Joel Macfarlane

Posted by: joelmacfarlane | June 15, 2009

5 Unglamorous Steps to Running a High Performing Team

In the last week I’ve heard many ‘interesting’ ways to take an average under-motivated team and turn it into one of the illusive High Performance variety. Office furniture, pool tables, team structure, salaries etc. all appear to be important.

I thought I would throw my 10 cents in and describe the tangible elements I have always found in teams that performed better than most.

I apologize for my exclusion of pot plants, natural light and meeting rooms that look like ski lifts.

1. People
Forget trying to change people – it just takes too long. The famous book Good To Great said correctly ”Get the wrong people off the bus and the right people on it as quickly as you can”. If you want your team to perform above average you need better than average people (no brainer, huh).

If you don’t know how to pick or recognise these people make sure you start by hiring a manager in their field who does. I personally always start with the same profile. Youthful, extremely bright people, with a genuine passion for what they are doing. These are the people who won’t let you down, will work on into the night and spend their spare time reading articles online to improve their skills.

Simply put, if you staff your team with these people you can’t go wrong.

2. A clear and exciting mission
You won’t get these people past a first interview unless you have a clearly defined and inspiring mission to offer. They don’t want to be on a losing team and they see their time as an investment which should take them somewhere great. You need to lay out a mission ie.“We’re going to be first to market with a world beating product using cutting edge technology, in 12 months we predict 100% growth etc.”.

If you do it right, good people will be climbing over each other to become part of it.

3. A clear business goal
It’s common sense but every great company needs a clear goal and a plan to get there. For a team to perform well they need to know exactly where you want them to take the company. Enough said.

4. Inspirational Leadership
Your team will be running on strong coffee and long hours so it’s very important they have an inspiring leader to keep them motivated. Sure, your highly intelligent staff members are like race horses but they still need someone to motivate and keep them running in the same direction.

5. A Reason
You now have a team of smart people working towards your goal and you better believe they will be asking themselves…what’s in it for me. You need a good answer to this question. There are plenty of ways to address this. Options, shares, bonuses. Pick something which suits your situation but just make sure there is something in it for them. There is nothing more demoralising for a smart, in-demand person than the feeling of working extra hours to make someone else rich. This should be avoided if you want to keep the talent you have spent so much time and money recruiting.

Put these factors together and your team will perform, it won’t be able to help itself. You will have the best talent working on an exciting and clear mission, motivated by an inspirational leader, happy in the knowledge that their late nights are going to make them rich.

Here are some photos of what Google believes makes a team perform. (Spot the people working – no I couldn’t either). For more go to Picasa

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Posted in Business 2.0 | Tags: Leadership

Posted by: joelmacfarlane | June 10, 2009

Managing your online brand

In 2 days time (from writing) Facebook are making named URLs available (eg www.facebook.com/johnsmith). This got me to thinking about online personal branding.

Company branding is often given careful consideration, but how about your own personal brand. This is the brand that sticks with you as you move between companies and it can make or break your career.

As everything moves online so does our brand. When I get CVs submitted to me I reach for Google and all of the skeletons fall out. I read a great CV last week then checked out the applicant’s Linkedin profile. It included his personal business site which I flipped open. It was the standard embarrassing one-man band approach, “We are bla bla consulting and we listen to what you want”. The problem is the site didn’t tell me anything good but it did tell me a whole lot of bad things – some of the styles were broken and overall it looked like a dog’s breakfast. The CV went into the bin and I went on to other applicants.

You could imagine a different outcome if I had found something like a blog with a long history of well thought-out content and technical comment. So, in this case, his online profile was more important that 10 years of work history.

I would make the assumption that every time you meet a business contact for the first time or submit a CV, your personal brand will be ruthlessly hunted across the net.

This makes it critical to manage what people will dig up, as carefully as you would (should) craft your CV. To do this you need to own your brand online and to put time into keeping it polished.

Own your Results

You should aim to own the top block of results for your name on Google. This way you can control how people experience your personal brand. For example if you’re a designer you want people to experience great design or if you’re a developer relevant technical content.

To do this you want to build a carefully managed collection of sites. Some examples are:
1. A linkedin profile
2. Your own site
3. Blog
4. Twitter

Own the property

When gmail came out how many people thought it was necessary to get your name as an email address…..yup and now you’re bobsmith.4.Washington. That’s right, you didn’t think it was important and now you’re paying the price!

