That’s how they do it at Google!

If your only decision criteria is that’s how the big players do it, then you should reconsider.

Recently I’ve been talking with some startup founders on LinkedIn (1-10 employees, pre-revenue) about some of the types of issues they’re facing. They’re all phenomenally smart people who aren’t constrained by the rules of large corporate systems. Obviously none of them have suggested trying an approach because “that’s how [whatever large company] does it!”

It’s something I’ve also thought about a lot in my own work managing a department. Over the years, I’ve read a few books on project and product management. As I went through the books, I was always pleasantly surprised that our team had already been adopting what I saw to be the best aspects of these varied systems. I’ve said to my team on a few occasions “It’s nice that we’ve sort of stumbled into best practices.”

That’s not to say that business books are useless. I’ve read through a decent number of the popular ones in the last couple of years. I always pick up a few key insights that work well for my team. But today I want to talk about choosing what to include in your processes, when to do it, and when to change your mind.

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Is this what lead to success?

A great concept from The Lean Startup is the concept of “Innovation Accounting”. When you adopt a new process, or make any sort of change, it’s easy to think “we made this change and revenue went up, therefore this change was beneficial.” But that’s a dangerous line of thinking. In the future, your team or your company could be substantially larger, running 10-20 projects at a time, launching new products every few weeks, and (optimistically) revenue will still be growing. At that point, it’s pretty obvious to see that you can’t just say that revenue is increasing so everything we’re doing is important, urgent, and beneficial.

If you want to apply innovation accounting, you need to discover what you actually need to measure to see if a decision worked. For example, when we make a decision in the curation department, we don’t just wait to see what happens to revenue, we look at what we can measure on our own.

For example

• Will it allow us to work faster?
• Will it impact the quality of our work?
• Will it create problems for other teams?
• Will it create problems for our customers?
• Will it be easier for the sales team to close deals?

We can measure our speed and quality and we can talk to our stakeholders to see the impact on them. We can collect the information we need to know if a decision we’ve made was the right one. If it wasn’t the right decision, we can always go back to the old process and try another experiment later.

Is it the right choice, right now?

The mark of a good business book is one that explains how their ideas can be applied to businesses of different sizes. Lots of business books discuss their ideas as though they will work for any business of any size, which is another red flag.

Mary Parker Follett’s essay “The Giving of Orders” talks about the law of the situation. Where we don’t make choices based on a directive from above, but rather by what the situation actually calls for. Leaders must collaborate with their experts to get to the heart of the problem and decide on the best course of action together. This collaborative style of management can also lead to better Active Commitment and less resistance.

Good Ideas come back

“Good ideas come back” is a common phrase at Basecamp. In the book Shape Up, they talk about how they only focus on what is most important right now, and don’t keep much of a backlog. The idea is that if someone had a good idea that was important, but not necessarily urgent, they won’t write it down, because it will come up again when the time is right. Personally not the way I prefer to manage a list of projects, but it is a good way to manage decisions.

Just because you’ve changed your processes for what fit a given situation, doesn’t mean the processes can’t change again when a new situation comes up. If you pick up a few ideas from a book that can be applied to your business, don’t forget to go back when your team is larger and processes are more complex. An idea that you dismissed earlier, may now be the perfect solution to your problems.