The (real) good stuff is not money

Motivation and employee empowerment often takes a back seat when compared to sales, profit-margin, leads. You know, the money stuff. While monetary viability is the bloodline of any business, your people should be the pulse. Are they excited to be part of the team? Or are they just registering placid interest, day in and day out? After all, we’re talking of very smart people here. There are greatness in them that inspire you to hire them in the first place.

Case in point

Our designer Dahlia is now in Langkawi for the next one week to work side by side with me. The moment I picked her up from the airport, she hit me with an idea of how we could help Sani, our front-end developer grasp all the small nuances of design and translate these little details into his HTML/CSS work. We decided that Sani, who only ever opens Photoshop to slice up layers, should design his own website.

We get from ‘Hey what if…’ and ‘I was thinking…’ to ‘Let’s do it!’ and ‘Who wants in?’ within a matter of minutes.

We work from Starbucks at Cenang Mall because well, coffee, and they have these really huge tables with enough space for all our mousing needs. Within 2 hours of Dahlia telling me this idea, Sani was already sketching his first website. It’s really exciting to know that your team is nimble enough to maneuver ideas into execution at such a short amount of time. We get from “Hey what if…” or “I was thinking…” to “Let’s do it!” or “Who wants in?” within a matter of minutes.

Sani’s big love is with inline skating (read his blog here) so we asked him to design a webpage for his SKROLS club. On his own. When he’s done, he’s going to build this website in Bootstrap.

Along the way, he’s learning a crash course in web design from us. Between Dahlia and I, we have over 14 years of design experience. But this placed us in new territory — we needed to communicate design by going back to basic, but not get too technical lest we lose the audience. We showed him how subtle differences makes for good design, emotions associated with colors, how to apply masking, understanding visual weight and hierarchy, Gestalt principles, typography for web, grids and folds and many more. We also demonstrated different ways of working with Photoshop and the considerations when designing a responsive website, going beyond the tools you use.

There were a lot of haphazard sketches and awkward finger gestures. Thinking back, Sani was probably too polite to say no to two trouble-making girls 🙂 No, we haven’t gotten to the Pen tool yet but when we do, we’re pretty excited to see him cringe.

If you’re in Langkawi this week, do stop by Starbucks in Cenang Mall — we’re 2 mins from the beach — and say hello!

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When we started Stampede, Dov and I were still cringing at our share of bad workplace experience. Our goal then was to create a working environment where people not unlike us can do stuffs they really like while actually enjoying each others’ company. My litmus test when I wake up every morning is almost always – “Do I want to go to work today?”

You cannot underestimate the power of working with people you like. If you are an entrepreneur and have the choice, this should be high on your list. Not profit, not product. People.

Which brings me to my next point. So you found a person who is a perfect fit to your company culture. What next?

The Education of Failure

I think that it is crucial to build a company culture that allows employee to fail and fail fast. Everyone fails. You shouldn’t tiptoe and delay the inevitable. Only by throwing away your reservations and trying things and risking failure, you are able to learn new things. The key point here is moving forward – not to dwell on your failures or repeating the same mistakes. The former is denying yourself of further greatness (and I mean this in every sense of the word) and the latter is just, well, plain lazy. We abhor lazies.

At the speed in which this industry thrives, failing and moving on is a ubiquitous advantage. Never before an outcome of failure can be rectified almost immediately. If it’s beyond repair, be genuine and honest about it. Clients appreciate transparency and only know too well that everyone is fallible to some degree. Get it out of your system, step back and think of another way around it. Nip the negativity in the bud and move the project, and yourself, into positive territory again.

My take – everyone should be permitted to fail. I fail on daily basis, as few dozens half-finished artworks can testify. Dov’s intensity of hacking at his keyboard multiplies when he couldn’t get some code to work. Failure is an acceptable by-product of actually doing something. A good team is built to weather, nay encourage, the education of failures. People will be too scared to try new things if they’re too busy dodging toes.

On the other side of the coin, a company should have a failure-handling mechanism well-oiled and ready. Assure employees that failure is acceptable, help them get their bearing back, send them out there again, then get the hell out of the way.

