All articles by Daniel DebowBlog Index

I attended The WorldBlu Conference + Awards 2010 in Las Vegas this past week and had the opportunity to deliver the presentation below. The conference brings together this year’s WorldBlu List of Most Democratic Workplaces awardees to share their powerful ideas, best practices, tips and strategies with business leaders from around the world. Since 2007, WorldBlu has been identifying the leading “blu” companies that operate using the principles of openness and transparency, collaboration, and a power-to-the-people ethic to build highly innovative, democratic, and profitable organizations worldwide. We’re proud to be on the list for the second year straight!

Learning Workplaces

Learning workplaces are highly motivational. In order to learn you need fast feedback loops. My talk focused on 4 key ideas about learning workplaces:

1. Democratic workplaces must be learning workplaces
2. Learning organizations are inherently lean
3. Traditional performance reviews don’t help us motivate or learn
4. A better way to learn @work

Introducing The Agile People Manifesto

We also took this as an opportunity to launch the Agile People Manifesto, a project to define the key principles behind the agile management movement. We are the facilitators and hosts of the conversation, but we need your voice to make it successful. Join the conversation and help create the manifesto!

Since we’ve been involved with a successful start-up before, people often call us for advice and insight on starting a new company. We’re humbled by the requests and happy to share our experiences. But we realize that we keep getting the same questions. So, we’re going to start sharing answers to common questions and sharing tips that we have found worked for us. You mileage may vary so take this advice with a shaker of salt!

One of the most common questions we hear is: “I want to be an entrepreneur. How do I know I’ve come up with a great idea?”

The short answer is: you don’t. It’s incredibly hard early on to determine if your idea is great. Just about the only sure thing is that your idea will shift and morph as you move through the customer discovery process to find product/market fit.

For this reason, we strongly advise that early on you do not write a business plan.

Why? Business plans are exercises in convincing other people that you have a great idea. You lock yourself in a room, surf the web for stats to explain how big the market is, analyze competitors, and dream up how great your product/service is going to be. Along the way, you end up convincing yourself that you’ve got it all figured it out. This is a dangerous delusion. You have not figured it out… yet. You have simply searched for and found confirming evidence that supports your best guesses.

Instead of spending time trying to convince yourself and others that you have a great idea, we suggest the opposite: You should look for disconfirming evidence that the choice to start this business is a good one. That’s right - try to convince yourself that your idea is bad. If you can’t, your idea might be good. We loosely borrowed this approach from Roger Martin’s Strategic Choice-Structuring Approach (PDF) in his book, The Responsibility Virus. Roger’s approach focuses on making hard strategic decision, and there is no tougher decision than: “do I/we risk my/our time, reputation, treasure and sanity on a crazy idea for a start-up?”.

Why try to prove yourself wrong? So that you don’t waste your time. You want to cycle through bad ideas quickly, refine your approach, and iterate your way to the great idea. Getting drunk on your own kool-aid too early is a big waste of time and resources.

Here’s what we did in the very early exploratory stages – and what we suggest you do.

1. Create a general filter. Narrow down what you’re passionate about and interested in and what kind of business you hope to have. In our case, we knew we wanted: SaaS, low professional services, consumer-ized, freemium, focused on a large demographic shift. Run your ideas through your filter. If they don’t match up pretty well, decide if you want to continue exploring.
2. Do general research. Once you have an idea you like, spend only a few quick days doing general research. We’ll write more about this later, but the best research is talking to real people who know something about the problem you hope to solve.
3. Agree/decide on the 4-5 things that must be true for your idea to be awesome. This is the important part. For example, you might have a great idea to build personal jet-packs. If you were going to choose to start this business a few things must be true. For example:
   • People would want these (I would, btw!)
   • You could get regulatory approval
   • You have access to the technical know-how to design & build them
   • You could manufacture them at a price point a large market would bear
4. Arrange these things that must be true in order of easiest to disprove to hardest. In this case the list might look this:
   • You have access to the technical know-how to design & build them
   • You could get regulatory approval
   • People would want these
   • You could manufacture them at a price-point a large market would bear
5. Try to disprove your first point. Spend time skeptically examining whether you can convince yourself that this fact is not true. In this case, don’t dream about the rocket-scientists you could, maybe, someday hire. Instead, ask pragmatically if you actually have the skills to design and build a rocket pack or know anyone who could. If you don’t, you have disproven a key fact. Therefore, stop searching. Iterate. Move onto another, different idea. But don’t spend the next 5 months building a giant plan for your rocket-pack business, while ignoring the fact that you don’t believe you know how to build it!

The point here is to get agreement about shared facts, and then systematically, and with least possible effort/time disprove them. If you can’t disprove a fact, trying as hard as you can, move forward. If you can’t prove yourself wrong, you might just be onto something!

I’d love to hear what you think about this approach. Please comment/critique/complain in the comments below!

When you’re organized, you and your team will be more effective. Log in to coach your team.

