Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: management

  • Building the post-agile workplace

    Building the post-agile workplace

    “I personally believe we haven’t seen a major change in how companies work since the industrial revolution,” says Yammer co-founder Adam Pisoni. “We’re, I think, on the brink of a change as large as that.

    Pisoni was speaking at Microsoft’s Australian TechEd conference on the Gold Coast and gave an insight into how Yammer’s development philosophy is being implemented at Microsoft since the smaller company was acquired last year.

    He believes all businesses can benefit from collaborative, cloud based tools like Yammer however software companies like Microsoft are the ones being affected the earliest from their adoption.

    “We sometimes joke that Yammer’s development methodology is post-Agile, post-Scrum” says Pisoni. “Because they were not fast enough and don’t respond to data quickly.”

    Understanding modern workplaces

    This will strike fear into the minds of managers who are only just coming to understand Agile and Scrum methodologies over the traditional ‘waterfall’ method of software development.

    “We focused primarily in the past on efficiency,” states Pisoni. “In many ways things like scrum attempt to make you more agile but still focus on efficiency. Everyone is tasked based and hours and burn down points and all that”

    “The name of the game now is not efficiency, it’s how quickly you can learn and respond to information.”

    “Yammer is less of a product than it is a set of experiments running at all times. We take bold guesses about the future but then we try to disprove our hypotheses to get there.”

    “So we came up with this ‘post-agile’ model of a small, autonomous, cross-functional teams – two to ten people for two to ten weeks who could prove or disprove an hypotheses based on the data.”

    “This lets us quickly move resources around to double down on that or do something else.”

    Flipping hamburgers the smart way

    Pisoni sees this model of management working in areas outside of software development such as retail and cites one of his clients, Red Robin burgers, where the hamburger chain put its frontline staff on Yammer and allowed them contribute to product development.

    The result was getting products faster to market – one burger that would have taken eighteen months to release took four weeks. The feedback loops from the customer and the reduced cost of failure made it easier to for the chain to experiment with new ranges.

    With companies as diverse as hamburger chains, telcos and software developers benefitting from faster development times, it’s a warning that all businesses need to be considering how their employees work together as the competition is getting faster and more flexible.

    It remains to be seen if this change is as great as the industrial revolution, but it’s now that can’t be ignored by managers and entrepreneurs.

    Paul attended Microsoft TechEd Australia as a guest of Microsoft who paid for flights, accommodation and food.

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  • Why do executives see romance in the startup culture?

    Why do executives see romance in the startup culture?

    One of the fascinating phenomenons of the modern era is how corporate managers have appropriated the startup culture.

    At the announcement of the Australian Centre for Broadband Innovation’s Apps For Broadband prizes, Foxtel’s CIO Robyn Elliot described her experience of working in a startup.

    “Foxtel was once in the category of startup itself,” said Elliot at the start of her speech.

    Apples and Oranges

    Comparing Foxtel to a scrabbling startup in the modern sense is bizarre given the company was a well funded joint venture between News Limited and Telstra – the company being a good example of modern Australian crony corporatism rather than a risky undertaking by daring entrepreneurs.

    This conceit about startups isn’t unusual among corporate executives, in the early days of Australia’s National Broadband Network it was quite common to hear NBNCo managers talk about their startup ethos – this from a company backed by around 30 billion dollars of government funding.

    At one stage I interviewed for a job at NBNCo and I struggled not to start giggling when the “startup ethos of the organisation” was earnestly emphasised to me several times during the meeting.

    Not surprisingly the job went to an ex-telco staffer, as did most of the team’s roles. No doubt their corporate experience was far more suited to the company’s ‘startup ethos’  than that of actually having worked in four startups. Giggling in the interview probably didn’t help either.

    The romantic dreams of executives

    Given most corporate staffers would curl into the fetal position and weep after two weeks of working in a real startup, why do executives indulge in the conceit that their business is ‘just like a startup’?

    The answer could lie in “The Consequences to the Banks of the Collapse in Money Values” written by John Maynard Keynes in 1931.

    A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him. It is necessarily part of the business of a banker to maintain appearances, and to confess a conventional respectability, which is more than human. Life-long practices of this kind make them the most romantic and the least realistic of men.

    So it is for the modern corporate executive who has spent their working lives fighting for the corner office having met their KPIs and spending years cultivating their network of like minded managers.

    After two decades spent writing stern memos on the use of paper clips and climbing the corporate ladder, it must be tempting for a middle aged executive to look at those funky youngsters getting billion dollar payouts after a couple of years grabbing three hours sleep a night among the pizza boxes under the desk and get pangs of what might have been…..

    A harmless startup fantasy

    In some many ways the executive startup fantasy is touching and largely harmless, even if it does attract sniggers and giggles from the unwashed and underpaid who’ve actually been there.

    The real risk is when a senior executive tries to shoehorn a Silicon Valley startup culture into an organisation.

    While most large companies could do with some of the hunger and flexibility found in smaller businesses, there’s many ways that could go terribly wrong – particularly when driven by a starry eyed romantic manager.

    For most executives though, the dreams of being in a startup will remain a fantasy – and that’s probably best for everybody.

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  • Dealing with the corporate digital divide

    Dealing with the corporate digital divide

    It’s fashionable when talking about the ways different generations use computers to split users into two groups – the digital natives and digital immigrants.

