelerate certain delivery, their colleagues feel compelled to do the same even if they are not equipped to do so
  • Competitiveness: Related to the previous point, workaholism indirectly foment a level of competitiveness within a team that can be detrimental to the long term goals of a specific project.
  • Long term performance degradation: Unless you take the time to structure a method that allows you to regularly work long hours, your performance will degrade over time as an inevitable consequence of exhaustion.
  • Burnout factor: Being burnout as a consequence of working long hours ends of affecting the overall performance and attitude of the team.
  • Short-term focus: If you are constantly burning hours focusing on short term objectives, it becomes really hard to keep thinking and contributing to the long term strategic vision of a product or company.
  • Working hard for the wrong reasons: Ultimately, I can live with workaholics as long as they are driven for the right reasons but I found out that, more often than not, you encounter people whose only objective with working long hours is not passion or motivation but a selfish desire to score some points with their management team.

Those are just some of the elements why I fundamentally try to not encourage workaholic-type behaviors within our team. I would be very interested to hear your thoughts about it. More about this topic in a future post….

 
1 Comment

Posted by on May 17, 2013 in Uncategorized

 

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Dreams Fly High at Venture Hive: The Hidden Treasure of Miami’s Startup Scene

22 Apr

venturehiveLast Friday was demo day at Miami’s startup accelerator Venture Hive. This was the opportunity for the companies in the program to present to potential investors and other influential people in the South Florida business community. For me, Friday represented the culmination of three months of my first role as a mentor on a startup accelerator program. While watching the presentations and trying to revisit all the wonderful memories and experiences of the last few months, I couldn’t avoid but feeling very proud of having had the opportunity to contribute to such an important program to help build the startup community in South Florida.

12 weeks I was introduced to Dr. Susan Amat by my great friend David Walsh was crazy enough to propose me as a mentor for the Venture Hive program. I was very hesitant for the obvious reasons: I didn’t know if I have a lot to contribute in terms of experience to the new companies and I my time was very constrained running KidoZen and Tellago. However, after talking to Susan for a few minutes I was completely dazzled by her passion and big dreams to transform a city known mostly as a touristic spot into a startup hub for the South East of the US and Latin America. To this day, I would never forget David’s description of Susan “Jesus, you really need to meet this person” he said “because she is the only person I know who has more energy than you” J and he was completely right. After meeting Susan and her team, I didn’t know exactly how but I knew I wanted to help.

The rest is history, for 12 weeks I had the privilege of mentoring NightPro: a company that is disrupting the nightlife event management scene and which platform is being used by some of the most prestigious clubs in the world. The founders: Juan and Francisco are the core of a super talented team that never seems to stop working and have managed to capture a segment of the market which has escape to the powerhouses in the space like EventBrite or TicketFly. Week after week I worked with that team trying to help in the few areas I knew I could contribute such as technology readiness, raising capital, strategic alliances, etc. Even when I was traveling all over the world, we managed to have online meetings at 3am to make sure I stay on the loop on NightPro’s current activities.

During my time at Venture Hive, I witnessed the evolution of the different teams from small technical solutions or ideas to companies with an structured vision, execution plan and, in some cases, sophisticated technology solutions.

Living in a highly competitive environment, it’s gratifying to see how the different startups managed to compete and yet collaborate intensively in order to make everyone better. That’s the secret of Venture Hive: everyone pulling together to achieve a bigger dream. Obviously, a lot of the startups in the program are going to fail but as long as some of them succeed (and they will) Susan’s dream will continue on and Miami will be able to open its doors to those entrepreneurs from the South East of the US and Latin-America that are dreaming to change the world.

 
1 Comment

Posted by on April 22, 2013 in Uncategorized

 

Tags: , , , , ,

I Want Control, I Want a Pretty Tittle, It Makes Me Feel Happy

11 Apr

controlThe story sorts of goes like this:

One of your employees continuously express the desire of leading or managing specific activity and have more control over certain decisions given their particular expertise on that specific area. After months of hearing this argument, you finally decide to promote that person to that management position to implement some of his ideas. Immediately, you realize that, even though your employee is very happy with the new “title” or position he constantly struggles to make any decision and is constantly asking for the involvement of his superiors to address some of the tasks that fall under his new role.

Sounds familiar?

As recent research studies proves, the sense of control is one of the elements that contribute to people’s true happiness. The ability of influencing the outcome of a situation based on our own actions gives us a sense of comfort and confidence that ultimately becomes an important factor in our happiness.