So fail and fail fast. Then dust yourself off and move on. Rinse and repeat.

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Here are some guidelines by Ben Chestnut, founder of Mailchimp where he grants his employees the permission to be creative:

1. Avoid rules. Avoid order. Don’t just embrace chaos, but create a little bit of it. Constant change, from the top-down, keeps people nimble and flexible (and shows that you want constant change).

2. Give yourself and your team permission to be creative. Permission to try something new, permission to fail, permission to embarrass yourself, permission to have crazy ideas.

3. Hire weird people. Not just the tattoo’d and pierced-in-strange-places kind, but people from outside your industry who would approach problems in different ways than you and your normal competitors.

4. Meetings are a necessary evil, but you can avoid the conference room and meet people in the halls, the water cooler, or their desks. Make meetings less about delegation and task management and more about cross-pollination of ideas (especially the weird ideas). This is a lot harder than centralized, top-down meetings. But this is your job — deal with it.

5. Structure your company to be flexible. Creativity is often spontaneous, so the whole company needs to be able to pivot quickly and execute on them (see #1)

We might not have any written manifesto at Stampede (perhaps we should) but I can confirm that we have done all of these. Especially #3. Yes, that’s right – you should have seen our verbal artistry nearing the end of EST.

(Photo is of Slipknot frontman, Corey Taylor giving a talk to the students at the Oxford Union’s grand hall.)

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Some people when they look for a job in journalism ask themselves, What do I like to do and Who can take me there? Who can get me to a war zone? To a ballpark? To Wall Street? To politicians, to movie stars? Who’s got the vehicle? And you send them your resume and you say, “I want a seat in your car.” … And you wait.
But there are some people, who don’t wait.
I don’t know exactly what going on inside them; but they have this… hunger. It’s almost like an ache. Something inside you says I can’t wait to be asked I just have to jump in and do it.
So for this age, for your time, I want you to just think about this: Think about NOT waiting your turn.
Instead, think about getting together with friends that you admire, or envy. Think about entrepeneuring. Think about NOT waiting for a company to call you up. Think about not giving your heart to a bunch of adults you don’t know. Think about horizontal loyalty. Think about turning to people you already know, who are your friends, or friends of their friends and making something that makes sense to you together, that is as beautiful or as true as you can make it.
In every career, your job is to make and tell stories, of course. You will build a body of work, but you will also build a body of affection, with the people you’ve helped who’ve helped you back.
And maybe that’s your way into Troy.

From Robert Krulwich’s 2011 commencement speech at UC-Berkeley’s Journalism School, via Tim Carmody, who ran around the entire internet giving a million high-fives because of this speech, and to Ed Yong, Tim’s high-five #001.

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The communication mayhem in Building A Website, Explained

In almost all aspects, communication is the one definitive role in the success of a project.

Working separately of distance and time with the team and the client is a new experience to me. Face to face communication is easier, but it’s not always possible. Even so, there is no excuse for a disconnect in communication, especially with a number of supporting facilities that allow for effective and accurate transfer of information. Distance and time is no longer an obstacle now even if your team and your clients are not in the same location, or in the same country.

Here at Stampede, we use all sort of communication tools: Basecamp, instant messaging, voice conference, email, telephone. We even send each other reminders via ReminderFox. All these tools, when applied right, greatly facilitate the type of work we do, to help deliver ideas and keep us focused on details. I do find written communication more productive. To me, everything noted and recorded can always be quickly reopened and referenced at any point of project development. There is very little margin of misinterpretation too.

Nevertheless, you shouldn’t depend sorely on communication tools. The most basics of communication delivery is also important to master. Firm messages are easiest to understand while properly composed questions will encourage productive discussion and further attention to details. Keep your communication clear and concise. Without it, misinterpretation is bound to happen and I have seen plenty of problems resulting from the tiniest of misunderstanding.

Any successful project accounts for delivery of work product on time and with agreed and planned quality. Poor communication can result in severe delays, uneven workload and consequently, hinder a company’s growth. Good communication, on the other hand, will attract great clients and bring about the happiest of team to work with.

(Image from MIX’s brilliant Building a Website, Explained)

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