Jeff Magnusson

I love books.  I’ve done almost all of my learning from books and web pages.  So following up on a post by Boris about finding startup books in Vancouver, I wondered what would be the required reading list for a startup (or a Bootup cohort company).

Here’s my tentative list, from personal experience.  What else needs included?  Is there a great Drupal book?

Business

• Four Steps to the Epiphany – Steve Blank – on my TO READ list, the bible of customer development.
• Startup Lessons Learned – 2008-2009 – Eric Ries – I’m not listing blogs on this post, because there’s plenty of resources for that.  But I get to cheat and include this book form compendium of Eric’s posts.  This material is invaluable, for the detailed discussion of continuous deployment practices and the lean startup business model.

Engineering

• Test Driven Development by Example – Kent Beck: the how-to book for applying test-driven development (a great Extreme Programming technique for rapid reliable code, and very applicable to continuous deployment) and unit tests.
• Refactoring to Patterns – Joshua Kerievsky: if you’re writing a lot of code hopefully you’ve read both Refactoring and Design Patterns, but this book puts the two together and gives you strategies for migrating spaghetti legacy code to nice patterned code.
• Facebook Cookbook – Jay Goldman: this is a great book that covers all aspects of Facebook platform and Connect programming, from ideation and planning to viral marketing and API code samples.  The only downside is that the API is constantly changing and portions of this were already out of date when I bought the book last year.

Personal

• Getting Things Done – David Allen: on my TO READ list – sounds like the least gimmicky, most lean and effective way to stay focused on what’s important and cut out your wasted cycles.
• Getting To Yes – Fisher,Ury: how to negotiate effectively in all areas of your life (with employers, investors, spouses, fishmongers) by avoiding positions and addressing underlying interests.
• The Seven Principles for Making a Marriage Work – John Gottman: <preach>Some things are more important than your next round or release.  Without strong support at home you can’t succeed, and whether your startup succeeds wildly or flames out, you will have failed if you lose what’s important to you.</preach>

Please, let’s fill this in with more.  And then get Chapters or Amazon to sponsor a set for new cohort companies

In a recent HBR article (What Really Motivates Workers) it was revealed that workers are motivated less by the usual suspects (incentives, recognition, …) than we thought and that in fact progress in their work is the key driver of daily satisfaction.  How can we take advantage of this in software development to crank up real and perceived progress, and keep workers happier on a daily basis?

First, it seems we’re an industry uniquely situated to take advantage of creating perceived progress.  I don’t mean false progress, but with the real time metrics available such as compile errors, bug databases, unit tests passed or test runtime, we have the tools to demonstrate progress in several ways depending on the project.  The trick may be to identify the ones that are most valuable to your product, and to keep some perspective on how much you emphasize them.  If you keep cheering up your team by pointing to the diminishing bug list, you’ll have a hard time rallying them when a large dump of bugs comes in from new testing.  Keep it focused on customer satisfaction and percent of code under testing.

Second, there are methodologies and tools for software engineering that support constant progress and prevent the kind of backslide that kills morale and motivation.  Specifically, I’m thinking of agile methods that cut out time spent on exhaustive planning and requirement specifications that doesn’t feel like progress to the person writing it, and creates the opportunity for big negative progress when it turns out they’re misguided.  Then tack on test driven development to allow constant, incremental additions while locking out the possibility of backsliding again, and continuous integration and deployment to keep your work rolling forward instead of halting and going back.

These are very pragmatic, and well tested methods that, used together, will hugely increase the number of days your team can go without a big backslide, adding incremental improvement or capability day in and day out.  And, according to the article, this is a key driver of motivation.  So in addition to the benefits we already knew about (faster results, less wasted time, better tested code, no ‘ocean boiling’ integration and release cycle) we can now say that agile methods keep your team happy and motivated.

What other techniques support constant progress?

As we begin to trust more and more of our private data to cloud companies such as Dropbox, Mint and Facebook it is becoming critical that the companies clearly communicate their intentions and principles, and then unfailingly act on them.  They must be authentic.  In the current online ecosystem of small, single-function companies such as Dropbox and Mozy the relative anonymity of the company hasn’t slowed adoption by users.  It seems that when it comes to trust, no information is just as good as positive information.

This can’t be sustained as the company grows though, as sooner or later the public will get more information about a company and its owners, executives either through direct communicatin or the press.  Once this happens, the trust will only be maintained if the personality of the company is trustworthy (think “Don’t be evil” over a chair-throwing Ballmer) and they act authentically to support their personality.

For small companies, the trust seems to start at a tangible level, based on things like privacy policies and practicalities.  I trust my data to Dropbox because really, with 3M+ users, they’re not going to dig through my docs.  As the company develops more personality, their actions and communication need to be authentic to that initial trust in order to sustain it.  I trust my email to Google and my friends to Facebook because I know that while they analyze my data to show me ads, they won’t jeapordize my trust by acting inauthentically.  In both cases, their trustable personality has become their greatest asset.

What do small companies need to do?

1) Establish tangible trust.

Have a privacy policy.  Clearly communicate how you store and use people’s information and data.  In all of your communication, stay in alignment with those policies, and

2) Always communicate authentically

Authentically means you act in accordance with the trustworthy policies you established in (1).  This is where your corporate personality starts to take shape, and you need to work to communicate in a professional, trustworthy way.  I’ll trust data to a few kids in a garage, but only if I thnk they have a long view that values retained customers and pride in their work over a quick buck from a marketing company.

3) Recognize that trust as your most valuable asset.

Once you have company that customers implicitly trust, you have to protect that with everything you’ve got.  Your employees and communications all will impact your ‘personality’ in a postive or negative way.

From the book New Venture Creation, which lists common responses when entrepreneurs are asked an open ended question about what they believe to be the most critical concepts and skills:

1. Do what gives you energy – have fun.
2. Figure out what can go right and make it.
3. Say “can do” rather than “cannot” or “maybe”.
4. Illegitimi non carborundum: tenacity and creativity will triumph.
5. Anything is possible if you believe you can do it.
6. If you don’t know it can’t be done, then you’ll go ahead and do it.
7. The cup is half full.
8. Be dissatisfied with the way things are – and look for improvement.
9. Do things differently.
10. Don’t take a risk if you don’t have to – but take a calculated risk if it’s the right opportunity for you.
11. Businesses fail; successful entrepreneurs learn – but keep the tuition low.
12. It’s easier to beg forgiveness than to ask permission.
13. Make opportunity and results your obsession – not money.
14. Money is a tool and a scorecard available to the right people with the right opportunity at the right time.
15. Making money is even more fun than spending it.
16. Make heroes out of others – a team builds a business, an individual makes a living.
17. Take pride in your accomplishments – it’s contagious!
18. Sweat the details that are critical to success.
19. Integrity and reliability equal long-run oil and glue.
20. Accept the responsibility, less than half the credit, and more than half the blame.
21. Make the pie bigger – don’t waste time trying to cut smaller slices.
22. Play for the long haul – it is rarely possible to get rich quickly.
23. Don’t pay too much – but don’t lose it!
24. Only the lead dog gets a change of view.
25. Success is getting what you want, happiness is wanting what you get.
26. Give back.
27. Embrace sustainability.
28. Never give up.

A few old chestnuts in there, and a few that really ring true.  I especially like 8, 11 and 16.