If we extrapolate this to corporate environments or startups, is not strange to find people who constantly request greater and greater levels of controls for no apparent reason other than to feel important or appreciated. Contradicting with that addictive desire of acquiring control, we must acknowledge that most people have no idea how to exercise control effectively. Quite the contrary, most people struggle when making decisions and going through the pain of taking ownership and responsibility for specific situations.

Even though most capable people like the feeling of having control over specific outcomes, they are constantly challenged by the responsibility that comes with any level of control and start making erratic decisions that affect the rest of the team or, sometimes, making no decisions at all. However, there is no doubt, that people are genuinely happier when they feel in control over specific situation. To address this contradiction, most big organizations create all sort of vague mid-management titles like “Director of X” or “Manager of Y” titles that gives employees the illusion of control in very constrained environments that prevents from causing any harm.

During his days at Opsware, Silicon Valley legend Marc Andreeseen famously said something around the lines of “if titles make employees happy, give them titles….”.

Whether you agree with that philosophy or not (I personally don’t ), there is no doubt  that granting the right levels of control to the right people is a continuous challenges for most Sr. managers in organizations. The easiest answer to that challenge is to hire really talented people that are also solid team players and granting them the right levels of ownership and control so that they can also influence the rest of the organization.

Easier said than done though :)

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on April 11, 2013 in Uncategorized

 

Tags: , , , , ,

No Talent, No Problem: Become a Big Company Bureaucrat

26 Mar

Everyone working or doing business with large enterprises at some point have run against the frustrating bureaucracy reigning in those environments. This type of bureaucracy is an inherent aspect of big organizations but I’ve also been surprised of encountering a few startups launched by people with big company background which amazingly presents the same frustrating levels of bureaucracy.

Seeing that phenomenon has made me realize how much bureaucracy is not only a product or big company environments but also a consequence of hiring people with “bureaucratic DNA” ;)    At the end of the day, a lot of times bureaucracy is a mechanism created by people with no real talent in order to survive in a company environment.

How to spot a big company bureaucrat?

If you are working in a big company you already know who those guys are. If not, just look around for some of the following characteristics:

  • They want control but have no idea what to do with it: Bureaucrats demand and fight for control all the time because it makes them feel important. However, when granted control over a specific situation, they have no idea how to make effective decisions.
  • They have no real talent: You wonder who these people bribed to get to their position ;) Big company bureaucrats bring little or no marketable talent and instrument complex processes to hide that fact in the eyes of their colleagues.
  • They manage by fear: When in management positions, big company bureaucrats constantly inspire fear to their subordinates. This is just about the only way they know how to manage a team because fear is the only thing that makes them feel in control.
  • They can’t make a decision without calling a meeting: Making decisions entails taking risks and big company bureaucrats are adverse to risks; so what do they do? They call meetings to make other people responsible for the decision.
  • They call meetings for everything: Big company bureaucrats not only call meetings to get consensus about decisions but they call meetings for everything. Meetings makes bureaucrats appear busy in the eyes of their colleagues and, at the end, they have nothing better to do.
  • Everything is a crisis: Big company bureaucrats feel comfortable in crisis environments because they don’t know how to discriminate real important decisions from average ones. Besides, crisis offers bureaucrats the feeling of being in control that they so desperately need.

What do you think? Do you live surrounded by big company bureaucrats?

 
2 Comments

Posted by on March 26, 2013 in Uncategorized

 

Tags: , , ,

Most Enterprise Software Analysts are Useless: Find the Right Ones

11 Mar

During last week’s trip to Europe, I received a call from the CIO of a fairly large organization whom I met last year, soliciting some advice on a technology evaluation process they were conducting on the mobility space. Needless to say I was a bit surprised by the sudden call given that this trip to Europe was exclusively focused on a couple of speaking engagements and I hadn’t scheduled any customer or partner visits. When I inquired a bit more about the causes of their request, the customer explained that they have been increasingly disappointed by the results of their technology evaluation efforts with a very prestigious analyst firm and needed a (in their own words) “more hands on opinion”.

As I started reviewing the analyst recommendation, it turned out our customer was absolutely correct in their assessment. The entire research reflected a very high level technology viewpoint of the different products as focused almost entirely in the support for some well-known buzzwords. While clearly frustrating, this experience is far from being an isolated incident. The fact of the matter is really hard to find enterprise software analysts with the hands-on knowledge about the technologies they evaluate, the technology knowledge and the market perspective to offer a pragmatic analysis about a specific technology trend. Most analysts in large firms, they have little or no practical experience developing products or solutions in the enterprise and they focused their analysis in large customer surveys. Also, these group of enterprise software analysts always seemed to be disconnected with the investment trends taking place in the venture capital or private equity communities which fosters a lot of the innovation that eventually impact the enterprises.