I know – managing is complicated. You’ve got to keep track of your team’s activities, get work done and keep them engaged and learning. If you use email, spreadsheets and your notebook to manage your team, today’s video is for you! You’ll learn quick, easy ways to:

1. Capture notes, actions and kudos in one place – even from email
2. Have more productive 1:1 meetings
3. Save tons of time on annual reviews

Tracking everything in one place will save you time and you’ll get more done!

Log in to coach your team

Do you know what your team really thinks? Get feedback today!

Effective leaders ask questions, discover blind spots, and learn continuously. Start by asking your team a quick question: “What’s one thing I can do to be more effective in my role?”

In today’s video you’ll learn how to:

1. Ask a focused question in 15 seconds
2. Get ongoing, honest feedback from your team
3. Clarify feedback with anonymous conversations

Engage your team by asking for their feedback. You’ll learn and succeed together.

Get feedback today!

Public recognition will motivate your team to do great work. Give kudos today!

Quick kudos are motivating: “I’m totally addicted to sending kudos. I get back comments like ‘this made my day’ or ‘I didn’t think anyone noticed.’ Great idea, great program.” – Mike Beltzner, Director of Firefox, Mozilla

What you’ll see in today’s video:

1. How to give motivating kudos in 15 seconds
2. How to personalize kudos
3. How to share kudos with everyone on your team

Recognize a job well done. You’ll get results.

Give kudos today!

We’re really excited to sponsor Twestival! Twestival is an excellent example of people coming together to do great things and have some fun at the same time. Our kinda thing!

We believe great communities inspire people to be great and that positive feedback motivates people to reach their full potential. So, we built Kudos – a quick, fun, social way for you to recognize the good things your teammates do every day.

We think you should recognize the people who participate and volunteer to make Twestival happen.

In honor of Twestival, we linked Kudos to Twitter and created a special limited-edition Twestival badge that you can award!

Rypple will donate $1.00 to Concern Worldwide for each of the first 4,000 people who sends a Twestival badge. You’ll be encouraging someone AND supporting Twestival just by sending a badge!

Here’s how:

1. Go to https://rypple.com/feedback/#kudos
2. Enter the email address of your chosen Twestival-er and write a short message
3. Click “Add a badge” and choose the Twestival badge
4. Click “Post to Twitter?”
5. Click “Send Kudos”

As an extra-special bonus, you can win prizes for giving Kudos. You can win daily prizes, such as an Flip HD Camera, and, if you give the most Kudos at your company, you might just win an Apple iPad or a trip to Miami’s South Beach!

We hope that Kudos will help you be an even bigger part of Twestival.

It’s not often that CEOs are excited to hear that their product could be made obsolete.

But two weeks ago at HRTech in Chicago, David and I heard just that from one of our more prominent corporate users and we couldn’t be happier!

Of course, Rypple isn’t really going anywhere and the comment was actually good news with respect to the impact of social media on organizations. Let me explain.

HRTech is an annual trade show and conference. It’s coordinated by the dean of HR technology writers, Bill Kutik, who moderates a “Cool New Technologies” panel every year. My co-CEO, David Stein, delivered a fantastic demo of Rypple at this year’s session. The feedback from the live audience was super-positive and we got some great feedback via Rypple afterward!

One of our executive users pulled me aside for a quick conversation the day before the demo. He’s the CEO of a mid-sized professional services firm who’s been using Rypple for a year.  He wanted us to know he loved Rypple.  Awesome!

Then he said:

“I think you might have a real problem.  I’m concerned that using Rypple might make Rypple obsolete. We’ve been using it for a while now, and I’ve noticed that people are much more willing to give me feedback face-to-face.  They’re willing to talk to me — and to each other.”

To which we said:

That’s the furthest thing from a problem we can imagine! In fact, your observation of “increased feedback” is actually the goal of our service.  Using a social tool like Rypple to drive an increase in face-to-face interaction is precisely what makes Rypple so compelling.

The point is: social media is not simply narcissistic self-exposure online. When carefully and thoughtfully designed, social media can enhance real world interaction (ask anyone who’s been to a TweetUp!). We’ve worked hard to help support and encourage feedback as a social behavior in our customers’ companies because we believe it leads to learning, better execution, and success.

In fact, we’ve found that when an organization or senior executive integrates Rypple into their operation, they do so because:

• feedback, transparency, and communication are important to them
• there is a real commitment to continuous improvement
• what their people think matters.

Great social apps encourage people to develop real, actual social interaction.

If introducing Rypple to a firm filled with smart, high performing individuals made them more open to giving and getting feedback and increased teamwork and collaboration, then we hope more CEOs tell us that Rypple is going to be obsolete!

Tags: Bill Kutik, collaboration, Cool New Technologies, Corporate Culture, Culture Change, HR, HR Tech, learning, lessons, Social Media, teamwork, TweetUp

We’ll be bold if you’ll be.  We’re talkin’ to you, HR Technology Conference attendees…

This week, we’re prepping for HR Tech. Bill Kutik, the uber-analyst,  has selected Rypple as a “cool new technology” for the show.  Sweet!  We get to demonstrate Rypple in front of a large audience.

