Atomic has been interviewing candidates to be the managing partner of a new office we’re opening this summer. The role of managing partner is broad, with the ability to sell our software product development services high on the rather long list of skills. Considering the candidates from this perspective got me thinking about what it takes to be effective in this role. What makes a good technical sales person?
I wrote last summer about a study on the personality traits of successful sales people. Surprisingly, these included modesty, conscientiousness, curiosity, and lack of gregariousness. Doesn’t exactly fit the stereotype, does it?
While I haven’t done a study of my own, I think I can predict some other attributes that would be necessary or at least extremely helpful in selling for a company like Atomic Object.
Read more »Helping entrepreneurs with their startup requires you to begin from a place of surplus, with a reserve of certain capacities not easily measured. The obvious sort of capacity — developer time, designer time, wall space, team space — is the kind we’re perennially short of at Atomic, but which can be readily measured and planned. I realized, in the middle of a recent day-long project kickoff, that engaging with entrepreneurs requires personal reserves of optimism, creativity, persistence, patience and generosity of spirit.
One of the reasons that I believe innovation services firms are so important to our economy is that they are incubators of talent. Whether a firm retains the talent it helps create and therefore makes it available to its clients, or whether the talent migrates to a product company, the economy and our communities benefit.
The structure of innovation services firm demands a lot from people. That in turn tends to attract people who are very serious about their craft and work. Passion, and the ability to focus on craft rather than a single product or career advancement, creates an ideal environment for young people just starting their work life. Because these firms also provide a natural home for more experienced people to practice and refine their craft, the young people have a source of mentorship and teachers.
As everyone who’s recently tried to hire developers or interaction designers knows, there’s an acute talent shortage in the US. This should be worrisome to everyone, given the importance of software to nearly all aspects of the economy, but is especially troubling for firms like Atomic Object that provide innovation services in software product development. And of course it matters greatly to companies seeking to innovate through software. A recent article in Forbes goes so far as to say that we’re seeing the rise of Developeronomics, an economic system based on the critical need for software and the scarcity of development talent.
The market is beginning to react to the disparity between supply and demand with new forms of training and education. Universities still matter, I believe, and I’m sure they are trying to increase their output, but there are a host of creative new attempts to address the shortage. Some are aimed at particular sorts of people, some are designed to address the perceived shortcomings of a computer science degree.
Here are a few of the new programs, all for development, I’ve heard about in the last month. I’m much less familiar with training programs for interaction design, but I guess there must be something brewing there, too.
Codeacademy in Chicago provides 12 weeks of beginner-focused web design and development training. Their target customer seems to be entrepreneurs.
RoleModel Software’s Craftsmanship Academy is an intense 6 month training program, followed by a one year apprenticeship. Ken Auer has been mentoring and training developers for years. It seems that Craftsmanship Academy is a formalization of this work.
The governor of the State of Michigan, Rick Snyder, recently announced that the State will be developing a program to train programmers and piloting it in three cities. The Shifting Code program is run by the Michigan Economic Development Program and is a recognition of the fact that the talent shortage is hurting our economy. No details yet on this one.
Jen Meyers spoke about Girl Develop It at the SCNA conference this year. GDI trains women in programming. Given the paucity of women in university programs, this grass roots, bootstrapped effort is going after the 50% of the population that is nearly lost to the profession.
The software craftsmen at 8th Light have a very strong and well-defined apprentice program. I’m not sure on the details, but I know these guys and know how seriously they take their apprentice program. People accepted into it are very lucky.
Oh; tears. That’s ok. We can keep talking in the meantime.
That’s how I’ve handled tears in the office. Most of my experience comes either from my own strong emotional reactions or when working on hard stuff with our female employees. What’s been common to all the latter situations is a distinct sense of shame or regret I sense from the woman I’m talking with. I didn’t really understand this until I looked into the conventional wisdom on crying in the office and talked with some women. What I’ve discovered made me think more deeply about crying, and made me realize what a double standard exists in the workplace.
