How I Did It: Omniture’s Josh James

Photo by Ed McCulloch

I enjoyed the Inc. Magazine article on Josh James, one of Omniture’s co founders who “says he has no special love for technology. But he has long seen its possibilities. In 1996, he and a college classmate launched a webpage-building service when businesses were just discovering the Internet. Fueled by tens of millions in venture backing, James built Omniture, based in Orem, Utah, into a thriving Web analytics and online marketing company whose software tracks Web traffic for companies such as Toyota, Gap, and JetBlue. James took Omniture public on his 33rd birthday, in 2006. Last October, Adobe purchased the company for $1.8 billion.”  >> Read the full article

Double Your Productivity Without More Work Or Stress

Zappos COO Alfred Lin enlightens us on how to become 37 times more productive in only one year! Can it be? Let’s hear him out:

“…Being 37x more productive is impossible, and I’ll show you why. But along the way it will become clear how becoming 2-3x more productive might be within reach.

His math isn’t the problem per se. It’s true that if you improve 1% each day over the previous day, that’s a 1% compounding rate. My question is: Is it possible to increase your daily productivity by an entire percent every day?

To answer that, I want to give you a fun math puzzle. Yeah, I know, “fun” is relative… Okay look if you don’t like word problems just take a random guess at the answer. If you’re up for the challenge, try to solve it without pen and paper. You know, just to prove your MIT education wasn’t for nothing.

Here’s the puzzle: You get in your car at home and head out towards your mother’s house 60 miles away. (Your mom likes this word problem, I can already tell.) You hit traffic during the first half of the trip, so after 30 miles you’ve averaged only 30 miles per hour.

 

Now the traffic opens up and you can go as fast as you want. The question is: How fast do you have to go during the second half of the trip such that you’ve averaged 60 mph over the entire trip?

If you’re not using pen and paper, maybe you guessed 90? 120?

Actually it’s impossible! To average 60 mph you need to travel the whole 60 miles in a single hour. But it’s already been an hour! Even if you went 1000 mph during the second half, it would have taken just over an hour to complete the 60 miles, therefore your average is still less than 60 mph.

It’s amazing how periods of low velocity wash away gains of high velocity. In the puzzle, if you doubled your speed in the second half it would increase your trip average from 30 to 40 mph. If you quadrupled your speed in the second half, your trip average would still be only 48 mph.

Once you’re behind, you can’t make up ground no matter how fast you go.”

The Five Whys

The January 2010 edition of Inc. Magazine has a great article titled “When and How to Micromanage“.  In the article Joel Spolsky talks about a “problem-solving technique developed by Toyota after World War II to improve its manufacturing process.  The idea is to ask “why” five times to get to the root of any failure, so you fix the core problem instead of the symptoms.”  I think it is very healthy for companies to constantly question the status quo and I liked Toyota’s approach of questioning current processes.  Many companies are asked why they do things by their customers, employees, or stockholders and sometimes I know the answer to questions are because someone said so.  Rarely are those companies or individuals within those companies challenged to answer the five whys.  When a child learns to first talk they ask lots of questions don’t they?  Why is it as adults we frown upon asking questions?

Jason Fried

Inc Magazine recently wrote another great “The Way I Work” article on Jason Fried who is one of the Founders of 37signals.

Below is what I found interesting from the article:

