Business Lessons I Learned This Year | Hacker News Reader

Business Lessons I Learned This Year

quicksprout.com

35 pointswebtickle11 comments

Anyone else tired of these business-advice-self-help blog posts? It's all this feel good generalized advice that just seems to reiterate the same points over and over again. Anything with concrete examples (data is even better) is so much more useful than this sort of stuff.

Is there a market for the business equivalent to "Men's Health"? Instead of "10 ways to get great abs in 5 minutes", it could be filled with similar advice for businesses.

Not that I want to deride the advice - I guess some things one just needs to hear over and over again, until they finally sink in...

Although I agree that the jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none personality type doesn't make a good hire, the corollary to this is that you need to watch out for people with advanced not-my-job-syndrome. Over the years I've worked with designers who consider any mention of production of their work "techie speak", developers who think design is just "making things pretty", Flash guys who get the creepy-crawlies if they have to interface with Javascript, marketing drones who completely lack any understanding of how a web application is built, etc. Claiming to be a "specialist" is often just cover for a lack of intellectual curiosity.

People should of course always excel at a few specific things, and play off each others' strengths, but remember: specialization is for insects.

> Although I agree that the jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none personality type doesn't make a good hire

I'm not sure that I do. I've seen companies that survived because someone did what it took to ship, regardless of whether "it" had anything to do with his/her speciality.

Or, maybe that person's "speciality" was "ships product".

As a self-professed generalist I just didn't want to sound too self-serving. ;) OTOH, I believe that striving to develop particular excellence in a few things IS a hallmark of good self-discipline...

I've always found the continuation of that cliche to be interesting. In full it reads "jack of all trade, master of none, but ofttimes better than the master of one."

I completely disagree (with the article) when it comes to startup staffing. There are a few cases where having a domain expert is necessary (e.g. if you're writing, say, a new database system or doing realtime software, or if you're selling into a specific market where connections are necessary) but for most startups you're way better off having someone who's a decent programmer but also a competent sysadmin, pretty good with customers, or decent contract negotiator. An early stage startup probably won't even know what to specialize _in_.

Better yet is having someone who's a fast learner and can pick any/all of the above up as needed.

I couldn't make it to the end of the article because of the spelling errors. If you're offering business advice, at least learn how to write a coherent sentence!

It's always great to look back at successful/unsuccessful marketing attempts and see where they went right and wrong.

1 Advise I Learned This Year. "Don't take any, including this one"

I think there are a lot of good gems in there. Especially the one on: the minimal viable product concept by Eric Ries.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com