But, we feel a bit strange about it. You see…. the magic demo can be fraught with danger, the place where your moral compass as a vendor can get warped. Demos and other heavy forms of “push” marketing are optimized to convince buyers why their solution “could be” useful.

That’s not why we started Rypple. We wanted to be bold and build a service that real people want to use and actually find useful.  So, we’ve created a consumer oriented  product for people who happen to work in the “enterprise”.  This reduces training costs for our clients and means that our primary marketing is user recommendations.

It’s all part of a bold business model, called “Freemium“: free for many, subscription for some.   Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box.net, described Freemium’s benefits best:

[Freemium means]…if the product doesn’t solve [the actual users'] problem, they move on to something else. This forces you to create better, more usable products, and not simply build your business on aggressive and costly marketing and sales. … This also means your product has to rock… If you’re not, Free users will leave and the rest certainly will never pay.

This approach has worked well. CEOs, trainers, project leaders, doctors, professors, and executives have found that Rypple delivers real results for them, their teams, and their companies.  Amazing evangelists, like John Foster, the Chief Talent Officer at IDEO,  are collaborating with other users to help us make Rypple rock even more.  And, of course, free users are converting to pay users.

Next week, we’ll be spending time with lots of HR professionals at HR Tech.  These are great, hard-working people typically responsible for tens of thousands of employees and many complex systems.  They are used to the dog-and-pony-shows of buying and deploying [gulp] Enterprise Software for others.  It can be painful and we sympathize… Heck, we’ve been there!

That’s why we’ve decided to demo to these pros at HR Tech as users, not buyers.

After all, HR pros want to find out what teammates, employees and mentors really think – just like everyone else!  They also want regular, helpful feedback so they can learn and improve.   By demo-ing to them as users they’ll see that the can try Rypple for themselves or with their teams – for free and with almost no set-up. We’ve made it simple to experience Rypple with minimal effort and red tape.  The service we’ll demo is the exact service you can use, for free, today. No vaporware!

Being bold doesn’t mean being naive.  We know what the purchasing and change cycle are like in large organizations.  But, based on our experience, we believe it’s better for everyone if there are internal champions who have experienced real benefits from Rypple before the buying process starts. That’s what freemium does.

So, HR-tech-ers…. will you be bold and “turn the future into the past“?   Will you be bold and discover useful insights you would not have otherwise learned, so you can advance your own career and make your organization more productive?

We hope so.

See you at Cool New Technologies at  HR Tech!

*****

ps: We’re glad we’re not the only ones who think this way!

Tags: Bill Kutik, business development, Enterprise Software, Freemium, HR, HR Tech, ideo, John Foster, professional development, Workplace

Tim Sackett, the EVP of HRU Technical Resources just wrote a great post “Better Performance Reviews in 140 Characters…” on FistFul of Talent.

Tim did some performance reviews recently and was struck by how much more clear, direct, and productive it would be if they were limited to 140 characters, like Twitter.

I believe I’ve uncovered the manager’s dream!  140 character Performance Review – 30 seconds and you’re out.   What an increase to productivity, to clarity – I mean how could you not be clear and concise in 140 characters.

We couldn’t agree more Tim!   Limiting characters forces people to be clear and concise. No fluff, just direct actionable feedback.

That’s why we built Rypple.  It takes your core insight of easy to create and concise feedback and builds on it to create a useful solution for improving insight, productivity, and performance.  And, like Twitter – it’s fun!

It takes seconds to give useful Rypple feedback.   And, because its so quick, people get more feedback, continuously, which helps people to develop.

We love it when smart people reaffirm why we built Rypple.  Thanks Tim!

Tags: constructive feedback, Development, Feedback, Fistful of Talent, HRU Technical Resources, Performance Reviews, personal review, professional development, Tim Sackett, twitter

The phrase “learning is work, and work is learning” means a lot to us at Rypple.

We think of learning as something that is deeply connected to the successful execution of our service and our vision. That’s why the most productive and satisfying work we do every day is related to learning. In fact, we believe that in order to enjoy and be good at your job, you have to be learning, all the time.

What’s interesting though is that process of learning becomes much quicker and easier with feedback.

Often when I encounter something new, I want to talk about it with friends and colleagues. Discussing a new idea helps me understand it better because other people’s feedback frames the concept in ways I often wouldn’t have thought of.

But at work, the things that I need to learn about are not abstract ideas. They are tangible. Usually, when I’m trying something new at work, I want to know:

• Did a new approach, idea, or practice result in desired change?
• What do our users and clients think?
• What worked and what didn’t?
• What does our team think?

Courses, books, and blogs are wonderful ways to gather new approaches and specific knowledge. But to really *learn* I need to understand and apply new knowledge in real-life. As a result, I’ve found that my most meaningful learning comes from trying something out and then seeing what happens.

We hope Rypple can bridge this divide by helping people get regular feedback whenever they try something new or when they want to enhance what they’re already doing.

Regular Ryppling is a simple, cost-effective, and easy way to build a repeated cycle of learning into your daily work life.

Tags: Feedback, knowledge, learning, Rypple, work