    Born after 1990, digital natives are believed to have an intuitive understanding of digital technologies born from never having known a world without computers.

    Digital immigrants on the other hand are from an era where computers were not common outside big corporations and government departments, so most people born before 1990 had to learn to use computers.

    like many similar demographic divides, the line between digital immigrants and natives is contentious and probably more unhelpful than useful.

    A fascinating question though is whether corporations can be digital natives and immigrants.

    One of the challenges for older corporations, the corporate digital immigrants, are the legacy business systems that have their roots in the pre-digital era. A good example of this is United Airlines which struggles under inflexible management and old aircraft which can’t provide the levels of service and reliability expected by modern customers.

    A similar problem faces retailers who’ve haven’t invested in modern logistics, point of sale and online commerce systems – these businesses simply cannot compete with those who have up to date technology.

    Part of this problem comes from the difficulties in upgrading both technology and management systems in complex organisations, it’s not an easy task and the cost of failure is high so it’s understandable that many businesses don’t attempt it.

    In the meantime there’s the corporate digital immigrants, the more recently founded businesses that aren’t weighed down by legacy management and technology.

    The problem for the legacy businesses is the digitally native companies are able to take advantage of cheap and powerful tools that older organisations struggle to integrate into their operations.

    So the digital native-immigrant divide could be actually a business problem rather than one of how different generations discovered computers.

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  • Collecting tolls on the information superhighway

    Collecting tolls on the information superhighway

    The news that internet services company Melbourne IT is looking at cutting management costs and returning cash to shareholders in the face of declining revenues doesn’t come as any surprise to observers of the firm.

    In many ways Melbourne IT is a historic relic, one of the last examples of the late 1990s dot com boom where management from those heady days survived unscathed by the realities of the 21st Century.

    Melbourne IT story illustrates the poor management and flaw investment strategies of the big dot com float and also illustrates the risk of under-investing in key areas, as anyone using the site or the services of its Web Central subsidiary will understand.

    Both companies feature clunky sites and extremely poor customer service. For resellers and customers using the Web Central command center, the experience and technology is straight out of the late 1990s.

    While overseas businesses like Rackspace, GoDaddy and Bluehost innovated and invested in their platforms, Web Central and Melbourne IT sat back and how expected their dominant position would guarantee them profits.

    Much of that management complacency was born out the founding of Melbourne IT when it was spun off from the University of Melbourne to exploit the then monopoly the university’s computer faculty had on granting Australia commercial domains.

    In 1998, as the dot com boom was entering its most heated phase, Melbourne IT was floated and immediately attracted anger and allegations of wrong doing – none of which was proved – as the stock debuted on the stock market at four times its listing prices which generated huge profits for the insiders who were fortunate to get shares allocated before the sale.

    Melbourne IT’s huge stock valuation was based on the belief the company would exploit its dominance of the critical domain market – it was similar to other technology floats of dominant players at the time such as accounting giant MYOB in 1999 and Telstra’s spin off of its small business Commander operation the following year.

    All of these stock market floats proved to be disastrous as each company’s management showed they were incapable of exploiting their privileged market positions.

    Of the three, Melbourne IT’s management survived longest partly because of the riches expected to flow into the company’s coffers through Top Level Domain sales as gullible government agencies and corporates being driven by a Fear Of Missing Out overpay for new online addresses.

    Now it appears ICANN’s top level domain river of gold isn’t going to flow, partly due to arrogance and management incompetence in that organisation, so Melbourne IT is now going to have to cull its executive ranks.

    Steadily, both Melbourne IT and Web Central have gone from being dominant to irrelevant and provide a good case study of how poor management and complacency can squander a dominant market position.

    The failure of Melbourne IT’s management proves that clipping tickets on the internet is not always the path to riches, particularly when you don’t invest or innovate.

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  • A question of incentives at Microsoft and Apple

    A question of incentives at Microsoft and Apple

    Ben Thompson on his Stratechery blog speculates what Apple would be like were Steve Ballmer running the company.

    Thompson makes an excellent point – that Ballmer has been very good in building a company driven by incentives like salaries, bonuses and titles. It describes Microsoft very well and highlights the companies strengths and weaknesses.

    Were Ballmer to run Apple, Thompson concludes, it would be a far more profitable company than it is today but it would be fading into irrelevance just as Microsoft is.

    That makes sense as Microsoft under Ballmer has been able to profit from the dominant market position it built up in the late 1990s, but the company has struggled against innovative competitors or the big market shifts following the arrival of smartphones and tablet computers.

    Where Thompson is on more shaky territory is citing Amazon as another example of where profit is less important than innovation;

    Amazon famously makes minimal profits; Microsoft made more money last year than Amazon has made ever, yet Amazon too is far more relevant in the consumer market today than is Microsoft.

    Amazon may well be more relevant to the consumer market today than Microsoft, but that’s largely on the back of a business model built on shareholders subsiding customers – something that Apple has never done.

    It may well be that when investors get sick of propping Amazon up, the company’s business model will have to change. Should Amazon have a Microsoft like dominance of the online retail or cloud computing markets then customers might be in for a nasty dose of sticker shock as profits are maximised.

    Ultimately incentives are what shapes a company’s culture – whether the incentives are built around stack ranking, commissions or currying favour with the founder, they will determine how the business behaves.

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