Scott Barstow

A Different Kind of Performance Review

I was reading an article by Premal Shah of Kiva this past week.  The focus of the article was on how to do reviews for the people that work for you.  I thought he had some really good ideas on how to get away from the traditional annual review.

At Kiva, the staff are required to present their latest work regularly to a group of their peers.  If they are working on a particular project or particular part of the world, they stand up and give a presentation to the staff about why they are doing this particular work, and how it’s going.  This review process factors heavily into a staff member’s performance evaluation.

I really like this idea, and when I get to the point where I have employees at Rocket Hangar, I think having something like this would be a great way to make sure I have the right people working with me.  If they don’t feel passionately enough about something to stand up in front of the rest of us and tell us why, then we shouldn’t probably be spending money or energy on it.

Question: If you had to do this at your job, would you feel strongly enough about your work to stand up and defend it in a room full of your peers?

Being Ruthless About What You Shouldn’t Do

I have been reading and studying the book End Malaria this week.  It’s a compilation of 62 authors who came together to help, as you might imagine, end malaria in Africa.  For every book that you purchase, $20 is donated to buying mosquito nets.

The first part of the book is about focus, a topic that ironically, I have a hard time focusing on.  The first two writers, Kevin Kelly and Roger Martin, write about a very similar discipline.  Kevin Kelly writes about only doing the work that you are uniquely gifted to do, and Roger Martin writes about “thin slicing”, the practice of working your way into only the work that you are best at. 

Notice that I said working your way “into” the work that you are best at.  In most companies, shedding work that is given to you is seen as lazy or not being a “team player.”  It’s typically seen as working your way “out of” something, rather than “into” something.  

The fact is that you, and I, are horrible at certain things and really good at others.  I am great at starting new things, but generally not great at the tedium of managing those things each day, as an example.  When we do the work we are horrible at, it induces more stress and causes us to waste time and effort.  It’s not something that is in our sweet spot.  When, however, we are in a groove on the thing that makes us tick, we get amazing amounts of work done of amazing quality.

Working yourself into your best work does not mean you get to ignore the other work.  Roger Martin talks of taking almost a year to train the people around him to do the work that is required by his organization, and to do it his way.  It was at that point that he felt good enough about the systems and practices he had put in place to step away from that work.  It was more work up front in return for far, far less work in return.

The temptation we all have is to think we should do everything.  The fact of the matter is, however, we should do only a very small slice and do it unlike anyone else.  That is where we provide the most value.

Question: What are you doing today that would be better done by someone else?  If you had to divest yourself of it immediately, how would you do it?

Serving Two Masters - Will It Work?

I have been running Rocket Hangar for about a year now.  When I started the company, I had two primary goals:  1. Do interesting and valuable work. 2. Don’t go broke 

For #2, I lined up a series of consulting gigs that I still work on to this day, more or less.  Smaller gigs have come and gone, but I continue to have a decent stream of work from those initial clients.  This work has provided funding for me to do #1 without really having to spend much of my personal savings.

For #1, I envisioned jumping into the mobile application space and doing interesting and cool things there.  I built two or three really cool applications, but none of them have had any success commercially.  This wasn’t a surprise.  I expected to stub my toe a few times while I figure the whole thing out.

The tension for me in this whole thing has been determining whether my approach is the right approach.  I have spoken with several people who are very successful starters of companies, and almost all have said that the focus of not having consulting or other work was immeasurable.  On the other hand, I know of others that have used consulting as a way to find what the market needs and then fill it.  I have leaned this way, for sure.  I like having money coming into my company, and after the first six or so months of building things that no one really cared about, this rang more true for me.

The need for clarity around this has become more acute for me recently, as I have started to get a lot more inquiries on the consulting front.  I also have hooked up with a business partner here in Raleigh and we are doing some really great things together with new products.  I am starting to feel the need for help with the work I am doing, but don’t want to take on overhead without something more sustainable than consulting work.