As a result, a lot of organization pay large amounts of money for receiving some very basic and often wrong advice that almost always tends to favor the most established players in the market.  A solid research in an enterprise software space should be a combination of a solid understanding of the current technology but also about the vision behind the product, market conditions, etc.

Obviously, my opinion about enterprise software analysts is far from being a generalization and you can still find some very talented analysts that come from a product engineering background who tend to go very deep in their researches in terms of the technical capabilities of a specific product of technology. I’ve been lucky enough to spend time with some of those rarely talented analysts and received some very valuable advice.

I know my thoughts about this topic can come across as very blunt, but I find it incredibly infuriating every time I see organizations being affected by relying on research materials that are completely disconnected from reality. My advice to enterprise customers to always do the correct due diligence when interacting with analysts. It’s not that hard to determine when you are interacting with an analyst with a solid understand of the space and your current needs or whether you are dealing with a someone who just likes to play to be an expert.

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on March 11, 2013 in Uncategorized

 

Tags: , , ,

Finding the Foil in Your Story

22 Feb

In literature, the Foil is a character type that used to highlight the qualities of the protagonist by highlighting a strong contrast. Arguably, the most famous foil of all times is Sancho Panza, the famous Don Quixote squire who continuously contrasts with the protagonist both morally and physically and serves as a constant reminder to Don Quixote’s mission. Notice that the foil is not necessarily a negative character.

Just like in literature, missions in startups are better described and accomplished when there is a Foil in the story. In this context, a foil can be a large competitor, a situation in the current macroeconomic context of a particular industry or even a type of customer. Regardless, by presenting the characteristics of your foil you will highlight the benefits and vision of your company, product or service. It’s not that hard, if you are working on something relevant just look around and you will find many many Foils :)

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on February 22, 2013 in Uncategorized

 

Tags: , , , , ,

Inspire With Your Vision Not With Success

14 Feb

At dinner last night, we had a very interesting debate about different strategies for building great teams. While hiring well is, undoubtedly, one of the most difficult elements of startups, the winning formula seems to be very clear: Hire great people that work great together and are inspired by the company’s vision. The first two factors of the equation need no further explanation; great people that can work well together is a winning formula to build great things. However, great people and great teams are not enough to build great companies; you still need an inspirational vision.

In the early stages of a startup vision is everything. When you don’t have a lot of traction or financial success, only a great visions can inspire people to join your team and help to make your company better. However, after the company grows a little bit and achieves some success, I’ve found that a lot of startups stop emphasizing their vision as the cornerstone of the company and, instead, they focus on inspiring employees with their initial success.

Success can be projected in many ways: industry awards, financial rewards, killer offices etc. Some of those versions of success can definitely attract people to join your company as most intelligent people prefer to join a successful venture than an unsuccessful one. However, success is rarely a factor to inspire people to do great things. When a successful image becomes the center of your company instead of an inspirational vision, you are likely to attract people that are only there in the good times and that can only execute in short term goals. It’s not a surprise that a lot of companies go through a transformation process after they achieve an initial wave of success in order to find their soul again.

As a founder and/or CEO, your MOST IMPORTANT JOB is to clearly articulate your company vision to the key players in your company so that they can communicate it within their teams. A solid vision will keep your team together and focused during the difficult times and it will serve as the inspiration to take your company to the next level during the good times. Financial success, a fun culture, awards are important but rarely inspirational. Selling a great vision can help create successful companies but selling success will only help you to create mediocrely successful ones.

 
2 Comments

Posted by on February 14, 2013 in Uncategorized

 

Tags: , , , , ,

Enterprise Software Lessons: The Challenges of Acquiring International Customers

08 Feb

Last night, I was having dinner with some executives from one of our partners discussing their recent successes on acquiring customers and developing enterprise mobile solutions powered by our KidoZen platform in Eastern Europe and Asia. During our conversation, I couldn’t stop thinking that one of the main reason behind our partner’ success is their deep understanding of those markets and the dynamics to effectively execute on them.

Establishing a solid international customer presence is one of the hardest endeavors for any company but it’s exponentially more difficult in the enterprise software space. The main reason that makes international expansion so difficult for enterprise software companies is that customer acquisition, pricing and even negotiation dynamics are really influenced by the cultural and socioeconomic aspects of a specific region. These challenges are not as apparent in areas like North America and Western Europe that share a lot of economic, social and cultural commonalities but it’s very obvious on almost every other case. Underestimating socioeconomic, cultural and historic differences is one of the main mistakes made by enterprise software startups attempting to acquire international customers.