Tears indicate strong feelings. So do yelling, swearing, talking loudly, and slamming doors. Strong feelings can be an indicator of passion. At work, tears have always signaled to me that the cryer gives a shit. Since that’s one of Atomic’s value mantras, crying never struck me as particularly bothersome or problematic. It’s certainly true that I’ve been privileged to work with strong, competent, level-headed, caring women, and relatively few of them, but I’ll just go ahead and generalize anyway: in my mind, tears are usually an information radiator for caring.
I just got home from the Software Craftsmanship North America conference. As usual, Obtiva and 8th Light did a great job putting together an excellent event. In only its third year SCNA has grown to nearly 300 attendees, yet not lost its original passion and focus.
I gave a talk on Saturday morning entitled Companies for Craftsmen. I briefly described my idea of the innovation services firm, the common traits of such firms, and how important they are to the economy. I see innovation services firms as a great natural match for craftsmanship. That’s not to say that every innovation services firm on earth is a great place to work, respects craftsmanship and has established a culture that makes it a happy and satisfying place for skilled makers to work, but I see strong natural alignment between these two.
The common cultural elements I’ve found at companies that are good places for craftsmen include:
- Transparency – in their facilities, business practices, customer relationships, and projects; alignment across these dimensions is powerful
- Values – articulated, understood, strong and shared
- Trust – in many layers and directions, between employees, owners, leaders, and clients
- Friendship – a natural consequence of spending time solving problems together with people with whom you share values
There were plenty of interesting questions at the end of my talk, and conversations that continued into the hallway, that told me people related strongly to these common cultural traits of great companies for craftsmen.
One of the things I really enjoy about getting together with other companies like Atomic is the variety I see in business practices. While we share the common cultural traits above, we have a very wide and creative range of solutions to common business problems. I came away from SCNA this year with some new ideas to try, a strong sense of community and our place in it, and some new friends and kindred spirits.
My friend Matt introduced me to Russ Roberts’ EconTalk podcast while we were in Germany in September. At his suggestion I recently listened to an episode that delved into F.A. Hayek’s distinction between “made order” and “emergent order” in human systems. The main thread of discussion in this podcast was differentiating law (emergent order) from legislation (made order). The law/legislation discussion was quite enlightening, but it was the more general point of made/emergent order that really struck a chord with me. I found it particularly insightful as I wrestle with the challenge of ownership and governance at Atomic Object.
I made many mistakes as we grew Atomic Object. Since we turned ten years old a few months ago, obviously none of them were fatal. For example, not getting help in my job sooner was one of the bigger mistakes I made. Seeing many small mistakes as evidence of a smart strategy is something I’ve just recently come to appreciate.
Mistake is just another word for a failed experiment. The purpose of experiments is to confirm or deny a hypothesis, or in other words, to learn something. Saying that we made a lot of mistakes is also saying that we ran many experiments. For example, we built a web CMS product back in 2002. We invested time and effort to try an open compensation system. We invested in various strategic partnerships. We hired someone into a leadership position from outside the company. We created an isolated design team. We bought an ad in a trade magazine. We took over the maintenance team for a large customer. These are a few of our failed experiments. None of them worked the way we anticipated, but we learned an awful lot from these “mistakes”.
Lately, I’ve been working on a second round offering in what I call the Atomic Plan. My goal is broadening ownership in Atomic Object. The first round offering was made in May 2009. That sale of equity brought in seven new owners and started us down a very interesting path of succession planning, leadership and experiments with governance. It hasn’t all been smooth, but we’ve made some interesting discoveries and some significant progress.
As part of this second round, I decided to look again and see what the literature on employee ownership had to say. I had previously familiarized myself with the technical body of knowledge around employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs). My search this time has turned up more interesting sources. So far the best book on the subject that I’ve found is Equity: Why Employee Ownership is Good for Business by Corey Rosen, John Case, and Martin Staubus.
The profit and loss (P&L) or income statement is critical for understanding your business. Every quarter we close the books, analyze the P&L, compare against our economic model of the company, and prepare a report for the company meeting. We usually notice some anomalies. It can take quite a few hours digging around trying to explain why Cost of Sales varied unexpectedly, why metrics like revenue/employee varied, whether or not expenses were in line with expectations, etc. We improved this process considerably when we started adjusting for WIP and accrued wages.
We’ve made four more changes this year that have made our P&L more useful, and simplified our quarterly financial analysis and reporting process.