I’ve had to convince people to purchase their own names as URLs. If your name is available you need to buy it! For the price of a lunch and a little time you now own the top result for your own name. If you don’t want to use it now, just park it. If it’s available now it won’t be soon and you will NEVER get it back.

The same applies for other technologies like the newly released Google profiles. I can’t tell you how this will be relevant but it’s a couple of minutes to claim your name and make sure its yours for ever.

In 2 days time Facebook will make named URLs available. This means you’ll be able to get www.facebook.com/yourName. This might not appeal now but is a good way of claiming some space before the 1000 other John Smiths grab it first.

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Posted by: joelmacfarlane | May 28, 2009

Term of the Day : Cargo Cult Programming

Last week I accused a developer of being a “cargo cult programmer”. He had no idea what I mean so I had to take him on a quick journey through Wikipedia.

What is a cargo cult?

Back in the day, an isolated, indigenous society’s first contact with the outside world was a shock. The best examples existed in some small pacific islands where the native people could barely comprehend the new technologically advanced culture which had arrived.

They often coveted the more advanced society’s possessions which they called cargo. They had no idea how the settlers had amassed so much ‘cargo’ and came to believe that the new comers had been given this vast array of possessions by spiritual means.

This gave birth to cults which worshiped items of ‘cargo’. These cults crudely imitated behaviour they observed by the owners of the goods and therefore presumed that the spirits would recognise this and send them ‘cargo’ as well.

Good examples of these cult rituals are setting up rooms like offices and dining rooms as places of worship and constructing things like radios out of straw and then dancing around them.

More info : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult
Cargo Cult programming

A modern adaption of the term is ‘Cargo Cult Programming’. You can see the intimation. This style of programming is characterised by the ritual inclusion of code the developer doesn’t understand in the pursuit of a solution they also fail to grasp. All in the hope that something will fix the problem.

An excellent example of this is the ritual worship of code produced by other more advanced developers. Without any understanding of it, the cult member cuts and pastes this code into their program hoping that it will magically work.

This term is so apt in many circumstances, I hope you get as much enjoyment out of it as I did. So Enjoy!

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Posted by: joelmacfarlane | May 6, 2009

My New Shoes

Every now and then you see something online that is a game changer. Great way to start a blog aye! But grandstanding metaphors aside I have fallen for a new site which offers a glimpse of the future (of retail at least).

Consider the way sociality has moved over the last 100 years. After living through the great depression our grandparents were happy to have jobs and a roof over their heads. Our parents lived life a little grander and added a TV and Stereo. But you can be sure they kept that stereo for 20 years before you convinced them to throw it out and go blue ray.

Fast forward to 2009. Our friends in Asia have managed to make everything so cheap you can afford the latest flat screen TV and feel like you need to upgrade 2 years later to get a second HDMI port. CD, Mini-Disk, DVD, Blue Ray,IPod. If you’re under 30 you’ve probably have had most of these.

So now we are swamped with cheap product what is the next step? We all drive flash cars have the latest hi-fi gear and trade our phones up each year. We have everything we possibly need but none of it is special or different. It’s the same old stuff everyone else has.

The next step is of course personalisation. We want things that are unique to us and define who we are.

The first good example of this is Threadless.com. Its co-founders started Threadless in 2000 with $1000 and a vision of revolutionising the humble t-shirt. Using a model, now known as crowd sourcing, designers (and would be designers) upload their own t-shirt designs and each week the site’s users select the top 10 designs which are produced (and sold for $12).

This fitted perfectly into the need for customisation and its founders were pleasantly surprised when the company started growing 500% a year with no advertising, professional designers, photographers or sales force.

As is the way of the world it took seven years for main stream retail brands to catch up. Today I tried NikeID and it totally blew me away. The site allows you to design your own shoes and clothing. Take a standard design and customise the different elements till you end up with your perfect statement clothing article.

I’ve been looking for the perfect pair of shoes for ages. I wanted something kind of like a golf shoe, 10% hipster, 10% information technology, thin, slick, would go with jeans and stylish. Think I could find one, nope. Within 5 minutes I was addicted, I’ve created my perfect basketball shoe which I can even brand “Air Mac”, a fair of casual shoes and a company t-shirt. This is seriously cool! And everyone I showed around the office was hooked.

Try it…I bet you will never buy a standard pair of shoes again…unless like me you live outside the US.

I’ve read a fair bit on the subject of Mass Customisation & Personalisation and also crowd sourcing. It all makes alot of sense and can be applied in various forms to most businesses. However alot of it is fairly fluffy so it’s good to see a site that just does it.