Managing Creativity

From an article in July's HBR:
A company’s most important asset isn’t raw materials, transportation systems, or political influence. It’s creative capital—simply put, an arsenal of creative thinkers whose ideas can be turned into valuable products and services. Creative employees pioneer new technologies, birth new industries, and power economic growth. Professionals whose primary responsibilities include innovating, designing, and problem solving—the creative class—make up a third of the U.S. workforce and take home nearly half of all wages and salaries. If you want your company to succeed, these are the people you entrust it to. That much is certain. What’s less certain is how to manage for maximum creativity. How do you increase efficiency, improve quality, and raise productivity, all while accommodating for the complex and chaotic nature of the creative process? Read more...

It's a great time to be an entrepreneur

There’s never been a better time to be an entrepreneur because it’s never been cheaper to be one. Here’s one example.

Excite.com took $3,000,000 to get from idea to launch. JotSpot took $100,000.

Why on earth is there a 30X difference? There’s probably a lot of reasons, but here are my top four. I’m interested in hearing about what other people think are factors as well.

Hardware is 100X cheaper
In the 10 years between Excite and JotSpot, hardware has literally become 100X cheaper. It’s two factors – Moore’s law and the rise of Linux as an operating system designed to run on generic hardware. Back in the Excite days, proprietary Sun hardware and Sun hard drive arrays had to be bought. None of it was cheap.

Today, we buy generic Intel boxes provided by one of a million different suppliers.

Infrastructure software is free
Back in 1993 people had to buy and continue to pay for maintenance on everything they needed just to build their service -- operating systems, compilers, web servers, application servers, databases. You name it. If it was infrastructure, they paid for it. And, not only was it costly, the need to negotiate licenses took time and energy. I remember a story of one of my oldest friends having a deadline at Excite that required him to buy a Sun compiler through their Japanese office because it was the only office open at the time (probably midnight) and he needed that compiler NOW.

Compare that to today. Free, open source infrastructure is the norm. Get it anytime and anywhere. At JotSpot, and startups everywhere you see Linux, Tomcat, Apache, MySQL, etc. No license cost, no maintenance.

Access to Global Labor Markets
Startups today have unprecedented access to global labor markets. Back in 1993, IBM had access to technical people in India, but little Excite.com did not. Today, with rent-a-coder, elance.com and just plain email, we have access to a world-wide talent pool of experts on a temporary or permanent basis.

SEM changes everything
Ten years ago to reach the market, expensive distribution deals had to be signed. People advertised on television and radio and print spending a crap-load of money. There’s an old adage in television advertising “I know half my money is wasted. Trouble is, I don’t know what half”.

It’s an obvious statement to say that search engine marketing changes everything. But the real revolution is the ability to affordably reach small markets. You can know what works and what doesn’t. And, search not only allows niche marketing, it’s global popularity allows mass marketing as well (if you can buy enough keywords).

So What?
It’s nice that it’s cheaper, but what does it mean to entrepreneuring?

More people can and will be entrepreneurs than ever before
A lot more people can raise $100,000 than raise $3,000,000.

Funding sources explode which enables more entrepreneurs
The sources of funding capable of writing $100,000 checks are a lot more plentiful than those capable of writing $3,000,000 checks. It’s a great time to be an angel investor because there are real possibilities of substantial company progress on so little money.

More bootstrapping to profitability
With costs so low, I think you’ll see many more companies raise angel money and take it all the way to profitability.

Higher valuations for VCs.
And, for those that do raise venture capital, I think it means better valuations because you can get far more mature on your $100,000 before you go for the bigger round.

All in all, it’s a great time to be an entrepreneur.

They called it the "Miracle on Ice."

Twenty-five years ago, a team of American college hockey players overcame seemingly insurmountable odds to beat the heavily favored Soviet team—and, soon thereafter—win the gold medal at the 1980 Winter Olympics.
"It may just be the single most indelible moment in all of U.S. sports history," Sports Illustrated wrote of the team's gold medal run. "One that sent an entire nation into a frenzy."

Another team that sent the US—or at least the part of that country that enjoys professional basketball—into a frenzy was the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls. Led by the likes of Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman, this team posted the best regular-season NBA record of all time (72-10) and went on to defeat the Seattle SuperSonics in the 1996 NBA Finals.

The 1980 U.S. hockey team and the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls were quite dissimilar. One was made up of little-known amateurs; the other of superstar professionals. One was a significant underdog; the other was a dominant force all year. Despite these and other differences, however, both could easily show up on a list of the greatest sports teams in US history.
The way these two groups of players melded together to reach their goals is inspiring, especially for people who value teamwork as much as I do. Individually, none of them—even the immensely talented Michael Jordan—could have accomplished what they did together. They needed each other to succeed.

As obvious as it seems to me now, I didn't fully grasp the importance of teamwork until I recently. When I began to evaluate the first half of my life, I got discouraged because I realized I had not achieved what I wanted to accomplish thus far. I was disciplined, I worked hard, and I thought I was helping people. But something was missing.

Eventually, I realized what that something was. Although I had concentrated on developing myself, I had not focused enough on building a great team. That, I concluded, was a major mistake—one that had kept me from reaching my full potential.

At 32, I realize that my success is not going to be determined by my gifts, my abilities or my opportunities. It is going to be determined by my ability to develop a great team.
Ever since then, developing my team has been my No. 1 priority.

The results are well worth the effort because of what my team does for me.

1. My team makes me better than I am. If the members of my team were here, they'd tell you the same thing.

2. My team multiplies my value to others. These people don't add to my worth when it comes to contributing to others; they multiply it greatly.

3. My team enables me to do what I do best. Because the members of my inner circle complement me and do things I don't do well, I am able to focus on the things that I can do well.

4. My team allows me to help others do their best. Having a team allows me to move people around until they're in what I call their "sweet spot" or "strength zone"—the place where talent meets passion, resulting in fulfillment and excellence.

5. My team gives me more time. Without a group of trusted colleagues, I'd have to do everything by myself—or at least keep a close eye on it all. With a great team, others can shoulder key responsibilities, freeing me up to concentrate on my top priorities.

6. My team provides me with companionship. I'll be happy when I can call my team players some of my best friends.

7. My team helps me to fulfill the desires of my heart. Not only that, but they help me fulfill them in a way that often far exceeds my expectations.

8. My team compounds my vision and my effort. When you're surrounded by a great group of people, the well-known acronym for TEAM really is true: Together Everyone Achieves More.

The best part is that these benefits don't just apply to me. A great team can do all this for any leader who, as I did at 32, stops trying to be a one-person show. As Andrew Carnegie said, "It marks a big step in your development when you come to realize that other people can help you do a better job than you can do alone."

Is Open Source Innovating?

A Google engineer named Douwe Osinga recently posted on his blog an argument that Open Source software is not innovative. He compares open source to the Soviet Communist propagandists who railed at the US for allowing poverty while people stood in bread lines in Moscow.

This argument however is completely fallacious, most of the important innovations occuring today in non-'webservice' application development are coming out of open source. (Rails, Bittorrent, Wiki Engines, Ajax Frameworks, etc)

Software patent blackmail is not just terribly harmful to open source software development, it hurts all software development.

Copying other people is core to any invention, we all stand on the shoulders of giants.

I could write a whole essay on why Open Source IS innovative, right down to the development model itself, but I don't want to give more attention to this argument than it's worth.