Every day brings a seemingly endless stream of decisions to make.  I will no doubt screw some of this up, but I am loving the process.

Question: What has worked best for you if you were in a similar spot?  I would love to hear from anyone / everyone out there on the best lens to view this through

What is the optimal company headcount?

I got a topic from Kade Ross (@kadeross) last night related to an article about the effect of increasing headcount on employee productivity.  You can read the article here.  The gist of the article is this:  for every 10% you increase company headcount, productivity drops by 6.3% for each employee.  Kade calls this the borg, a state of existence where nothing gets done and people look for ways to get nothing done.

In the article, the author puts the main cause of the productivity decline as issues with communication.  Dissemination of vision, company objectives, etc. get harder as the company gets larger.  I think that is some of it.  However, having worked at Symantec ( a company of 18,000 ), I think the cause of this is something far more harmful.  As companies grow in size, most introduce new layers of management ( bureaucracy ).  The more layers you have, the more you breed a culture of meetings as opposed to doing.  Meetings are required because you have to get everyone’s opinion, and make them feel a part of the process.  Meetings also allow the new management layers to carve out niches of independence and protection, where “protecting my turf” becomes the new rallying cry instead of “kicking ass.”

Kade puts the optimal headcount over/under at 35.  I put the over / under at somewhere below that, somewhere around 22.  It obviously depends on where the people are, but if the assumption for this exercise is that all employees are local, I think a small number allows everyone to be close enough to each other to hear what is going on and jump in on each other’s problems.  Assuming the standard 2-3 founders, that leaves 18 or so spots to fill with people that you know will kill it.  Most of us know that many people or know where to find them.  

What do you think?  Can a big company somehow overcome the seemingly immutable laws of meetings, inefficiency and turf wars?  If so, how big a company can survive?  If not, what do you do when your company starts to hit these walls?

Unfocused

I was reading a post by Michael Hyatt this week called ‘Why I Stopped Reading Your Blog’.  A few of the points he made I agreed with, a few I didn’t.  One of the points made me think for a while about this site, specifically his point about being unfocused.  Michael is a great writer and a tremendous businessman, and I respect what he has to say on most every topic.

The topics I cover here are at best widely varied, which is just a nice way to say unfocused if I am being honest.  At least that’s how it probably looks.  I write about politics, sports, technology, education, religion and anything else I care about.  Some of what I write elicits responses, some fall silently to the earth with a small “poof” and are lost forever.  

So, am I unfocused, and if so is that a bad thing?  Should I be another technologist droning on about who wins the iPhone / Android battle or the other topics du jour?  Or is this space my own little slice to just let it all out?

I came to the conclusion after thinking about it that, for me, being unfocused is my focus, if that makes any sense.  In other words, this is who I am.  I don’t think about one thing all day and live and die with it.  My universe has a good bit of entropy, and so does this site.  

Re-invention

One of the great gifts of being a professional in technology is the gift of re-invention.  What was true of me yesterday does not have to be true of me tomorrow.  As I was looking for opportunities to do something new, I made a purposeful decision to not focus on what I had been doing, but instead looked at what I could be doing.  I have done many things in my career ( running network cable, installing point of sale equipment, managing a helpdesk, and a laundry list of other things, the latest of which is focused on software development ), but one thing has always been true.  I have always liked picking something out that I had no idea how to do, and figuring out how to do it.

If you are a history teacher, or a dentist, or a contractor, your opportunity to re-invent yourself probably comes by changing careers.  Or, you probably get better and better at it, and move up, and possibly do great things with it, but you don’t get to say “Today I’m a dentist, but tomorrow I will be an eye doctor” without going back to school for a long time.

I love that yesterday I could be at Symantec, a huge company focused on building huge products with one piece of technology, and today I can be focused almost exclusively on mobile applications with a completely different set of skills, languages, and domain expertise required.

I suppose there is some amount of inefficiency in this approach.  I could just keep working on and doing the same things.  But I have learned enough to know it’s just not my bag.

