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A talk given by David Weekly on 8/18/2008 at Tec de Monterrey's Mexico City campus.
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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?
http://DavidWeekly.org
http://twitter.com/dweekly