  • Doesn’t believe less is more, he believes less is less (because less is more implies that more is better).
  • Today, 37Signals has a staff of 16 and more than three million customers who use the company’s Web-based applications, such as Basecamp and Campfire.
  • He condemns traditional corporate office culture, with its 40-hour workweeks and constant meetings, and shoots down many of his customers’ suggestions. And he’s not opposed to a little goofing off in the afternoon.
  • Likes drinking tea and these days is really into matcha, which is a powdered tea. You add hot water and use a bamboo whisk to make a frothy liquid. You actually consume the tea leaves. I get it online, because there’s better selection, and I’m lazy”.
  • Our blog has more than 100,000 readers, but I don’t post every day. I write when I have something specific to say. I recently wrote a scathing piece on the tech media. It really bothers me that the definition of success has changed from profits to followers, friends, and feed count. This crap doesn’t mean anything. Kids are coming out of school thinking, I want to start the next YouTube or Facebook. If a restaurant served more food than everybody else but lost money on every diner, would it be successful? No. But on the Internet, for some reason, if you have more users than everyone else, you’re successful. No, you’re not.
  • We rarely have meetings. I hate them. They’re a huge waste of time, and they’re costly. It’s not one hour; it’s 10, because you pulled 10 people away from their real work. Plus, they chop your day into small bits, so you have only 20 minutes of free time here or 45 minutes there. Creative people need unstructured time to get in the zone. You can’t do that in 20 minutes.

>> Read the Full article

Tony Hsieh: On a Scale of 1 to 10, How Weird Are You?

This is a great article on how the founder/CEO of Zappos.com learned how important it is for companies to focus on culture and choosing the right employees for their company.  If you have time, the very first question and answer is my favorite so be sure and read that one if you can.Tony Hsieh is the chief executive of Zappos.com, and this interview was conducted by Adam Bryant.  Below are some of my favorite questions:What are some of the most important leadership lessons you’ve learned?
After college, a roommate and I started a company called LinkExchange in 1996, and it grew to about 100 or so people, and then we ended up selling the company to Microsoft in 1998. From the outside, it looked like it was a great acquisition, $265 million, but most people don’t know the real reason why we ended up selling the company.  It was because the company culture just went completely downhill. When it was starting out, when it was just 5 or 10 of us, it was like your typical dot-com. We were all really excited, working around the clock, sleeping under our desks, had no idea what day of the week it was. But we didn’t know any better and didn’t pay attention to company culture.  By the time we got to 100 people, even though we hired people with the right skill sets and experiences, I just dreaded getting out of bed in the morning and was hitting that snooze button over and over again.

Why?
I just didn’t look forward to going to the office. The passion and excitement were no longer there. That’s kind of a weird feeling for me because this was a company I co-founded, and if I was feeling that way, how must the other employees feel? That’s actually why we ended up selling the company.  Financially, it meant I didn’t have to work again if I didn’t want to. So that was the lens through which I was looking at things. It’s basically asking the question, what would you want to do if you won the lottery? For me, I didn’t want to be part of a company where I dreaded going into the office.  So when I joined Zappos about a year later, I wanted to make sure that I didn’t make the same mistake that I had made at LinkExchange, in terms of the company culture going downhill. So for us, at Zappos, we really view culture as our No. 1 priority. We decided that if we get the culture right, most of the stuff, like building a brand around delivering the very best customer service, will just take care of itself.

So how do you do that?
About five years ago, we formalized the definition of our culture into 10 core values. We wanted to come up with committable core values, meaning that we would actually be willing to hire and fire people based on those values, regardless of their individual job performance. Given that criteria, it’s actually pretty tough to come up with core values.

Tell me what happened.
We spent a year doing that. I basically sent an e-mail out to the entire company, asking them what our values should be, and got a whole bunch of different responses. The initial list was actually 37 long, and then we ended up condensing and combining them and went back and forth and came up with our list of 10.  Today, we actually do two separate sets of interviews. The hiring manager and his or her team will interview for the standard fit within the team, relevant experience, technical ability and so on. But then our H.R. department does a separate set of interviews purely for culture fit. They actually have questions for each and every one of the core values.

Can you give me an example of the value and the question?
Well, some of them are behavioral questions. One of our values is, “Create fun and a little weirdness.” So one of our interview questions is, literally, on a scale of 1 to 10, how weird are you? If you’re a 1, you’re probably a little bit too strait-laced for us. If you’re a 10, you might be too psychotic for us.  It’s not so much the number; it’s more seeing how candidates react to a question. Because our whole belief is that everyone is a little weird somehow, so it’s really more just a fun way of saying that we really recognize and celebrate each person’s individuality, and we want their true personalities to shine in the workplace environment, whether it’s with co-workers or when talking with customers.  I think of myself less as a leader, and more of being almost an architect of an environment that enables employees to come up with their own ideas, and where employees can grow the culture and evolve it over time, so it’s not me having a vision of “This is our culture.”  Maybe an analogy is, if you think of the employees and culture as plants growing, I’m not trying to be the biggest plant for them to aspire to. I’m more trying to architect the greenhouse where they can all flourish and grow.