Bursts

I enjoy studying my own ineptitude when it comes to staying on task.  I have come to the realization that my best work happens in one to two hour bursts of creativity and energy.  It usually happens after I have cleared my head of unnecessary fodder.  It can happen in the morning, afternoon, or at 11:30 at night, but when it does it’s a lot of fun.

Distracted

I have spent the last few weeks in a mental fog.  When I started Rocket Hangar my initial thoughts were that I would not have enough to do, and that I would be scrambling to keep meaningful work coming in while I explored the landscape and decided on the direction for the company.

The reality has been quite the opposite.  I have more work than I can get done.  I am about three months in now, and I realized over the weekend that I am spinning my wheels, mainly because I am looking at all the bright, shiny things I could do and not  giving nearly enough thought to what I SHOULD do.

It may sound odd, but having too many options is almost worse than having precious few.  With fewer options you have to pick something and go for it.  What I have realized is that I find myself hedging each opportunity against the others and talking myself into and out of different ideas and concepts.  If you have read Linchpin by Seth Godin, it’s classic Lizard Brain stuff.  It’s not productive.  I have to stop.

How I Use GMail Priority Inbox To Manage My Work

After a lot of different attempts, I have finally settled on a good system for using the features of Priority Inbox in GMail.

What I started out with as a goal was to start using the Priority Inbox as a way to manage my TODO list.  I wanted something simple that I could use from any mail client ( my phone, browser, etc. ).   After trying various ways of Starring, sorting, and other jumped through hoops, I have come up with the following.  Hopefully you will find it useful as well.

One of the best kept secrets of GMail is the ability to create custom variations for your email address without having other email addresses.  This is done by using the ‘+’ as a part of the email address.  For instance, if my email address is scott@foo.com, I can create scott+test@foo.com.  GMail handles this perfectly and passes all of your mail through to your inbox.  This is especially convenient when you are signing up for things on the web and are not sure if you are going to get spammed afterwards.  If I were to sign up for a Paypal account, I might use an email address of ‘scott+paypal@foo.com’.  Because my inbound email from Paypal will always have this email address, I can now create a filter that tags all of my Paypal email with the label ‘Paypal’ and marks it read, or deletes it, or whatever I want to do.

Back to Priority Inbox…

So, what I did was I created a Contact record in my mail setup called TODO.  The TODO contact has an email address of ‘scott+todo@foo.com’.  This allows me to just type TODO in the ‘To’ box of any of my email clients and send an email to myself, or forward any email to my TODO list using the custom address.

Once I had the contact created, I created a new Filter in GMail called ‘TODO’.  The rules for the filter were simple.  If the incoming email was addressed to ‘scott+todo@foo.com’, I mark the email as Read and apply a label called ‘TODO’ to the email.  Pretty simple so far.

The last and most important step was to use a section in Priority Inbox setup ( Go to Settings | Priority Inbox ) that allows you to define your own new custom section.   See below screenshot ( click to enlarge):

I went into this 3rd and Empty section and selected my newly created TODO label from my list.  When done, my previously empty section now looked like this:











Once configured, simply save your changes.  You now have a new section in your Priority Inbox display that looks like:






That’s it!  I can send an email to TODO from any email client and capture things I need to get done right away, before I lose track of them.  Notice that this does not prioritize the list in any way.  That is because I don’t treat TODOs with a priority.  For me, I just work the list off.  If I have a short amount of time, I pick short tasks from the list or make a judgement as I am reviewing the list.  If I have more time, I will pick things that are more involved.  Once I complete a task, I either remove the TODO label or just delete the email, depending on whether I need to keep it or not.

What’s great about this method is that it’s always right in front of you what you need to get done.  Every time you review your Inbox, your list of TODOs is right there staring at you, reminding you what you need to get done.

Hopefully this helps you out, and gives you some new ideas about how to optimize your work list.  Special thanks to Heath Oderman who found the empty section for Priority Inbox and devised a way to use it in this fashion.

Let me know what you think.