In order to mitigate those challenges, I typically advice startups to focus on establishing the correct strategic alliances with other enterprise software vendors with the right market and business-culture understanding and the professional reputation to be successful in a specific country or region. Even though establishing mutually beneficial and effective strategic alliances is an incredible hard effort, it can be extremely rewarding in the long run. Particularly in the enterprise software space, strategic partners can complement your product or service with the right connections, customer acquisition and delivery processes that will help you to organically grow znc be successful on that market. Attempting to acquire customers internationally all by yourself, can result in an exhausting exercise that will distract you from your main missing or creating great enterprise software technologies or services.

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on February 8, 2013 in Uncategorized

 

Tags: , , , , ,

Enterprise Software Lessons: The User is not The Buyer

01 Feb

Last weekend I was reading a fabulous article by Roman Stanek on which he presented a series of arguments that demonstrate that, despite movements like the consumerization of IT, enterprise software remains very old school. When debating about the article with a colleague, we found ourselves having a very interesting discussions about the hidden factors that still cause enterprises to resist revolutionary movements like the consumerization of the enterprise. Among those factors, there is one that enterprise software startups almost always managed to ignore: in the enterprise, users are not necessarily the buyers.

The intrinsic characteristics of the enterprise software sales model represents a major difference about the acquisition and monetization process between enterprise and consumer software technologies. In the enterprise, software products are typically either targeting hundreds or thousands of users or providing important infrastructure functionalities that will be used by dozens of applications. Either case is sufficient for enterprise software products to be subjected to various approval and compliance processes that go well beyond the acceptance of the initial users.

Why is this important?

Well, as an enterprise software startup, you need to understand the dynamics of enterprise software sales models and surround your product with the right sales models that help it navigate the technology acquisition processes in the enterprise. Here are a few suggestion I found useful:

  • Find a champion: The most important aspect of an enterprise software sales process is to find the right people within your customer’s organization that are so in love with your product that they are willing to champion it’s adoption within the enterprise.
  • Give your champion incentives and ammunitions to sale your product”: Now that you’ve found your champion, you need to offer him the right materials, tools, incentives and other elements so he/she can be effective socializing your product within the enterprise.
  • Reduce friction: As a principle, enterprises tend to resist disruptive changes. If you have the option, make sure your product is easy to acquire in a non-invasive mode.
  • Speak at different levels: Sales processes in the enterprise involve people that are not the target audience of your product. Regardless of whether you are selling to developers, IT Pros, marketing, etc make sure you can present the value proposition of your technology from different standpoints like executive, technical or sales that are easily understandable by the different groups in the enterprise.
  • Be patient: Selling to enterprises is a bit of a chess game, you have to stay patient and make the right moves at the right time.
 
1 Comment

Posted by on February 1, 2013 in Uncategorized

 

Tags: , , , , ,

Enterprise Software Lessons: Fighting IT Paralysis with Innovation

25 Jan

These days I spend a considerable amount of times working with CIOs discussing strategies to embrace modern enterprise software techniques such as big data or enterprise mobility within their organizations. One thing that still amazes me is the large number of obstacles that enterprises still encounter embracing innovative technologies.

The sad contradiction is that, in any organization, you can find talented IT leaders that are eager to bring innovation into their companies. Contrary to popular believe, great developers and managers in IT are also eager for innovation. However, time and time again, these forward thinker leader struggle against processes and policies that were created decades ago in a time on which uncontrolled IT innovation could have been, in fact, harmful to an organizations.

But IT organizations need to understand that those times are gone!

The idea of constraining innovation in the name of security, compliance, stability is simply ludicrous. In the era of cloud computing, open source dominance, software as a service, software virtualization the costs of experimenting and innovating are almost insignificant compared to the potential benefits.

In a nutshell, IT organizations need to move away from the contradictory position of wanting innovation while enforcing the policies to shut it down. The new technology revolutions have brought enterprise software back from the dark ages but IT organizations need the forward thinkers, the innovators, the linchpins to implement great solutions.

In this new renaissance of enterprise software, aspects such as IT policies, compliance rules and business processes should be established to help innovations to be applicable in the enterprise but never to constraint it. At the end, the harm that lack of innovation can cause enterprises in terms of talent, morale, competitive differentiation and even culture are significant larger than any potential damages they can incur by fomenting innovations.

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on January 25, 2013 in Uncategorized

 

Tags: , , , , ,

← Older posts
 
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.