Organizational star performers

Interesting research covered on an HBR podcast:

• It seems to be more productive to develop star performers internally compared to hiring them from the outside. This is because outside stars leave behind them a support structure, which they need to develop at the new pace. It often takes up to 5 years for stars to become productive again. (Vlad: Hmm, I am sure one's mileage varies here, but I guess the point is that star performers are not immediately as productive at the new place as they were at the old.)
• Star performers are less likely to leave employment. In fact, the turnover of stars is half the rate of non stars
• People don't leave companies, they leave managers. If companies change management, expect some turnover
• Stars are less likely to leave if there are other stars around

Generation X and workplace

Interesting podcast about Generation X and their struggle to find their place in corporations. As the podcast explains, Gen Xers grew up in an environment full of corporate layoffs, which caused them to be "light on their feet" so to speak and much more opened to options than other generations. They are entrepreneurial, fed up with Boomers not getting of their way and worried about the new cool Gen Y.

How to kill a great idea

Interesting story about Jonathan Abrams - the inventor of Friendster and how he "created the first online social network and enlisted Silicon Valley's best and brightest to run it. Yet Friendster flamed out spectacularly. What went wrong?"
Link to the article

Ranking Ideas

How many times have you hard someone say: “That’s a great idea. You could make a lot of money with this.” Or on a flip side, I am sure you’ve heard someone say: “That idea is not worth a thing.” Well, how do you know if an idea is worth it? I guess great entrepreneurs just know it in their gut. Well, I am not there yet so if nothing else, I would like to use some kind of a checklist to rank my ideas and then go after the ones that have the most promise. When I listened to the below podcast, I realized that’s exactly what I've been looking for. Here are some notes pretty much verbatim from the podcast. For those who would like to know more, the podcast is called Killer Innovations by Phil McKinney (www.techtrend.com/blog/podcast.xml ).

In this episode Phil asks a fundamental question - how does one choose the best idea among many ideas? The answer is that one needs to answer yes to at least one of these three questions.

1. Does the idea improve the customer expectation or experience?
   1. How? Provide details.
   2. Can you measure the improvement experience? 2 times better? 5 times better?
   3. Will the customer value it? Will they pay premium for it? 

1. Does the idea improve the competitive landscape?
   1. How will the idea reshape the competitive landscape?
   2. What will the competitors do? How will they react?
   3. Does the idea create a sustainable competitive barrier?
   4. What is the current market value chain? Now, how does this idea change the value chain? 

1. Does the idea fundamentally change the structure of the industry?
   1. Can the ecosystem partners play in this new value chain?
   2. Can the existing or new players benefit from the new value chain?

If you cannot answer yes to one of these three questions, the idea is a waste of time. But we are not done yet. Other questions to ask are:

1. Can you actually turn the idea into reality?
2. Do you have expertise and capabilities?
3. Do you have the right knowledge?
4. Do you have a contribution to make?
5. Can the idea generate enough margin?
6. What is the total addressable market that you can go after?
7. Can you price the product to create enough margin? A rule of thumb is that you add up a total R&D cost of a product. Look at the total margin the product can generate. Depending on the industry the new idea should generate 5-10 times the R&D cost at minimum. Some industries are 20,30, even more times the cost.
8. Is there enough sizzle? Can we create the sizzle through a model or a prototype?
9. Will the senior management support it? Can this idea get funded?
10. Can we access the customers’ preferred channel?

Now, for each new idea at the top of your list, rank the ideas based on the above criteria. The results give you the best ideas.

Three Signs of a Miserable job

Patrick Lencioni's latest book discusses the topic of job satisfaction. A summary of this book and an interview with the author can be found on HBR's podcast. According to the author,the key factors for job satisfaction and thus performance are:

Anonymity- Employees are often miserable in their jobs because of anonymity. Quite simply, employees feel that they are transparent and unimportant. If they don't feel a personal connection, if they feel that their managers do not take a personal interest in them, they often do not like their jobs.

Relevance - Employees need to feel their jobs are relevant. If they don't feel they can positively impact others, or that their jobs have some meaning, they are often miserable.

Imeasurement - One's job performance needs to be measurable. Employees need to have some way for them to assess their own performance. In such case they are not dependent on a whim of a manager relative to performance appraisal. This is why salespeople are often happy in their jobs. It is because they have measurable evidence of their performance - sales.

VoIP Basics

Nice eBook about VoIP by ShoreTel. The book explains benefits of VoIP in general.

Shoretel Article

FuelQuest - Cisco Case Study

"We can really function as a virtual organization,” adds Vladimir Collak, Senior Network Engineer. “We can hire industry experts who might not consider relocating to Houston. With our systems, they don’t have to. They can work from home offices and appear tothe outside world as if they were sitting at our headquarters. Their extension, their voice mail, e-mail, everything can work fromwherever they reside.”


More on this case study