Did the process of developing those core values go smoothly?
Honestly, there was a lot of resistance to the core values rolling out, including from me. I was very hesitant, because it just felt like one of those big-company things to do. But within a couple of months, it just made such a huge difference. It gave everyone a common language, and just created a lot more alignment in terms of how everyone in the company was thinking. If I could do it all over again, I would roll out our core values from Day 1.

What other things did you do at Zappos to sort of reinforce and build the culture?
Probably the most important thing I did was try to encourage employees to come up with their own ideas for building the culture. The actual ideas that I’ve personally come up with are few and far between.

But what were those?
For example, for our offices in Las Vegas, it’s a big building. We’ve probably got 700 employees in Vegas. The previous tenants had multiple doors where you can exit, and the parking lot is in the back. We made the decision to actually lock all the doors so everyone has to go through the front-entrance reception area, even though that means you might have to walk all the way around the building. The reason for that is to create this kind of central hub that everyone has to pass through to help build community and culture.  And the free lunch we provide for employees is really meant less as a benefit in terms of a free lunch, and more to get employees to interact with each other. But most of the stuff that happens in our office is really about some employee coming up with an idea and, whether it’s me or other managers, saying, “If you’re passionate about it, just run with it.”  At some point, it kind of just snowballs, because once employees see other employees just doing stuff, then that lets them feel like they have more permission to run with their ideas.

If you’re hiring a senior executive, reporting directly to you, what kind of questions would you be asking them?
It’s pretty hard to interview senior executives, because they’re in that position for a reason. They do many interviews themselves. It’s hard to tell from an interview. So I’m not sure there’s that much you can get out of the in-office interview. They need the relevant skill set and experience and so on. But far more important is, are they going to be good for the culture? Is this someone we would choose to have dinner or drinks with, even if they weren’t working for Zappos?  Hiring senior-level talent is very hard, it’s hit or miss, and they can do a lot of damage to the culture. We’ve had bad experiences with that. So we have this thing called the pipeline, which is our vision for how we want to grow as a company. We’re hoping five years from now the vast, vast majority of all hires will actually be entry-level, but we’ll provide all the training and mentorship so that, over a five- to seven-year period, they can become a senior leader within the company. That will help protect our culture and also give all the employees a growth path professionally.

If you could ask only one or two questions to get a sense of a person, what would they be?
“If you had to name something, what would you say is the biggest misperception that people have of you?” Then the follow-up question I usually ask is, “What’s the difference between misperception and perception?” After all, perception is perception.

What are you trying to discover with those questions?
I think it’s a combination of how self-aware people are and how honest they are. I think if someone is self-aware, then they can always continue to grow. If they’re not self-aware, I think it’s harder for them to evolve or adapt beyond who they already are.

Article Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/business/10corner.html

Below is a list of Zappos.com’s core values:

  1. Deliver WOW Through Service
  2. Embrace and Drive Change
  3. Create Fun and A Little Weirdness
  4. Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded
  5. Pursue Growth and Learning
  6. Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
  7. Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
  8. Do More With Less
  9. Be Passionate and Determined
  10. Be Humble

Mark Cuban’s Advice on Staying Focused When Young

Source: http://blogmaverick.com/

I have followed Mark’s blog for some time and really liked this post.  A college student asked Mark how he remained focused prior to his business success to which Mark replied with the following: “You are still in school. You don’t need to have all the answers or focus on one thing. You should be trying a lot of things until you find the one thing you really love to do and are good at. When that happens, you will be able to focus.  Being focused at 21 is way over rated. Now is the time to screw up,  try as many different things as you can and just maybe figure things out.  The thing you do need to do is learn. Learn accounting. Learn finance.  Learn statistics. Learn as much as you can about business. Read biographies about business people. You dont have to focus on 1 thing, but you have to create a base of knowledge so you are ready when its time.  You will never know when that time will come.  But you can be ready when it does.”

