We’ve been considering creating a new permanent position in one of our tech team for four or five months. We don’t hire willy-nilly because we have almost zero turnover and have a horror of layoffs. We have a couple of folks who have been doing full or part-time contract work for us, so, because we’re a buncha chickens that like to manage risk, that group was our focus:

1> Reduced risk due to known ‘isims’
2> Reduced cost of recruitment
3> Reduced time-to-productivity

My business partner spoke to the hiring manager, let’s call her Sharon (inside joke), and she went through the exercise of describing the perfect candidate, spec’ing out the associated costs (lab, hardware, etc), the ability to push projects out faster - all the standard stuff. Then she had a think and came back to us with her preferred candidate.

We always ask the same question: Are they an “A” player?

Let me explain: Top people hire top candidates because they’re not scared of being shown up by a direct report. Second rate people are scared they don’t deserve their jobs, so they hire people they can control: third rate people. We shorten that to the headline of this post.

Sharon said that the person “had the ability to be an A player.” If she hadn’t slapped her head at what she said, I’d have used the rarely used Veto Pen!

Because we all know that an annoying habit in a job candidate is only going to get worse when you can’t get rid of them by shaking their hand on the way to the lobby.

It’s even worse when you hire a contractor who is turning in “B” work. You’re rewarding them with a permanent job, health care, and some prestige for their behavior. Plus you’re taking away the threat of instant-out-the-door. So they’re going to change their behavior why, exactly?

Look, we don’t blame Sharon for *almost* making a mistake. That is why we do things in teams - you can’t catch everything. The important thing to me was that she ‘got’ it and moved right on to figure out the right answer. That’s why she’s an “A” player.

No, not the “crips vs. bloods” debate. Nor the “Arsenal vs. Real” one. The one at work where one guy wants a triangle that points right (feng shui!) and another one wants a circle that spirals inwards toward the first letter of your company name. And, oh yeah, someone has an Aunt who is “creative.” Help!

If you’re going to be selling retail-over-the-web in a super competitive arena like fashion then you should spend a lot of time on your look, the shapes of your icons, etc, etc.

Otherwise, I would argue, once you hit a minimal level of quality then you’re done. My prime example of this is Amazon. A sprawling pile of ugly UI. Next up is GoDaddy. Enough said.

Do I think that REI’s site is prettier than LL Bean’s? Yes. So what. I’m not sure it changes anyone’s buying habits.

Social sites? If my dog looked like reddit I’d shave his behind and take him for walks backward. 8M visitors a month? Obviously ugly isn’t important. I think propeller.com looks like it fell through a time warp from 2001. And they just put it up!

The best way to save your time and avoid the logo/color hassle is to first realize that if you were to stackrank what is important about your website, worlds-best-graphic-design would be at the bottom of the list. Or near there.

So, once you’ve decided to avoid spending a $10K and (what is worse) a thousand hours arguing with everyone about logo shape and size, I suggest that you get on over to google and type in “logo design” and pick someone who will give you something decent for $100. You don’t have to marry it: “ok” is ok. (Hint, if their site is ugly to you, don’t buy a logo from them.)

Then, once you’ve got something that takes your fancy, go back to google and type in “Joomla template design” (or whatever) and find someone who will take a basic template (free or paid - I see little quality difference, frankly) and match the colors and give you some basic navigation icons in similar shapes and colors. This should cost less than $200.

So, there you go, a week elapsed time and $300 and you have a decent looking website ready to hold your navigation, content, and product.

If you really want to save money, reverse the order: find a free template you like and tell the graphics designer to match the color. I think it works better the other way, but, then, $200 is not such a big deal to me. YMMV.

If your minions are really upset by this, try to get them to focus on navigation issues, or tone of contact, or something that is actually customer affecting.

We were having a philosophical discussion about posting content to social networking sites - the diggs, reddits, propellers, etc. But also to the newsvines, canadakas, and all the others.

