Welcome to The Very Daily Weblog of Joshua Blankenship

I work with a gent named Jon. He is smart. He is methodical. And Jon gets things done. Currently, he’s managing multi-million dollar construction and facilities-related projects. He interacts with the client and with a multitude of subcontractors. Wouldn’t it be ridiculous if he wanted to be the architect, too? And install the electrical lines? And paint the walls? And make sure the equipment on site had enough diesel fuel? And manage all the deadlines? And do all the things on the punchlist? I wonder if one of the reasons Jon gets things done is because he doesn’t do all of it himself.

I do web design. And print design. And layout work. And creative/art direction. And copywriting. And strategy. And more and more I’m realizing I need to take cues from the way people like Jon get things done, or I’ll never get anything done. (At least nothing exceptional and universe-denting.)

What pieces can you let go so the whole is better?

Quick growth is often seen as an indicator of success on the web. But in my experience, hardly anything that grows fast does so without strain and stretch marks. The quick growth often forces your hand to implement before you can strategize. Then you waste time trying to fix mistakes brought on by speed, hopefully before the hoopla surrounding your launch dies down and everyone leaves for greener pixels. I wonder why slow growth isn’t popular on the web? Too boring for us? Not immediately measurable?

Here’s my subscriber stats from when I started using Feedburner in November ‘07—current:

No huge swells of change, no massive influxes of traffic. Not very exciting, is it? Just a slow, (surprisingly) steady uphill climb which enables me to (hopefully) build long-term relationships with fine people like you. Nothing flashy. Nothing newsworthy. Not even a lot of traffic* in the grand scheme of things. Then again, sustainable relationships take time, effort and hard work, and those things aren’t nearly as sexy as big stats.

But they’re way more valuable.

*It would have been easy to prove the point without the actual stats numbers, but why bother trying to be something I’m not? Transparency is valuable, too.

You can try to outspend the competition. Or you can try to outculture them. Create a place that makes employees feel special. A place that makes them feel like they’re part of a bigger whole. A place where they continually get to learn and evolve. A place where everyone actually likes each other.

If you create a culture like that, who would want to leave? Plus, you’ll get the best minds out there knocking on your door to get in.
— Matt Linderman, excerpted from Pixar’s tightknit culture is its edge

I think Matt hits on something important here. I know for us at NewSpring, it’s essentially impossible to outspend the competition, especially when it comes to skilled professional jobs like designers. We joke about “negotiating your paycut” when you come on staff here. For better or worse, it is what it is — a constraint we work within. We’re a church, and we simply don’t have the resources to “compete” with a company that sells products and makes profits.

But we can outculture them every day of the week. We can offer creative staff permission to fail (big) and have freedom, we can ditch as much bureaucracy as possible and we can push boundaries. Plenty of people work in “dream jobs” that don’t have any of these values.

Besides, after the initial courting process, I don’t worry too much about salary. I mainly think “do I want to go to my job today?” I answer “yes” 99% of the time these days, and I assure you that has nothing to do with my paycheck and everything to do with the culture I walk into everyday.

I found this Wikipedia article via Jakob Lodwick who quoted some of this excerpt:

Skunk Works is a term first coined in 1943 by Lockheed…and widely used in business, engineering, and technical fields to describe a group within an organization given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, tasked with working on advanced or secret projects.

I feel extremely lucky to work in an organization that 1. values autonomy, 2. values leadership, 3. tries their best not to get bogged down in bureaucracy and 4. trusts their employees (and volunteers!) to put their skills and effort into creating new solutions to help us move forward.

Oh, the secret projects we have up our collective sleeves…

[When shoe company] Zappos hires new employees, it provides a four-week training period that immerses them in the company’s strategy, culture, and obsession with customers…After a week or so in this immersive experience…[Zappos] says to its newest employees: “If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.” [Because]…if you’re willing to take the company up on the offer, you obviously don’t have the sense of commitment they are looking for.
— William C. Taylor, Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit—And You Should Too

From my very satisfied customer’s point-of-view, Zappos is an incredible company. What’s even more fascinating to see is their corporate culture functioning in non-standard ways like the quoted policy, and fully embracing technology like Twitter (they have over 300 employees using Twitter) in order to connect directly with customers.

Rumor has it that Microsoft wants to build a Flickr competitor, in effect trying to round out a suite of web solutions to mimic its desktop operating system offerings. Ignoring Microsoft’s track record of not being able to build a decent web solution for anything, how could this possibly work for them on a scale where it’s a worthwhile investment?

The current customers for this kind of web solution are already firmly entrenched in Flickr (or Facebook, which hosts more photos than any other website.) They have photosets, meta data, comments, favorites, contacts. Does Microsoft honestly think anyone that invested in Flickr will jump ship? So in order to be successful, they have to market this to completely new customers. Microsoft users are already downgrading from Vista to ye olde XP, and now the company is going to start an uphill battle in an area where they’ve never had success, in a market already flush with established, innovative companies. That sounds like a brilliant waste of time, manpower, money, and energy.

Of course, since it’s Microsoft, they’ll lean on the same strategies they always do: marketing muscle and feature bloat. But features are not going to make me leave Flickr. I don’t post to Flickr because of features anyway; it’s about community, and doing a handful of things very well. Microsoft’s feature-heavy solutions try to do everything, but they do it poorly and make it more difficult to actually get anything done.

Here’s a better business plan: why not just spend the money allotted to this project to FREAKING FIX INTERNET EXPLORER for web developers by making it standards compliant?