Article from the New Yorker on John Mackey

John Mackey, the co-founder and chief executive of Whole Foods Market

The New Yorker has a long article on Mackey which was a very good read.  Since it is so long, I’ve summarized what I found interesting from it below.  I’m terrible at summarizing and in college never got into highlighting my textbooks.  When reading I either found it all really interesting or all really dull, so it was either all yellow or remained all white.  So, the fact that I have summarized lots of text below should tell you a lot about what I thought of the article.

  • Oversees fifty-four thousand “team members”
  • A year ago, Mackey came across a book called “The Engine 2 Diet,” by an Austin, Texas, firefighter and former professional triathlete named Rip Esselstyn. Basically, you eat plants: you are a rabbit with a skillet. Mackey had been a vegetarian for more than thirty years, and a vegan for five, but the Engine 2 book, among others, helped get him to give up vegetable oils, sugar, and pretty much anything processed. He lost fifteen pounds.
  • Mackey sought succor in spiritual practice. He engaged a friend, a follower of the Czech transpersonal psychologist Stanislav Grof, to guide him through a therapeutic session of holotropic breathing. “I had this very powerful session, very powerful. It lasted about two hours,” Mackey said in an inspirational CD set he released last year called “Passion and Purpose: The Power of Conscious Capitalism.” “I was having a dialogue with what I would define as my deeper self, or my higher self.” He had a pair of epiphanies, one having to do with severed relationships that needed healing. The other was that “if I wanted to continue to do Whole Foods, there couldn’t be any part of my life that was secretive or hidden or that I’d be embarrassed [about] if people found out about it. I had to let go of all of that,” he said. “I’m this public figure now.” He couldn’t “embarrass the company,” he told me. “I have to grow up”—he is fifty-six. “I can’t have affairs with women. One of the things that happened was you have more money and you have more opportunities for such things. And those are sort of off-limits.
  • “I have my own views, and they’re not necessarily the same as Whole Foods’,” Mackey told me. “People want me to suppress who I am. I guess that’s why so many politicians and C.E.O.s get to be sort of boring because they end up suppressing any individuality to conform to some phony, inauthentic way of being. I’d rather be myself.”
  • “He’s a ready-aim-fire guy, and he’s not real disciplined in how he speaks his mind,” Gary Hirshberg, the C.E.O. of Stonyfield, the organic milk and yogurt producer, told me. “He has a really hard time reconciling his public and private selves.” Mackey’s resilience has surprised even those who, like Hirshberg, hold him in high esteem. “John has that Clintonesque ability to hang in there,” Hirshberg said. “He is Whole Foods management’s greatest asset but also, at times, its greatest challenge.”
  • The health-care op-ed’s headline, “THE WHOLE FOODS ALTERNATIVE TO OBAMACARE,” was the Journals, Mackey says, but the sentiments were his. Mackey’s prescriptions ranged from the obvious (people need to eat better) to the market-minded (promote interstate competition among insurers) to the dreamy (the corporations will take care of us). The gist was that, together, they’d obviate the need for a federal plan, and that the course being pursued by the White House and the Democrats would have disastrous consequences. He led with an epigram attributed to Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”
  • “I was so viciously attacked for two reasons,” Mackey told me. “One is that people had an idea in their minds about the way Whole Foods was. So when I articulated a capitalistic interpretation of what needed to be done in health care, that was disappointing to some people.” He begrudges the extent to which people have projected onto Whole Foods an unrealistic and idealistic vision of the company. “The C.E.O. of Safeway, Steven Burd, wrote an op-ed piece in June advocating, basically, market solutions to the health-care problem, and nobody gave a ****,” he said.
  • In high school, Mackey was an indifferent student, a late bloomer, puberty-wise, and a fanatic about basketball, science fiction, and girls. Before his senior year, he was cut from the varsity basketball team, and he persuaded his parents to move so that he could switch schools and play. “That changed my life because for the first time I realized that if you didn’t like the hand you were dealt, you didn’t just have to feel sorry for yourself. You could do something about it.”
  • He told me, “If I could, I would wave a magic wand so that Americans ate better because the diseases that are killing us—heart disease, cancer, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s—these diseases have a high correlation with diet. And that is something that most people do not understand.”
  • Mackey is, by all accounts, fiercely competitive. Years ago, the traditional executive-retreat volleyball games had to be scrapped, owing to Mackey’s intensity and his ill-disguised scorn for less capable teammates. (Mackey says that he simply got too old for volleyball.)
  • “But you have a reputation for liking to argue,” I said to Mackey.  “But I don’t like to argue to be right. I like to argue because that’s how I get to the truth. I think dialectically.”
  • I asked him whether he’d given thought to what might come after him. “I don’t have any plans to leave anytime soon, no matter how much the unions would like me to,” he said. Talk turned to food, as it often does. “You only love animal fat because you’re used to it,” he said. “You’re addicted.” He urged me to consider reprogramming my palate. He also suggested that I try Grofian breathing.