One of the guys was trying to justify posting stories from his dog blog into foreign sites which are over-run with (generously speaking) English general purpose stories. For example, he found NuMarketing and was excited - the dutch love dogs, he wants visitors to his blog. Perfect.

Except he was getting called him all sorts of names for being a spammer. But, of course, it’s not really spam, it’s just off topic. Well, actually, it’s not off topic from what’s being left on the pligg site, it’s just off topic from the quote on the side. If the quote on the side about the site being Dutch Marketing is accurate.

So, we got into quite a discussion about evil, mini-evil (lots of Austin Powers fans at work), and the tragedy of the commons (yes, we have libertarian economist on staff - don’t you?).

I tend to come down on the side of more generously putting my stories around when it looks like that is accepted behavior. But I think if a webmaster tells you to beat it, then you beat it.

But the fun part was trying to come up with a story you could post *everywhere*. This is the best we could do:

My dog and cat, both vegans, are legally certified to be companion animals for the blind, the aged, and people suffering from depression and disease and they travel internationally for both that and to compete in animal-lmpics. Their former owner, a GLBTU adoptee, died in a tragic car, plane, rail, and cycle crash due to global warming and while backpacking around the globe. We found out because they twittered and blogged and kept facebook and myspace up to date with their GPS, smartphone, laptop, and wimax service, usually while listening to an ipod with itunes while surfing ron paul, hilary, fred, rudy, etc.

We think you could post that to any social networking site. And be on topic.

We have mentioned before that our company is interactive, with senior people, experienced people, long term people. Then why do they behave like a dozen third graders faced with eight cupcakes at a party on a hot day?

We have three competing UI designs for our new product around helping people use social networking sites more effectively. It’s kind of a tricky thing to make it all look simple without removing a lot of flexibility. And we all understand the problem space very well.

We have lined up a dozen or so beta testers from both our new potential customer pool and some of our existing customers who want to expand into this area. Everyone has read the beta interview documents and seen the ‘pitch’ documents.

So we’re all on the same page for what we’re solving, who we’re solving for, and what the challenges will be.

As a group I think we concluded today that (a) these designs stink, (b) you stink, and (c) no, you stink.

At times like this I itch to just choose one and steamroller everyone. Unfortunately that tends to produce embarrassing failure, so I don’t intend to do it.

I think tomorrow we may try to vote one of the two designs out so that we have two, combine the teams around differently, and see what we can get by Monday. I guess the good news is that everyone is using *almost* all the same Ajax libraries so if the “Bowling Bozos” (they pick their own team names, don’t blame me) want the cool right-click-picker from the “Stumbleupon Bums” (bad puns-R-us) the that should go fairly well.

Stay tuned.

I realized today I was talking too much. It’s easy to do if people are paid to listen to you. No matter how independent they are, they will defer to you when you’re talking. So today I basically shut up so that they’d hear me better.

In the spirit of that koan, I’ll keep this post short. For a change.

I learned a long time ago with my worst-boss-ever (Adrian, I still hate you, it’s been 10+ years. You’re amazing me even today.) that the more she talked the less I heard her. I so despised her that I was able to spend most of my time in her meetings thinking about how to decode her.

So I ended up learning a lot.

Like when she’d come in and listen I noticed that when she finally said something it was really worthwhile. I noticed this because she was usually channeling Dilbert’s PHB with Catbert DNA injected.

So today we had a fair number of meetings and I sat back to listen. I even did scribe once (boy, does that job stink!) so they’d get on without me.

It was great for me - I learned a lot, and I think my folks enjoyed it more than usual.

I was tired though - it was hard work not talking.

I wrote an article on my SEOMoz blog about how if you were smart you’d Outsource Your Business. Do I feel stupid as we watch a major player screw up the most important cyber shopping day of the year for 25,000 merchants?

Nope.

