Nigel’s decision to break with tradition and *not* sacrifice a cat at today’s daily stand-up meeting was a brave one.
Nigel’s decision to break with tradition and *not* sacrifice a cat at today’s daily stand-up meeting was a brave one.
Here’s the first one. You’ll need to click on it see it properly.
“Richard’s 20% project didn’t go entirely to plan”
Here’s the video. Set aside an hour of your time and watch it.
I’ll be posting up videos from the other speakers over the next few weeks. Subscribe to my blog feed or follow me on twitter to stay up to date.
Registration for Business of Software 2010 is now open. If you’re at all interested in building long-term, profitable software businesses then come and meet 400 like-minded people and hear Joel Spolsky, Seth Godin, Dharmesh Shah, Jason Cohen, Eric Ries and many others. It’s in Boston, October 4th-6th 2010. Find out more at the Business of Software conference web site.
“Go to a small company, work for the CEO, get a job where you actually get to make mistakes and do something”
Brilliant advice.
But what’s the next step?
Well, I’m one of the CEOs (we have two) of Red Gate Software. We’re the 14th best small company to work for in the UK. We were featured in this month’s Wired UK magazine as one of twenty businesses worldwide reinventing the way people work.
I’m looking for somebody smart and hardworking to work with me for the next twelve months. You’ll take on a number of projects, but the first two will be:
Interested? Get in touch with me and persuade me that we should chat. You need to be able to work in the UK, and be willing to relocate to Cambridge.
Here’s a sneak preview of the summary video from last year:
(You can see a longer, higher resolution video here).
If you want to sneak in before I officially announce registration and grab the special early-bird price ($1,595 for the first 100 registrants) then go to the conference web site.
(P.S. Next week I’m going to start posting up videos of last year’s speakers. The first one to go up will be Geoffrey “Crossing the Chasm” Moore. Follow me on Twitter or subscribe to the RSS feed to stay up to date).
Last week, we launched the product – a free tool to search SQL Server databases.
But this blog post isn’t about that.
It’s about an idea that popped into my head after reading Dan Pink’s excellent book Drive. One section talks about Atlassian and their FedEx days: the company takes a day off, splits up into adhoc teams, and delivers something in 24 hours.
Rather than describing what we’re planning here at Red Gate, here’s the e-mail I sent round internally:
From: Neil Davidson
Sent: 28 January 2010 14:51
To: Product Development
Subject: "Down tools" week
The upcoming SQL Search release has shown how valuable taking some time out to work on side projects can be. Many people have spent much time finishing the project, but it would never have happened if Nagashree, Rob, Alex and Dom hadn’t locked themselves in a house by the seaside for a week.
We’d like to extend this experiment. For four days, starting on March 29th, we’d like everybody involved in building products (both for our customers and internal development) to down tools and work on something different. You can work by yourselves, in your current teams or form new teams – it’s entirely up to you. The only aim is to create something relevant to Red Gate that you wouldn’t have created otherwise. You can build a new product, a prototype for a product, a tool for use by another department, fix some bugs in a current product that would otherwise have gone unfixed – anything really. The only rule is that you have to complete something by Thursday lunchtime. During Thursday afternoon we’ll have a show and tell – a chance for you to demonstrate to other people at Red Gate what you’ve been up to.
If you’re working in product development you should put this in your diary and cancel all meetings for those four days. You can work from home, in the office or somewhere else – wherever you’ll be most effective.
You can take part in down tools week if you're a permanent (not contract) developer, tester, author, designer, project manager or product manager. If you're not in these groups but want to take part then you'll need to get your divisional or functional head's permission and persuade a team you can contribute.
Each team will have a discretionary budget of £500 for hardware / software / other stuff we don't already have in the building (but please check first).
Ideally you’ll have a clear idea of how you’ll spend the four days before they actually arrive.
Neil
Down tools week doesn’t start for a while, but merely announcing it has produced extraordinary results. The forum post announcing it has been read 1,350 times (that’s almost ten views for every person in the company). It has 64 replies. People are hyped. Ideas are flowing. Stuff is happening.
I’m not entirely sure what the outcome will be. I’m hoping that we’ll end up with a slew of prototyped ideas and a bunch of happy people. I’m sure there’ll be a lot more hard work until we can turn those embryonic proofs of concept into living, breathing, releasable software, but it will be worth it. Whatever happens, it will be fun. Even more importantly – and this is what it’s all about – we’re doing the right thing.
I’ll write up the results once the week is over.
Enjoyed this post? Then subscribe to my RSS feed or follow me on Twitter.
P.S. We’re hiring. Check out our jobs page.
These are just two of the topics our user experience folk (they're the people who design Red Gate's software) have covered in our new UX blog. You can read more in pride and preference by Adam Walker and the empty magic of Steve Jobs by Marine Barbaroux.
