Apple booted out Steve Jobs protégé Scott Forstall yesterday, a shocker that generated headlines alongside Sandy and buzz here at Tempworks. On the surface, it looks like Forstall fell victim to no longer being ‘protected’ by Steve Jobs, but within high growth technology companies that kind of intrigue is rife. Competing ideas about innovation and platform make for a turbulent culture, especially in companies that have grown beyond anyone’s expectations.
One of our lead designers here at Tempworks, Pete Klein, had this to say in an internal memo we exchanged recently about how those issues were playing out for us. I’ve edited slight to protect the innocent (and guilty):
1. INNOVATION, NOT INSTANT PERFECTION: We already do this, as both support and development are keenly aware based on the number of support calls and bug fixes we preform are (the Sam Walton “ready, fire, aim” approach).
2. IDEAS COME FROM EVERYWHERE: We would have a central location to share and vote on ideas. I think this would help get people talking cross-department, which I think TempWorks could use some help in. I think a lot of people in all departments in this company have a lot of great ideas that die on the vine because we don’t encourage sharing. Sharing isn’t discouraged, it’s just not encouraged.
3. A LICENSE TO PURSUE YOUR DREAMS: 20% time. While there is evidence to support the effectiveness in innovation by 20% time in many companies (Atlassian, Google, etc) as highlighted in Daniel Pink’s book Drive, I am very skeptical of this. The people who work hard and innovate don’t necessarily need 20% time to do it. They care enough about their work to put in the extra time anyway.
Plus, with the niche market we cater to, there would not be nearly the payout as with a company like Google, who is gigantic, can fund everything, and creates services for everything. Long story short, there would be little payoff for 20% time.
4. MORPH PROJECTS DON’T KILL THEM: I think it is smart to keep projects on ice and look for uses for them in the future, but morph every project? This seems too idealistic. That being said, if we make this an ideal in our coding style and set them up in a way where they are able to play nicely with other applications, the ability to take out a piece of functionality of a dead product and plug it into a new one would be awesomely efficient.
5. SHARE AS MUCH INFORMATION AS YOU CAN: We already do this to some extent with our internal WIKI. We could do a better job integrating this with our install process. This would prevent Web Services from not being notified get notified of an install a week before it needs to be done. It’s happened this year, more than once, I believe.
6. USERS, USERS, USERS: You can probably guess where I stand on this. The user and the task they want to accomplish should be first and foremost in our designs, code and data structure secondary to it (within reason and in consideration of organizational objectives, of course). We could do a better job as a company defining why we are making products and why this benefits the end user. We should also be doing more in house user interface testing using our own employees as test subjects.
7. DATA IS APOLITICAL: This has to do with more user testing, to take thoughts out of opinion land and into a more objective format, which I am in favor of.
8. CREATIVITY LOVES CONSTRAINTS: I agree with this. This is not a problem for us.
9. YOU’RE BRILLIANT? WE’RE HIRING: she was just tooting her own horn and doesn’t really say anything.
In summary, we already launch early and often, we could do more to encourage employees to share ideas, there would be little benefit to doing 20% time, you should kill projects that are resource drains but we should code in a way where our products are expected to interact with each other, we should do more to share information in standard way with things like installs, we should do more user testing and it’s fine to constrain creativity.
I don’t see a big downside to most of this, and there are potential big gains in employee retention and customer satisfaction to be gained, as well as a place to mine for ideas for new features and products. I’m at a pretty low level and hardly have the eagle eye view of TempWorks or the staffing industry, so it’s likely there is a lot I’m not seeing, but to me it seems like there are some good common sense suggestions in this article
At the very least, I think it is nice to have more tools in your tool belt to attempt to fix or improve organizational performance when the time is right.
From: Gregg Dourgarian
Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2012 12:24 PM
To: Pete Klein
Subject: Re: Marissa Mayer’s insights on innovation
I agree with you but I don’t remember steve jobs framing his ideals in the way that she did in that post…what do you think the consequences of that way of operating would be on tempworks?
Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4GLTE smartphone
—– Reply message —–
From: "Pete Klein" <pete@tempworks.com>
To: "Gregg Dourgarian" <greggd@tempworks.com>
Subject: Marissa Mayer's insights on innovation
Date: Wed, Jul 18, 2012 12:19 pm
Don’t know if that is 100% true. That approach worked for Steve Jobs. He alternated insults and praise, so I don’t know if there is a difference in that respect.
From: Gregg Dourgarian
Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2012 12:10 PM
To: Pete Klein
Subject: Re: Marissa Mayer’s insights on innovation
I don’t know exactly but apparently she is extremely brilliant and overbearing and made people feel inferior … when you humiliate someone you get a very bad response
Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4GLTE smartphone
—– Reply message —–
From: "Pete Klein" <pete@tempworks.com>
To: "Gregg Dourgarian" <greggd@tempworks.com>
Subject: Marissa Mayer's insights on innovation
Date: Wed, Jul 18, 2012 12:04 pm
How did she fail to live up to her principals?
From: Gregg Dourgarian
Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2012 12:02 PM
To: Pete Klein; TWDeveloper
Subject: Re: Marissa Mayer’s insights on innovation
She was tantamount to kicked out of google for not living out what she professed in that post…i do wish her and yahoo well though
Our devs and ops people are much closer to embodying her principles
Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4GLTE smartphone
—– Reply message —–
From: "Pete Klein" <pete@tempworks.com>
To: "TWDeveloper" <TWDeveloper@tempworks.com>
Subject: Marissa Mayer's insights on innovation
Date: Wed, Jul 18, 2012 11:42 am
She’s the new CEO of Yahoo and former Google designer and executive. Thought it might be of interest.
http://www.fastcompany.com/article/marissa-mayer039s-9-principles-innovation