Look, without Yahoo (or someone like them) let’s say 80% of those people wouldn’t be on the internet with anything but a (shudder) 1&1 hosted brochureware site with an 800#. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

Floods happen - does everyone leave Louisiana? Earthquakes in California. Hurricanes in FL.

It’s not going to get a lot of press, but I’m sure thousands of small shared servers in places like RackSpace, CariNet, Verisign, GoDaddy, etc went down today too. I bet just as many individual merchants lost their stores on the thousands of small hosting companies as did on Yahoo.

I would still argue that, on a risk management basis, you are better off trusting someone like Yahoo to do for you than you are trying to do it yourself. You gonna get a server, a dedicated RoadRunner line, etc and do your own hosting?

No, of course not.

Let me just say that maybe Yahoo could have done a better job - we don’t know what happened yet - but I’m sure they were paying attention to the problem, which is certainly more than most businesses could do.

We recently decided to launch a new product on a non-redundant server because we’re pretty sure demand is going to ramp pretty fast and we’ll need to move it up to a much larger set of multi-processor boards with dedicated hardware firewall connections. Those will have redundant power supplies and the full raid and NAS backup. So we’ve decided to take the risk of an early life failure around launch to save $50K.

If we’re wrong we’ll learn from the mistake but we won’t feel like we made the mistake by misunderestimating the situation. I know the small merchants at Yahoo are feeling the pain, but they weren’t wrong to outsource to a major vendor. And most can’t afford a contingency plan, so they are not wrong to not have one.

I think this falls under my Grandfather’s category of “I bet that hurt. Pull your socks up and get on with it.”

I will never forget the first time I told a boss we had to choose between which of my top three deliverable and he told me that all three were my #1 priority. I was at the stage of life where that kind of thing would make me go get drunk.

I was also at the time of life where a greasy diner breakfast would put my hangover right. I’m way to old to recover in a morning (sometimes it takes days) so now I’m more careful about getting into a triority corner.

You know the old saw: Fast, Cheap, or Good - pick any two. In reality you can only pick one but clients and circumstances often force you to produce all three.

Like with project planning, where you can only save time early, you can only avoid a triority by spotting it’s evil smell early.

For example, once I had a client trying to launch a major internet product more quickly by pinching off a division as a startup. Stop laughing, it was not my suggestion - the Bain guys sucked $2M out of them for that sterling piece of advice. So there they were, trying to coordinate an IT mentality, a corporate purchasing department at a remote location, a tricky technical product development, and a changing market.

Triority forming: late product changes, delayed hardware, and inadequate tech guys. About six months before launch I got the CEO to approve a “tiger team” to build a “prototype Release 1A” and, surprise, we ended up with a remote data center (remember Qwest?) with HUGE machines and GULF sized bandwidth. We were a dozen days after the missed initial product release in launching “Release 1A” but the in-house team took six months to turn the real release on.

Sure, the marketing guys hated me (nothing was on time, the messaging didn’t match, etc), but we avoided a triority: change the product, release it on time, and there is no hardware. All perfectly predictable if you’re paying attention, but only something you can deal with given plenty of lead time.

I suggest you consider looking ahead at your own project - are there a series of conflicting factors coming together? It’s not like inventing the next flavor of lip gloss - it’s always deadline, feature, or people related. Or all three. And marketing, sales, and corporate are always involved. Sometimes all three. Are there consultants in-house? They’re involved.

Once you see the nexus forming you can decide what to do: avoid it, bug out, or be in a position to rescue it. One thing you cannot (CAN NOT!) do is prevent it from happening. The inertia of any organization is much greater than your ability to shove people around.

Ok, you’ll try, we all do. But please have a backup plan. Remember, you can avoid, run, or be ready to fix. Hey, that is a triority of options!

Over at SeoMoz one of the better blog posters, Vingold, has a really good article on 4 Things That Are Wrong With the 4 Hour Workweek.