The Wisdom of Crowds

I haven’t had a chance to read Wisdom of Crowds yet by James Surowiecki but an article in Building43.com was very interesting.  It shows that collectively a crowd/group’s mind is better than your own when trying to solve a problem or answer a question.  Check this out…

“In 2007, Michael Mauboussin presented a big jar of jelly beans to his 73 Columbia Business School students. How many beans did they think it contained?  Guesses ranged from 250 to 4,100; the actual number was 1,116. The average error was 700 — a massive 62 percent — demonstrating that the students were awful estimators.  Now here comes the weird part.  Even with all these wildly incorrect guesses, the average guess was 1,151 — just 3 percent off the mark. Not only that, only 2 of the 73 students guessed better than this group average.  So, although individually everyone was woefully inaccurate, collectively the group was incredibly accurate.  Was this a fluke? Hardly. The experiment was made famous in 1987 by Jack Treynor. In his case, it was 850 jelly beans and 56 students. The group estimate was 2.5 percent off; only one student guessed better. The study has been repeated many times since with similar results.”

Ways to Foster Innovation

Apple had a famous ad campaign in 1997 asking people to “think different”.  How many off you think different?  If you find you or your company struggles to think differently, I just reviewed a great list of 50 ways to foster innovation and here are my favorite from the ideachampions.com article:

  • Remember that innovation requires no fixed rules or templates — only guiding principles. Creating a more innovative culture is an organic and creative act.
  • Wherever you can, whenever you can, always drive fear out of the workplace. Fear is “Public Enemy #1” of an innovative culture.
  • Have more fun. If you’re not having fun (or at least enjoying the process) something is off.
  • Always question authority, especially the authority of your own longstanding beliefs.
  • Make new mistakes.
  • As far as the future is concerned, don’t speculate on what might happen, but imagine what you can make happen
  • Increase the visual stimuli of your organization’s physical space. Replace gray and white walls with color. Add inspiring photos and art, especially visuals that inspire people to think differently. Reconfigure space whenever possible.
  • Help people broaden their perspective by creating diverse teams and rotating employees into new projects — especially ones they are fascinated by.
  • Ask questions about everything. After asking questions, ask different questions. After asking different questions, ask them in a different way.
  • Ensure a high level of personal freedom and trust. Provide more time for people to pursue new ideas and innovations.
  • Encourage everyone to communicate. Provide user-friendly systems to make this happen.
  • Embrace and celebrate failure. 50 to 70 per cent of all new product innovations fail at even the most successful companies. The main difference between companies who succeed at innovation and those who don’t isn’t their rate of success — it’s the fact that successful companies have a LOT of ideas, pilots, and product innovations in the pipeline.