Browse the blog posts, and then put faces to the names.
*The iPad is cool, but this is cooler.
He’s on Google.
This episode from a couple of weeks back illustrates the ever increasing importance of experts. As information swells in quantity but shrinks in quality, people who can sift through the muck to find the gold become more important and more powerful. People who can judge and interpret; who tell us, the public, what is worth paying attention to and what we can ignore; experts and gatekeepers; journalists, editors, doctors, lawyers and scientists: they are all more important now than ten years ago. And they’ll be more important in ten years than now.
I wonder what the implications of that are.
P.S. I lied about the lawyers.
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In 1989 this tiny oil painting of the Virgin Mary was valued at some $9000.
On November 29th 1991 it was worth $180,000.
A day later, on November 30th, it was valued at between $36 million and $54 million.
The valuation proved accurate. In 2004, the UK's National Gallery bought it for some $50m.
What changed in those 24 hours? Clearly the physical painting didn't change. It had the same brushstrokes and the same paint made from the same chemicals. It was painted with the same degree of technical skill. The subject matter was the same. It was as pleasing to look at after as it was before. It was no better a painting on November 30th than it was the day before.
The one factor that pushed the price up overnight to a staggering $540,000 per square inch of paint was the word of a single man. Nicholas Penny, a curator at the National Gallery, announced that this painting was not, as had previously been thought, by an unknown artist. It was, instead, an original Raphael. In Penny's opinion (and this is only an opinion, and a disputed one at that), the science - the infrared scans, the microscopic analysis of the under drawing and the pigment analysis - proves it.
This is fascinating. The price that people (both the National Gallery and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles who made an identical bid) were prepared to pay for this painting wasn't determined by the physical painting. It was determined by something else - a belief; a mere perception of value. One day, the perception was that this painting was worth under $200,000. The next, the perception had changed and the painting was worth millions. Tomorrow, somebody yet more expert than Penny might announce that it is not, after all, a Raphael. Our perceptions will change and its value will plummet.
Whether you're selling paintings, apples, bottled water or word processors there's a valuable lesson here:
Your product's fair price is determined not by what your product is, but by what your customers think. The two may not be linked.
I will explore this more in a future blog post. For now, you can follow me on Twitter or download "Don't just roll the dice: a usefully short guide to software pricing" (it's a free eBook)
Instead, this book is aimed at everybody else. It's aimed at the 99% of the business world who are faintly befuddled by the strange world of youtube and delicious that they find themselves living in. It's aimed at plumbers, hairdressers, lawyers and oil company executives who, if by some fluke they ever find this blog post, are still wondering what the @ signs in the title mean. It's aimed at people in large corporations and small businesses alike who are dimly aware that their working lives are about to change - indeed, have already started to change in disconcerting ways - and who don't know what to do. It's aimed at the people standing at the shore, too scared to dip their toes into the water. "Inbound marketing" takes them gently by the hand, leads them to the water, reassures them that everything is going to be OK, and teaches them how swim.
The premise of the book is that the old marketing is dead or dying. Gone are the days where simply throwing money at print or radio advertising guaranteed succees. Instead, you need to engage your customers. Give them reasons to come to visit your web site, and once they are there give them reasons to come back again and again. Turn your web site into a hub, stuffed with remarkable blog posts, videos and interviews. As the authors put it (they have a pleasing way with words) "ten years ago, your marketing effectiveness was a function of the width of your wallet. Today, your marketing effectiveness is a function of the width of your brain."
"Inbound marketing" is clearly - and explicitly - inspired by authors such as Seth Godin and David Meerman Scott. But where this book differs is in its emphasis on hands-on advice. Not only is it inspirational, but it's also brimming with practical wisdom. Sure, it talks about the power of Twitter. But then it gives you advice on how to choose a twitter handle. Sure, it talks about the rise of the superstar blogger and the death of the press release. But then it talks about how to decide whether you need a PR agency and, if you do, then how you should hire one. Sure, it stresses that your employees will need to learn new skills if they are to survive in this new world. But then it talks about what those skills are, what steps your employees need to take to get them and how you can track how they're doing. Each chapter contains a checklist of things you should do, right now, to start improving your inbound marketing.
This is no dry textbook. It's full of anecdotes, some from the usual suspects (Whole Foods, Zappos and Barack Obama) but from others too: accounting software, a shutter manufacturer and a PR firm among others. It's well written, and there are cartoons too.
Inbound marketing - get found using Google, social media and blogs is an excellent, mainstream introduction to new marketing. If you want to dip your toes into the cold water of social media then buy a copy. If you're already surfing the waves, you almost certainly know people who are standing dazed on the shore. Buy them a copy from Amazon. They'll love you for it. This book deserves enormous success - keep an eye out for it at an airport near you.
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