Of course, besides some of the get-rich-quick (how does that work again?) schemes in the book, the real problem is that after some period of experiences you can’t actually learn much that is actionable from a “normal” business book.

True fact, as my kids say.

Look, Jack Welch is 100 smarter than I am, with 2,000 times more drive, and is worth 30,000 times as much financially. (On the other hand, I still have my first wife, so I’m clearly wiser than he is!) And I read his book(s) and his articles in the biz journals. And I learn almost nothing actionable each time.

What does that mean? Well, Jack put in a 10 year quest for “six sigma” quality. I actually know exactly what that means and used to work in a manufacturing company. Completely useless for my business though. And Jack talks about creating a culture of management excellence through hiring practices and sophisticated 360 degree peer reviews, blah, blah, blah. For a SME that is about as useful as government health reform.

And Vin puts his finger on that exact issue with this “4-Hour-Workweek” thing:

For instance, in the best chapter of the book, titled “Outsourcing Life,” he says essentially this: “Never do a task yourself that you can delegate. Never delegate a task that you can automate. And never automate a task that you can eliminate all together.” You can read volumes of management and business books, and you’d be hard-pressed to find more concise and complete advice on streamlining a business.

That is probably the only thing in that whole book that would have been useful for me to read. (Thanks, Vin, you saved me a ton of time!) Read a whole book for that advice? Wow, what a waste of time.

(One of the things I do when I find a thing like that is to put the book down and try it immediately. I’m a quick twitch Terrier kind of guy, so it is use-it-or-lose it for me. So, even though I think I already to to avoid getting tasks completed the hard way, I’ve just gone back over my daily to-do log and looked for things that really didn’t need to get done. I found a few, maybe there is a pattern in there where I could save myself an hour/month or so. Which is pretty good improvement.)

One book I do read on an annual basis, and have for 20 years or so, is DeMarco and Lister’s Peopleware. It’s not a techie book, it’s about helping people be successful in your organization. And though it was written for the tech industry, nothing in it is dated. Chock-ful-O-wisdom and actionable ideas.

I admit it - I don’t get chair rash on my bum at work anymore. That is because I have to go home and do hubby/kid stuff. And I try to make sure my managers force people to work reasonable hours when we’re not, you know, actually on fire.

So I don’t worry too much about the attitude of the guys who are still there when I leave. They know I’m on email and reachable by phone if they need me. I also work some pretty fierce late night and weekend hours to make sure my administrative and project stuff is ticked and tied. And my guys know that - I lead from in front. You have to.

How do I know they’ll wind it up and leave at a reasonable hour. I can see the key card and alarm logs over the internet, so I can pull a spreadsheet of at-work hours once or twice a month. I figure if someone is at work for 60+ hours then we’ve got a problem. I’ve never actually found someone working too few hours.

We do have one guy who is not at the office as much as I’d like, but he’s super productive, so as a small company we have lots of latitude. Probably because he’s careful to show up to scheduled meetings we’ve gotten smarter about scheduling meetings. I do know he’d be more senior in the organization if he were around more - he misses the hallway techrock talk where he could show more leadership. I suspect he knows that, so there you go.

You may recall that I just wrote a post about how my Thanksgiving present was a buncha guys who were ahead of schedule. And I can look at the daily revenue numbers and see that we’re on track for our financial numbers (not that here is much you can do about that this late in the year!). So everything is going well, and everyone knows that.

Then why where there four people in the office when I dropped by today to pick up the “extra” frozen turkey? It was kind of funny: they all scattered within three minutes of me showing up for work. I’d made this rather serious edict about taking a four day weekend without email, etc. If they’re emailing each other on project stuff (as opposed to the stupid jokes they keep sending me) then they’re smart enough to keep me off the CC list.

No, I don’t actually have an answer as to why they were here. And I won’t ask - I don’t need to know the answer to everything.

When I left I did put a note on the door saying: “Go home. See you MONDAY.”