From Grumpy's Garage

Businesses large and small usually labor under 19th century technology and ideas. The technology has been upgraded several times and is much more efficient now, but it's still the same basic technology. No, I'm not talking about the telephone. Though that's another one of my pet peeves, I'll rant about the telephone another time. I'm talking about the hierarchical structure of our organizations -- the dehumanizing of work and creation of a "thinking class." OK, hierarchical organizations weren't invented in the 19th century. They go way back, to the armies of the Roman Empire and even before that, but let's pick it up in the 1890s. Railroads were expanding across North America and Europe. Steam ships plied the seas. America was giving birth to the Industrial Revolution. And, in the eyes of Frederick Winslow Taylor, things were remarkably inefficient. Forgoing the chance to go to Harvard, Taylor started on the shop floor as an apprentice, rising rap...

What a week! My teammates from Sydney to Zurich all descended upon Seattle this week for our annual Ops-a-Palooza. It was a week of big announcements, personnel changes, workshops, and getting to know our teammates as more than avatars on a video conference screen. I tried to make sure we kicked off the week right. For those teammates who got into town early enough, I arranged for some wine tasting in the Woodinville Warehouse District. Patterson Cellars was better than I expected. It's harvest season, so the this working boutique winery was crushing grapes. We got to sample some of the grapes from the truck and watched as they cleaned, de-stemmed, and crushed the juice from them, all while our hostess visited samples of wine upon us. It was a fascinating visit. And, for a couple of teammates who stayed an extra day, we stole away on Thursday afternoon to sail from a nearby dock, gliding along by zephyr to the south end of Lake Union. I was able to point out the sights and give a l...

 That's the question that Jeff Goins poses in Chapter Six of his book,  The Art of Work . (While the main theme of that chapter is "portfolio work", a collection of different types of work that combine to satisfy a passion, each necessary but insufficient when taken individually, this question of "Why do I work?" has given me cause to pause and muse lately.) But life is too short to not satisfy my passions. And if I can satisfy my passions while also paying the bills, that is the ultimate success scenario. But if I cannot do both, I must ask myself, "Do I live to work? Or work to live?" If I work to live, I'm living at a mere survival level. I'm doing what I have to in order to survive. I might be surviving in high style, but if I'm doing it just for the money, I am prostituting my soul for a buck. I'm better than that. But if I live to work, then I wake up in the morning excited about the day ahead. It gives me energy and purpose. It l...

 When you are traveling down the road toward your calling, the pathway might not be as straight as you'd expect. In fact, it might not be very straight at all. In  Lean Startup , Eric Reis characterizes the path that a startup company takes as primarily a learning journey. Whatever initial funding your startup has defines its "runway": how long you have to get your company airborne and paying for its own existence. But you progress down the runway is not fixed. It's not just the rate at which your company is burning through its capital. Its how fast it's learning about the value it's trying to deliver and the market that it's trying to serve. The sooner you find that product-market fit and generate positive cash flow, the sooner your company can pull back on the stick and get the wheels off the runway. Reis calls that learning process the "build-measure-learn" cycle, and periodically, a startup has to reach a decision point, a crossroad where it ...

 Once you've crafted an experiment to explore the "space" before you and learn in which direction your calling lies, then executed that experiment, you should be looking for results evidence that supports or refutes the hypothesis. Ideally, you would have articulated the results you're looking for in the design of the experiment. Those results should inform your next steps. In  Lean Startup  terms, do you persevere or pivot? Pivoting is normal. It's not giving up on a destination. It's not admitting error. It's acknowledging that what you seek doesn't seem to be in this direction. Even if you have to stop in your tracks to consider your next move, like a basketball player who stopped dribbling, you can keep one foot anchored to secure your place and move your other foot around to get a better view of what to do next. To extend the basketball metaphor perhaps too far, your team does not have to score every time they get control of the ball. Yes, that wo...