Innovation Culture

Innovation Culture

David Weekly, PBwikiTecnológico de Monterrey

August 18, 2008

The Mentality of theSuccessful Entrepreneur Confidence

Knowing you will succeed where others failed. Humility

Knowing you have more to learn. Energy

The stamina to run a long, hard race & inspire. Insight

Through training, seeing what others cannot. Curiosity

Wanting to know WHY.

Ideas are Cheap!

Innovation: 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. E=MC^2 doesn’t mean you can make a nuke. Value is execution: EBay, Google, Wikipedia.

Don’t hide ideas. Make them valuable. Talking about an idea will help you hone it & make it valuable.

You’re a Failure!

Most of your ideas will be bad.

It will take a lot of hard work to find this out.

You will feel bad.

You will feel stupid.

You.

You’re a Failure!

The key to success in any discipline? Rapid, safe failure Learning how to fall without hurting yourself Learning how to recover from an error

You need this in order to train @ 100%! Embracing failure will let you be more

aggressive in vetting bad ideas. Which will let you find the good ones.

Expectation Management

Paint a very humble picture…then try to knock it out of the park!

Exceeding low expectations is greatMakes you look & feel like a rockstar.Helps people believe in you.

So expect the worst, hope for the best.

Technology Lets You Fail Fast

Vetting technology ideas is faster, cheaper, and easier than ever.

CPU, storage, RAM, bandwidth = cheap8gb quad-core: $1600->$1150 in 9 months!

Cloud compute & services = easy Rapid-prototype frameworks (Rails, PHP,

Python) = fast

Advisers Let You Fail Fast

If you need advice, ask for it, from whomever you think is ideal.

You don’t need an introduction, just make be clear who you are, what your question is, and why you’re ask them.

Make an Advisory Board This is surprisingly effective!

Why Does Silicon Valley Work?

Value capability over everything versus your parents, GPA, school…

Failure-tolerant culture From Gold Rush days Hard work buys you the right to fail.

Hippy culture Rapid peer distribution of best practices Lack of formalism in peer connectivity

Steal Those Good Ideas!

Practice Meritocracy

Embrace Failure

Connect with Others Facebook, LinkedIn, Hi5, Twitter, your blog Read others’ FriendFeeds, blogs Create meetups to get to know others nearby

Guide to this Talk

1. Start an innovative business.

2. Build a culture of innovation.

3. Profit!

Tips for Innovative Cultures

Work should be fun! Helps retention People work harder! That’s when the best work gets done.

Focus on results. Office hours, dress code, working location? Four Hour Work Week & Getting Things Done Encourage vigorous experimentation with internal processes,

backed by data. Offsite? (To Thailand?) Does your team work better in cubes or offices?

Avoid Mediocrity

Bad people are easy to toss out,okay ones are very, very difficult.

A-listers hire A, B-listers hire C. Great people attract great people!

100x performance from good coders. Hire people who are smarter than you.

Avoid Mediocrity

Be comfortable firing people.

Set clear performance requirements.

Shouldn’t be a surprise.

This is good for them.

Avoid Mediocrity

Learn how to spot Good People Confidence + Humility + Energy + Insight + Curiosity People who do useful things for fun.

Stick with them / stay in touch!…even if you can’t hire them right now.

Build a Thriving Culture

Focus on making users happy. Collect good ideas from everyone

A PBwiki is a good way to do this. Encourage respectful dissent

“Yes” people contribute nothing.@PBwiki you get fired for not disagreeing!

Eat your own dogfood!

Build a Thriving Culture

Can young people have good ideas? Most big ideas were had before 30.

Einstein, Galois, Newton, Nash, Brin+Page, Zuck

Can women have good technical ideas? Ada Lovelace – first programmer: 1850! Admiral Grace Hopper – invented the first computer programming

language.

Can regular workers have good ideas? Why are Toyota & Honda killing Ford & GM?

People who build cars have ideas about how to do it better!

Prove Your Success

Record Everything. Learn or hire data warehousing. Be careful about explaining away failure or

success – almost everything has a reason. If you don’t know why it went up, it will come

down just as predictably. Regularly review metrics

Even better: success dashboard

Guide to this Talk

1. Found an innovative business.

2. Build a culture of innovation.

3. Profit!

Want a job? Want to give me feedback on this talk?

david@weekly.org

http://DavidWeekly.org

http://twitter.com/dweekly