The Real Secret of Thoroughly Excellent Companies
blogs.harvardbusiness.org
blogs.harvardbusiness.org
My experience was basically that they hired me because "senior developers should be good at wading into bad code" rather than for anything vaguely resembling the sorts of engineering tasks that they grilled me for during the interview process.
Most of the software I got stuck with was a nightmare of bad design and rushed hacks. It was also a technological step backward from a government contracting job.
And then there's the problem of supporting all of that crap...
And the benefits aren't all that good, to boot.
Most of the developers I've talked to who worked there didn't like it, and the more senior they were, the less they liked it.
Chances are one will get ten heads in a row.
This doesn't mean they have a secret you can learn, or that they can teach you how to flip ten heads in a row straight off, or that they can do it again or event that they can flip one more head.
We have a world where millions of businesses were started, some are very successful - most folded - that doesn't mean the successes have a secret you can copy to copy their success. Or even a non-secret.
I'm not saying business success is as random as tossing a coin, but self-selecting the successful companies to study is a very biased sample, and that doing what they do to get the results they get is not a guaranteed strategy.
I was a child, and $2 was relatively cheap way to learn that lesson.
The key to success is in people, starting with the person at the top of the pyramid. A bad boss cannot formulate success by inverting his personality or by adopting a daily "secrets to success" checklist to fervently abide by because he will fail eventually. That is a guarantee.
So if you want to be successful, you have to be good and hire good people. And if you can't hire good people it is probably because good people are hard to find (and probably expensive). That is why success is hard to achieve.
To push it one step further, an organization with lots of (or some) not-so-good people will not achieve trust, at least not to the fullest extent. A slacker causes other people to become embittered because they have to compensate. Slackers are not trusted. Gossipers are not trusted. Liars are not trusted. Greedy bosses are not trusted. Greedy bosses do not trust.
Isn't this basic job of the manager? Why do academics and industry label common sense with lame terms?
The bottom line, and the secret:
Great sales people create an opportunity to fulfill a commitment -- even when one doesn't naturally exist -- and then fulfill it.
The last of these has been the most successful, and interestingly it was cooked up by a tech. support guy, Mike Bosworth, who was "persuaded" to try his hand at Sales.
I have tried to summarize the essence of Solutions Selling here: http://dailykibitz.blogspot.com/2009/01/distillation-of-solu... and have just released a product, bSelling, intended to support this kind of approach: http://dailykibitz.blogspot.com/2009/03/first-web-based-prod...
In the drier example they give, the GM is able to understand the initial symptoms, follow the chain of inference, and identify the root cause.
What about the case where the chain of problems involves highly technical ones that the GM is really in no position to answer?
Before you say that tech companies should be run by hackers, consider that even unfamiliarity with a sub-project can make an otherwise competent techie give retarded advice.
What is a friend?